On Wednesday, former Republican presidential candidate and current Secretary of Urban Development Ben Carson revealed that his house had been vandalized with “hateful rhetoric about President Trump.”
“More recently our home in Virginia along with that of a neighbor was vandalized by people who also wrote hateful rhetoric about President Trump,” explained Dr. Carson in a Facebook post. “We were out of town, but other kind, embarrassed neighbors cleaned up most of the mess before we returned.”
The former neurosurgeon also described another incident about the Confederate flag at a neighbor’s house in Maryland.
“Several years ago we bought a farm in rural Maryland. One of the neighbors immediately put up a Confederate flag. A friend of ours who is an African-American three-star general was coming to visit and immediately turned around concluding that he was in the wrong place. Interestingly, all the other neighbors immediately put up American flags shaming the other neighbor who took down the Confederate flag,” he wrote.
“In both instances, less than kind behavior was met by people taking the high road,” noted Carson. “We could all learn from these examples.”
Carson’s comments were posted in reaction to the recent incident in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis holding a rally to promote their racist views and protest the removal of Confederate statues clashed with “anti-fascist” group Antifa. Tragically, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was murdered by a man with white supremacist ties who mowed his vehicle through a crowd of protesters; two officers manning the rally also lost their lives in a helicopter crash.
“Hatred and bigotry unfortunately still exists in our country and we must all continue to fight it, but let’s use the right tools. By the way, that neighbor who put up the Confederate flag subsequently became friendly. That is the likely outcome if we just learn to be neighborly and to get to know each other,” he concluded.
Dr. Carson, as well as being a member of the president’s cabinet, became a supporter of Donald Trump soon after he dropped out of the 2016 presidential race.
H/T Alex Pappas