One easy way to identify people with authoritarian tendencies is to watch and listen to how they react to being challenged on their worldviews and opinions.
One would think that a person who once tried to run for the job of POTUS would have learned a while ago that it is not a good idea to try and bully questioners on-air.
Not Ben Carson.
On a TV show, when his BBC interviewer reminded him that he was not answering a question, his response was to cry “cut her mic”.
A rather revealing response I believe. Rather than answer a question, he decided to try and blow past it. When that was pointed out, his instinctive reaction was to demand that she effectively be prevented from asking him any more questions.
Folks, I should not have to spell this out. This is not a simple dispute over facts and style. This is a man attempting to bully and bluster his way past awkward questions from a woman on-air. He was being reminded that he was not answering the question, so his reaction was to try to get his own way by cutting off further questions.
Fortunately, Katty Kay is employed by the BBC, where for a long while the standard bearer for awkward question persistence was Jeremy Paxman, who actually helped to destroy the career of a leader of the Conservative Party when, like Katty Kay, he refused to let him off the hook for failing to answer a question. While the BBC has become horribly supine and non-inquisitive of late, failing to ask enough awkward questions over both the Jimmy Savile scandal and Brexit, Ms. Kay does seem to have some Jeremy Paxman DNA, and as a rule, UK television interviewers are a lot less deferential than their US counterparts.
POSTSCRIPT – If you want to sample the sheer juvenile bloviating fuckwittery of many of the newly-arrived supporters of Donald Trump , you can sample the comments on Twitter (WARNING – Place cushion on desk in front of you to reduce chance of concussion).
