The Curious Case of Benjamin Carson: The Latest Icon for White-Guilt “Con”servatives

Did another skinhead manage to knock some sense into Geraldo Rivera’s head via a chair this past summer? A few months ago the liberal gadfly made an uncharacteristically prescient observation on the reasons behind the surging poll numbers of Dr. Ben Carson:

I’m reminded of David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York City who, when people were polled, was killing Rudy Giuliani in their second matchup. And then, when Election Day came, it came, obviously, Giuliani beat Dinkins…a lot of Republicans polled by Monmouth are giving the politically correct answer.¹

Of course, since this quote was posted on the cuckservative ‘Freedom Outpost’ site, the predictable reaction was ineffectual outrage: ‘Wow’, ‘Um, what?’, and…wait for it…’liberals are more racist than conservatives.’² Seems to me we’ve heard this song and dance before, and it sure didn’t rate a 10 on American Bandstand then, either.

Regular readers of Faith & Heritage know this already, but for the uninitiated let me make it abundantly clear: Ben Carson is an atrocious candidate. From his unwavering fidelity towards Israel to his unwavering fidelity towards vaccines to his unwavering fidelity towards databases, he has proven himself to be no ally of Christians. Likewise, for a black Republican president to immediately succeed a mulatto Democratic president – and, doubtless, guarantee himself a full two terms as seems to be de rigueur for a chief executive from either party anymore – brings to mind the curse from God towards His rebellious and reprobate people: ‘The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.’ (Deut. 28:43-44)

You can’t tell a white guilter this, though – he wants his affirmative action despot, and by cracky, he aims to get him by hook or by crook! A more pertinent issue would be to examine the means whereby Carson is being buffeted into yet another ethnic Trojan Horse, as well as how successful these means have proven to be. Let us proceed in doing so.

********

It’s a tried and true maxim but, should an especially bright five-year-old happen to come across this article, it bears repeating: in the voting booth, policy doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn. Only two kinds of people show up to vote: partisans and undecideds. Partisans will vote for a fencepost providing it is branded with the proper ‘R’ or ‘D’ moniker. Undecideds, being more in thrall to the democratic process than they are with actually doing something productive that evening, are not wonkish by nature. They vote with their ‘heart’, not with their ‘head’, and so what they ‘feel’ about two competing candidates thus becomes crucially important. Strategists in both parties understand this very, very well. Hence, their preoccupation with ensuring that a candidate be ‘relatable’ to as broad a spectrum of voters as possible.

Of course, what constitutes relatability has changed drastically over the years. Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency was considered a resounding success electorally, resulting in a then-very rare second term for a Republican president. Ike’s military record was considered no small factor in this victory. (Displaced Germans languishing in various sections of the Comintern weren’t a reliable voting bloc.) Over the next forty years, an unofficial cardinal law of politics was thus established: any serious presidential candidate had to have some sort of World War II service on his resume. It hardly mattered if such service was limited to Lyndon Johnson’s flying one observer mission over New Guinea (for which he won an undeserved Silver Star) or Ronald Reagan’s processing newsreel footage Stateside (he would later claim to have been present at the liberation of many concentration camps to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir). The so-called ‘Greatest Generation’ had been in uniform and they wanted their tyrants to have done the same.

Then in 1992 an amazing thing happened. William Jefferson Clinton, an avowed draft-dodger whose questionable moral character was even then well-known, defeated WWII vet George Herbert Walker Bush to capture the White House. Bush’s war record has since been proven to be every bit as fraudulent as LBJ’s was, but this was not as well-documented at the time: thus, this new situation was considered quite a shocking development by the conservative pundits of that era. Rationalizing that economic conditions had consigned Bush to electoral Valhalla, many of these same pundits eagerly awaited 1996, convinced that Clinton’s philandering, involvement in scandals from Vince Foster’s ‘suicide’ to Whitewater, and overbearing activist First Lady all marked him as a one-term wonder. Came the year, and Clinton managed to resoundingly thump Bob Dole, the last WWII vet ever to garner either party’s nomination. Clearly, things were changing. Just what was it about Billy, anyway?

Simple. Changing demographics. The so-called ‘Greatest Generation’ wasn’t the greatest political force in America anymore: their baby boomer kids and the first wave of their Generation X grandkids were, and they couldn’t care less if someone ever donned fatigues and went off to fight the good fight for post-Christian cosmopolitanism. They wanted to be led by someone more ‘real’, more ‘attuned’, someone who really and truly could ‘feel their pain’ and offer them metaphorical hugs of solidarity in lieu of God-ordained liberties. Clinton’s amorality was no detriment to this process: far from it. His gross turpitude was seen as mere ‘imperfections’ from a soul-sick populace. They alternately bequeathed pagan forgiveness upon his head with platitudes of ‘There but for the grace of my personal belief system go I’ and envied him the wantonness he was able to imbibe in with the cloak of power shielding him from all consequences except the most innocuous impeachment imaginable. He was seen as the first ‘human’ president, and that backhandedly benevolent title is still bestowed upon him to this day, from Republicans as well as Democrats.

A new relatability paradigm was thus born – the Sinner as Saint, or Mr. Prodigal Goes to Washington. Why not don the dirty laundry the media digs up on you and bewail your ‘human failings’ with crocodile tears, and reap the harvest of votes thereof? The efficacy of this strategy was again proven in the weeks before the 2000 election. A story broke that GOP candidate George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in 1976. This, combined with rumors that Bush had used his daddy’s patronage to avoid overseas duty during Vietnam and had also had a cocaine problem in the past, gave Democrats hope that the presidency would remain in their hands. Instead, a couple of thousand recounts and court challenges later, the Bush Dynasty became an accomplished fact of American political history. How much Bush’s treacly confession and faux atonement contributed to his victory is impossible to say. Still, it is undeniable that his chief advisor Karl Rove milked every last drop out of the subsequent and equally treacly endorsement bestowed upon the Bush campaign by virtually every evangelical, mainstream Reformed, and Tradcat association in the country. And if further proof were needed that military service was a dead electoral asset, three Vietnam vets in a row – Gore, Kerry, and McCain – all failed to win the top spot. It seems extremely unlikely that any vet of that war will ever make it to the White House.

In 2008, Barack Obama presented a new relatability dynamic, one geared especially for the last vestiges of Gen Xers and the first wave of Millennials. Here was the personification of that hallowed mantra of early twentieth-century Unitarians: the Great American Dream. A mixed-race kid from a broken home raised by Communist grandparents overcomes an early life of thuggery and drug abuse to obtain a law degree, become a community organizer in Chicago and, with the help of such kind-hearted and altruistic friends as the Chicago Daleys, George Soros, Ted Kennedy, and bomb-throwing Weather Underground radicals like Bill Ayres, wins election to the Senate and then, a mere four years later, to the presidency. (His campaign literature downplayed the ‘friends’ part.) No doubt his heartwarming tale inspired the terminally vapid, but his real asset was his race. What self-respecting Millennial, weaned on a junk culture of television miscegenation and online Top Ten Lists and Phun Phacts and burning with a desire to make war peace and freedom slavery via ‘social justice’, wouldn’t want to get on the bandwagon to elect The First African-American President? None of them, and they voted for the Kenyan usurper in droves on two separate occasions. Republicans, seeing the writing on the wall the first time, were desperate for a politically correct gamut of their own. They tried running Sarah Palin, their first-ever woman on a ticket, with their Old White Guy McCain, but to no avail.

They did learn a valuable lesson, though: the new relatability game has little to do with anything personable. Rather, following the cultural Marxist playbook, the new generation of whites (still the most powerful and reliable voting bloc) is concerned entirely with societal milestones (millstones?). They want to elect the ‘first’ one of everything. The Democrats already have the first black president under their belt, and given the all-but-certain coronation of Hillary in 2016, will have the first female candidate of a major party as well. Good thing Obama is only a half-breed though. A fully black candidate is kind of a second-tier milestone now, but a milestone nevertheless. Hence, many in the GOP establishment have been scrambling desperately to find just such a candidate for the past two election cycles. They failed with Herman Cain in 2012, but Ben Carson this time around just might suffice for many of them – particularly if they could also get Marco Rubio in the VP slot and thus lay claim to having the first Hispanic on a major ticket as well. After that, the last major milestone will be the first ever LGBTQBNSWIX8675309 candidate – not this election cycle, but wait until 2020. That’s assuming there will be another election, of which I have my doubts.

********

Okay. The Republicans have their black. Next step: gussying him up to appeal to culturally suicidal white voters. Who is this guy, and how can we turn his traits into advantages?

Well, he certainly isn’t an unknown quantity. His is a modern-day Jackie Robinson story, to hear his spin doctors tell it. Born in Detroit in 1951 to a young illiterate mother and a Baptist preacher (and bigamist³) father who abandoned the family, Carson overcame a childhood of great want and battled racial prejudice every day of his life to obtain a medical degree in neurosurgery. Despite the almost insurmountable walls of hatred that surrounded every hospital in America, he was able to hone his skills and in 1985, found himself director of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins – the youngest in the country at that time.⁴ In 1987, battling fierce opposition from the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi skinheads, and homegrown militias, Carson would separate the conjoined Binder twins of Germany⁵ and would establish that as a specialty, performing several similar operations until his retirement. The purveyors of apartheid and Jim Crow on high were unable to prevent the accolades from flowing into his lap – self-aggrandizing bestsellers, write-ups in Time, profiles on CNN, NAACP honors, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, even a cable television movie based on his autobiography Gifted Hands. And if you think the racial component of this bio is exaggerated, it’s obvious you’ve never been a spin doctor.

Judeo-Churchian voters need not be concerned, either: Dr. Carson is a man of stalwart ‘faith’. Granted, that ‘faith’ is Seventh-Day Adventism, but that too can be turned to advantage. He can declare himself ‘The Heart-Healthy Candidate!’ on account of his vegetarianism. Likewise, his historical understanding of the Millerite Great Disappointment will lend him a certain stoicism when he is forced to sell Glacier National Park to China at a ‘reasonable’ rate. If those aren’t sufficient, who cares? Evangelicals (and their neo-Reformed partners in vacuity) are pathetically easy to please:

“I think a lot of evangelicals would say they would rather have a practicing Adventist than a nominal Presbyterian (Donald Trump) who doesn’t seem to have basic theological understanding about Christianity,” said Thomas Kidd, a professor of history and religion at Baylor University in Texas. “Even if he’s not an evangelical like us, he’s sort of a friendly fellow traveler in a way that Trump is not.”⁶

‘Practice’ makes perfect. Mitt Romney was a ‘practicing’ Mormon who ran away with the white evangelical vote in 2012. Rudy Giuliani, the initial GOP frontrunner in 2008, was considered an insufficiently practicing Catholic and lost the nomination. It matters little to the modern conservative pantheist what faith his candidate professes, so long as it is firmly held and non-Islamic. And given the ‘milestone’ mindset, why not throw ‘first-ever Adventist president’ out and see if there are any bites? Take that, upstart Jehovah’s Witnesses!

And what more could you possibly ask for in his demeanor? To cuckservative whites who have precious little real-world experience but a lot of nostalgic feeling for 1980’s television, who better to lead them down a guiltless trail than Bill Cosby as Cliff Huxtable? What’s that you say? He’s had some troubles? He certainly did, like the time Theo accidentally washed his car with Cliff’s favorite red sweater!!! That was sooooo funneeeee!!!!!! The point being that Carson’s non-confrontational, eyes-wide-shut facial expressions, reminiscent of Droopy in blackface, along with his soft-spoken voice and rolly-polly gait, are all deliberately tailored to appeal to timid whites. They, after all, are the same demographic that bought the Barack Obama commemorative plate because they honestly were inspired by his ‘confident smile and kind eyes’.

But playing Bennie the Pooh isn’t quite enough, either. After all, this same demographic thinks Django Unchained is a documentary. The African-American is supposed to be seething with pent-up rage over the hideous injustices heaped upon his noble head for centuries!! We don’t want to vote for some ‘Oreo’! We want the real deal! Someone who’s been beaten down time and time again by the Man, only to emerge blacker and meaner every time!!! That’s the Way of the Pimp, and you don’t get much more virulent than that!!!!

In the interests of having his cake and eating it too, Carson therefore concocted a childhood saga revolving around his uncontrollable fits of anger, redeemed only by his embracing Christ. The salient points are as follows:

At the core of his narrative of spiritual redemption are his acts of violence as an angry young man — stabbing, rock throwing, brick hurling and baseball bat beating — that preceded Carson’s sudden transformation into the composed figure who stands before voters today.

In his 1990 autobiography, “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story,” Carson describes those acts as flowing from an uncontrollable “pathological temper.” The violent episodes he has detailed in his book, in public statements and in interviews, include punching a classmate in the face with his hand wrapped around a lock, leaving a bloody three-inch gash in the boy’s forehead; attempting to attack his own mother with a hammer following an argument over clothes; hurling a large rock at a boy, which broke the youth’s glasses and smashed his nose; and, finally, thrusting a knife at the belly of his friend with such force that the blade snapped when it luckily struck a belt buckle covered by the boy’s clothes.

“I was trying to kill somebody,” Carson said, describing the incident — which he has said occurred at age 14 in ninth grade — during a September forum at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.⁷

In years past, such an admission would have been automatic grounds for electoral censure. Can you imagine anybody voting for Ronald Reagan if he had admitted that his youthful rap sheet included numerous cases of assault and even attempted murder? Is that someone to whom you would entrust the keys to the missile launch button? In 1972, Democratic VP candidate Thomas Eagleton’s admission to having merely been hospitalized for depression was considered a sufficient reason for George McGovern to unceremoniously drop him from the ticket.

These, however, are not years past. Such an admission of gross failure plays very well into the ‘I’m only human’ relatability factor which, if not the prevalent issue in the previous few elections, is far from dead. In addition, white evangelicals are at their core a voyeuristic lot. They will eagerly lap up the gory details of a sob story, provided said story winds up happily ever after with a ‘come to Jesus’ conclusion. Cynical? You bet. Real life almost always is.

This certainly could be a winning strategy, except for one teeny problem: increasingly, it appears none of this story is true. Numerous classmates of Carson’s have come forward to relate that his vaunted horrible temper is largely a fantasy – and certainly not volatile enough for him to have ever wrought violence. Conveniently, his mother, who would seem to be the most likely source to verify these claims, is said to be suffering from Alzheimer’s.⁸ His vaunted ‘street cred’ is vanishing faster than Detroit’s credit rating.

Perhaps this could be written off as sour grapes from resentful acquaintances if not for the fact that another gaping hole in his narrative has appeared: the alleged scholarship to West Point that he declined. Modern Republicans might be anxious to show solidarity with their black brethren, but certain ingrained habits die harder – military veneration in particular. Hence, the Carson campaign played up an apocryphal anecdote in Gifted Hands about how, after receiving accolades as the top ROTC student in Detroit – an honor akin to being named the top hip-hop mixmaster in Twin Falls, Idaho – Carson was invited to meet General William Westmoreland at a banquet…or something. (Given what a pivotal moment in his life this was, he is exceptionally sketchy on details.) At said banquet, Westmoreland was supposed to have made a remark that Carson was West Point material, which somehow got twisted into an offer of a scholarship in the young medico’s mind.⁹ Never mind that scholarships, as they are understood in the wider academic world, do not exist for West Point, or that to gain admittance a prospect must be nominated by a civilian authority such as a Congressman, Secretary, or director of an ROTC program.¹⁰ Doubtless Westmoreland was only on a stateside racial ‘building bridges’ mission, desperately hoping that by shaking a few black hands he could curtail black frag attacks on white officers in Vietnam. Try telling that to a narcissistic young black with delusions of grandeur, though.

These were two of the first major cracks to appear in the foundation of the Carson campaign, but they were far, far from being the only ones. Turns out that, once you get past the politically correct credentials, Carson isn’t much of a candidate. At all. Establishment or otherwise. Let us count the ways:

With his veracity increasingly being called into question, Carson’s reputation as a world-class neurosurgeon is also being seriously challenged. As mentioned previously, his major claim to fame involved the 1987 separation of the German Binder twins, conjoined at the head. The popular misconception is that the operation was an unqualified success, and Gifted Hands claimed it to be such. However, in the late 90s it was disclosed that both twins had sustained severe neurological damage in the course of the operation and seemed likely candidates for lifelong institutionalization.¹¹ Nor is this the only anomaly in an otherwise stellar career. The website ‘Wall Street on Parade’ sums up his post-Binder feats in all their grim detail:

After the 1987 operation, Carson went on to perform at least four other surgeries on Siamese twins joined at the head. In 1994, female infants Nthabiseng and Mahlatse Makwaeba died – one during surgery and the other within hours following surgery. In 1997, Carson performed surgery on infant Siamese twins Joseph and Luka Banda in South Africa with both surviving and reported at that time to be doing well. However, at age five, CNN reported that the father of the Banda twins, David Banda, told the news outlet that “Luka’s grades are very good” but “Joseph’s development is slow.” There have been no detailed media reports on the Banda twins in the past decade that Wall Street on Parade could locate. The Banda twins would be approximately 18 years old now with their medical outcome seemingly of major interest to a wide swath of the medical community.

In 2003, Carson was one of the lead surgeons attempting to separate 29-year old Iranian Siamese twins Ladan and Laleh Bijani. Both women, who had achieved law degrees, died. There was angry reproach from a family member, as reported by the UK Guardian newspaper.

In 2004, Carson led a team attempting to separate infants Lea and Tabea Block. Tabea died within hours of surgery. . . .

Of the five sets of Siamese twins, or 10 individuals, which Carson surgically attempted to separate, five people died and two were institutionalized with serious neurological damage. According to the New York Times, those results are not any more stellar than the results dating back to the 1920s.¹²

Sure, his is not a simple field of surgery – I understand that. One can’t expect perfection in these difficult cases. Still, his rather tepid success rate hardly qualifies him as a surgical pioneer in the Christiaan Barnard sense of the word. Why doesn’t he tout his occasional success story, like this one? Could it be because white doctors also routinely perform such operations successfully, and to increase his Black Urchin From the Projects That Made Good credentials, he opts to highlight his ‘sexier’ cases? Take that, Whitey? It certainly appears that way. Needless to say, this hyperbole rather undercuts his authority when he waxes poetic on the efficacy of vaccines and suggests that any parents who resist such a regimen deserve reeducation in a FEMA camp, or words to that effect.

Questionable character is not his only problem, though. He has also proven himself to be an utter incompetent in the field of foreign affairs. And while we might take some solace in the fact that this proves that he won’t be named to the board of governors of the Council on Foreign Relations any time soon, that still isn’t a sufficient reason to support him. He is ignorant on which nations comprise NATO. Despite his avid Zionism, he is clueless as to Israeli political parties or the role of the Knesset. He has trouble pronouncing ‘Hamas’. His chief policy advisor, retired Major General Robert Dees (no relation to Morris, I assume), is an ardent Judeo-Churchian who took the 9/11 attacks at official face value and came to believe the mission of the U.S. military is Christian proselytization, domestically as well as internationally.¹³ Ask Carson what ‘just war’ policy is, and he’d likely respond that America should concentrate its entire focus on military excursions – ‘Just war, nuttin’ else!’ Why would anyone expect anything less from a black candidate, though? In 2012, Herman Cain’s famous gibberish comment about the President of Ubeki-beki-beki-bekistan-stan, among many other gaffes, proved conclusively that he was no George Kennan, either. Efforts to spin Carson’s fogginess into an unfair and racist ‘gotcha!’ campaign by his rivals have fared no better. Before severing ties with the campaign, Carson friend and notable black neocon talk radio host Armstrong Williams claimed that Carson’s shabby presentations were the result of being presented with speeches directly before speaking engagements.¹⁴ Which raises even more questions about how ill-informed the good doctor is, but anyway. Williams would later try to cool the fires with an illiterate tweet that read, ‘Don’t be alarm by CNN story. Every campaign hits a rut, but No one will remember the challenges once Team Carson surges in the polls again.’ Responses to this were primarily from solidarity-expressing blacks voicing their indignation in ebonic dialect: ‘That brother lost once he was used as an Obama attack dog! They love to see us fight each other. They no longer need him.’¹⁵ You are known by the company you keep, and Carson’s efforts to distance himself from this buffoon may be proven to have been too little, too late.

The Pursuit of the Gaffe Spree goes on and on. Carson’s ‘Outside the Box’ campaign ad has already entered the annals of political legend for its shabby and stilted awfulness – indeed, one will search in vain for a commentary-less video of it on YouTube, suggesting that it was pulled from circulation mucho pronto. His equally ill-fated hip-hop radio spot, designed to appeal to an urban black demographic that might vote for a radical Republican of the Reconstruction era but no one else from the party, aired for even less time. And for all the accolades lavished upon his campaign for its initially successful grassroots fundraising efforts, a quick glance at his corporate donor list reveals that he received the most money from Northwestern Mutual (presumably hoping to become the federal insurer of choice when Obamacare inevitably fails to be scrapped) and, even more disingenuously, Coca-Cola.¹⁶ Because, y’know, that’s only who you would expect to support a health-conscious medical doctor like Carson. McDonald’s, having had a rough year, was apparently unable to cough up anything for him.

Fortunately, the entire Carson campaign seems to be a doomed endeavor. He consistently ranks as a third or even fourth place finisher in the polls, especially in all-important Iowa. In a desperate bid to hold onto his ‘maverick outsider’ status, he has begun to ape Donald Trump’s rhetoric and has stated he would be open to leaving the GOP and running as a third party candidate…except when he changes his mind. And his underwhelming performance in the final Republican debate of 2015, capped by an awkward moment of silence for the victims of the San Bernardino shooting, likely has sealed his fate. Stick a fork in him, he’s done.

In conclusion, what can we say to the legions of gullible white cuckservatives that set up Dr. Ben Carson as the Great Black Hope that was going to make America (whatever that means anymore) ‘great’ again? I cannot improve on the words of the prophet Ezekiel, delivered in chapter 22 and verse 30 of his book:

And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.

Verse 31 informs us that God’s pouring forth of His wrath and indignation upon the heads of the wicked is sure to follow. May that ever be the fate of the traitors among us.

 

Tweet