January 14, 2016
EXCLUSIVE: Why Ben Carson Believes He’s Your Best Choice for President
I want you to address the comments that you’ve made about Black Lives Matters being “silly†and “sickening.†Shouldn’t there be protest from communities when you have cases such as Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald? Shouldn’t we have groups bring that to the attention of the public?
I don’t have any problem with people bringing attention to it. I do have a problem when people disrupt what other people are doing, when they don’t do it in an orderly way, and when they leave out large segments of people who need somebody to be concerned about them. I’m very concerned about all of those young black males who are dying on our streets every single day and nobody seems to be interested. The Black Lives Matters people don’t seem to be interested…the police don’t seem to be interested… society at large doesn’t seem to be interested. Nobody seems to care and they just die. That’s what I’m concerned about.
So if you were elected president how would you use your bully pulpit to address this?
You got to get to the root causes of the problem. Why do we have so many young black teenage boys who end up in these situations? Well, we have to be honest about it to recognize that a lot of those boys are being born into a situation where there is no father figure, there is no authoritarian figure, there is no major role model figure. They don’t particularly learn how to relate to authority. Then they find themselves in these situations where they’re faced with authority without having the background for dealing with it and frequently that ends up in a tragic situation.
We need to be talking about how do we create mentorship programs so that we begin to get the right kind of education for these young men, but more importantly how do we begin to reintroduce into our communities the concept of family and family values and the importance of marriage and marriage relationships, and not allow ourselves to be completely fractured by the progressive movement that says there is no such thing as an ideal family.
How do you implement that from a policy standpoint?
You look at the things that work. I have an opportunity to speak at a lot of nonprofit organizations. For instance, many of them help young women who become pregnant usually by accident. What they do is provide them with alternatives and support. Then they hook up with other organizations that will help that young woman by providing good child support so that she can finish her education…so that she can get her GED or her associates degree, bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, learn to be independent and teach her children that independence. That’s the kind of thing that breaks the cycle. Government can support those kinds of programs, encourage and unite those programs, but those need to be private sector programs. Government programs just have a tendency to metastasize and become big layers of bureaucracies.
If you get through the primaries and you’re the nominee, you’re going to have to get votes from a diverse group of constituents — African Americans, gays, millennials, women, Latinos, Muslims. How do you do that when you’ve made statements that have alienated certain groups? How do you get them to support your campaign?
Early on in this process I did make some inflammatory statement. You’ll notice that I don’t do that anymore because people can’t hear what you’re saying anymore after that.
[The Problem with the Stump for Trump Girls]
Is that part of the campaign reboot?
That’s been going on for quite a while. You’ll notice that I really don’t do very much of that any more. You just have to be very careful when you say things. Whether they’re true or not is not important but if they create so much distraction that people can’t hear what you’re saying, then there’s no point in saying things like that. That’s something that you learn with time.