Episode 697: The Culture War on the American Family

Published May 17, 2024, 3:05 PM

Newt talks with Dr. Ben Carson about his new book, "The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture's War on the American Family". He argues that the erosion of traditional marriage, rising divorce rates, radical ideologies, attacks on faith, and government interference are causing a breakdown of the family unit, which he believes is the cornerstone of strong communities and a strong nation. Dr. Carson encourages a return to biblical and familial values. He also discusses his work with the American Cornerstone Institute and the Carson Scholars Fund, which aim to promote academic achievement and humanitarian qualities in young people. He emphasizes the importance of citizens actively participating in the democratic process.

On this episode of News World, Strong families of the cornerstone of strong communities that go on to build a stronger nation as a whole. Unfortunately, widespread divorce rates, the erosion of traditional marriage, the popular rise of radical ideologies, attacks on faith, and government interference in our daily lives are resulting in a breakdown of the family, robbing us of the country we love. Doctor Ben Carson says it doesn't have to be this way. In his new book, The Perilous Fight, Overcoming Our Culture's War and the American Family, Doctor Carson offers inspiration and the answers needed to restore the family as America's key foundation. Like many, doctor Carson fears we are losing the country we love and encourages readers to return to the biblical and familial values on which our country was founded. So I'm really pleased to welcome my guests, doctor Ben Carson. He is a best selling author, the former Secretary of Housing in Urban Development, a twenty sixteen Republican presidential candidate, the former director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Dons Hopkins, founder and chameran of the American Cornerstone Institute, and Callis and I regard both Ben and his wife Candy as very good personal friends and people we admire very much. Ben, welcome and thank you for joining me again on news World.

Well, thank you for having me, and thank you for continuing to be a voice of current and logic out there.

I've always been stunned by your comprehension of what people need to learn, ever since I first heard you as a much younger man, had a prayer of a breakfast in Washington, d C. Where you were so remarkable that from that day to this I've never forgotten just how brilliant you are.

Oh well, thank you. It's been a very interesting life, I must admit. But the thing that really concerns me. You know, I worked very hard as a pediatric neurosurgeon for a very long time, and I looked so forward to retiring and playing golf and just cruising around the world having a good time. But things have deteriorated to the point I wouldn't be able to enjoy myself on the golf course watching us disintegrate. So we have to stay engaged, remembering all those people who came before us and what they were able to do, and the sacrifices that they may.

You were also remarkable at every level. I mean, you were a world class pioneer in pediatric surgery. I thought you were a very effective presidential candidate in twenty sixteen. You were a very important, passionate, pioneering Secretary of Housing in urban development who really worked hard to help us do a better job of helping poor Americans have decent housing. You created cornerstone to teach people. And I remember fondly Kliston and I being with you and with Kendy at an event at Mount Vernon. And your depth of patriotism is remarkable, and yet all of it goes back to your mother. Could you just take a minut or two, because you've talked about a number of cases, but it seems to me that both you and your brother Curtis were profoundly influenced by your mom.

Well, we absolutely were. She's the wisest person that I ever knew. Didn't have much in a way of education. She came from a huge rural family in Tennessee, shifted from home to home, never really had a stable location, achieved less time the third grade education, and got married at age thirteen, hoping to escape dire poverty and hoping for some opportunity, and she and my father moved to Detroit, where he was a factory worker and a part time preacher, but she years later discovered he was also a bigamist and another family, so that resulted in the divorce and she was left with the task of trying to raise two young sons by herself in the inner city. But she was never a person who would give up easily, and we moved in with some relatives in Boston and a very typical tenement multifamily dwelling, sirens and gangs and murders. Both of my older cousins who we adored were killed. That's kind of stuff that I saw as a kid, and I really never expected myself to live beyond the age of twenty twenty five at the most. Obviously, things change, and a lot of that was due to my mother. She worked two or three jobs at a time as a domestic because she didn't want to be un welfare, she didn't want to be dependent on the government, and she would leave at five in the morning and get home at midnight, job after job, but always looking after us. But she was very concerned that we were doing poorly academically, and she said, you're going to wind up the same way as I am. You've got to become educated. And after careful prayer, she came up with the idea of turning off the TV and making us read books and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read. But we didn't know that. In the process of reading all those books about scientists and explorers and entrepreneurs, you know, I began to realize that the person who had the most to do it would happened to you if you I stopped listening to all those people who are saying you can't do this. The society is stacked against you. There's a bunch of racist people. I just put all that stuff in the garbage and started focusing on what I could do. And you know, I went from a terrible student to a top student. Same thing happened with my brother. I always say, if everybody had my mother, we wouldn't have any problems.

We've never talked about it. How has Curtis's life been.

Curtis went into the Navy because at that time in our lives, they had the lottery system to see who was going into the military service. Because of Vietnam War, were still going on. I got a very high number, like three hundred and thirty three, but he got a little number like fourteen. So he said, well, they're going to take me, so I may as well go where I want to go. And he went to a nuclear atomic submarine program and was doing very well with that, but then decided that he would prefer mechanical engineering. So when he got out of the Navy, he and the role the mechanical engineering major at the University of Michigan and finished that, did some advanced degree work, ended up working as an aeronautical engineer. So I always said, I became a brain surgeon, and he became a rocket scientist.

Here's your mother, who, in traditional liberal terms would have been a figure of despair, and she raises two sons who go to Michigan and Yale and end up being remarkably successful people. So there is hope that people can in fact grow and learn.

And I encourage young mothers all the time not to think about what you can't do, but to think about what you can do. You know, when you think about the human brain and the potential of the human brain, what it can do, he remembers everything you've ever seen everything you've ever heard. Can process more than two million bits of information per second. You can't overload it. And it's like a computer, and if you program it the right way, it does amazing things. And if you don't put anything in there, you're not going to get anything out.

In terms of your own success. You have a great story about your uncle William and cars, and again as an example, the life is a motion picture. It's not a snapshot. It's a trajectory, and if you get on the right trajectory, things up. Tell us that's for a minute about this two car relationship with uncle William.

After the divorce, we moved in with relatives and Bosston, Uncle William and Aunt Jean. He worked in the meatpacking factory. He was one of the hardest workers you ever saw, work not only the regular shift, but worked any overtime that he could get to try to keep a roof over our head and food on the table. And when I graduated from Yale, he was so proud of me, and he bought me a car. There was a nineteen sixty eight Pontiac Lemon's and that car broke down on a regular basis. I learned a lot about mechanics of cars back in those days. But years later he was visiting us, he and Aunt Jean and I had recently bought a new Lincoln Continental, and he just fell in love with that car. He just loved it so much that I signed it over to him and gave him the keys, and I said, Uncle Williams, this is your car. And he loved that car so much he slept in it.

Now that's getting repaid with interest.

That I just was so grateful for, you know, what they had done for us when basically we were homeless, and you know, he really cared for us, and he was a very kind man who worked very hard, was an excellent role model.

Well, you know, when you talk about role models in your new book, The Perilous Fight Overcoming Our Culture's War in the American Family, you make a point that I think is so direct and yet so frustrating, that there are three simple steps that if we could get most American teenagers to understand them, they would never be in poverty. Would talk a little bit about the three steps that make a difference in your future.

This was a study that was actually initially carried out by the Brooking Institute, and they're not particularly conservative, to say the least. But they discovered that if a person finish high school, got married, and wait until they're married to have children, the likelihood of them living in poverty is two percent or less, which of course much less than what we see in the general population. That shouldn't be news anymore, but it is. There was a time in our nation when that wasn't People knew you had to get an education, they knew you had to get married former family. They knew that you didn't have babies out of wedlock because that was a disadvantage to the baby, much less a disadvantage to you. And they knew that working hard was not a bad thing, it was a good thing. And those are the kind of values that frequently are passed on through the family. So when you have the dissolution of the traditional nuclear family, you're not getting those kinds of values passed on. And you think back to some of the statistics. Children who come from broken homes are two point three times as likely to be homeless, think about that, and twice as likely to get in trouble with the police or end up in jail, twice as likely to experience educational underachievement, to experience alcoholism, drug abuse, teen pregnancy. All of these things are things that come from family values. The other thing that we have to keep in mind is that you learn a lot about your family history, but also you have somebody emphasizing your learning process. Our history is the basis of our identity, which is the basis of our beliefs. So if you break that chain, what happens to the individual? They become like a leaf blowing in the wind with no anchor. That's what's happening to all these children, these young people that we see at the universities who are easily being incorporated by the philosophies of Hamas, which is terrorism and hatriot, and they're easy victims for something like that. Somebody who has a solid family foundation not going to do that well.

I was talking over the weekend with a professor of Duke who helped design the Singapore health system, which is remarkably effective and for about five percent of the GDP produces a better outcome than we do at eighteen percent. But he said one of the keys was that they understand the cultural framework within which health occurs, and so they spend a lot of time and effort communicating with people. And it occurred to me that these three simple principles which you mentioned, complete at least a high school education, get a full time job. Wait until after Mariers showed children. If we had some kind of national effort that made sure that by sixth grade every young person knew these three rules, you'd have a different country in one generation.

You would. But of course we would have the left sign you can't do that, that is inappropriate, and they would try to outlaw immediately.

But that is what device about it is.

I know what we have to do is stay in the fight and put the facts on the table. Sometimes we get into a fight with them and it's just ideology against ideology, but we have to take the facts and put them on the center of the table and work around those. And then keep in mind that you can take the most radical left wing person and the most radical right wing person and they're going to agree on eighty percent center of stuff. But we allow that twenty percent to be the troublemaker. And we allow the media to stir up all of this dissension, which I guess benefits them because people want to see what they have to say. But they're not looking long term. They're not looking long term at what is happening to our country. And if they know their history, they can see that Marxist ideologies are taking over in our country. And what happens when you have a Marxist government, what happens to the media. They immediately are completely controlled. So they're digging their own grave and they don't even know it.

One of the things I'm most struck with is it, on the one hand, you have this very scientific background. At the same time, with all this huge scientific knowledge that you have, you come back and focus on the Bible as a manual for life and the degree to which we should be looking at the Creator in order to understand the wisdom to have a healthy society and a healthy life. How do you integrate those two worlds. You clearly do it brilliantly, and I'm just curious how you do it.

For me, it's just logic and common sense. You know, a few weeks ago we were all marveling at the eclipse, But think about it, we know that there's not going to be another eclipse like that for twenty years. How would that be possible if the universe was random? Those are the kinds of things that let me know that there is a God. I look at how complex the human brain is. In order for something like that to evolve through the process of natural selection, you would have to have millions of consecutive right things done, not random things done. That's virtually impossible. Like flipping a coin in a million times, it comes up heads. That's not going to happen. So I let the logic inform me. But also you think back on our country and our founders. They were men who believe in God. A lot of people like to say now they were deists. They just believed there was a God. But they didn't intervene in any way. That used not to be in our textbooks, our history books used to talk about the bulletproof George Washington, who was a courier for General Bredock in the French and Indian War, which shot many, many, many me Indians many times, nothing ever happened to him. He had four bullet holes on his coat, he had bullet fragments in his hair, but he had no wounds. And years later one of the Indian chiefs saw him and said, I just wanted to meet you before I died, because I am an expert marksman, and I shot you many times, shot you many times. Pretty soon I tell him to stop shooting at you. I said, this is the man who's protected by the great Spirit above that used to be in the history books that our children learned from. But you know what happened in nineteen sixty three, the Supreme Court said, sorry, no Bibles, no prayer in school, and all the schools took down the Ten Commandments. And I have to ask what exactly is wrong with eu shall not kill, and use, are not still, and usehall not envy, and all these things. And no one has ever given me a satisfactory answer as to what's wrong with those things, because there is nothing wrong with those things. And now we have people talking about your truth versus my truth instead of talking about the truth. And our founders based our whole constitution and our way of living on God's word. Adams, our second president, said, our constitution is designed for a moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for the government of any other And unfortunately that's what's going on right now in this country. We have people who are not moral, who are not religious, people like the judge and the Trump case in New York who has clearcut conflict of interest and won't recuse them. So and there seems to be no mechanism to deal with people who are not moral. So we got a problem.

Well, what do you think has led to this assault? I'm old enough that I grew up in America that sort of had a very common sense and patriotic feel for its history, for the Constitution, for the founding fathers. And I've watched over my lifetime this endless constility, particularly in the universities, are now driven all the way down into the K through twelve. But what do you think drives this kind of anti American and anti religious hostility?

Don't think that I'm a conspiracy theorist, but I believe they're a group of people who want a one world government. And what stands in the way the United States of America and the system that we have, and we can't be overcome because we're too strong militarily. You can only be destroyed from within. The house divided against itself cannot stand. And therefore a great deal of effort is being employed to destroy the harmony, the sense of community in our country and the basic building blocks of our communities that would include our faith and our families. And this attack has been going on for a while. I think I mentioned to you before the Congressional Record January tenth, nineteen sixty three, when Congressman Herlong of Florida read into the record the forty five goals of communists in America, and unfortunately many of them have been accomplished. They include things like gaining control of the school system and the teacher unions so you can indoctrinate the kids. It includes fomenting rioting amongst our young college kids and getting control of their newspapers and indoctrinating them. It includes making at Barrant sex normal, natural and healthy to infect our very core, our very moral core in our country. And it's working, that's the problem. It's working very effectively. And that's I think the reason that Khrushchev said the Eisenhower more than sixty years ago, your grandchildren's children will live under our system. He knew what he was talking about, because they ruled our system from the.

Vent process of this effort to dissolve traditional America literally, I mean, which has grown particularly I think through the colleges and universities and now through the teachers unions. We have a project that you know about called America's New Majority Project, where we have been doing a lot of polling and a lot of trying to understand where the American people are. And eighty four percent of the American people believe parents have the right to know what's happening to their children in classrooms eighty four percent. And yet the teachers' unions are bitterly opposed and use their muscle. They spend about five billion dollars a year on politics, and they use their muscle to try to get state legislatures to block parents from being able to learn. I mean, this is the kind of aggressive radicalism which it seems to me requires the kind of effort you and others are putting into it, and in a sense is at the very heart of what your book is warning about, that we have to reestablish certain core values of the whole system collapses. Is that about right?

That's exactly right. And think about a child and a child's brain. At conception, the brain starts developing millions of neurons every single day. By the time a baby is born, it is still developing at a rapid rate. That's why the newborn baby sleeps twenty to twenty two hours a day. It continues to develop until their mid to late twenties. So when you're talking about a child nine, twenty eleven, twelve years old making radical decisions about their gender and what should be done with their bodies, that is craziness. You're dealing with somebody who has an underdeveloped brain, who is naturally curious, who's very suggestible. That's the reason that God gave kids parents to protect them during that time of vulnerability, and we're allowing people to take advantage of it in a very cruel way, which leaves a large number of these children in very desperate situations.

One of the things you have advocated is that ultimately parents who really care about these values may either have to have school choice or have homeschooling because it may not be possible to beat the teachers' unions inside their core institution. How important do you think school choice is in that sense.

I've been going to a lot of school choice organizations and talking with them and homeschooling, and it is proliferating at a very rapid rate. Homeschooling has more than double since twenty twenty. Many of the private schools have waiting lists that are years long now people trying to get in. That tells you that the American people know what's happening. COVID did us a favor in terms of opening a window so we could see what was being done to indoctrinate the kids. And people don't want that for their kids. They want them to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. They want them to know the basics of life so that they can function successfully. And one of the things that happens before nations go Marxist is that they dumbed down the population, and you can see that happening in our population. You go on the street and these on the street interviewers and you ask people who is the first president of the United States. They don't know. They don't know what countries touch on the United States, they don't know how many Supreme Court justices there are, they don't know what the three branches of government are. They don't know anything. And when you have people like that, they become very easy to lead. And that's what you need to go from a system of freedom and prosperity like we have to a system that people like Stalin had. You have to have people who don't think for themselves.

So you have yourself directly been engaged in trying to upset this, in creating the American Cornerstone Institute, which has a program that we've helped with called Little Patriots, which people can find a Little Patrio it's learning dot com. Talk for just a mitre about what inspired this and what you hope to achieve with the Little Patriots program.

Well, seeing how the children were being indoctrinated, we call this the inoculation to indoctrination. They need to know who we are, and we can't be shamed about it. We have to boldly go in there and proclaim who we are, teach our children all of our history to good, to bad and the ugly. But of course there's a heck of a lot more good than there is bad and ugly. And what we've done is sort of stood in the background and let the people who like to emphasize bad and ugly CRT sixteen nineteen program people take the reins and go into our schools and go into the superintendent's office and propagate this garbage with no opposition. So we want to oppose that. We've been very fortunate to have a lot of very philanthropic people joined the program and underwrite the cost of it so that we can provide it one hundred percent free of charge to everybody. Because this is pace of things that need to be known not only by elite people who can afford them, they need to be known by everybody, and we have to do everything we can to disseminate that information.

Well, I mean, the Little Patriots Learning Program, which I think I've read every single script, is very very impressive introduction to American history. But now you've also gone and developed a brand new Executive Branch for America program at the American Corner. And so what was your reasoning in creating Executive Branch for America.

Well, because there are four million people who work in the executive branch of government, and when a new president comes in, he gets to change three thousand of them. That's the drop in the bucket. And unfortunately, because all of our agencies tend to be concentrated in the DC area, we tend to get an over abundance of people who are philosophically inclined to agree with the DC type of mentality, which is generally pretty left wing. If we're going to salvage this country. We need to have a lot of people come in not only during political seasons as political appointees, but as career appointees who have a conservative event, so that we can help right the ship. It's leaning way way way over to the left. That's kind of sink if we don't do something about that. We need to get people in there on the right side of the ship, and they need to be there for a long periods of time, because, as you know better than anybody, the people who really do the work are the staffers, and they're the on the research. And if you have the right people there, they can push the programs through very effectively. And if you have the wrong people there, they can stall your programs and they can say you're only going to be here for four years. We can out last year. And many of them have been there for twenty thirty forty, we've and had some people who have been there for fifty years they've had.

I love your positive, optimistic approach, and I also have to say, having had the remarkable opportunity to get to know both you and your wife Candy personally, you are such profound citizens and you've co founded the Carson scholars Fund, which recognizes young people of all backgrounds for exceptional academic and humanitarian achievements. What was your reasoning and creating the Carson scholars Fund.

Well, you know, I would go into schools. I did a lot of speaking in schools, and the first thing I would see at they entered the school for all these trophies, all state wrestling, all state football, all state basketball. What about the academic superstar? What don't think it a national honor society pen and a pan on the head that they're a little nerd and nobody really gave them any love. We said, you know, if we want to encourage this, we need to honor these young people. We started giving out scholarships to students starting in the fourth grade for superior academic achievement and demonstration of humanitarian qualities. Because we are trying to develop the future leaders of our country. We need people who are not only smart, but people who care about other people. It's so important. Napoleon was smart, the marquis decided was smart. Hitler was smart, but they didn't care about other people. And it makes all the difference in the world. And we've been having the banquets. We have six banquets around the country. We have one coming up up in the Baltimore, Washington area, and we always have adult honorees as well, the people who are good role models. The one for Baltimore this year is cal Ripton, who demonstrated incredible tenacity, the iron Man of baseball. And last weekend we had Tony Orlando in Naples, Florida area, because he was a man who dedicated himself to the veterans, raised over one hundred and seventy five million dollars for veteran causes, and used his celebrity in a very positive way. And that's what we want these children to do. And you should see their faces, you know, when they march in and the music is playing Posession of the Nobles, and the lights are shining on them, and they're being recognized very much like the sports stars. And I don't have anything against sports and entertainment, don't get me wrong. It's just that we have to show some love to the people who do a lot in our society.

You're really a remarkable person. You were an absolute pioneer, a world level pioneer in pediatric neurosurgery. You are a presidential candidate, a cabinet officer, an inventor of programs committed to patriotism and to getting this country back in the right direction. The author of books You had a terrific movie about you and Candy called Gifted Hands, which I've had the really interesting experiences than I got to actually watch it with the two of you, and I can testify that the movie is really worth seeing and you will be awestruck by what the Carsons are like. And the thing I think I admire most is you continue as a citizen. This is something I wish to get across to everybody who listens to us. One of the great challenges of being an American is you have to be a citizen in all your life. You're not allowed to retire, you're not allowed to go on vacation. You are a citizen, and it takes a lot of citizens to offset those who would harm us as a country.

Well, especially right now with things that are going on. Citizens have to recognize that our founders knew that we would get to a point like this, and they put the power to change it in the hands of citizens, in the hands of the people through the vote. But it means you have to use that power appropriately. Most people when they go into the voting booth. They just look for the name that looks familiar. That's all I mean. It could be Satan Yep, I know that one. That's the one they check off. That's no good. That's not exercising your citizenship appropriately. And you don't have to stand for unreasonable things when you go to be a polling place watcher and they say you can watch, but you got to watch from way over there on the other side where you can't see going on. No, you don't listen to that garbage. Or they said, the signatures don't have to that just they do have to match. Or you can have a thousand ballance that come from the same address. No you cannot. And yes people have to have voter ID. We have to insist on these things. These are things that make perfectly good sense. They're just a logical, common sense things.

And of course the problem is they all weekend the ability of the machine to rig the election, so they actually return you to honest elections. Listen, I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book, The Perilous Fight Overcoming Our Culture's War on the American Family, is available now on Amazon and bookstores everywhere. I think it's an incredibly important book. You are a remarkable American. Everyone should read it and should listen to you on a regular basis. And I want to encourage listeners who'd like to learn more to visit the American Cornerstone website at American Cornerstone dot org. They're going to be very impressed with what you're doing to help save this country.

And you're helping us, and you've been there from the beginning, and we appreciate to thank you for being a page.

Thank you to my guest doctor Ben Carson. You can get a link to buy his new book, The Perilous Fight Overcoming Our Culture's War on the American Family on our show page at Newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by Gingish three sixty n iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about right now, Listeners of Newsworld concerned for my three freeweekly columns at gingrichsthree sixty dot com slash newsletter, I'm new Gandwich. This is neut work.

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