Republican presidential candidates don't usually stick up for socialist senators running in the Democratic primaries, but that's exactly what Ben Carson did Monday.

In an op-ed for USA Today, Carson chastised the Black Lives Matter movement for disrupting Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' speeches.

"There are many things to be angry about when you are consumed by hopelessness. Bernie Sanders isn't one of them," he wrote.

Carson said that when he was growing up his mother was more worried about crime and violence in his neighborhood and than "Socialist senators from tiny rural states," adding that Black Lives Matter should learn to "focus on the real sources of our hopelessness."

Many of those sources, Carson argued, are connected to liberals and the Democratic Party: a lack of access to quality education, the entertainment industry portraying blacks as "thugs" and trash," drug culture and poverty.

"Tell [Democrats], we don't want to be clothed, fed and housed. We want honor and dignity," Carson wrote. "We don't want a plan to give us public housing in nice neighborhoods. We want an end to excuses for schools that leave us without the means to buy our own houses where we choose to live. We want the skills needed to compete, not a consolation price of Section 8, Food Stamps and a lifetime of government paperwork."

Carson, the only major African-American presidential candidate, is polling in the top tier of Republican White House aspirants. He claimed that while the GOP has ignored the black community for too long, African-American participation would help blacks "communicate and find a different way."