LOS ANGELES — 2016 presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson sat down with Breitbart News during a visit to Los Angeles recently, where he weighed in on Hollywood’s creeping liberalism, social issues, and the ongoing war on terrorism in the Middle East.
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said of the progressivism and liberalism that has pervaded American culture through Hollywood. “Because many of these people have taken advantage of the capitalist society to become very wealthy individuals.” He found that to be at odds with their embrace (in theory) of wealth redistribution and increased government dependency.
Hollywood A-lister Gwyneth Paltrow, for example, whose net worth is estimated at $140 million, recently vowed to live on government-issued food stamps. She failed to continue past day four of the challenge.
As a champion of decreasing government involvement in the public sphere, Dr. Carson said the government’s increased involvement since the 1960’s with the “War on Poverty,” and “spending $17 to $19 trillion,” has made everything worse. “There’s more poverty, more broken homes, 10x more people on food stamps…all the things that were supposed to get better are much worse.”
Many of the “Black Lives Matter” protests that have taken place in California and across the nation have tied economic disparity to their calls for “justice and peace” in the wake of alleged police violence. Dr. Carson said a lot of the violence in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri “is secondary to frustration. There’s been a lot of change and there’s not much hope. And that makes it very easy for people to be manipulated.”
If he were commander-in-chief, Dr. Carson said he would change that dynamic quickly through policies such as allowing for a tax holiday for all overseas money. “That would be a gigantic stimulus. In about six months they can bring that $2 trillion back.” Carson said he would require 10% of those funds to be used for training and employing the unemployed.
On national security, Dr. Carson said the first step towards winning in the war against “radical Islamic terrorists” who are intent on destroying us and our way of life is acknowledging them for what they are. “And if we can’t even acknowledge that, how are we going to defeat them? We have two choices: 1. Either we defeat them or 2. We let them defeat us. And I don’t like the second choice.”
Dr. Carson told Breitbart News that “the sequestration [in the bipartisan Budget Control Act of 2011] makes no sense because it means that our captains, majors, lieutenant colonels every month are getting letters saying ‘thank you for your service. We no longer need you. We are allowing out military to deteriorate in front of our very eyes and it’s frustrating to see that our leadership either doesn’t understand it or doesn’t care.”
Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter @AdelleNaz
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