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--:-- John Bickley: Good morning, I'm John Bickley, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Wire, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I'm Georgia Howe, co-host of Morning Wire.
--:-- John Bickley: Today, we're joined by Dr. Ben Carson, founder and chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute, and a former presidential candidate and secretary of housing and urban development. Dr. Carson, welcome to the show.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Thank you for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: Before we get to the premise of your new book, The Perilous Fight, I'd like to ask you about some presidential campaign issues. So first, we hear rumblings that you're on Donald Trump's short list for potential VP candidates. Have you actually had any discussions about being VP?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: No.
--:-- John Bickley: Would this be of interest to you?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Well, you know, we've talked about the things that we can do to save America. And that will be of very great interest to me. What role I play in that, whether it's inside or outside the administration, remains to be seen.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Speaking of being inside the administration, you were part of the Trump administration for four years as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. How difficult was it to battle a hostile press during those four years?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Well, you know, the assumption was that they would be hostile. They would try to present anything you did in a bad light. So it was an advantage knowing that you don't go in naive. But it's much more difficult when you have to measure everything that you say and you do because you know that it's going to be distorted.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Are you seeing that same pattern playing out this election cycle?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Very much so. I mean, just recently when Donald Trump said something about the auto industry and if he wasn't elected, it would be a bloodbath. And of course, they took that out of context and said that he's calling for violence if he isn't elected. And he was talking about the automobile industry and what would happen there.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, Trump has acquired enough delegates to earn the Republican nomination. Do you think he deserves a chance at another four years?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: I certainly believe that another four years would be good, particularly compared to the time that we've just gone through. I mean, when he was there, we had low inflation. We had very low unemployment. We had highest wages. We had respect on the world stage. We didn't have rampant crime. We had a secure border. We were energy independent. I mean, the list goes on and on. And comparing that to what's going on now, it should be a pretty easy choice.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, you've written a new book, The Perilous Fight, in which you argue that the family is America's strongest asset and that it's under attack. How so?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Well, it is the fundamental building block of any society. The family, the community, the state – and all those are the components of the country. And what's been happening is those who want to fundamentally change our country recognize that you're not going to bring the United States down militarily. So you have to do it from within.
--:-- John Bickley: What are some of the specific strategies for doing so, for damaging or undermining the family?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Well, for one thing, denigrating the role of men in the family, making men seem unnecessary, denigrating the sanctity of marriage, making dissolution of marriage very easy. You know, trying to remove parents from the home setting and turning that responsibility over to schools and to teachers.
--:-- Georgia Howe: All the traditional things that families provide for kids, trying to substitute those for other areas so that they can be indoctrinated. And bear in mind, you know, the Marxist philosophy. It was Vladimir Lenin who said, give me your children to teach for four years and the seed that I sow will never be uprooted.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Trying to place our children in those settings where they can implant those seeds. And if you do that early on, it basically changes the trajectory of that child's life.
--:-- John Bickley: How much do you think this is a deliberate strategy being played out, deliberate nefarious action versus people just buying into a left-wing ideology?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Well, it doesn't require a whole lot of people to be deliberate. It does require a lot of people to be what Lenin referred to as useful idiots who destroyed their own future willingly without understanding the implications of what they're doing.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And in order to do that, you have to have control of the media. You don't have to be very observant to see how coordinated the mainstream media is in the messaging that they do.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: And it depends on the fact that a lot of the populace doesn't research material. They just accept what they hear and work on the basis of that. And that's what they depend on.
--:-- John Bickley: And virtually every community, if you look at the history of the world, before they become communists or socialists, they dumbed down the population. Because you have to have a dumbed-down population that will accept what you said to them.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The ultimate goal here, in your view, is it the destruction of America or the transformation of America? Or is that a distinction without a difference?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: It needs to be transformed. You know, particularly if you're looking for a socialist type of society, which is consistent with a one-world type government system.
--:-- John Bickley: And you can see it already, the seeds of it. It sort of started with the United Nations, the World Health Organization, various other world associations, trying to sort of gather everybody under an umbrella.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: The biggest standout to that whole concept is guess who? The United States of America. How do you get the United States of America to conform? You're not going to do it militarily. They're much too powerful. The only way you're going to do it is to change them from within.
--:-- Georgia Howe: When you hear some people on the left talking about fundamentally changing America, that's what they're talking about.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: You mentioned the quote from Lenin about giving him four years to teach the children what they'll never unlearn. Where does this indoctrination originate in higher education?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: No, it starts early on. You know, you look at some of the things that the children are exposed to early on in terms of critical race theory, for instance. Teaching little white kids that they're oppressors and that their ancestry is oppressors. Teaching little black kids and other minorities that they're victims and that you have a whole system that is stacked against them, creating guilt and victimhood as ways of manipulating and controlling behavior of different people.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It's very insidious and it's moving very rapidly. The same thing with transgenderism, taking little children whose minds are not fully formed, whose brains will not be fully developed until they're in their 20s, who are naturally curious and very suggestible, confusing them about who they are.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: It's very hard to undo that kind of thing.
--:-- John Bickley: What evidence do you see of Americans wanting a return to conservative principles rooted in faith and family? Do you see hope in terms of the public desiring more of a return to what made us strong in the past?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Well, I see a lot of hope because I go to a lot of universities working with the Turning Point USA group and the enthusiasm of those kids and how they're bringing others in.
--:-- Georgia Howe: You look at, I think it was Auburn University last year, they had a rally and 200 of the kids decided they wanted to be baptized that night and the thing just exploded.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: There's a reason that kids feel a need to find something else. They see that this system that is being pushed on them leads to emptiness. It doesn't lead to fulfillment. It doesn't lead to happiness.
--:-- John Bickley: And when you go back and you look at the founding principles of our nation, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the ability to lead the life that you want, not with all the government mandates and people telling you what you can say and what you can't say and how you have to think.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: I think a lot of our people are starting to see the light and recognize that we don't really want to give up what has made America the shiny city on the hill.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And as much as they try to denigrate our country, why are all these people still trying to get in here? Obviously, we have something pretty special.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: In terms of solutions, what are some ways forward to tap into this energy that you see, this desire you see? Is this about policy or is this about changing hearts and minds? How do you approach it?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Well, you're probably not going to legislate it. You're going to have to get people to actually understand what's happening to us, to understand that we're being manipulated that we're being played like pawns.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We have to understand who the enemy is. The enemy are those who want to fundamentally change us, the Marxist ideology that is infiltrating our society that wants our people to feel insecure so that they will want to change to something else.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Which is why you have all these DAs who won't prosecute the criminals. They want us to feel afraid. They want us to feel that our system doesn't work and that we need to switch over to something different.
--:-- John Bickley: If you can manipulate the vote, you can pretty much do what you want in that society. This is the very reason that France, for instance, in 1975, outlawed mail-in balloting as a general principle because they said, "They've tried everything. You just can't control the cheating."
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: That's the same thing here. But we don't want to fix it because we don't want to control the cheating.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Sort of a tag-on to that question. There's a lot of conservatives ready-made to hear this message, already embracing this message. How do you reach people on the other side of the political spectrum?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Well, the key thing is showing them historically what the goals are of those who want to fundamentally change our nation. And also showing them what the statistics are.
--:-- John Bickley: There are a lot of stats in this book that talk about what happens when children are raised outside of the traditional nuclear family, as opposed to those who are raised inside. Marked difference in terms of success in society, marked difference in terms of incarceration, suicide and depression, all these things.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: So do you really want to subject your child to that? Or do you want to inform yourself and create an environment that is actually healthy for them?
--:-- Georgia Howe: And that needs to be addressed head on. And I think a lot of people, if you show them the actual data and let them understand that they have a role to play in achieving the kind of environment that will lead to success, I think you can change their minds.
--:-- John Bickley: Final question, a more open one. What's a key takeaway or argument in your book that we haven't touched on enough here yet?
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: Well, the only thing is the role of faith, which is so important. And, you know, if you go back to that document that I talked about, the congressional record in 1963, one of the goals is to eliminate God and faith in American society. Replace that with faith in government.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And that is why you see so much hostility, particularly toward Christianity in our country. And we need to understand the Judeo-Christian values of love your neighbor certainly trump the leftist value of cancel your neighbor if they don't agree with you.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: It strikes me that this is the convergence of faith, something that's supposedly private, in politics. You've just outlined that these things are not actually separable, that in the end, this is a crucial junction point.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And that they're also not things that need to be kept in the dark. We're told from the time that we're little children, don't talk about two things, politics and religion. Those are the very things we need to be talking about because those are the things that are being attacked and attempted to change.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: And that will be much more successful if you don't talk about it.
--:-- John Bickley: Dr. Carson, thank you so much for joining us and good luck with your new book.
--:-- Dr. Ben Carson: A pleasure. Thank you so much.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was neurosurgeon Ben Carson, author of the new book, The Perilous Fight. And this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for listening to Morning Wire. If you want to hear more, be sure to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on social media.
