Ben Carson responded to a deceptively edited right-wing video about Planned Parenthood last week by accusing the group’s founder, Margaret Sanger, of trying to “eliminate black people.”
In an interview with Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson, Carson responded with outrage to an audio clip of President Obama saying “God bless you” during a speech to Planned Parenthood.
“You wonder if he actually knows the history of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger, who was trying to eliminate black people,” he said. “That was the whole purpose of it.”
His allegation rests on a debunked claim that has circulated through right-wing circles for years that Sanger was using birth control to exterminate the African American community.
Carson also promised that he would use Hillary Clinton’s praise for Sanger and her relationship with Saul Alinsky against her in the presidential race, claiming that he would “educate the people” that the campaign is really about a divide between “American and anti-American things.” This led him to attack the Affordable Care Act, which he said was illegitimately “shoved down our throat” … even though it became a law just as any other law does through an act of Congress.
The GOP candidate later returned to the Planned Parenthood video.
“If we can’t defund Planned Parenthood after this, we’re lost, we’re just in the wilderness forever,” he said. “This is the smoking gun. We’ve always known the kind of organization this and how anti-life they are.”
He also claimed that the video will help him make the case that abortion should be banned: “We can also use this then to help women understand that they are being manipulated. They’re being told, ‘if you can’t kill your baby then somebody is against you,’ when in fact the woman is the protector of that baby, this is one of the sacred relationships of humanity.”
