Dr. Ben Carson, perhaps the most famous Seventh-day Adventist, having been chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, written several books, had a film made of his early life, received numerous honorary doctorates, and, most recently, having served in the Cabinet of the Trump Administration as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, recently sat down with the Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek (the son of Polish immigrants to the U.S.) for an hour-long interview in Jekielek’s excellent, “American Thought Leaders” interview series.
Jekielek begins with Dr. Carson’s personal story of rising from poverty and underachievement to top academic honors through a self-educational reading program insisted upon by his illiterate but very wise mother. But because most of you have heard that story many times, I’ll skip ahead to the topical issues covered.
On Education:
Mr. Jekielek: I want to say right now that there just seems to be a lot less of an emphasis on exactly these things, right?
Dr. Carson: That’s the critical problem that we’re having in our schools right now. In Baltimore city, the graduation rate, obviously, is very low but the number of students who are working at grade level is almost zero. In so many of our large cities, that seems to be the case. And the politicians, I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I remember in Baltimore during The No Child Left Behind series, some of the schools that were failing badly, they said, “We’re going to send these kids to other schools.” The politicians physically gathered around the school saying, “No, these are our schools. These are our failing students. We want to let them fail.”
They didn’t say that, but obviously that was the message. Nothing has improved. We really need school choice in a big way, and we need to make it possible for the money to follow the children so that they can get a good education because it doesn’t matter what background you come from in this country. If you get a good education, you write your own ticket.
Mr. Jekielek: We’re at this place right now where you hear about for example, zero students. I know of cases exactly in school systems where 0% of the students are actually functioning at grade level. This general phenomenon is not uncommon. Is this system just broken? Completely broken?
Dr. Carson: I don’t think we’re putting the correct emphasis on education like we did 100 years ago, 200 years ago. Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed with our education system when he came to study America, did his big two volume set on democracy in America. All you have to do is go back and look at some of those exit exams. You had to really know something to graduate from the sixth grade back in those days.
And today, you’ve probably seen some of those Man on the Street interviews where they go and say, “Who were the opponents in the Civil War,” and they’re like, “Was it England?” I mean, people don’t know a lot of basic stuff.
It’s not just embarrassing, it’s frightening because we only have 330 million people. That sounds like a lot of people but it’s a quarter of what China has, a quarter of what India has. In the future, we have to compete with them, which means we need to develop all of our people. We can have a large group of people who know nothing and are easily manipulated.
On Critical Race Theory:
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned something quite important. You’re saying that never mind civics, but history, some people just don’t know some of the most basic history. Or, we can talk about this a bit too, interpretations of history that are highly opinionated, let’s say.
Dr. Carson: Well, instead of critical race theory, we ought to be teaching critical math theory and critical English and critical history and civics and the things that people really need to know in order to be useful contributing citizens of our nation.
Mr. Jekielek: And what about history? How is-
Dr. Carson: History is so important because your history is what gives you your identity, and your identity is what gives you your beliefs. So by distorting history, we are having a very disruptive effect on the identity of our young people and it makes them very vulnerable. And, I think that’s why it’s so easy for them to … A third, I think, of our young people now think socialism is okay.
They don’t really know what it is. They think it’s probably familiarly social media. They don’t know what it is. It would be wonderful if they could go and live in frankly socialist countries for a year or so. I think it would open their eyes tremendously in terms of the tremendous opportunities that we have here and why we need to make sure that we maintain freedom in this country.
This country is about liberty. It’s one of the key things, obviously, that we emphasize at the American Cornerstone Institute; faith, liberty, community, and life. And, it was because people wanted to be able to live freely without the government’s foot on their neck, that they came here in the first place without the government mandating that you must do this and you must do this and you can go here and you can’t go there. That’s not America, and we cannot be fooled into thinking that’s America on the basis of some health issue. We can’t let any kind of issue destroy our freedoms.
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Mr. Jekielek: So, the Cornerstone Institute. Of course, you founded it not too long ago. You mentioned some of the core ideas behind it, but a big focus that you’ve had has been tackling this whole idea of critical race theory in schools and just frankly, the question of race, right?
Dr. Carson: Right, it’s such an important issue because the United States of America plays a very important role in the world, and if we lose our status and we lose our standing, the world will deteriorate very rapidly. Once again, when we are strong, there tends to be much peace in the world. When we are weak, the death spots begin to reappear. And, how do you weaken America, a place that is so strong historically? You divide the people.
Jesus said it first, Abraham Lincoln repeated it. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, which presents white people as oppressors and the root cause of problems for everybody else, and that everybody else is a victim, I’m quite at a loss to explain how that improves our country.
How does that make a people better? It doesn’t. It creates division and 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? Their hair texture? I don’t think so. As a neurosurgeon, I can tell you that when I open somebody’s skull and start working on the brain, that is what makes them who they are. The other things are just peripheral decorations, and they have nothing to do with who you are as a person.
That’s what we need to begin to really, truly understand. You look at a human brain versus an animal brain, say a dog, and what’s the difference? Well, the surface topography is quite similar, but the dog’s midbrain is much more developed than the human midbrain, and that allows you to react.
Dog’s react much faster than we do. Most animals react much faster than we do, but we have these very well-developed frontal lobes. Now, what are those for? Rational thought processing, extracting information from the past and the present, integrating it, understanding it, projecting it into the future, controlling what’s going on. That’s what we do as human beings rather than acting like animals.
Critical race theory tells you, “No, no, no. Act like an animal. Just look at the surface of that person, look at their external characteristics and make a judgment as to who they are.” Why should we be going backward? We need to be moving forward. We need to use the intellect that God has given us to move forward, not to act like animals.
On Slavery:
Mr. Jekielek: Well, so there’s this assumption that, based on skin color, that all the people with this particular skin color will basically be the same.
Dr. Carson: That’s exactly right. And, it’s just so ridiculous. To assume, for instance, that white people are oppressors and it started with slavery, and that everything they do is to maintain their possession is false on the surface because most of the white people in the south did not own slaves. They couldn’t afford slaves, so to say because of their ancestry of slave holding, they’re evil is just not correct.
Also, most people don’t know this, there were black slave holders also. In 1670, the Commonwealth of Virginia actually declared that blacks and Indians could not own Christian slaves, which was their euphemism for white slaves. There’s a lot of very interesting history if you go back and delve through it.
The point being that people are people and when they find an advantage, they take advantage of it. And, you also must remember, where did the slaves come from? The African slaves usually came from tribal fighting, and one tribe would prevail over another and they would either kill or take the enemies as their slaves, and then all of a sudden, there were these Portuguese people saying, “Can we buy some of those slaves?” They said, “Hm, that’s a good way to get some cash.” That’s really a big part of how things got started, and it just multiplied from there.
Mr. Jekielek: Nobody disputes the horror of slavery in America. Do you feel like that chapter has been closed, I guess, in the country?
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. You look at sex trafficking, and even in the United States, we are the biggest subscribers to human trafficking. So we don’t have to go back 200 years. We can look at what’s going on right now.
We really should be focusing some attention on what is going on right under our noses, and the incredible lives that these sex slaves live. It’s awful. There’s a movie coming out soon called The Sound of Freedom that really details the child’s sex trafficking that goes on and the kind of lives that they have to live. And, it’s so awful that sometimes when they’re rescued, they actually go back to it because they don’t know any other life. They don’t feel any other security.
So we have a job to do. But there was nothing unique about the United States and having 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, lose a huge number of people to try to stop it. And some people say, “Well, that Civil War, that wasn’t about slavery. That was about maintaining the union.” Well, remember the reason that the south wanted to secede is so that they could maintain slavery. So obviously that was the root cause. As I always say elementary, my dear Watson.
On the 1619 Project:
Mr. Jekielek: I think you’ve said this in the past that this whole critical race theory, this idea in the 1619 Project, that origins of America are in slavery, that it’s actually more of a tool to divide than an attempt to paint an authentic history.
Dr. Carson: That’s correct. And, if you really want to fundamentally change a country and change a society, you first must get people to feel that it needs to be changed. That it is so inherently evil the way that it is, that it needs to be changed. This is all part of that plan to try to make us appear evil so that people will want to change our system into something else. And, the exact opposite is the case.
This is the place that has provided more opportunity for more people, not only in this country, but around the world. This is the first superpower of the world that has not gone around and trampled and tried to conquer everybody else. It is an amazing place. And I think a large part of that has to do with our faith and the fact that we did have a moral basis, our Judeo-Christian foundation, and the development of our Constitution, our Bill of Rights.
And as we’ve moved away from that, and if you go back and you look at the writings of Lenin and Stalin and some of the other Russians, and they talk about the strength of America, our family structure and our moral foundation and how that was going to make it extremely difficult to ever conquer, to defeat the United States of America, and that the way that it would be done is to corrupt them morally and to destroy their family structure.
And, it seems like those are the things that are going on right now. And, we have to be smart enough to realize that we have something that’s particularly wonderful here. This is like the older brother and the younger brother, the younger brother has this delicious dessert that the older brother wants, but he can’t have it. So he says to the younger brother, “Maggots smothered in rats, and all kind of horrible things,” and the little brother says, “Ew, I don’t want this,” and he runs out. And, the big brother eats it.
We have a wonderful system. Other people want it. We cannot be so foolish as to allow someone to make us think that it is rotten to the core and that we need to change it. Do we need to learn from our mistakes? Absolutely. Have we been perfect? Absolutely not. Has any society been perfect? Absolutely not because they’re inhabited by people and people are imperfect.
On the Divisive, Communist Media:
Mr. Jekielek: Okay. You mentioned earlier that a nation divided isn’t going to do … a house divided against itself isn’t going to work. And, we’re very much in that place, aren’t we, here in America right now?
Dr. Carson: Unfortunately, we’re very much there right now. And, I hate to say this to you because you’re part of the media, but they have fomented the hatred, and I don’t know why they do it. And, I don’t know why they push the scenarios that would make socialism and communism more acceptable. Have they not read history that tells you that the first thing that communism governments do is completely control the media? Do they not know that?
So, I think they’re being a little shortsighted. And, I always encourage journalists, particularly young people, to recognize that the only business protected by our constitution, the only one, is the media, the press. Why? Because they were supposed to disseminate unbiased information to the people, and that’s the only way that the people can know the information which will allow them to have an opinion, to have a will, because the country was supposed to be run on the will of the people. That was what distinguished us from other nations that were government-centric. We were supposed to be people-centric.
And, it was a great experiment and many people thought it would never work, and that somehow we would eventually wind up being government-centric. But that’s why our founders spent so much time on our constitution to provide the people with the tool that they needed to keep the government from expanding and controlling their lives.
On the Virginia Election and the Right of Parents to Educate Their Own Children:
Mr. Jekielek: You’ve commented on this recent election in Virginia, that it was … Well actually, let me ask you. What is your comment on the election in Virginia?
Dr. Carson: I was very pleased to see people willing to cross the political barriers and vote on what was an important issue, and that is who has the right to say how your child should be educated. Do your children belong to you or do they belong to the state? And, I think that was an issue that democrats, republicans, independents, all, could come together on. And I think there are many issues that they could all come together on.
On the Covid-19 Pandemic:
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about COVID-19. You’re not a fan of big government. You’re not a fan of government structures telling the populous what to do, how to behave and so forth, or perhaps even manipulating them into behaving in certain ways. I don’t think you’re a fan of any of these things.
Dr. Carson: No, I’m definitely not and therefore, I have some difficulty with the way that COVID is being utilized to manipulate and to frighten people. We should be using every tool available to us to fight the pandemic. There’s no question about that. But that means therapeutics, which have been poo-pooed. And, I understand why. Because in order to get an EUA, an Emergency Use Authorization, to pursue the vaccines, you can’t have anything that’s effective as an alternative. So, that’s a defect in our system. We need to get rid of that and we should be able to pursue all the different avenues and let them take us where they possibly can.
I think a lot of people died unnecessarily because we had that attitude. You look at the infusion of antibodies, monoclonal antibodies. A tremendous advantage, which was not really utilized the way it should be early on. My life was saved because of it. I was severely ill with COVID. I was ready to move on to the next world, and it was really that therapy that turned things around for me. But there are many things that have been very effective that we have not pursued, including natural immunity.
The CDC so much as admitted a few weeks ago that they don’t have evidence that natural immunity is effective or is not effective, whether it’s easier or less easy to transmit the disease. And then they admitted that they don’t collect that information. Well, why wouldn’t you collect that information? Why wouldn’t you want to know that? The only reason you wouldn’t do that is because you didn’t want to know the answer because it didn’t fit very neatly into what you’re trying to do, which is get everybody to be vaccinated.
And, I think that’s one of the reasons that people don’t trust the information that’s coming out. A lot of the people who probably should be vaccinated are not doing it because they see these inconsistencies, these things that make absolutely no sense, this demand that everybody get a vaccination, except if you’re coming across the southern border illegally and then it’s not all that important.
Mr. Jekielek: Or, you’re in Congress, for that matter.
Dr. Carson: Or, you’re in Congress. That’s right. So, our people are not stupid. They’re able to see these things and they’re able to process that information, and if we stop treating them like children and level with them, people will make the right decisions. We have tremendous healthcare in this country, great doctors and healthcare providers, and we have people who have different circumstances.
Some have natural immunity, some have other systemic diseases, a variety of different conditions so what their treatment should be and what preventative measures should be taken, they should do that with their physician, not some government bureaucrat who has a one size fits all measuring stick.
Mr. Jekielek: Okay, so two things. The first one is it’s true that the CDC hasn’t been doing this work around natural immunity, around gathering data around it, but I’m aware of a paper that Brownstone Institute just published somewhat recently just looking at all the studies out there about natural immunity. Because not everybody isn’t studying natural immunity. There’s plenty of folks that are, and it’s pretty clear based on the entire body of evidence from what they found that it’s incredibly effective and as one might expect in every other situation that we’ve been aware of. So, this has been perplexing to me.
Dr. Carson: Well, it is perplexing and it makes absolutely no sense. It’s obviously being ignored because it goes against the “everybody has to vaccinated” mantra. It’s one of the reasons that I think people are losing confidence very quickly in the CDC and the NIH and our governmental agencies. And, that’s a shame because that’s going to impact public health issues well beyond COVID and it’s a serious issue.
How the Horribly Misguided Response to Covid Exposed the Top-Down Structure of Medicine:
Mr. Jekielek: The other thing that occurred to me, and you touched on it just as you finished the previous answer. I’ve almost been conditioned based on hearing the news about COVID and how we have to respond to COVID that somehow there’s this medical body that from on high dictates to all medical practitioners what they all should do. I know rationally that this is absolutely not how medicine works, that doctors are trained so that they can deal with a patient as best they can know how, right? It’s never a one size fits all cookie cutter answer.
So, how is this that this has somehow changed in this pandemic?
Dr. Carson: Well, we’ve had a lot of pressure on doctors to conform. You have to subscribe to what you’re being told or you can be canceled. Doctors are like everybody else. Some of them are courageous and some of them are not. That’s why it’s important for the individuals to actually know the truth, and that’s why the press could play such an important role to get the real facts out there so that people know what to work with.
We have a situation where you have the government advocating that children be vaccinated, even though the risk for death for a child with COVID is 0.025%. Essentially, the same as it is for seasonal flu. You don’t see us doing all this every year for seasonal flu. So, the risk of mortality for a healthy child is approaching zero and yet, we’re saying do this without knowing what the long-term risks are. We don’t know what they are. Why would you subject an innocent child to a lifetime of unknown risk? It just makes absolutely no sense.
And, I think a lot of people are seeing that. Even our court system, three federal judges have said no mandates. You can’t do this, and you certainly can’t relate a person’s livelihood to it. And yet, the executive branch of our federal government says, “Let’s push on with it anyway.” What is that? That’s lawlessness. So, how can they sit around and criticize the smash-and-grab people and everybody else who’s exhibiting lawlessness when at the highest levels of government, we’re exhibiting lawlessness?
Mr. Jekielek: People have argued that some people should be vaccinated to protect everybody else. And some people have argued that this is why children should be vaccinated, even given the realities that you described there. What do you think about that?
Dr. Carson: Well, I think it doesn’t make any sense because if the elderly people are already vaccinated, which well over 90% of them are, then what danger is it to them that somebody else would come around who wasn’t vaccinated? That argument doesn’t make any sense on its face. Everybody get vaccinated so you can be protected. But, you’re not really protected because even if you’re vaccinated, they’re still going to give it to you. They’re not listening to themselves. They’re just talking.
Somebody has proclaimed a certain agenda, and you have a bunch of people following it who are not thinking for themselves … intelligent people. They’re what Vladimir Lenin referred to as useful idiots.
Mr. Jekielek: A number of people that I’ve spoken with, public health experts, are deeply concerned about the cost to the whole profession, to the whole concept of public health. That this is essentially killing the discipline.
Dr. Carson: It really is. We need to have faith in our government. We need to have faith in our healthcare systems and by injecting politics into it, I think we have put ourself behind the eight ball. It’s going to take a while, I think, to reestablish that trust. And, it can only be done by leaders who are not deeply indebted to political figures. Most of the people who ascend to leadership positions in our country have done so by you rub my back, I’ll rub your back type of stuff. Rarely do we get somebody who has not become indebted to others, and I think that’s one of the reasons that we find ourselves in the difficult situations that we are in.
On How We Get Out of the Public Health Catastrophe Created by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins:
Mr. Jekielek: So with public health first, let’s talk about the way out, because I know you think a lot about these things. I know you have that incredible spirit of optimism can overcome anything. There’s a lot of people feeling really despondent out there. Just on the public health side, which is such a fundamental, foundational aspect of public life, how do we get out of this?
Dr. Carson: Well, I think the way out is quite easy. We say, “Sorry, we’ve been having tunnel vision and that’s not who we are.” 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 let’s ask ourselves why is that? And then you see it’s because they take anti-malarial’s, particularly hydroxychloroquine. Let’s study that. Let’s see what’s going on there.
Let’s listen to these physician groups who have had incredible success with ivermectin. Let’s look at the results with monoclonal antibodies. Let’s look at all of these things. Let’s put them all in our armamentarium so that we don’t have a one size fits all system. And, let’s throw the politics out. We could solve this problem pretty quickly.
COVID is a virus. Viruses mutate. That’s what they do, and they will continue to mutate. Fortunately, most of the times with each mutation, they attenuate, they become a little weaker. Pretty soon, they’re everywhere. They become endemic. They become part of something that we just learn how to live with. We can admit that and deal with it, or we can take every little mutation and every little change and try to make it into a crisis so we can frighten people and control their lives more.
Mr. Jekielek: So, in a broader picture, we’re again talking about a house divided can’t function. So what is the path out through here?
Dr. Carson: The only path is strong leadership, and we don’t have that. We need people who know how to … That was actually the thing that I think was most appealing about Joe Biden. It was said that he was going to bring people together. Of course, he’s driven them much further apart. But, that’s what we need right now.
Somebody who can look at what’s good for everybody, and let’s work on the basis of that. Knowing that we have a pluralistic society, knowing that not everybody is going to agree about everything, why not learn how to take everybody’s best interest in consideration? Why not learn how to look at what’s logical and what makes sense? And, why not encourage discussion of those things rather than everybody get in their respective corners and shooting hand grenades at each other?
But that requires real leadership, and I don’t care where that leadership comes from. I don’t care which party it comes from, but it is essential for the prosperity of this nation.
Mr. Jekielek: Well, Dr. Ben Carson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on again.
Dr. Carson: Well, thank you. It’s always good to be with you, and I appreciate the fact that your outlet [The Epoch Times] actually tries to be logical.