Okay, where to begin… Let’s go with the truth. When I first read this quote, having heard Dr. Carson a number of times I seriously doubted it ever happened or thought possibly it was seriously taken out of context and shamelessly pieced together from unrelated sound bites by somebody with an agenda. After much thorough research, my first assumption was correct, as in IT NEVER HAPPENED! I listened to the entire Mark Levin Radio Show broadcast from 10/22/2014 and Dr. Carson was most definitely NOT a guest on Levin’s show that day. However, he was a guest on Andy Parks’ radio show that day and here it is for your ears to hear, and no he did not make this quote or anything remotely close to it… https://youtube/watch?v=ZnYhsjBsJCs But let’s get back to the fictional alleged quote he made to Mark Levin on 10/22/14… Levin’s show is 2 hours and he took a few callers that day, but had no guest interview on this day. To make sure this conversation didn’t occur the day before or the day after and was misrepresented by date I checked 10/21/2014 and 10/23/2014 and Levin’s only special guests on those days were Mark Steyn and Dana Loesch. Levin, a Constitutional Law historian, author, and lawyer (with a long career in politics, corporate law, and media), is very much a lecturer and if you havent heard him, listening to his show is a hell of a lot like listening to a Constitutional Law Professor take over a room at his or her lectern. He can easily talk for an hour or more on one single bullet point of the U.S. Constitution, which is why he does not have the ratings of his conservative talk show host peers, but he is generally the most respected and revered among them and by them for his political experience (he was the youngest chief of staff to an Attorney General in American history) and unparalleled constitutional knowledge and understanding. For the record, on 10/22/2014 Levin talked about the big news story of the day; the lone wolf style jihadi terrorist attack outside the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa; the origins of progressivism in America starting with Theodore Roosevelt (R), Howard Taft (R), and Woodrow Wilson (D); then he did a very long lecture on the reasons for the creation of Article 5 and related histories of that part of the U.S. Constitution before moving on to Ferguson and the Michael Brown shooting. At the 90 minute mark he started taking calls from random listeners and having related conversations with their topics. Perplexed and wanting to know the origin of this quote attributed to Dr. Carson, I did a search and I found it originated on Daily KOs where it was published on Dec. 8, 2014 by Bill Berkowitz who is a member of this community news website where members can publish their own politically motivated articles for their own unpaid pundit amusement, hence “Daily KOs” (I guess a Facebook post just is not good enough for Mr. Berkowitz and since when does a news website named Daily KOs come with journalistic credibility anyway?). Mr. Berkowitz titles his article “Dr. Ben Carson, African-American Conservative, Hits All the Tea Partys Wacky High Notes” and then highlights it with the following in italics, “In October, Dr. Ben Carson told conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin that: Before Obama, people barely noticed skin color; that goes back 150 years. Blacks were happy and grateful for what we were given. Because the Facebook posting on December 30, 2014 by Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off reads October 22, 2014 and the source (Mr. Berkowitz) only gave the month of October as the time of the quote, I double checked the entire scheduled guest caller list on the Mark Levin Radio Show for October. Guess what I found, or more pertinent guess who I didn’t find? Yup, there’s no Ben Carson! Here’s who I did find (for the record)… 10/1: Michael Ledeen calls in from the Foundation of Defense Democracies as does former House majority leader Tom Delay, 10/2: No guest, 10/3: Inga Barks of KNZR fills in for Mark and her guest was Dick Morris, 10/6: No guest, 10/7: NJ Senate candidate Jeff Bell calls in, 10/8: No guest, 10/9: Jason Mattera calls in about his new book, Crapitalism, 10/10: No guest, 10/13: No guest, 10/14: No guest, 10/15: Rob Maness calls in about his Senate run in Louisiana, 10/16: No guest, 10/17: Rick Santorum calls in, 10/20: No guest, 10/21: Mark Steyn, 10/22: No guest, 10/23: Dana Loesch, 10/24: No guest, 10/27: Dan Bongino calls in about his upcoming Congressional Maryland race, 10/28: No guest, 10/29: Barbara Comstock calls in about her race for Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, 10/30: Milton Wolf calls in and says he will vote for Pat Roberts in order to stop Harry Reid, 10/31: Joni Ernest from Iowa calls in about her Republican Senate run. But alas, I did find an interview Mark Levin did with Dr. Carson on his radio show on MONDAY, APRIL 1, 2013. Interestingly, he was responding to the demeaning and disrespectful (some might argue racist) name calling he gets, mostly from white liberals. You know, “Uncle Tom” and the like. Heres the transcript from that conversation... MARK LEVIN, HOST: These attacks on you, I have to ask you. You’re a religious man. Do these attacks make you want to speak out more and do more or do they cause you to second guess coming out and talking like this? DR. BENJAMIN CARSON: No, they make me recognize what serious trouble we’re in. And what has really brought it home to me is, you know, I’ve gotten so many letters of support or phone calls or emails from people who believe similarly, but are afraid to speak out because they think there may be retribution. And basically, it proves what I was saying at the National Prayer Breakfast that political correctness is threatening to destroy our nation because it puts a muzzle over honest conversation, and the fabric of our nation is changed without the benefit of a conversation. LEVIN: Well, youre right. They dont want a conversation, do they? They dont want us to engage. In fact they… CARSON: No, they want to shut us up completely. LEVIN: Yeah. CARSON: And thats why the attacks against me have been so vicious because I represent, you know, an existential threat to them. They need to shut me up, they need to get rid of me. They cant find anything else to delegitimize me. So they take my words, misinterpret them, and try to make it seem that Im a bigot. LEVIN: And youre attacked also, in many respects, because of your race, because youre not supposed to think like this and talk like this. A lot of white liberals just dont like it, do they? CARSON: Well, you know, they’re the most racist people there are because, you know, they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation? LEVIN: Now, you’ve been on networks like MSNBC. I mean, that’s not really a news network. That’s just a bunch of, a bunch of leftist hosts who dress up as phony reporters and attack guests they don’t like and so forth. Is that something you’re going to continue to do? You think taking your case, are you thinking taking your case to those places is worthwhile? CARSON: Well, you know, I’m not afraid of any of them because, you know, for me it’s very easy. All I have to do is tell the truth. You know, I don’t have a particular agenda that I’m pushing. So, it’s going to be pretty difficult for them to trip me up. I’m going to just tell the truth, and I’ll tell the truth wherever I go on a liberal media or on a conservative media.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 10:27:30 +0000
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