Black LA Times columnist blasts 'dangerous' Larry Elder as 'the Black face of white supremacy' amid recall showdown with CA Gov. Gavin Newsom

Erika D. Smith of the Los Angeles Times just penned a column that's getting quite a bit of attention. It's titled, "Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You've been warned."

The fact that Smith also is black underscores the breadth of pushback that Elder — a conservative political commentator — has been receiving since he announced his candidacy in the recall election of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

TheBlaze on Friday noted that left-wing political groups are shocked and horrified that Newsom, a Democrat, could actually lose the recall to upstart Elder.

What did the columnist write?

Smith pulled no punches in her attempted takedown of Elder, pointing out his "smug smile of a Black conservative" and saying nothing angers her more "than watching a Black person use willful blindness and cherry-picked facts to make overly simplistic arguments that whitewash the complex problems that come along with being Black in America."

"Like a lot of Black people, though, I've learned that it's often best just to ignore people like Elder," Smith added in her column. "People who are — as my dad used to say — 'skinfolk' but not necessarily kinfolk."

More from her piece:

It's not just that Elder would be a Trump fanboy Republican trying to run a state dominated by Democrats. Or that he has zero experience in elected office and clearly doesn't have the temperament for governance. (He can't even take questions from journalists without losing his cool.)

It's that — perhaps out of spite or perhaps out of an insatiable need for attention — Elder opposes every single public policy idea that's supported by Black people to help Black people. This has been true for decades, but it's particularly problematic given the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd.

"We have been having a series of real uncomfortable discussions about systemic racism in institutions across this state," state Sen. Sydney Kamlager (D-Los Angeles) said, according to Smith. "About how to really peel back the layers of ignorance or ineptitude so that we can deal with them in very real ways. And Larry Elder is someone who just fundamentally doesn't believe that [systemic racism] exists."

She added that Elder "apparently doesn't believe that racial profiling exists," that he "scoffs at the many efforts to reform the criminal justice system and to root out racial bias in policing by requiring more transparency and accountability from officers" — but that he uses stats showing "that Black people are particularly prone to murdering one another."

"Do we still have the phenomenon where a young Black man is eight times more likely to be killed by another young Black man than a young white man?" Smith quoted Elder as saying to Orange County Republicans. "If the answer to those series of questions is yes, I submit to you that systemic racism is not the problem."

More from her column:

Elder mocks critical race theory, though I'm not sure he understands what it actually is. That doesn't bode well for ethnic studies in California.

If he's elected, the task force studying reparations for Black Californians would be toast. As would yet unsigned bills to allow police officers to be decertified for misconduct and to support community-based alternatives to 911.

Smith also ripped Elder's stance on vaccine mandates, promising that as governor he'll "repeal those before I have my first cup of coffee — and I don't drink coffee."

Anything else?

She added that Elder's "candidacy feels personal. Like an insult to Blackness," and that "Black people know better than anyone how dangerous Elder is. He is the O.G. troll that no one was supposed to feed. But here we are."

You can read Smith's complete column here.