Charlottesville deserves a serious discussion: Ben Carson
On Thursday, President Trump reiterated his past comments blaming both sides for the violence in Charlottesville when he said, “You have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also.” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson responded to the comments telling the FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto, “I think the president is very willing to call out those individuals who sort of instigated the whole thing in the first place as well as those who reacted to that instigation.”
Carson called for people to stop focusing on every little nuance of what is said and focus on what can help America.
“We need to get away from parsing everything to make it fit, you know, our sense of what’s value and ask ourselves, ‘what is helpful to us as a nation?’”
According to Carson, what happened in Charlottesville can be useful in leading to a broader discussion about America’s history.
“This whole Charlottesville situation deserves a serious discussion, you know, not just barbs from this side or barbs from that side, but let’s ask ourselves, do we want to get rid of the history of our nation? Do we just want to hide it and say we are wonderful people? You know, we need to have that discussion because other nations who have obliterated their history have never seemed to benefit from that.”
Carson specifically addressed the push to remove Confederate statues, “Those are things that need to be discussed, that’s why we have local governments.”
But when asked if those statues bothered Carson himself, he reacted, “Me personally? No, they don’t bug me personally, you know, I’m a big picture type of person, I don’t tend to get bogged down with things that perhaps tend to drive other people nuts because there are so many bigger issues.”
Carson then responded to criticisms of him, the Trump administration’s only African-American cabinet member, and his support of President Trump’s handling of Charlottesville telling Cavuto, “I understand that people allow themselves to be manipulated and feel that you must all march to one drum and if you deviate from that, there’s some horrible name they can call you, I don’t care about that quite frankly.”