Dr. Ben Carson
Conservative Political Action Conference
Gaylord National
National Harbor, MD
March 8, 2014

Alright, thank you very much.  Thank you.  Before I get started I just want to introduce my wonderful wife Candy of 39 years.  She's always by my side.

Well thank you for that very warm welcome and I just have a lot to say so I'm going to go pretty quickly here.  You know America is a land of dreams and it has fulfilled dreams of so many people from so many places.

As a child, you know I had a dream of becoming a physician.  I loved anything that had to do with medecine.  Dr. Kildare, Dr. Casey, anything.  And I even liked going to the doctor's office, so it tells you I was pretty wierd, but what an incredible career it provided for me.  If somebody had sat me in front of the keyboard and said I want you to type out the career you want to have, I could not have come up with a better scenario because we live in a land of opportunity, because I had a mother who was no excuses and because I believe in God.  And those are really incredible things.

And I thought, I thought last year when I retired that I was going to learn to play the organ and learn some new languages and play golf.  Well I think the good Lord had a different plan.  And I'm not sure what the culmination of that plan is but I am having a good time and Candy is having a good time as we go all over the country – red states, blue states, North, South, East, West – enormous, enthusiastic crowds coming out and it's like you mean there's somebody else with common sense?  I'm not the only one.

Well here's the good news.  The majority of people in this country have common sense.  The problem, the problem is they have been beaten into submission.  You know the PC police and all these people; people are afraid to speak up for what they believe.  And you know one of the principles of Saul Alinsky, he said you make the majority think that what they think is outdated and nobody thinks that way, and that the way they think is the only way intelligent people think.  And if you can co-opt the media in the process, you're far ahead of the game.  That's exactly what's happened and it's time for people to stand up and proclaim what they believe and stop being bullied.

You know one of the most wonderful things – you know people say don't you miss medicine?  Well I miss what medicine used to be.  I don't miss what it has become.  But I do miss the patients.  But the good thing is I've operated on so many thousands of patients there's virtually nowhere that I go that I don't get to see some of them.  So it is actually a wonderful thing to be able to get involved in people's lives.  The most important thing they have is their health care, and that is reason that we need to fight to make sure that that stays in their hands and not in the hands of the government.

You know medicine prepared me for out of the box thinking and it prepared me for a lot of controversy.  You know I got involved in doing you know new procedures and you know there were some people who didn't like that very much.  But I'll tell you the difference.  In medicine we actually talked about it.  We talked about the differences.  We talked about the evidence and the facts, and when the facts were shown, people made adjustments.  Unfortunately that does not happen in the political world because you're dealing with ideologues.  They don't care how many facts you show; they just believe what they believe and they want to keep doubling down on it, and the only people who can stop them are us, the American people.  This is where it lies.

Now as you know, as you know I am not a fan of political correctness, I hate political correctness: I will continue – I will continue to defy the PC police, who have tried in many cases to shut me up.  You know I actually find them pretty amusing, you know.  I mean I still believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.  You know because, because I happen to mention that nobody gets to change the definintion of marriage and mention some other categories, they said Carson said that gay marriage and bestiality are the same thing.  Well that's preposterous.  Of course they're not the same thing.  Anybody who believes that is a dummy.  But anybody who believes that somebody said that is a dummy.  You know that's the problem, okay.

And then, of course gay people should have the same rights as everyone else, but they don't get extra rights.  They don't get to redefine marriage.

And then I said that Obamacare was the worst thing since slavery.  Now let me tell you why I said that.  Of course they said that Carson says that slavery and Obamacare are the same thing.  Of course they're not the same thing.  Slavery is much worse, but, but bear in mind what happens with Obamacare.  We the American people have with that program shifted the power that was given to us by the Constitution and by the Founders to the government.  It's the most massive shift of power in America that has ever occurred.  That's why we need to re-do it, we need to put the power back in the hands of the people, and we need to make sure we keep it there.

And then, and then recently I said that in Nazi Germany people did not believe in what Hitler was doing; most of them didn't.  But did they speak up?  Did they say anything?  Absolutely not.  And look at the atrocities that occurred.  And of course the left says that Carson says that progressives are Nazis and that they're changing America into Nazi Germany.  Well of course that's not the case, but that's what they do.  They repeat these lies over and over again because they cannot argue the actual facts.  They don't want to talk about the real issues.

And...it's important for the American people to understand the tactics of these people who simply sit around and try to demonize people.  It comes straight out of the book Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.  He said never have a conversation with your adversary because that will humanize them and your job is to demonize them.  That's why you see that all over.  Intelligent people will understand that because, you know I find there are so many people who get intimidated so easily.  Stop being intimidated. 

You know I look at somebody like Dr. Melanie Cooper, who is having a banquet a week from tonight in Atlanta, New Community Horizons Victory Over Diabetes.  She's  a wonderful woman who's concerned for the welfare and the health in that community, and there are some organizations there that are telling people to boycott her, not to support her.  Why?  Because I'm coming to be the speaker.  And they say they don't want him spewing his poison particularly to the young people.

Well I wonder what poison that would be.  Would that be the poison of self reliance and self respect that people should have.  Would that be the poison of telling people in minority communities that they need to learn how to turn over the dollar a few times in their community before they send it out, and that's how you create wealth, and that you should reach back and pull others up with you and if you do that you don't have to depend on anybody else.  Would it be the poison of talking about how education is the key and that you don't have to be a victim: it's a matter of your mind and what you decide to do, and that the most important person when it comes to your future is you, and the decisions that you make, and the things that you decide to do.  This is America.  We are free; we can do that.  And most importantly would it be the poison of putting what God says in front of what any man says.  Think about that.

You know we have the debut of a new black conservative magazine called [phon.] Current-C.  It will be starting this Monday; you can get it – it's an electronic magazine through the Washington Times.  But you're going to see a different point of view, and it's not going to be about being victims.  It's going to be about how we use our collective intellect and our resources to move up, and that's what all of us as conservaties should be emphasizing.  Not like some other people how to keep people down and to keep a voting block.  We want everybody to move up.  And I'm going to go there.  Let me tell you, I don't believe in political correctness.  I'm going to go there, to the 47-percent, because you know I used to belong to the 47-percent.  I belonged to the 5-percent.  I belonged to the 1-percent, but made the way up there, and I know that there are a lot of people in the 47-percent who are decent, hard-working Americans who want to realize the American Dream and we're here to make sure that they do it.  We're going to bring them up.

The other thing, so important, Save Our Health Care, part of the American Legacy PAC.  Why have I gotten involved with that?  Because, and I thank all the people who signed the petition – over 200,000 already.  Keep signing.  We want millions of people.  See because the left wing says the reason people don't like Obamacare is because it doesn't go far enough.  That's not true.  Sign that petition.  Show 'em that we don't like it.  We want it changed.  We want something better.  We want the health care in our own hands.  We can do it.  We pay twice as much per capita for health care in this country as the next closest nation.  We can easily do this.  We have a lot of alternatives.  You'll be able to read about them on the American Legacy PAC.

And then the other thing I can't go without saying.  Seventeen-and-a-half trillion dollar national debt.  Think about the implications of that.  The only reason that we can do that is because our currency is the basis of the international reserve currency system, and we can print money.  You know if Greece could print money, they wouldn't be in trouble either.  You know in the 5th century B.C. they could; it was the drachma, and they did, they were the currency, but that's a long time ago and they were pretty irresponsible.  We're being just as irresponsible, quite frankly.

Seventeen trillion.  Do you how long it would take to pay that off if you paid $10 million a day?  Forty seven hundred years.  That is absolutely absurd.  We are killing the next generation.  We have to think about that.  And what did Putin say last week?  He said we, Russia, if you put sanctions on us, we may just decide that the American dollar will no longer be the reserve currency that we use.  Now quite frankly that's not going to hurt us very much with just Russia; it'd probably hurt them more than it would hurt us, but what if they get other people to do that?  China has voiced some concerns.  The U.N. committee in 2010 voiced some concerns.  It's because we are irresponsible.  And the only way we get out of that quite frankly is we have to know who our representatives are, and the ones who are voting to keep raising that debt ceiling get them out of office and replace them with somebody else.

And you know I have several other things to say but my time has expired [shouts from the audience], but one of the things that is so important for conservatives, the ship is about to sail off of Niagara Fall and we're all going to be killed, and we've got a bunch of people looking over the side of the ship, and they're saying "but there's barnacles on the side; we've got to get the barnacles off."  Forget about the barnacles.  We've got to get the ship turned around first. 

And you know when we get through with the primary season if your person hasn't won and you can call them whatever you want to call them – you can call them a RHINO, you can call them a tea-bagger, you call them whatever you want.  Vote for them.  Okay, we need those people.  Okay.  We need them.

Also, also, we have got to get back to the same mentality that Americans had in the pre-Revolutionary days.  They got together with their friends and their neighbors and their associates and they talked about what kind of America do we want to have; what do we want to pass on to our children?  And they encouraged each other.  And that's how a bunch of rag-tag militia men defeated the most powerful army in the world at that time.

You need to go out and talk to people.  Everybody you know.  Have the discussion.  Don't let the left shut you up.  Everybody needs to talk about what we are doing and what we want to have as a nation.  Encourage each other.  Talk to your 87-year-old aunt who hasn't voted in 20 years.  Go and make sure she understands what the issues are.  If she's an invalid, make sure she's signed up for an absentee ballot.  If you need to go and help her fill it out, go and help her fill it out.  Get all of those people, bring them back into the fold.  I run into, particularly elderly people all the time, all over the country.  They say, I've given up on America; I'm just waiting to die.  We have got to bring them back in.  The greatest generation can help us save this nation once again.

And finally, finally you think about the people who sacrificed so that we could be free.  I could talk about a lot of them, but you can read about them in our book One Nation, and I know the left will say, he's just hawking his books; that's all he wants is money.   I've got plenty of money.  That's not the problem.  But you know what we need are action steps.  And we have action steps to help people, every American citizen to get involved in having a country that is for, of and by the people.  We can get it back but we have to be brave. 

Think about those people during World War II.  Nations falling like dominoes, one by one.  The whole world about to come under tyranny.  Except for one thing, this nation, the United States of America, that sent young men from the cities and suburbs, the country, to fight a war on two fronts of the world, a country that sent young women into the factories to build more airplanes, tanks and mortars than anybody could have imagined; a country that through its strength and its might and its determination changed the course of the world.  You want to tell me we're not an exceptional nation, you go jump in a lake.  That is absolutely not the case.

And it's not – Why were they willing to fight?  Why on D-Day did those guys storm the shores of Normandy, being mowed down by machine gun fire, hundreds, thousands, stepping over their comrades, overwhelming the Axis powers?  They did it because they wanted you to have a land that was free.  They didn't do it so that you could have a land where our leaders pick and choose the laws that they want to enforce; they didn't do it where we could have a land where we pick winners and losers.  They did it so that we could have a nation where there was freedom and justice for all.  And the next time you sing the national anthem and you get to the end of that first stanza and it says the land of the free and the home of the brave, don't just let those words roll off your tongue.  We must remember that we cannot be free if we are not brave.

Thank you and God Bless.




Ed. Dr. Carson went on for about four minutes after his time had expired.