Ben Carson: A Housing Slasher, an Uncle Tom Defender of Segregation, a Christian Fundamentalist Nut Case… and Dangerous New Member of Trump’s “Legion of Doom”

December 7, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

By any conventional standards, Ben Carson is an obscene joke as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Less than a month ago, Carson’s close friend Armstrong Williams said Carson felt he would “cripple the presidency” in a cabinet position, because, “Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience, he’s never run a federal agency.”

But there is a fascist method to this madness. Trump’s choice of Carson to head up HUD puts someone who wants to decimate public housing and shut down any governmental interference with segregation, and who is a Christian fundamentalist lunatic to boot, in a powerful position in the U.S. government.

Ben Carson says any attempt by the government to address housing discrimination is a “mandated social-engineering scheme.” He says the micro-thin safety net that provides poor people, inner city residents, and Black and Brown people with barely livable shelter­—if that­—in dangerous projects and filthy homeless shelters is too much—that it just encourages “dependency.” What do you think an appointment like this means to people for whom the existing, shitty government programs are a matter of survival?

Barack Obama mixed in acknowledgments of America’s “past sins” and programs of reform to somewhat improve living standards among masses of people generally with lectures to Black youth that fundamentally it is their own fault that they are in the situation they are in. Ben Carson does the latter without the acknowledgment that there is any legitimacy to calling out white supremacy. He promotes himself (and is promoted by all kinds of white supremacists) as living proof that Black people can make it in America. And if they can’t, insists Carson, “poverty is really more of a choice than anything else”[!]

Ben Carson channels the spirit of forces among Jewish people in Hitler’s Germany who insisted that working with Hitler was the best way for Jewish people, or at least some of them, to survive under the Nazis. They denounced poorer and more desperate sections of the Jewish population and turned them over to the Nazis (see “Should Oppressed People Join the Police to ‘Make Things Better’? It’s Been Tried Before, So Let’s See How It Worked”).

And then there’s the Christian fascist factor. Carson is a religious fundamentalist and science-basher. He says the earth was created in six days, period. And that the Big Bang theory, which at this point represents the consensus of actual scientists on the origins of the universe as we know it, is “ridiculous.” He is an evolution denier. He insists climate change­—which threatens the survival of the human species—is no big deal and not driven by human activity (“there’s always going to be either cooling or warming going on”). And he demands that women be forced to bear children against their will, in the form of banning all abortion except when a woman’s life is endangered­—meaning forcing even women who have been raped or victims of incest to bear children. He has said he would “love” to see Roe v. Wade overturned, clearing a path to making abortion illegal in nearly all cases.

Ben Carson is a theocrat who opposes distinctions between church and state. He said during his own campaign for president that “this is a Judeo-Christian nation.” And, “I absolutely would not agree with” allowing a Muslim to be president of the United States. Carson’s addition to the cabinet beefs up the Christian fascist factor, represented by Mike Pence and others in the fascist Trump regime. Or, as New York Times columnist Charles Blow has aptly named them, the Legion of Doom.

So what might appear to be simply the mismatch of a hapless nutcase with no qualifications to be in charge of housing and urban development… is actually a highly conscious and calculated move with the most ominous implications. And one more, very urgent, reason why the Trump Regime must be stopped in its tracks before it gets off the ground.

 

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