Ben Carson's gotten to the lash out against the media stage of his campaign following weeks of controversy surrounding a series of controversial statements on a religious test for office and guns and is now turning to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly for some back-up.
On Monday night's edition of the "O'Reilly Factor," the host interviewed Carson to discuss media "attacks," citing comments from Chris Matthews, Trevor Noah and Bill Maher. Carson's rising poll numbers, O'Reilly posited, may be why "the far left continues to hammer the doctor."
"There’s something about you that really annoys the secular-progressives,” O'Reilly noted, "what is that?"
"I think it's the fact that I you simply won't submit to their nonsense," Carson answered matter-of-factly. "How dare someone like me actually think for themselves?" Carson added, seemingly implying a race based difference in media coverage.
"Do you think there is a color thing in play here at all?" O'Reilly asked directly:
They don't like conservative black men and women because, you know, you are betraying the sensitivity I guess of the left that feels that you guys need help. We have to help you. We have a debt to African- Americans and all of that. And you preach self-reliance.
[...]
They are trying to diminish your intellect. That's what they try to do.
Carson picked up O'Reilly's cue and ran with it:“You’re not supposed to wander away from that or you’re an Uncle Tom.”
"Everybody comes up to me everywhere I go and they say please don't submit to those media people," Carson insisted. "Do not do it. You have to stand up for us."
When O’Reilly asked Carson if he believes in creationism, Carson argued that never said that the world is 6,000 years old and that God could have made the world billions of years old.
After admitting that "Carson and I, we think alike in a lot of different ways," O'Reilly went on to explicitly defend some of Carson's most controversial recent statements, seemingly victim-blaming the students and teacher who were gunned down at a Oregon community college recently and inaccurately claiming that the Holocaust happened because Hitler disarmed Jews:
When you mentioned that you would have rushed the gunman -- I said yes, didn't they do that on 9/11 and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania? Yes, they did.
When you mentioned that the Nazis seized guns, one of their first policies were to get guns off the street -- that's exactly true. The Warsaw ghetto showed that Jews in Warsaw who were armed could hold off the Nazis and if everybody had that then the Nazis would have had a lot more trouble doing what they did.
So there is a lot of things that you say that I understand and then I see a guy like Chris Matthews saying you are diminishing those people in Oregon. I know you would never do that.
Watch O'Reilly's interview with Carson:
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