CNN host Don Lemon’s claim that “white men” pose the “biggest terror threat” to the U.S. is laughable, “ridiculous” and divisive, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson said Thursday on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
“Actually, it’s a little bit humorous,” Carson (shown above right) replied when asked if he, too, believed that white men “are the major threat in this country.”
“The only thing that can really destroy us [is] ourselves,” said Carson. “You know, Jesus said it best. He said, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ It was echoed again by Abraham Lincoln. And it’s absolutely true today.”
Lemon (above left) has been fielding intense backlash after he claimed Monday on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.”
Immediately after Lemon said that the country should “not demonize any one group or any one ethnicity” — he did just that.
“So we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the Right, and we have to start doing something about them,” Lemon insisted.
After folks on social media and elsewhere went nuts over that comment, Lemon doubled down on his claims Wednesday night on his own show, “CNN Tonight.”
“Earlier this week, I made some comments about that in a conversation with Chris. I said that the biggest terror threat in this country comes from radicals on the far Right, primarily white men. That angered some people,” Lemon said.
“But let’s put emotion aside and look at the cold hard facts. The evidence is overwhelming. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office shows that even though more people died in attacks connected to Islamic extremists, the vast majority of deadly attacks in this country from 2001 to 2016 were carried out by far-Right violent extremists.”
Lemon insisted that people “who are angered about what I said are missing the entire point” and should not be worried about the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.
“We don’t need to worry about people who are thousands of miles away. The biggest threats are home-grown. The facts prove that,” Lemon said.
Related: CNN Host Don Lemon Faces Backlash Over ‘White Men’ Terror Threat Comment
Carson said Lemon was one of “the purveyors of hatred and division,” noting that Americans have a choice whether or not to buy into that.
“We the people get to decide. Are we going to listen to the purveyors of hatred and division, or are we going to listen to our higher angels and start working on ways that we can create real fairness and use logic and common sense to solve problems and learn from our history?” Carson said.
“You know, we have a history of dividing people into different segments, and that has caused a lot of problems in the past. And we’ve paid big prices for that,” Carson added.
“Let’s acknowledge it, but let’s learn from it and move in a positive direction not a negative direction.”
When “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Carson again if he thought that white men pose the biggest terror threat to this nation, he adamantly replied, “Of course not. That’s ridiculous.”
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