American Thought Leaders - Dr. Ben Carson: There Is a War on the American Family

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“America used to be the shining city on the hill, and now it���s declining rather rapidly. I was in Europe last year talking to a number of people, and I said, ‘What do you think about America?’ And the answer I got was, ’We think you’ve lost your minds.' And that was very concerning to them, because if America goes, what happens to everybody else?”Dr. Ben Carson is a renowned neurosurgeon, former U.S. presidential candidate, and author of, most recently, “The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family.”“The family is where you derive your identity. And we’ve already had the example with the breakup of the black family, and you see the violence that has ensued. The murder rates in our inner cities are so high. People don’t respect other people’s lives. A lot of that has to do with the missing father, and now, that’s spread to the rest of our society as well,” says Dr. Carson.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

America used to be the shiny city on the hill and now it's declining rather rapidly. I was in Europe last year talking to a number of people and I said what do you think about America? And the answer I got was we think you've lost your minds. Dr. Ben Carson is a renowned neurosurgeon, former US presidential candidate, and author of most recently The Perilous Fight, overcoming our culture's war on the American family. Family is where you derive your identity. With the breakup of the black family, you see the violence that has ensued. The murder rates in our cities are so high, people don't

respect other people's lives. A lot of that has to do with the missing fathers. Now that's spread to the rest of our society as well. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. Ben Carson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's wonderful to be with you. I always enjoy being with people who are logical. Logical. I'm lucky. I'm lucky to be logical, I guess. I was just talking with a friend. I said that we were going to be interviewing

and he mentioned to me that when you were doing your surgery on the conjoined twins at the head, there was a 31 hour surgery. How does a person do that? Well, you know, it's sort of like being in the jungle with a hungry tiger. You're not going to go to sleep. You're not going to relax until you get out of it. And the time actually goes by very quickly because you're so intent in what you're doing. But I remember the first set of conjoined twins, after the operation, I was sitting in my office talking to one of the other surgeons, and we both fell asleep in mid-sentence and woke up three hours later. We were so tired.

You're literally running on adrenaline. No question about it. You're praying for wisdom. You're just hoping that you will be able to figure things out as you go whenever you're in uncharted territory. But you have a sense of what needs to be done. We have much more advantages now than they did in the olden days because of the imaging. The imaging has advanced enormously. And now that we're able to couple that imaging with things like AI and robotics,

it's going to greatly reduce the complications in complex surgery. Is this a much more common surgery now? It's still admonishingly rare, but the techniques that have evolved to deal with it certainly make it less complex than it was before. You mentioned prayer, that that was an important part of what you did. Now that's interesting because I don't think everybody would say that. And certainly not a lot of people in the scientific realm, some of them sort of denigrate prayer and people who pray. But the fact of the matter is, the way I look at it, when you look at the complexity of the human brain, for instance, it is extremely complex in the way that it's put together.

And even if you believe in natural selection, which are the things that work stay and the things that don't work disappear, you'd have to have so many consecutive things that work, millions, without a reversal. It's just not practical. And the way they solve that dilemma is they say, well, if you have enough time, billions and billions of years, at some point you will get the sequences that are necessary in order to create life. But that's like saying if you blow a tornado through a junkyard enough times over

a long, long period of time, at the end of one of those tornadoes will be a 747 that's ready to fly. I just don't think that's possible. I don't want to necessarily dig into this. This is a bit different than our topic. We're going to be talking about the importance of fathers as it's, you know, we're in around Father's Day right now, we're going to be talking about, but faith is very important. Back in the day when I was studying evolutionary biology, what occurred to me by about third year, okay, in undergrad was just that a lot of people religiously, in a way, believe that natural selection was the way that it all happened from the very beginning. This was reinforced by professors I took. I was interested in alternate models of evolution, right? Because it was clear to me by that time,

reinforced by a number of, I think, some of the best professors in this field, actually, that obviously it's not the whole story, right? If's part maybe it's part of this part of the story but it's what the strange thing to me was there's this kind of kind of almost faith among some people who clearly actually didn't understand how it worked because I was learning you know how with how the theory worked and everything but but they've nonetheless believed that it had to be that way. Well, there have been a lot of strong arguments in both directions. I was once engaged in a public argument about faith and God in the scientific arena, and there was a famous atheist on the other

side, and at the end I said, you win the debate because you've convinced me that you came from a monkey and I came from God. Well, no, but so a proper, you know, the proper evolutionary biologists will say, well, no, Dr. Carson, it's not a monkey. It's a common ancestor, right? That is incredibly amusing.

Let's go back. Let's dial back to the issue at hand a little bit more. Overcoming our culture's war on the American family, you know, the perilous fight. I've been learning about this over the last five years from multiple angles. The idea is simple. If you grow up in what you think of as the traditional nuclear

family, statistically, you are set for success. No question about it. Both the conservative think tanks and the liberal think tanks, they both come to that conclusion. Children raised in that environment do better academically, do better career-wise, have less incidents of alcoholism, teen pregnancy, mental disturbances. I mean, you're clicking on all cylinders. So there's really no controversy about that. The question is, what do we do with that information? Do we enact policies that promote traditional nuclear families or do we try to denigrate them? The latter

approach seems to be the one that Hollywood has taken. You can't look at any series these days and get very far into it before the alternative to the traditional family is presented, not only as acceptable, but probably as preferable. So there is a reluctance to form those traditional relationships. People are not getting married or they're getting married much later. That's having an impact on our population. The babies per woman now is down to 1.6. It requires 2.1 just for maintenance. And, of course, some of the left say that's the reason that we should open our borders and let everybody in. But, you know we

we have got to have a more orderly process to not be at 2.1 or above as you say for maintenance just to kind of keep the population it it feels almost nihilistic it's like we don't believe in ourselves enough to replicate the population or something well what we don't do is we don't think into the future. We just think about now. I want this now. This is what works for me now. I mean, you think about all the dinks. Double income, no kids.

That's sort of like the new American dream. Sure, you got more money to lavish on yourselves, but what happens when you're 85 years old? What happens to your family? Who's around who really cares about you? All those are important questions that sometimes people realize that when it's too late. So I wanted to take a quick break to tell you about something that's actually quite important to me.

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Mention American Thought Leaders. With that, let's head back to the interview. I recently had an episode where we talked about Yuri Bezmenov's interviews back in the day. And he was a KGB defector that explained the Soviet vision for demoralization of America, right? It's like how to foster a society that doesn't believe in itself. It feels to me like this is a very bipartisan thing, this lack of belief in ourselves as a society. Well, those who want to fundamentally change us into a Marxist or communist country, they don't care whether you're a Democrat or Republican. They just want to manipulate you. As it says in the book, in the congressional record, January 10th, 1963, when Congressman Herlong of Florida read into 45 goals of communism in America.

It's pretty touching because you can see all of it happening now, and that was over 60 years ago. Infiltrate the public school system and teacher unions so that you can indoctrinate the kids. Infiltrate the news media and Hollywood so that you can basically manipulate the population. Drive wedges between parents and children. Denigrate the status of the family. Make sexual perversion normal, natural, and healthy. I mean right down the line you look and say, check, check, check. America used to be the shiny city on the hill and now it's declining rather rapidly.

I was in Europe last year talking to a number of people and year, talking to a number of people. And I said, what do you think about America? And the answer I got was, we think you've lost your minds. And that was very concerning to them because if America goes, what happens to everybody else? I also recently had someone on the show, we were talking about this exact term. I think this is from Ronald Reagan or earlier, the shining city on the hill. Compared to many places in the world today with this decline that you're describing and all of that, all the problems.

Her argument was actually America remains the shining city on the hill because it's Americans that make America. And there's a ton of them that are here for that particular sense of freedom and opportunity that, relatively speaking, still exists and that the the reason why you have so many people you know taking advantage of the the the you know opportunity to come through the southern border right is because they're looking for opportunity no question but if you're stuck in the desert and a jalopy comes by that you can get on and get out of the desert, you'll take it. It doesn't have to be the Rolls Royce. But if you can have the Rolls Royce, which we used to have,

why not take it? Why not cultivate that? So there's no question that we have deteriorated and that we're going downhill, but we're still a heck of a lot better than most other places. If you were born in this country, you hit the lottery already. And that's one of the reasons that we should study what were those things that made us into a great nation.

And we should not be throwing those things away and thinking that we're just always going to be a great nation. It doesn't work that way. And, you know, you look at the cycle of prosperity and despair in nations historically, and we're sort of near the end of that cycle. And we don't want to be near the end of the cycle and why can't we learn from what people have done before why do we have to go down the same pathway you know our founders they studied every government that ever existed in the world and one of the things that became clear to them is that all governments tend to move in the same direction.

It doesn't matter how lofty their goals are in the beginning. They move toward growth, infiltration, and domination. It doesn't mean that they're bad people. It means that that's just what they do. A lion's not a bad animal because it kills gazelles and eats them. That's what lions do. And they worked very hard to give us a system that would not lead to that end. But they knew it was going to be difficult.

And that's why Ben Franklin said when he came out of that building, he was asked whether we have here a monarchy or a republic. He said a republic if you can keep it. And it's difficult. I mean, we're as close to losing it right now as we have ever been. When we can have a Department of Justice that is blatant in their bias and the way they treat different groups of people. And, you know, when you have elections that are questioned by half of the society and you don't make any attempt to make it transparent, those are the seeds that grow into the kind of discontent that cause very bad things to happen in countries historically.

So let me see if I got this right. You said with governments, I think you said there's growth and there's infiltration and there's domination. I'm kind of imagining bureaucracy as part of that, but I didn't fully understand how that works. Can you explain that? Well, the way our country was designed, the government was there for some pretty specific things, the protection of the people, to provide some basic necessities for a functional society. But they weren't to be involved in the day-to-day running of your life. That was supposed to be involved in the day-to-day running of your life that was

supposed to be up to you and you know when the Tocqueville came to study our nation he was very impressed with the environment that foster innovation and entrepreneurship that environment is severely affected in a negative way when you have government but into everything a good example would be the government's desire to have everybody drive electric vehicles without having the infrastructure that's necessary, without having figured out what are you going to do with all those dead batteries, what is that going to do to the environment, just this is what you need to do. The thing that made us great in the industrial area is that we let market forces determine what was going to survive, and what was going to thrive, and what was going to be defeated.

When people are incentivized to do well monetarily, they're not going to work hard to establish those things if there's no benefit to themselves and their family. I want to talk about this innovation. Obviously, you were quite the innovator back in the day in the field of medicine and the first you know it's neurology, neurosurgery, yeah and something we've been thinking about a lot in the last few years is medical schools. The DEI philosophy that has invaded some of the medical schools is of some concern because one of the medical schools in California who adopted that early on have a situation where

a large number of their people are unable to pass the national exams, National Medical Board exams. And is that the person that you want to operate on you or your child? You know, there's a certain body of knowledge that is absolutely critical to do the job appropriately. You don't want a pilot who knows 90% of what needs to be done. But, you know, that just doesn't work. And that doesn't work if you need to have complex surgery done.

We have been, in the the past a meritocracy. And there's no question that certain segments of our society in the past did not have exposure to the kind of education that would allow you to excel in certain areas. That has largely been corrected. It's not a hundred percent. I was a first-year medical student. You know, I did poorly on the first set of comprehensive exams. My counselor told me to drop out of medical school. He said, you're not cut out for medicine, and you're just going to hurt yourself and other people. There was definitely no DEI there. But, you know, I prayed for wisdom, and I just started thinking.

I said, what kind of courses have you always done very well in? I realized I did really well in courses where I did a lot of reading. And what kind of courses have you struggled in? I struggled in courses where I listened to a lot of boring lectures, because I don't get anything out of boring lectures. That's not the way it is for some people. They get a lot out of them. I got nothing out of them. And I was wasting six hours a day. So I made the executive decision to spend that six hours a day reading. And the rest of medical school was a snap after that. Different people learn in different ways and some of the medical schools have discovered that. But you know several years

later when I was back at my medical school as the commencement speaker, I was looking for that counselor because I was going to tell me when I come out to be a counselor. Right. Well, and you know what's so interesting is I think I'm actually the opposite. I learn through listening much better than I do from reading. And so I've been taking advantage of these technologies that actually will read things to you. I find I can ingest the written word faster and more

effectively that way. So it's curious. It's different for different people, right? Yeah. Some people are very visual in their learning. And I'm visual, too. And so I learned to take everything that I needed to know for a test and put it on a flash cart. And I would carry these flash carts around in my pocket. My second year

in medical school I was living with my brother who was in the School of Engineering and he even knew all the bacteria and what they were sensitive to because I always had these cards on. The point is that you somehow knew enough about yourself that this is something you could do. And so I've been thinking about this whole realm of demoralization. On the one hand, societally we don't believe in ourselves enough. I want to talk about that more, but you know some of these

efforts like DEI and some of the work in theory right to help people, you know, just give give them a little bit of an extra push if they couldn't if they you know, for example, if they had if the general approach was the like this counselor, right? Then you a lot of people might not have said, okay, I'm going to figure this out. They might have said, well, I guess he's right. Right. I mean, you've certainly, in this book, you've certainly write quite a lot about race. And, you know, certainly in American history,

there was a viewpoint in the past where, well, you know, Black Americans, I guess they're not cut out for certain things. You obviously proved very clearly the opposite. But has there been a place for this in our society? Yes. There was a time when people didn't believe, for instance, that a black person could be a nuclear physicist or any number of things, an airplane pilot.

Obviously no one believes that anymore. And there had to be a time when that door was busted down because it wasn't going to be opened voluntarily. But that was decades ago. And what needs to be proven has been proven. So the only people who think that way now are Neanderthals. And there aren't a whole lot of them left around. So that takes care of itself. And you look at the progress that's been made just in my lifetime.

I remember when I was six going down to Tennessee, and there were all these whites only and colors only signs and you know people explaining to me what that means and why you need to pay attention. In that same lifetime, the same lifetime, you have black generals and admirals and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and heads of foundations and university presidents we've had a black president of the United States I mean to say that it's the same and the same lifetime it's craziness we've made enormous progress and continue to make progress to this very time. What can we do to believe in ourselves more? Well, you know, John Adams, our second president, famously said,

our Constitution was designed for a moral and religious people and is woolly inadequate for the government of any other. I think what we can do is get back to our roots. Now our founding document, the Declaration of Independence says that our rights come from our Creator, not from government. And we need to get back to the belief system that took us from a rag-tag bunch of militiamen to the pinnacle of the world in record time. It was the things that we believed our judeo-christian values they taught us to love your neighbor not to cancel your neighbor if they have a different yard sign

in prior times if it was harvest time and one of your neighbors broke his leg everybody else harvested his crops no questions asked they didn't want to know what his religion was or what his political affiliation was they said this is my neighbor and they need my help that was the kind of thing that made America into a very strong nation. That's what we need to get back. Instead of allowing ourselves to be manipulated on the basis of race, age, income, gender, religion, political affiliation, we allow wedges to be driven in and it's destroying our society but here's the bigger picture and I talk about this in the book the United States of America stands in the way of worldwide Marxism and we cannot be overcome militarily.

Therefore, you need to destroy us from within. And that's why all this effort is focused on the basic element of our foundation, which are our families. You destroy that, you destroy the passing on of values When you don't have values passed on You're sort of like what we're seeing on some of these college campuses Because they don't know history Which gives you your identity?

Upon which your beliefs are based. So if you don't know those things, you're like a leaf blowing in the wind. Whatever the social breeze is that's coming along, you get caught up in it, having no idea what you're talking about. And these students have no idea that Hamas, who they're advocating for, would no sooner cut their head off than turn the light on. You know, there's this multi-prong, you know, as you describe,

assault on the family. I just want to kind of lay out where are these, where are the pressure points? Because, you know, we, obviously there are families, right? And this, it's, it's something that strikes me, and I've been watching communist China for a very long time, and they were probably the most effective of any group at having the Cultural Revolution where the vestiges of the old are eliminated, right? Not everything. Military strategy, they chose not to eliminate that. Something we have talked about on episodes, but And I think that's a very interesting point. And I think that's a very interesting point. And I think that's a very interesting point. And I think that's a very interesting point.

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you know the black family did very well throughout slavery and Jim Crow and all those the family were together at that point and then along came Lyndon Johnson and the war on poverty and policies that did not foster family development. for instance, for living expenses, and you got a raise, your rent went up. You brought someone into the home who had another income, your rent went up. There were other things that sort of pushed the man out of the family. The more babies you had out of wedlock, the more money you got. These are crazy policies.

Clearly, they weren't designed to work like that. Well, I don't know. I wonder, because Lyndon Johnson was caught on tape saying, you know, if we give these black people these things, we'll have their vote for the next 200 years. You know, it was all politically driven. It wasn't because they were compassionate individuals. But the bottom line is it caused dysfunctional families to develop where there had been very strong families before, and you see the result of our society. And therefore, we're seeing a very rapid disintegration of traditional

nuclear families and a concomitant decline in our nation. Well, so, you know, we've talked before about, you know, characteristics of, I guess, large families, really, right? I mean, I'm just I'm actually just reading a book called Hannah's Children where a woman You know went out and just tried to understand what are the characteristics of the people have chosen to have large families So tell me about that a little bit. There seems this seems to be a phenomenon There's kind of at least at least to me. it seems like people are becoming more interested in this again. Is this right? Well, I hope it's right.

I haven't seen too much of it yet. But every time I encounter somebody who has more than two children, I congratulate them and thank them for what they're doing for our society because it's vitally important. The other thing that seems to really be proliferating, the Christian-based schools, private schools, the homeschool groups, growing at a terrific rate. Since 2020, the number of homeschoolers has doubled, and it's still accelerating. And the private schools, particularly the faith-based private schools,

have very long waiting lists of people trying to get in because they realize what's going on in our schools and the things that are being taught there which are not conducive to traditional American values and they denigrate traditional American values say that you know that's elitist or that's you know some kind of ism they put on it you have people on the left who seize upon the bad and ugly and just emphasize that particularly in the school in the training curriculums and so you you get a whole generation of young people who don't like our country, who think that we are the source of all evil, who can easily be recruited to do things that are harmful to us. This is a problem.

You know, Vladimir Lenin said, give me your children to teach for four years, and the seed that I sow will never be uprooted. They understand how important it is to get there early on. That's why at American Cornerstone Institute, we instituted the Little Patriots program, learning program, Internet-based, completely free of charge, but teaches our children K-5 what the values were that established this country. We have to be there early on during the formative years. And the Marxists understand this very well.

And they've taken tremendous advantage of it. And we're seeing the result of what they're doing in our schools. COVID was a great blessing to us in the sense that it opened our eyes to what was happening in our schools. COVID was a great blessing to us in the sense that it opened our eyes to what's happening in our schools. And we are responding. I don't think it's too late. One of the silver linings, I suppose, of the whole COVID situation. I'm aware, and I haven't seen statistics on on this but I have a sense that there's a lot of people interested in these faith-based schools that you said there's big lineups for that aren't particularly religious themselves. Oh yes

absolutely. I was talking to to the headmaster of one of the schools just this week and they said there are a lot of people who don't come from the Christian background but they recognize the value of traditional education because you know these schools don't spend all their time talking about the Bible they teach reading writing and arithmetic and physics. Well, and there's this sort of maxim, right? Like learning how to think versus what to think. Right. And that's interesting because, you know, the rhetoric or something, right,

is that, you know, of course in the religious school, that's where you're being indoctrinated, right? That's where you're being told what to think, how you're supposed to think about the world, as opposed to what we call critical thinking, or being able to figure things out for yourself based on logic. Right. And ask questions. Ask the right questions. You know, in 1958 there was a man named Edward Lewis Shrimp who started a lawsuit against one of the counties in Pennsylvania because at the beginning of the school day, they required the recitation of the Lord's Prayer and a Bible reading.

And the school district and even the state said, all a parent has to do is send a note asking that their child be exempted from that if they don't want that to happen. But that wasn't good enough, and it ended up in the Supreme Court in 1963, at which time they ruled that it was unconstitutional to have mandatory prayer or Bible reading. But then it continued to morph from there to there can be no support whatsoever for anything that's religious in the public setting now think about how illogical that is in a country whose founding document says that our rights

come from our Creator whose Pledge of Allegiance says we're one nation under God, whose coins and dollars say in God we trust. That makes no sense whatsoever. And that was obviously never the intent of the Founders, that we completely separate God and religion from everything. Their intention was that the church would not rule the state, and the state would not rule the church. Well, and it made a ton of sense because they were actually from competing religious groups, right? So they wanted to make sure that no one religious group would become the dominant and impose itself right this is what that was happening that was

happening in the 13 colonies right you know you had people who said no Catholics here or none of this group here pre attends I mean it was a mess and so it was it was done for the right purposes but but it morphed into something that was never the intent. But the challenge is, how do you make a society work? You have to have the rule of law of the society, it has to go. Because you can't accommodate things that are at opposite ends of spectrums. You know, some of the Sharia policies, for instance, and particularly the way that they treat women, that's not compatible with our system. That's not compatible with our culture or our laws. And I don't think that we should change our culture

and laws in order to accommodate that. If that's what you believe, then you should go somewhere where they believe that. It's even one thing if you believe it yourself in your unit. But it's another thing if you're kind of demanding that others accept it or participate. Those are two different things, right? Well, I mean, you hit on one of the key areas that's going on in our society today,

and that is there are those who want to take what is abnormal and make everybody else conform to that as if it's normal. I believe that God loves everybody, but I don't believe that it was intended that men have sex with men and women have sex with women. Now those who want to do that, they're welcome to do it, but for them to try to take that and say that that's the norm and that everybody should conform to that does not make any sense. What they should be doing is making sure that the norm recognizes that there are things that are not consistent with the norm

and that we need to learn how to tolerate those things. That's what you do. You don't take everything and turn it upside down. This is a society that was designed to help people of different faiths be able to function together, even as there might be this tendency as human beings to want ours to be the one that everyone kind of accepts. But it's a place where you couldn't impose that, right?

You shouldn't. Right. And it is a fear. Because as you know, in America we tend to be very reactionary. We don't do long term planning. We just react to what's going on. And I fear that there may be a severe reaction to this leftward tilt. And that we may start trying to legislate morality. I think we just have to be very vigilant and make sure that we don't go down that path. How do we deal with morality? Because you've been arguing, I think, that we need a shared morality.

You know, it's not just Christianity that has those ideas. You can go to the darkest jungle of Borneo and a thief, what does he do? He waits until nighttime and nobody can see him. So he must know what's wrong, right? That's right. Without having read the Ten Commandments or anything, there are certain things that we just know inherently are the wrong things to do and the right things to do.

You have to have laws. You have to have a basic code of morality. When everybody becomes their own definition of morality, then you've got a problem. But what is this about legislating? You're saying you're concerned that we're going to be legislating morality. Because the laws are a reflection of our morality as

well, but what do you mean when you say you're concerned? For instance, we may start saying, you're required to attend church. Those kind of things have happened historically. So we just have to watch ourselves and make sure that we don't do that. We need to allow people to make choices. And the thing about a free society is you can live the way you want to live as long as that is not impinging upon someone else's freedom to live the way they want to live. You don't have the right to turn your stereo up at 2 a.m. and blast out the neighborhood. That's just not right.

You've got to have rules against things like that. But I don't want to rule against what you can listen to. You can listen to anything you want in the privacy of your home. Because this is, again, the crux of all this is figuring out where we affect each other as human beings. I'm imposing a little bit on you. You're imposing a little bit on me, potentially. I could try to impose on you greatly and really infringe upon things. This is the system that the American Founders Creative is

trying to make sense of all of this. But where do you learn to be reasonable in that? In your family. Right. That's where you learn that there are other people, there are other opinions, people have property, you learn how to respect it. All those things come through family.

You know, one thing that's really struck me is that in large families you can't be too overly self-centered. Correct and that's why traditionally people say you know only children are spoiled. Now that's not universally true but it probably does have a tendency to ring true in a lot of circumstances. You know, I was self-centered as a young person, which was my diagnosis of why I had a bad temper. Because somebody did something to me, somebody was in my space, I want this. And once I learned to step outside the center of the

circle, the violent temper disappeared. What if we have this structural problem? What if we need to have these larger family units to learn just to be forced to cope with people outside of ourselves and our families that we're connected with? So there's much more of a natural inclination to be forced to cope with people outside of ourselves and our families, of course, that we're connected with. So there's much more of a natural inclination to be helpful. Well, we can incentivize. We can incentivize people to have children. They did that in Australia. They've been doing things that would incentivize family formation. It's interesting that Hungary has

some policies that they've had mixed success with. The reason this book that I've been reading about the large families is a thing. It's just so rare, right? Like, I'm trying to figure out what is it about people that these people in our current time period that make them want to do that yeah because it's so rare well if you talk to people who come from large families they love it they they love their their family structure their siblings and the interactions that they have so there must be something really good about it. I've seldom met anybody from a large family who wasn't delighted to have been

from a large family. So as we finish up, if you could just maybe recap, how do you think we can kind of come out of this? Yeah, I hope it's only a phase that we're going through. I hope people will look back in the future and say they temporarily lost their minds and they forgot about the things that made them into a great nation and particularly about the fundamental things like family structure. We need to understand that there's been a lot of technological things that have impinged upon family relationships. You have children who spend a lot more time with their iPhone or with their computer than

they do with their family. Parents need to be aware of the impact that that has. You have to be aware of your responsibilities as a parent today because children are impacted by so many more things than they used to be. A lot of people like to say nothing's really any different than it ever has been. It's a lot different. The things that 10 year olds know now will blow your mind. Things that we weren't exposed to until we were adults. So in order to really reestablish the family you have

to make a concerted effort. It has to be high on your priority list. Having dinner together. You know, if you're going to have children looking at television, watch it with them and discuss what you just saw. That's what I did with my kids when they were little. I didn't say, you can't watch this and you can't watch that. I said let's watch it together and let's discuss what it is so that they had a good understanding of what was happening to the society that they live in and how to insulate themselves and how to be effective in a society like that. So it has to be deliberate.

It's not sort of natural like it was in the old days when you and your family lived out on the farm in the plains of Nebraska. It's very different now. Well, Dr. Ben Carson, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. It was wonderful to be here. I look forward to our next time. Thank you all for joining Dr. Ben Carson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.