Ben Carson reacted last month to President Obama’s remarks on the shooting at a black church in Charleston by accusing the president of using his bully pulpit to “create wars,” including “race wars,” “a war on women,” “religious wars” and “age wars,” which threaten to “destroy” American society.

Shane Vander Hart, who hosts a podcast for the Iowa conservative blog Caffeinated Thoughts, lamented to Carson that President Obama had “injected gun control” and “race relations” into the discussion of a mass shooting by a white supremacist, and asked the Republican presidential candidate if he would have “a similar approach” to “local events or state events.”

“No, I think I would use the bully pulpit to help people realize what we have in common rather than what separates us,” Carson responded. “What it’s been used for for the last several years is to create wars: a war on women, race wars, any kind of anything involving people of two different races, income wars, always class warfare, religious wars now, age wars. You know, these are exactly the kinds of things you want to do when you want to destroy a society, not when you want to bring people together.”