Ben Carsons bizarre obsession with political correctness: What his crusade is really about

Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon-turned-conservative rabble-rouser and potential 2016 presidential candidate,made headlinesover the holiday weekend after he declared, as any good authoritarian would, that there should be no rules governing Americas wartime conduct.

[O]ur military needs to know that theyre not going to be prosecuted when they come back because somebody has said you did something that was politically incorrect, Carson said Monday on Fox News. (Where else?) Theres no such thing as a politically correct war. We need to grow up. We need to mature. If youre going to have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win. Our life depends on it, he added.

Of course, as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. is bound by international standards during war, although its not as if that has always stopped us. Beyond the brazen disregard for international law, however, whats most notable about Carsons remarks is his fixation on political correctness. This hardly separates Carson from his fellow conservatives, many of whom are committed to the narrative that we live in an age of censorship and fear, enforced by the agents of a politically correct reign of terror.

Turn on your television, read a newspaper, or read the comments at Breitbart.com, however, and youll find that politically incorrect (i.e., Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, racist, etc.) speech remains as prevalent as ever. As Oliver Burkeman argues, conservatives really take issue not with constraints on such speech, but with a changing society in which one is liable to encounter objections to bigoted utterances.

Still, Carsons nascent 2016 bid seems to be as much a campaign against political correctness as it is an effort in opposition to Hillary Clinton or his prospective Republican rivals let alone an affirmative campaign about his vision for the country. Appearing on The OReilly Factor after the Southern Poverty Law Center briefly included him on a list of right-wing extremists, Carson proclaimed that political correctness is destroying our nation, imperiling the constitutional framework laid by Americas founders.

Carson sees himself as a fearless champion of that framework, a lonely prophet of moral truth and reason amid a culture of obfuscation and politically correct hysteria hence his apparent conviction, despite never having sought nor held political office, that his is a necessary voice in the 2016 presidential contest.

Since bursting onto the political scene with a fiercely anti-Obamacare speech at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast during which he proclaimed that political correctness was muzzl[ing] free speech Carson has carved out a role for himself as the most relentless critic of political correctness, which he blames for a plethora of woes beyond the radical notion that America shouldnt commit war crimes.

Michael Browns death? Blame political correctness, not the overzealousness of a racist law enforcement system.Last year, Carson asserted that political correctness masked real problems like teen pregnancy and fatherless homes, which result in children who dont know how to respond to authority and end up being killed like Michael Brown.

The collapse of the Roman empire? Chalk that up to political correctness, too.Warning that the U.S. was headed down the same path, Carson last year linked Romes fall to a politically correct cultural climate. They were extremely powerful. There was no way anybody could overcome them. But these philosophers, with the long flowing white robes and the long white beards, they could wax eloquently on every subject, but nothing was right and nothing was wrong. They soon completely lost sight of who they were, he told Bloomberg News.

For Carson, standing against political correctness means never having to apologize for bigoted or intemperate remarks.No fan of gay rights Carson has compared homosexuality with pedophilia, bestiality, and murder he has refused to back down from those comparisons, saying that doing so would represent capitulation to the PC police. Similarly, he stands by his incendiary comparison of the U.S. with Nazi Germany, explaining that while hes come under withering criticism for it, I dont care about political correctness.

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Ben Carsons bizarre obsession with political correctness: What his crusade is really about