Ben Carson called for a return to McCarthyism this weekend, telling a group of reporters at a campaign stop in South Carolina that he would support the government “monitoring a mosque or any church or any organization or any school or any press corps where there was a lot of radicalization and things that were anti-American.” The Associated Press noted that Carson “did not expound on just how an administration would determine what constitutes ‘radicalization’ or ‘anti-American.’”
However, Carson has left many clues as to what he considers “anti-American” … and it mostly means the political left.
Back in May, Carson said a rally attendee was “absolutely right” when he claimed that the Obama administration holds a “strong anti-American spirit that is undermining everything that we stand for.” He went on to say that the “progressive agenda” was pushing an anti-American plot, citing author W. Cleon Skousen’s book “The Naked Communist.”
Carson frequently mentions Skousen’s conspiracy-ridden book, which paints America as a country under attack from a grand but secretive leftist agenda, on the campaign trial.
For example, he told a National Organization for Marriage gala that the gay marriage movement and other progressive goals emerged from a Marxist, New World Order effort to “bring America down.”
He similarly told David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network that America’s true “enemies” are those pushing pro-choice and pro-gay-marriage views by trying “to divide everybody up.”
Of course, the irony seems to be lost on Carson that accusing his political opponents of being “anti-American” may itself come across to most people as divisive.
