Ben Carson defended his comments about the Oregon shooting Wednesday, saying that he won’t backtrack or allow himself to be boxed in by political correctness.
During an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Carson said that he will not kowtow to the media and become a “vanilla envelope” to satisfy them. The neurosurgeon made the comments a day after he said that he would have rushed the shooter in order to force a different outcome.
“I don’t deal with it to be honest with you because we’re living in a culture now where you have a group of people who sit there, they don’t try to listen to what you’re saying,” Carson, second in the Washington Examiner‘s power rankings, said. “They’re just trying to find a defect so that they can cause more division. They’re trying to divide our nation into factions.”
Carson went on to list the war on women and the race wars as examples.
“I actually believe that the American people are smarter than that, and they’re not going to allow themselves to be manipulated as much as they have in the past,” Carson said. “I believe they’re waking up, quite frankly.”
The 2016 hopeful went on hit the media, a favorite target of his, telling host Martha MacCallum that they won’t ever “accept me” because of his disdain for political correctness.
“I don’t think so, actually,” Carson said when asked if needs to get better at saying what he means. “I think people know exactly what I’m saying, and they know exactly what the media is trying to do, and I think they’re smarter than that and they’re not going to be manipulated.”
“So I’m not going to change and become, you know, a vanilla envelope that they can accept,” Carson continued. “They’re never going to accept me because I don’t believe in political correctness so I can twist myself into pretzals, trying to fit into their silly little box, or I can be who I am. And we need people who are willing to stand up and talk what’s logical right now.”
