Ben Carson Wants to Elevate America's Discourse to the Level of Comparing Bad Things to Hitler
Ben Carson has made it a goal of his campaign to “get us to mature as a society,” reports the Associated Press, and so he is resolved to continue comparing things he thinks are bad to the worst atrocities in Western history. As mature, nuanced thinkers do.
“I don’t buy the PC stuff. I just don’t buy it,” said the man with a firm grasp on what is meant by “political correctness.”
He said the country can discuss complicated issues as adults, and he suggested people could learn from his example.
In Carson’s defense, he sees the same poll numbers as the rest of us, and they show pretty definitively that name-dropping slavery when offering opposition to women’s rights has not noticeably slowed his ascension to the top of the Republican field.
American conservatives, it seems, appreciate the kind of sober, careful thought that leads one to invoke Nazi Germany in a press conference riff about gun control:
“What happened in Nazi Germany can never happen again unless we forget it, unless we won’t talk about it,” Carson said.
“The Nazis may not be the most perfect comparison,” said Carson’s communications director, who must be a stupid third-grader with that kind of weak-sauce PC way of thinking.
Carson points out that he first made the abortion/slavery comparison two decades ago, showing a keen appreciation of the fact that ideas rarely require updating over the course of a third of a person’s time on earth.
“It always makes me tear up a little bit when I think about what people had to go through,” said Carson, of literal human slavery.
“I was never pro-abortion, but I was pro-choice,” he said. “I felt that even though I didn’t believe in it, I didn’t really have the right to say what anybody else did. And the thing that really changed my mind about that was thinking ... that if the abolitionists said that, said, ‘Well, I don’t believe in slavery, but everybody else can do whatever they want,’ I think maybe we may still have slavery.”
This revelation is particularly applicable for how specific it is to abortion rights, and not literally all other rights that people have with which an individual might not be totally on board. It’s just that kind of close, detailed analysis of the issues that will usher in a new era of maturity in American society.
“Dr. Carson isn’t bound by having to say what you think you have to say, and that’s refreshing,” supporter Rick Chaffin, a 60-year-old Air Force retiree, said recently at one of the candidate’s book signings in Georgia.
Mmmm. Refreshing.
