Ben Carson Should Produce His Long Form Popeyes Receipt

The internet is never short on figures to debunk, whether it be a Muslim kid who allegedly “built” a “clock,” a black guy who “says” he’s “black,” another black guy who insists he was born in America, or in the latest example, a retired brain surgeon who says he was threatened at gunpoint during an armed robbery and did the most cowardly thing possible.

Republican presidential heel-nipper Ben Carson joined the ranks of distrusted people of color this week when he recounted the tale of an armed robbery, during which he provided the gunman with valuable supervisory assistance:

Carson elaborated on the event in interviews with Michael Smerconish and Sirius XM host Jared Rizzi, and correctly pointed out that the robbery was a completely different situation than an active shooter event, which explains why he didn’t rush the gunman, but offered no explanation for choosing the gunman a new target.

Carson’s account has drawn criticism from those who find his cowardice inconsistent with the foolish and fact-challenged advice he’s been giving to the now-dead victims of the Oregon mass shooting, but there’s also an emerging Ben Carson Popeyes Truther movement suggesting that he made the whole thing up. There are just two things that cut in Carson’s favor here. As he has said, there’s virtually no conceivable reason why someone would make up such a story, and there is absolutely no concrete evidence that he’s lying. But when has that ever stopped anyone?

The case against Carson is more compelling than it might seem at first glance. Let’s start with his account of the robbery, which I’ve cobbled together from his various interviews, and take it piece by piece:

You eat Popeyes as a doctor? “We have to die of something.”

…”I can tell you, categorically, as a God-fearing Christian, it’s something that happened, it’s not something that I made up.”

Setting aside Carson’s anti-business claim that eating Popeyes will kill you, that’s also interesting because eating meat is against Ben Carson’s religion, and we all know how important Ben Carson’s religion is to him. Strike one, Doctor, if you are a doctor.

Carson: “The guy comes, puts the gun in my ribs, I just said, ‘I believe that you want the guy behind the counter.’ He thought I was…”

Hunter: “In that calm way?”

Carson: “He said, oh, okay.”

Hunter: “You just redirected him to…”

Carson: “Yeah, redirected him.”

…Carson: “Yeah, he had the wrong person, I directed him, he went to the cashier, the cashier gave him the money, and he ran out of the store.”

Now, I know that armed robbery isn’t exactly brain surgery, but generally speaking, they’re pretty well-versed on the positioning of the cashier. It’s a small detail, but a highly implausible one upon which the entire anecdote rests. Strike two!

“The resolution was, he said ‘Oh, sorry.’ And then he went to the appropriate person behind the register, who gave him the money, and he left the store running before the police got there.”

The armed robber not only passed on the contents of Dr. Carson’s wallet, but also apologized to him. Did he also stop to properly arrange the sporks on the place settings? Strike three!

“I wasn’t fearful for my life at all. I knew why he was there.”

This is a dubious claim for anyone to make who has actually had a gun pulled on them, because you don’t even have to want to kill someone with a gun to kill them. You don’t even have to have opposable thumbs. In Carson’s case, though, it’s even stranger for him to assert, with certainty, that he knows a desperate robber wouldn’t kill someone over money, when Carson himself once tried to stab someone over which radio station they were listening to. And that guy was his friend. Strike four!

“To me it wasn’t that big of deal, to be honest with you. Have I written about it in a book? I don’t know.”

Getting a gun pulled on you isn’t always a huge deal (it’s happened to me six times), but it’s a pretty big deal, and it’s something you remember, especially if it only ever happened once. Whether you’d include it in an autobiography or not is debatable, especially considering how this turned out, but you wouldn’t just forget if you ever did.

However, prior to that interview, Carson adviser Armstrong Williams told The Daily Beast that he had written about the incident, and Carson’s co-author says they never discussed it while they were co-authoring three books. Williams also considerably embellished the story, with details that Carson did not repeat in his later interviews:

“He was in a Popeyes and—God, this is so long ago—and some guy walked in with a gun and pulled it out and people were panicking,” Williams said.

Carson stayed calm, Williams said, and managed to “diffuse” the situation. “He thought it was kind of unbelievable that the guy calmed down,” he said. “He was very confident in talking the guy through and the guy listened to him.”

Williams first told The Daily Beast that law enforcement intervened.

“I think police came later and chased him down the street,” he said, adding that he wasn’t sure if the gunman was arrested after the chase.

If the name Armstrong Williams rings a bell, it’s because he was caught taking money from the Bush administration in exchange for positive coverage of their education policies. That doesn’t mean he’s lying, but Ben Carson isn’t even backing up that version of events. What is that, strike four?

The Baltimore police have been unable to verify Carson’s account, citing insufficient detail:

“We searched for it and based on the general statement, we have no report,” said T.J. Smith, the department’s chief spokesman. “Need more info.”

That’s mighty convenient for Carson’s critics, for now, but if Carson was a witness to an armed robbery, then there is a police report that will corroborate him. All the police need to locate it is some more detail, which Carson will surely be happy to provide:

“The incident at Popeyes occurred over 30 years ago. Suggestions that Dr. Carson is lying are outrageous. We will not entertain any further discussion on this issue,” Carson’s Deputy Communications Director Ying Ma told CNN in an email.

Okay, maybe not.

I’ll be honest, I do find this effort to prove Dr. Carson a liar distasteful and outrageous, and not all that dissimilar from the Birther crusade that Donald Trump so viciously campaigned on last election, and continues to flirt with. All of this circumstantial garbage ignores the very central issue of why Dr. Carson should be distrusted in the first place, or why he should be compelled to produce his long-form Popeyes receipt. To demand such a thing is outrageous, as Carson’s campaign has said, and I defy you to find any reasonable person who would disagree with that:

Nevermind.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.