Dr. Ben Carson used his first day as a Fox News contributor likening the Affordable Care Act to socialism by using a quote he attributed to Vladimir Lenin. Fox's employment of Carson continues its support for a conservative figure heavily criticized for his inflammatory rhetoric.

Fox News announced it's hiring of Carson as a Fox contributor On October 9, continuing its ongoing campaign to elevate his status after criticizing President Obama at the White House Prayer Breakfast earlier this year. On his first Fox appearance on that day's The Kelly File, Carson told host Megyn Kelly that it wasn't surprising that Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA) ridiculed the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee hearing with IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram because they don't want to have a “real conversation” about IRS controversies (emphasis added):

CARSON: It's not terribly surprising. Because if you read Saul Alinsky's book Rules For Radicals, it talks about the need to ridicule. It also talks about never having a real conversation with your adversary because that humanizes them, and your job is the demonize them.  And therefore we see people coming out and saying about those who oppose Obamacare, for instance, that they want older people to die, that they want kids to be deprived of food. You know, all these things are just straight out of the text. And what's really interesting is, you know, Vladimir Lenin, one of the founders of socialism and communism, he said socialized medicine is the keystone of the arch to the socialist state. In other words, you've got to get the socialized medicine as the foundation because it gives you control of the people. Once you have control of them, you can do what you want.

Earlier in the day on Sean Hannity's radio show, Carson used the same Lenin quote to attack the ACA. (The book The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr notes that “The Library of Congress could not locate this quotation in Lenin's writings.”)

Carson has been criticized for his history of inflammatory rhetoric, leading to his having to step down as a commencement speaker at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.  During a March 26 appearance on Fox News' Hannity, Carson answered a question by Sean Hannity about efforts to overturn bans on same-sex marriage, Carson replied:  “No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn't matter what they are -- they don't get to change the definition.”

Carson was forced to apologize after that comment, but he was lauded as a hero in the right-wing media and subsequently hired as a columnist in The Washington Times and, now, Fox News.