In the wake of the Paris massacre, Ben Carson gave an inexplicable foreign policy interview to Fox News on Sunday in which Republican presidential candidate:
- Stated he would not allow refugees into the US because of his "frontal lobes"
- Insisted that China is active in the Syrian conflict
- Struggled to name a single coalition partner he could call upon to combat ISIS
- Advocated a shooting match with Russia over a no-fly zone
Speaking about Friday's attacks in France, the former neurosurgeon, who recently overtook Donald Trump in some national polls, was asked three times which country or leader he would call to create an international coalition to counter ISIS, failing to name one.
He then stood by his recent discredited comments that China was active in Syrian war, before proposing the US shoots down a Russian plane if it violated a no-fly zone over Syria.
"If they violate it, we will, in fact, enforce it," he said. "We'll see what happens. For us to always be backing down because we're afraid of a conflict, that's not how we became a great nation."
Perhaps more bizarrely, the 63 year-old told the broadcaster that as president he would immediately reverse Barack Obama’s policy of accepting 10,000 displaced from the war-torn state. “Bringing people into this country from that area of the world, I think, is a huge mistake because why wouldn’t ISIS infiltrate [refugees] with people who are ideologically opposed to us?” he said. “It would be foolish for them not to do that.”
Carson added: “We should use our expertise and resources to help get them resettled over there and to support them over there. But to bring them here under these circumstances is a suspension of intellect.” Wandering, he continued: “You know that the human brain has these big frontal lobes, as opposed to other animals, because we can engage in rational thought processing.”
Extending the detour, Carson noted how his brain allowed him to “extract information from the past, present, process it, and project it into a plan,” while “animals, on the other hand, have big brain stems and rudimentary things because they react."
"We don’t have to just react, we can think,” he concluded.
Examples of Carson using his "big frontal lobes" include calling the pyramids grain silos for a character from a Broadway musical, and trying to hit his mother on the head with a hammer.
Watch the full interview above...
