Carson: Black Lives Matter Activists ‘Creating Strife’

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has accused Black Lives Matter activists of “creating strife”, underscoring the awkward relationship between conservatism and race for the only African American campaigning for president.

“Of course black lives matter,” Carson said on Wednesday after speaking at a closed-door event with local politicians and businessmen in Harlem. “But what I feel instead of people pointing fingers at each other and just creating strife, what we need to be talking about is how do we solve problems in the black community. Of murder, essentially.”

Carson then raised a 2011 statistic that was often cited during violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, last year, noting that homicide is the most likely cause of death for young black men. He said that African Americans needed to return to “family and faith”, which he said were “the values and principles that got black people through slavery and segregation and Jim Crowism.”

The former neurosurgeon, coming in second in a new CNN poll of the Republican candidates, went on to attribute the high rates of poverty, single-parent homes and dependency on welfare programs to this same loss of values. “As we throw those things away we’re seeing terrible crimes occurring in our communities,” he said.

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.