SLAUSON, IOWA — 2016 Republican presidential contender Dr. Ben Carson, at a post-Thanksgiving campaign rally in Iowa told rally attendees that he believes “deep down that cleaning up after Thanksgiving dinner is pretty much the exact same thing as slavery.”
Carson, who has seen his numbers slide in the polls lately, has had a bit of a penchant for comparing things to slavery in the past. Dr. Carson has compared the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare as it is also known — and abortion to slavery. During the speech, and afterward at a press conference, Carson insisted that “all around us are things that look like slavery, if you know how to look for them.” Carson said that he is “no longer surprised” when he finds something new to compare to slavery in his daily life, and Thanksgiving dinner this year was no exception for the neurosurgeon turned politician.
“There I was, relaxing after a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner my wife started preparing at 4:30 in the morning,” Carson told his audience, “and all of a sudden she comes out to the living room, where I’ve clearly got my feet up, and she asks me to help her clear the plates from the table and put the leftovers into various ZipLoc and Tupperware containers.” Carson said that he initially got up to start helping his wife, but then stopped short, and pulled her aside, telling her that she was acting exactly like a slaver would in the 1800’s.
Initially, he said, his wife pushed back, but eventually “she saw my reasonization and agreed with me,” Carson said. “I told her, look, slave owners made their slaves do all kinds of things they didn’t want to do, and she couldn’t deny that fact,” the Republican told the media later that day, “and that’s the whole thing with me, and a bunch of Republicans. We take a nugget of reality, and file it down, whittle it away to whatever bullshit we want it to mean, and that’s what we go with.”
“It’s the same reason why so many conservatives truly believe that single motherhood and innate violence are why black people are poor and have more gang activity in their neighborhoods,” Carson said, adding that while “all of that is utter tripe and it’s very clearly more a case of what happens when a whole race of people is by and large forced down onto the bottom socioeconomic rungs,” that “it doesn’t take much convincing for a conservative to blame someone he or she fears.”
Carson said that once his wife was convinced she was acting like a 19th century slave owner, she decided to do all the clean up herself, which Dr. Carson said “better went with God’s natural supremacy of the sexes anyway,” which pleased him. “I’m pretty sure God would love that I got out of helping my wife do the tidying up by making a really dumb comparison, for sure,” Carson told reporters, “because I mean, if we’re just putting words in an unprovable deity’s mouth, I can explain away so many stupid, arcane, and downright incorrect views about life, history and everything in between the same way, can’t I?”
With a little less then a year to go before the election, Carson is currently placing behind front runner Donald Trump, but has shown in the past an ability to tie and even overtake the billionaire depending on the poll.
