Ben Carson: 2016 Elections Could Be Canceled Due To ‘Widespread Anarchy’
Ben Carson, the 63-year-old neurosurgeon-turned-Tea-Party activist and Fox News commentator, is reportedly ready to throw his hat in the ring for the 2016 presidential race — but Carson hasn’t made up his mind yet, because he fears that the elections will be canceled as society falls apart and slips into a state of anarchy.
Carson first issued the dire warning in late August at a Republican fundraiser in Iowa — which, as the first state to cast ballots during primary season, is a frequent stop for aspiring presidential candidates.
At that time, Carson said that if the Republican Party fails to win back the Senate in the November 2014 mid-term elections, they could choose to cancel the presidential election in 2016 — presumably installing Barack Obama as president for life.
In fact, at that August 25 event, Carson’s wife, Candy, hinted that the Carson family may flee the United States for Australia if Republican candidates do not prevail in November.
Asked in a Fox News interview on Sunday morning whether he still believed that the United States will disintegrate into “widespread anarchy” in the next two years, Carson held to his prediction.
“Certainly there’s the potential because you have to recognize that we have a rapidly increasing national debt, a very unstable financial foundation, and you have all these things going on like the ISIS crisis that could very rapidly change things that are going on in our nation,” Carson told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. “And unless we begin to deal with these things in a comprehensive way and in a logical way there is no telling what could happen in just a couple of years.”
Carson did not elaborate on what makes the current problems he identified more likely to cause the collapse of the United States social order than any of the previous crises that have befallen the country in its 238-year history.
“Despite Carson’s fears,” wrote Think Progress reporter Josh Israel, “the United States has held presidential elections every four years since 1788, despite a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression.”
The presidential hopeful also accused Democratic Senate Majority leader of “thwarting the will of the people” by holding up “over 300 bills passed by the house that remain ‘sitting on his desk.'”
However, in 11 of the last 19 congresses, the Senate has failed to pass at least 300 bills passed by the House. The congresses in which the most bills have gone ignored by the Senate have come when Democrats controlled both the Senate and House.
The House also regularly ignores bills passed by the Senate, with 70 Senate bills currently sitting untouched by the House, most famously the 2014 Unemployment Extension bill passed by the Senate in April.
Wallace also asked Ben Carson why he would want to leave his successful medical practice “to spend the next two years begging people for money, shaking hands, eating a lot of bad meals.” But Carson said that the country needed him to run for president, saying, “sometimes we’re called to do things we don’t want to do because we have to do them.”
