On Monday, Dr. Ben Carson said that he would continue to push entertainers and those who influence popular culture to use their sway to promote education and values in the inner cities.
Speaking at The New York Meeting, Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, said that he has spoken to entertainment figures and asked them to “use some of that influence” to make the point to young women that “when you have a baby out of wedlock you are likely going to terminate your education and send that baby into poverty.”
Carson said young women need to know they are “doing nobody any favors” by having children out of wedlock, and that there are “other ramifications of these actions.”
“But they don’t do it,” he said of entertainment figures. “We have to keep pushing them on that.”
Carson said when he was growing up in the inner city, he thought he would not live to see his 25th birthday in what “seemed like a pretty desperate situation.”
But he said he had a mother who worked three domestic jobs because she did not want to be on welfare and would “never be a victim, and she would never allow us to be a victim.”
He said his mother made him read books and do book reports instead of watching television. Spending all of his time reading “changed my world,” he said, before saying that his mother helped him to reject all of the people around him that blamed their failures on racism, other people, and “this system.”
The New York Meeting is a monthly event run by Mallory Factor and O’Brien Murray. Panelists included James Taranto, Peggy Noonan, and Sirius XM radio host and Breitbart contributor David Webb.