Ben Carson on Progressive Tolerance: 'Only Works in One Direction'

Dr. Ben Carson has had enough with the double standard in academia and the media when it comes to tolerating the difference of opinions. 

Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125 with Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon, Carson blasted progressives who want to tear down those whose views are not in line with liberal orthodoxy and politically correct. 

“They want to destroy your business. They want to destroy your character. They want to get rid of you,” Carson said. “Whatever happened to tolerance? It seems like it only works in one direction.”

Carson himself was targeted by the thought police in 2013 when the White House demanded that he apologize to President Barack Obama after his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2013.

Carson blasted college campuses and liberals for pitting one group against another and cultivating what he said was a liberal intolerance of differing views.

“War on women. Age wars. Race wars. Gender wars. Income wars,” Carson said. “This is destructive. It is right out of the playbook of Saul Alinsky.”

Carson also reiterated that the “VA mess is a blessing because it shows us what happens with the gigantic bureaucracy” and “when everyone’s healthcare is under the auspices of government bureaucrats.” Liberals tried to twist his remarks to allege Carson was celebrating the scandal in Obama’s VA in which at least 40 veterans died after being placed on secret waiting lists, and Carson said only “stupid people” would believe such spin. 

Carson, who has just published his new book, One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future, spoke movingly about his mother who grew up in rural Tennessee with a third-grade education and eventually helped turn Carson’s life around. 

Carson’s mother worked three jobs from dawn to midnight but still forced him to do book reports even though she did not know how to read. After Carson started to love books and could not put them down, he went from the bottom of his classes to the top of them. Carson decided that he was the captain of his own ship while growing up in impoverished Detroit, and he would eventually become one of the top neurosurgeons in the world, pioneering numerous groundbreaking surgeries and treatments. He credited his mother’s attitude and self-reliance for much of his success.

“She would never be a victim,” Carson said of his mother. “She just hated the thought of being on welfare. She saw people who got on welfare and never came off of it.”