At last week’s National Religious Broadcasters Presidential Forum, Ben Carson said that the separation of church and state and marriage equality are incompatible with the First Amendment and the Bible, while boasting that he’s read enough “conspiracy books” to know that public school lessons and anti-discrimination laws are authored by communist subversives.

Carson told host Eric Metaxas that “the First Amendment gives you the right to live according to your faith without being harassed,” adding that “separation of church and state is not in the United States Constitution, it was a Supreme Court ruling a few decades ago where it actually entered the lexicon.” In fact, the phrase was used by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

This led him to criticize “our judicial Supreme Court” for making “bad decisions” like “the Dred Scott Act [sic]” and “the Uberfeld [sic] ruling on gay marriage.” (We assume that Carson was referring to the Supreme Court’s rulings in Dred Scott v. Sandford and Obergefell v. Hodges, respectively.)

He called Obergefell “way out of whack” because it “impinges upon the ability of people to live according to their faith,” saying that “as president I would really encourage them to come up with legislation that protects the livelihood and the freedom of people who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman. There’s no reason that those people should be persecuted in our society.”

Carson then explained that “the advocates of gay marriage” want to completely undo the Bible and, as a result, American society: “The Bible, in both the Old and New Testament, is pretty firm against their way of thinking but if you can negate that then you can negate other portions of the Bible as well. This is the camel’s nose under the tent to undermine the Christian foundation of our nation.”

“I believe that there are a group of progressive individuals,” he said, “who have intentionally been trying to take over our school systems, been trying to take over the media in particular and various areas where they, through their propaganda, can change and undermine the principles that made America great and substitute them with their principles. And they have imposed political correctness so that you can’t even talk about it while they change the fabric of society. That’s what’s happened. That’s why we’ve changed so quickly. And that’s why, if we don’t do something about it, which takes courage, we will end up with a very fundamentally changed nation.”

He then reiterated his belief that gay rights are part of a larger conspiracy to destroy America, boasting that he knows the truth after reading “conspiracy books”: “Many people have been mesmerized by the secular-progressive movement and they have come to accept it almost by osmosis, without recognizing what the implications are. I know fully what they’re doing but that’s because I do a lot of reading. I read conspiracy books, I read all kinds of books. I also read communist books and socialist books and I know about some of these plans that they have.”

Carson went on to say that Bernie Sanders has performed well in the youth vote because leftists “have taken over the educational institutions so they can basically change the thinking of our young people.”