Ben Carson, the pediatric neurosurgeon and conservative darling who looks to be gearing up for a long-shot 2016 presidential run, has some thoughts about voter fraud. “Anyone caught involved in voter fraud should be immediately deported and have his citizenship revoked,” Carson wrote in a column on immigration reform for the far-right site WND.com.
Of course, Carson’s edict doesn’t make sense: If these are non-citizens, as the context suggests, how can they have their citizenship revoked? If they’re citizens, where are they being deported to?
But this is hardly the first wacky pronouncement Carson has made. From comparing modern America to Nazi Germany and Obamacare to slavery, here’s a quick rundown of some of his crazier comments:
- “Obamacare is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery,” Carson said at the Values Voter Summit last year. “It is slavery, in a way.”
- “Read Mein Kampf, and read the works of Vladimir Lenin,” if you want to understand Obama’s plan for America, Carson said in a recent interview with Newsmax. Mein Kampf, of course, was the Nazi manifesto written by Adolf Hitler a decade before he took power.
- America today is “very much like Nazi Germany,” Carson said in March. “You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.”
- If Democrats remain in control of the Senate, “there may be so much anarchy going on” in 2016 that elections can’t be held, Carson told Alan Colmes in September.
- “I think most people when they finish that course, they’d be ready to go sign up for ISIS,” Carson said of an AP history curriculum that conservatives say is anti-American.
- “What’s happening with the veterans is a gift from God,” Carson said earlier this year on Fox about the VA health care scandal, in which some vets waited over a year for hospital beds. Carson argued the scandal was welcome because it demonstrated the evils of big government running health care.
- Carson lamented to WNC.com this summer that people he meets on the street don’t know about the Benghazi embassy attack controversy. ”And these people vote. That’s the sad thing,” he added.
Should be a fun campaign!
Zachary Roth