Larry Elder Laments Media Ignoring Gorilla-Mask Attack: If I Were a Democrat They Would Call It ‘Systemic Racism’

California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder on Friday suggested that a masked woman’s assault on him was a “hate crime,” citing a comment to that effect by the Los Angeles County sheriff.

The woman, clad in a gorilla mask, threw an egg at Elder this week as he campaigned, narrowly missing his head. The incident caused a scuffle to break out, and Elder said more than one bystander shouted “racial epithets” during the woman’s assault.

“I wonder if you know if law enforcement is trying to locate her, arrest her?” Fox News anchor Dana Perino asked Elder in a morning interview.

“I do know that the L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said that it was a hate crime,” Elder replied, before lamenting the lack of media coverage for the incident. “If I had been a Democrat, can you imagine what would have happened? It would have been talked about in Bangladesh. They would’ve called it an example of systemic racism. Because I have an ‘R’ at the end of my name, the story didn’t get nearly the kind of coverage it otherwise would have gotten.”

“Sir, it wasn’t just one woman in a gorilla mask,” Fox News host Bill Hemmer noted. “There were several people there. It is all on camera. A lot of people are saying this was assault. So, then, the question is for law enforcement — why has nobody been arrested?”

“That’s a good question,” Elder said. He took the opportunity to reiterate an assertion he has made connecting the incident to a program by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) granting felons the ability to leave prison early for good behavior, adding “Under this governor, 20,000 convicted felons were released early. Maybe the person that threw that thing at me was one of them.”

Surveys suggest Newsom is likely to prevail when California voters decide whether they want to remove him in a Sept. 14 recall election. A Los Angeles Times poll conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and published on Friday found 60.1 percent of voters saying they opposed removing him from office, while just 38.5 percent said they favored replacing him.

Watch above via Fox News.