Elder raised his political profile with an unsuccessful bid to replace California Governor Gavin Newsom last year. He told Newsweek that his decision to run for the presidential nomination would have nothing to do with whether former President Donald Trump runs again and was more about drawing attention to what he says is an under-appreciated problem in America: fatherlessness.
“Crime, spending, inflation, the war on oil and gas, the overrun borders, of course I want to discuss that, but also what’s not talked about: the destruction of the nuclear, intact family,” Elder said in the 45-minute interview.
“Women are incentivized to marry the government and men are incentivized to abandon their financial responsibilities, and that’s led to 70 percent of Black kids entering the world without a father married to the mother, while it was 25 percent in 1965.”
Elder’s name doesn’t appear near the top of the betting odds to become the Republican nominee and he has nowhere near the name recognition of potential candidate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – let alone Trump if he decides to run.
But since the California recall election put Elder on the political stage, he has started his own Political Action Committee - as well as finishing a third film and starting work on his fourth.
He began the legwork to potentially join the 2024 presidential race in August when he visited the Iowa State Fair — practically a must for hopefuls. While in the Hawkeye Sate, he huddled with Governor Kim Reynolds and stumped for former U.S. Air Force aviator Zach Nunn, who is in a tight race to unseat Democratic congressional incumbent Cindy Axne in the November 8 midterm elections.
At his PAC, dubbed Elder for America, he also endorses West Point graduate and former U.S. Army helicopter pilot Wesley Hunt, running for Congress in a new district in Texas, and Herschel Walker, the controversial former NFL star who is looking to replace Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia.
Should Elder run for president, some of the money raised by his PAC would go to his own campaign.
Republican Republican
“I’m from the Republican wing of the Republican party,” he said. “I’m committed to shrinking the size of government and putting as much money as possible into the pockets of the people.”
He said he’d enthusiastically support Trump if he were the nominee, but complained there have been too many “apostates” in the Republican party. For Elder, those include former President Ronald Reagan, on one issue, given he expanded the Department of Education after campaigning on abolishing it, and both of the Presidents Bush, each of whom expanded the government’s role in healthcare.
“In 1900, at all three levels — federal, state and local — the government took 9% from the American people; today it takes 35%. When I said that on Fox & Friends, I got a call from two fact checkers asking me for my source; I told them I pulled it out of my butt,” Elder joked (his actual source is economist Milton Friedman).
Though Elder was a national talk-radio host for three decades, some experts think he still lacks the necessary standing to beat the likely field of Republican candidates.
Elder, says Columbia University political science professor Robert Shapiro, runs the risk of “being overshadowed by too many others in the GOP. On the Democratic side, it is Biden if Trump runs and, if not, it is wide open. Kamala Harris, maybe, but also all the others from last time: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg. If Tim Ryan wins (the Senate race) in Ohio, look for him.”
Elder dismisses the notion he lacks name recognition, pointing out that Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were governors who weren’t well-known on the national stage while Barack Obama was a junior senator from Illinois prior to his successful run for the nation’s top job. “And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a freaking bartender before she was elected to Congress!”
Elder also notes he has more than 1 million Twitter followers, nearly 1 million subscribers to his two YouTube channels, he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and he’s a New York Times Bestseller (The 10 Things You Can’t Say in America and Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies and the Special Interests That Divide America).
His next book will be an autobiographical look at his gubernatorial run, including how an allegedly biased press treated his candidacy. During that race, Elder raised $22 million, more than the other 46 candidates who hoped to unseat Newsom combined, and Elder says he received 150,000 donations from outside of California.
Elder says he first thought about running for president during a trip to Key Largo, Florida, to see where Ernest Hemingway did some of his writing. “So many people came up to me to tell me they donated to my campaign or followed my race, but that California was too daunting for a Republican so I should run for president,” Elder recalled.
Should Elder, 70, decide against running for president, he’ll be plenty busy not only with his PAC, an Epoch Times TV show, weekly column and numerous guest appearances on Fox News and conservative talk radio, but also making movies.
Elder began his career as a filmmaker in 2004 when he made Michael & Me, a documentary about his attempt to interview Fahrenheit 9/11 moviemaker Michael Moore. In 2020, when director Justin Malone asked him to appear in a documentary about Black conservatives dubbed Uncle Tom, he joined as a producer. In one portion of the movie, Candace Owens notes that the most ridiculous thing she has ever been called is “a Black white supremacist.” A year later, a writer in the Los Angeles Times called Elder “the Black face of white supremacy.”
Given pandemic lockdowns, Uncle Tom got a very limited theatrical release but was available for streaming at multiple websites and, according to Elder, it earned 10 times its budget, a huge multiple by Hollywood standards (blockbusters Iron Man 2 and Thor, for example, earned three times their budgets).
Elder’s most recent release, Uncle Tom II, available at Salem Now, the streaming service of talk-radio giant Salem Media Group, takes on Black Lives Matter, the NAACP and compares the late 19th and early 20th century Black activists W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, with the former as a socialist and the latter as a capitalist.
“After slavery, Blacks still kept moving forward, despite formidable obstacles. Why? It was rare for a Black child to be born into a household without a father; there was a strong belief in Judeo Christian values, a strong sense of patriotism even as America failed to live up to its ideals, and a strong sense of entrepreneurship,” Elder told Newsweek. “Today, as the film points out, an organization like BLM represents the very antithesis of that approach.”
Elder’s next film, tentatively titled, The 10 Biggest Liberal Lies, will take on “the myths and misconceptions that leftists believe,” said Elder. Asked for an example, he said, “Liberals believe that the rich do not pay their fair share in taxes, when, in fact, the top 1% of income earners paid 40% of all the federal income taxes— while earning about 20% of the nation’s income. Liberals believe that conservatives are selfish, when, in fact, conservatives donate far more of their money and their time to charity, despite average households with less wealth than those of liberals.”
“Preaching to the choir is always a concern. Most actors, producers and directors are liberals, yet conservatives watch their fare,” Elder said. “I think it’s much more difficult for conservatives to get liberals to watch what they create. Ben Affleck once said it’s hard for him to ‘suspend his belief’ if the starring actor is, as he put it, ‘a big Republican.’ Well, Mr. Affleck how do you think we feel?”
Update, 10/31/2022 at 9:22 p.m. ET: This story was updated to include the film Michael & Me and to clarify Elder’s remarks about Ronald Reagan.
