Republican presidential hopeful Carson has attracted weeks of sensational headlines for remarks on everything from guns to religion to the Holocaust, but says that won’t stop him or “reign in his rhetoric”.
“I want people to see me as an honest person, a person who is actually willing to express what they believe” Carson said. “The way I look at it, if people don’t like that, I’d rather not be in office. I don’t want to be in office under false pretenses, just saying things people want to hear so I can get elected.”
Carson said he would do his best to remain steady and disciplined, and cited what he believed to be media frenzy surrounding some of his statements on gay marriage and Obamacare and that it was distracting from his overall message.
“He’s been unleashed and he’s found the fire in his belly and he’s not backing down,” Carson’s longtime business partner and confidant Armstrong Williams said of him. “Over the last two weeks, you’re seeing a candidate evolve into his own comfort level, his own brand of leadership. … This kind of leadership is not always popular with everyone.”
Last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Carson made news, saying that a Muslim should not be commander in chief.
Carson modified those statements later and said that he would be okay with a Muslim president if that person did not buy into the tenets of Sharia law. He added that he wouldn’t be comfortable with the leadership of religious zealot of any faith.
Carson has made some controversial comments on guns. Of the mass shooting victims at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, Carson said he would have stood up to the gunman, “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me.”
Carson presented the idea of arming officials on school grounds.
“ I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away,” and insisted that the Holocaust might have been avoided if the Jews in Germany had been armed.
Carson will not back down on either of those comments.
“I am not making inflammatory comments, although the media will try and turn it into inflammatory comments, but nothing that I’ve said is an inflammatory comment and that’s not the way that people see it,” Carson said.
“Yesterday in Tennessee I did a book signing in Knoxville and there were thousands of people there … standing in line for three or four hours for two seconds [with me],” Carson said. “The message they’re all saying is, ‘Don’t stop. Don’t give in to the left-wing media. Go ahead and be yourself and talk about what we the people want to hear about.’”
So far, Carson has been on an upward trajectory in the polls for almost two months now. He and Donald Trump are surprisingly in the top tier of candidates. They both have huge leads over experienced politicians like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
Trump leads with 27 percent support, followed by Carson at 21 percent. The next closest candidate is Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is in third place at 9 percent support.
And Carson is one of the few candidates who can routinely draw thousands of supporters at campaign events.
On Friday,at the National Press Club in Washington, Carson spoke of the the news media being “embarrassing” and vowed to “expose” its biases.
“We need the media to develop a conscience and start working for the people and stop having their own ideological agenda,” Carson said on Monday.
“I hope I didn’t give the impression that they’re all bad, but there’s a substantial majority that have an agenda,” he continued. “I’m still hopeful that the media will come to their senses … and step up to the plate with some real integrity. I haven’t given up on them. If I had, I wouldn’t say anything about them. It’s just like a child that you want to correct. If you don’t say anything, they become unruly.”
On his Holocaust remarks, Carson says:
“When I say that most people in Nazi Germany did not agree with Hitler but they kept their mouths shut, and when good people do nothing evil prevails, the fact that some people can’t understand that because somewhere in the sentence is the word ‘Hitler’ or ‘Nazi,” that says something about them, that doesn’t say something about me,” Carson said.
“We need to mature beyond that level,” he continued. “If you submit to that level of immaturity what are you doing to your society? What we need to do is grow our society into a level of maturity that they can understand principles that are being stated, rather than focus on a word and not be able to hear anything else. I think that’s the height of immaturity.”
On his outspokenness:
“If they (voters) agree with me, and it resonates and we’re all moving in the same direction, that’s the kind of synergy that will save our nation.”