Dr. Ben Carson has a surprising suggestion for Americans: read Marxist literature.
Carson's recommendation came in context of Wednesday's episode of Fox News' The Kelly File. Host Megyn Kelly asked the author, renowned retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner about the pervasive divisiveness in today's America.
Carson argued that such division stemmed from the intentional manipulation of the public, in which certain actors have pitted groups against one another, resulting in a host of "wars":
"There are elements in our society whose only desire is to drive a wedge into any little crack that they can find...therefore race wars, income wars, age wars, gender wars, religious wars."
Dr. Ben Carson discusses divisiveness with Megyn Kelly. (Image Source: Fox News Screengrab)
He then made a connection that Kelly suggested might make certain Americans uncomfortable -- citing Marxist ideology as the roadmap behind such identity politics. Dr. Carson encouraged viewers to expose themselves to a host of Marxist literature to better understand the strategy being employed to weaken American unity and thus its institutions:
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. And the purpose of it [the divisiveness] of course is to make people throw their hands up in disgust and say "This isn't working. We need to move to another system." Go back and read the Neo-Marxist literature. It's all right there. All this stuff is not secret. That's why I encourage people all the time to go read the stuff. You don't have to take my word for it…Vladimir Lenin. Saul Alinsky. Karl Marx. These people laid all this stuff out.
Carson then alluded to Cleon Skousen, who Glenn Beck recently heralded in context of a controversy about two of Skousen's books used in one Arizona charter school's curriculum. Carson stated:
"There was a guy who was a former CIA agent by the name of Cleon Skousen who wrote a book in 1958 called "The Naked Communist," and it laid out the whole agenda … showing what they're trying to do to Americans families, what they're trying to do to our Judeo-Christian faith, what they're doing to morality."
Carson's political stock has risen of late, with the doctor recently finishing third in a CPAC presidential straw poll, and some considering him as a contender in the upcoming 2016 GOP presidential nomination.
Carson's recently released book, "One Nation" (excerpt, quote list) has been a New York Times bestseller for seven weeks.
For more from Carson's discussion with Megyn Kelly, check out the full clip below. The exchange begins at 5:05.
