In an interview on Monday with conservative talk show host Sam Malone, Ben Carson lashed out at the media for pointing out that he used a fake Joseph Stalin quote at the most recent presidential debate and that he believes that the ancient Egyptians built pyramids to store grain.
Carson kicked off his rant about the media by urging Senate Republicans to follow his example in withstanding media pressure to consider President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, claiming that the founders never intended for a president to nominate “ideologues” to the court. He joked that he can provide a model for Senate Republicans because the media has been trying to “kill” him.
“I’ve been withstanding continued attacks from the mainstream media since I threw my hat in the ring,” he said. “Even before that, they’ve been trying to kill me and I’m still here.”
“They have been trying to kill you,” Malone agreed. “It’s like they don’t want you to exist.”
“That’s right,” Carson said. “They never talk about any of the good things that I talk about. From the debate, all they can talk about, they say, ‘He got this false Stalin quote.’ The fact of the matter is, the quote is very close to the thing that he said, and if you go and find the actual quote, which is findable, you’ll see that I am completely dead on target for what he was talking about. But you know they try to ridicule and say, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ because they obviously are terrified of me.”
Carson’s campaign has not said which Stalin quote the candidate was referring to; the fabricated quote he cited in the debate first appeared in a 1983 letter to the editor in a Kansas newspaper decades after the Soviet dictator’s death and has since become a popular conservative meme on social media.
The GOP presidential candidate then said that the “mainstream media” would try to control social media “if they could” because “they’re so used to being able to dictate who our candidates are, dictate what our lifestyle should be, and when someone comes along who is not going to play ball with them, they become very concerned. God willing, we are never going to play ball with them and we’re going to get the country back.”
Carson went on to discuss his chances in the upcoming Texas primary, lamenting that “Texas is being infiltrated by a lot of people from California,” before he returned to attacking the media for mentioning his claim that the pyramids of Egypt were built as grain storage facilities.
He claimed that the controversy over his pyramid statement amounted to a media “smear,” complaining that he was simply talking about “things in the Bible” and “they tried to make it seem like that’s a major tenet of who I am, grain in pyramids, just silliness, those are smear tactics.”
As further proof of such media hostility, Carson claimed that he is “the only person in history to have four separate segments on Saturday Night Live.”
