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THOUGHT LEADERS

Ben Carson: ‘A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand’

Former HUD secretary on the impact of education on his life and the rise of critical race theory

This country is about liberty,” says Dr. Ben Carson. “Because people wanted to be able to live freely without the government’s foot on their neck, they came here.”

In a recent episode of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek spoke with Carson, a former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the founder of American Cornerstone Institute, a nonprofit organization promoting conservative solutions based on the principles of “faith, liberty, community, and life.”

JAN JEKIELEK: Dr. Ben Carson, it’s a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders, and that I get to talk to you about where you came from.

DR. BEN CARSON: There are those who don’t particularly like my story, because it doesn’t cater to the idea of victimhood.

My parents got divorced early on. We had to move from the home in Detroit that I really loved.

One of my mother’s sisters in Boston took us in. It was a typical tenement that you see on TV, with rats and roaches and gangs and sirens and murders and broken glass all over the place, but it was a roof over our head. That couple of years gave my mother time to get on her feet, and we moved back to Detroit.

I was a horrendous student. But my mother was always encouraging me. She worked as a domestic, and

Dr. Ben Carson,

former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in Virginia on Dec. 7, 2021.

“We have a wonderful system. We cannot be so foolish as to allow someone to make us think that it’s rotten to the core and that we need to change it.”

she cleaned these beautiful homes, and she was always saying, “What makes these people so successful?” And she concluded they read a lot. So she imposed that on me and my brother: two books a week from the public library and written book reports.

I didn’t like it much at first, but after a while, I couldn’t wait to get into my books because they opened up a whole new world.

MR. JEKIELEK: How old were you when this happened?

DR. CARSON: Fifth grade. I started reading about scientists and surgeons and explorers and entrepreneurs. I came to understand, as my brother did, that you were the person who would decide where you’re going to go.

Within a year and a half, I went from the bottom of the class to the top.

MR. JEKIELEK: You’re at the bottom of the class, your mom forces you to read books and write reports on them. And in a year and a half, you shift to the top of the class. Do you remember something specific like an “aha moment”?

DR. CARSON: I do. I read all the animal books. I loved animals. Then I read all the plant books, and then I started reading about rocks and minerals.

Pretty soon, I could name any rock, tell you how it was formed, where it came from. Still in the fifth grade and still the dummy, and one day the science teacher walked in and held up this big, black shiny rock and said, “Can anybody tell me what this is?” I raised my hand and answered, “Mr. Jake, that’s obsidian.”

There was silence because nobody knew whether I was right or wrong. After he got over his shock, he said, “That’s right.” And I went on, “Obsidian is formed after a volcanic eruption and the lava flows down and hits the waters. ...”

They were all staring at me.

But I was the most amazed. It dawned on me that I knew the answer because I was reading books. From that point on, you never saw me without a book. Waiting for the bus, reading a book. On the bus, reading a book.

MR. JEKIELEK: There seems to be a lot less emphasis on these things.

DR. CARSON: That’s the critical problem in our schools right now. In Baltimore City, the number of students working at grade level is almost zero. In so many of our large cities, that seems to be the case.

We really need school choice in a big way, and we need to make it possible for the money to follow the children so they can get a good education. If you get a good education, you write your own ticket.

MR. JEKIELEK: Some people don’t even know basic history.

DR. CARSON: History is so important because your history is what gives you your identity, and your identity is what gives you your beliefs.

This country is about liberty. It’s one of the key things that we emphasize at the American Cornerstone Institute: faith, liberty, community, and life. Because people wanted to be able to live freely without the government’s foot on their neck, they came here.

MR. JEKIELEK: So, the Cornerstone Institute. You’ve focused on this idea of critical race theory in schools and the question of race, right? divided against itself cannot stand. Critical race theory and the 1619 Project, which presents white people as oppressors, create division, animosity, and resentment. Not to mention the fact that it’s based on a series of untruths. People are people, and what makes a person who they are? Their skin color? Really? As a neurosurgeon, I can tell you that when I open somebody’s skull and start working on their brain, that’s what makes them who they are.

MR. JEKIELEK: Nobody disputes the horror of slavery in America. Do you feel that chapter has been closed?

DR. CARSON: Remember, slavery has been a part of society since we have written records. And I’ll tell you something that’s pretty shocking, there are more slaves in the world today than there have ever been. Just look at sex trafficking. So we don’t have to go back 200 years. We can look at what’s going on right now.

There’s a movie coming out soon called “The Sound of Freedom” that really details child sex trafficking and the kind of lives they live.

There was nothing unique about the United States and slavery. What was unique is that we had so many people who were vehemently opposed to it, that we were willing to fight a civil war and lose a huge number of people to try to stop it.

We have a wonderful system. We cannot be so foolish as to allow someone to make us think that

it’s rotten to the core and that we need to change it.

MR. JEKIELEK: You mentioned earlier that a house divided against itself isn’t going to work.

DR. CARSON: Unfortunately, we’re very much there right now. The media have fomented the hatred, and I don’t know why they do it, why they push scenarios that make socialism and communism more acceptable. Do they not know that the first thing communist governments do is completely control the media?

They’re supposed to disseminate unbiased information to the people.

Now the majority of people no longer trust the press.

MR. JEKIELEK: Let’s talk about COVID-19.

DR. CARSON: I have some difficulty with the way that COVID is being utilized to manipulate and frighten people. We should be using every tool available to fight the pandemic. There’s no question about that. But that means therapeutics, which have been pooh-poohed. I understand why. Because in order to get an EUA, an Emergency Use Authorization, to pursue the vaccines, you can’t have an effective alternative. So that’s a defect in our system.

A lot of people died unnecessarily because we had that attitude. Look at the infusion of monoclonal antibodies. A tremendous advantage, which was not utilized the way it might have been. My life was saved because of it. I was severely ill with COVID. I was ready to move on to the next world, and that therapy turned things around for me.

Our people are not stupid. They’re able to process information. If we stop treating them like children and level with them, people will make the right decisions.

It’s one of the reasons people are losing confidence in the CDC and the NIH and our governmental agencies. And that’s going to impact public health issues well beyond COVID. It’s a serious issue.

We have a situation, for example, where the government is advocating that children be vaccinated, even though the risk for death for a child with COVID is 0.025 percent. So why would you subject an innocent child to a lifetime of unknown risk? It just makes absolutely no sense.

MR. JEKIELEK: There’s a lot of despondent people out there. How do we get out of this?

DR. CARSON: Let’s open this thing up to all the different mechanisms. Let’s look around the world at things that work. Let’s look at the fact that on the western coast of Africa, there’s almost no COVID and ask ourselves, “Why is that?” And then we see they take anti-malarial drugs, particularly hydroxychloroquine.

Let’s listen to these physician groups who’ve had incredible success with ivermectin. Let’s look at the results with monoclonal antibodies. And let’s throw the politics out. We could solve this problem pretty quickly. 

“History is so important because your history is what gives you your identity, and your identity is what gives you your beliefs.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

People gather before the start of a rally against critical race theory instruction in schools, at the Loudoun County Government Center in Leesburg, Va., on June 12, 2021.

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