The past week has been a torrent of crazy Ben Carson stories. First he stabbed a friend when he was young, and then he didn't. He got a full scholarship to West Point, and then it turns out they don't actually give those. It appears, at this point, basically nothing in Carson's memoir is credible. Let us sort out the latest bizarre tales from the past 48 hours.
Old video shows Ben Carson thinks there's a New World Order out to get America.
This one's been floating around online for a while, but resurfaced on social media yesterday: A video of Ben Carson going after the New World Order which vaguely has to do with atheists and socialists trying to destroy America. As an atheist and a socialist, I can assure Mr. Carson our goal is not to destroy America, but rather the people who run it.
Check out the clip yourself. Begin at roughly the 0:58 mark:
Guardian profile: Carson has a painting of himself with Jesus in his house.
The highlight of the day on Twitter were photos from a rather scathing Guardian profile that dropped Saturday afternoon.
Ben Carson's house: a homage to himself in pictures.
The piece is full of gems. Carson's house is like something out of Saddam Hussein's palace: pictures of himself marked by weird historic fantasy role play.
Honesty at Yale's Perceptions 301
This is my personal favorite. The Wall Street Journal has revealed an anecdote in Ben Carson's memoir to be entirely bogus. It's a tale of Ben Carson being taught a lesson in "honesty" by a Yale professor in a terribly convoluted and implausible way. What's shocking about the story is not how goofy and madeup it obviously is, but how this fact went entirely unnoticed for almost 25 years since his memoir's release. Here's the Journal's explanation:
In his 1990 autobiography, “Gifted Hands,” Mr. Carson writes of a Yale psychology professor who told Mr. Carson, then a junior, and the other students in the class—identified by Mr. Carson as Perceptions 301—that their final exam papers had “inadvertently burned,” requiring all 150 students to retake it. The new exam, Mr. Carson recalled in the book, was much tougher. All the students but Mr. Carson walked out.
“The professor came toward me. With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture,” Mr. Carson wrote. “ ‘A hoax,’ the teacher said. ‘We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class.'” Mr. Carson wrote that the professor handed him a $10 bill.
No photo identifying Mr. Carson as a student ever ran, according to the Yale Daily News archives, and no stories from that era mention a class called Perceptions 301. Yale Librarian Claryn Spies said Friday there was no psychology course by that name or class number during any of Mr. Carson’s years at Yale.
First off: $10? Why would the professor stage this elaborate ruse? And how does this make Carson "honest" rather than just a sap? Why would a professor sadistically give a harder test after "accidently burning" an earlier one? Why would this result in a mass walkout, sans Carson, rather than a discussion? What is going on here?
These questions remain unanswered by the Carson camp.
Ben Carson protecting white high school classmates during the 1968 Detriot riots the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.
This one is equally dubious. The Daily News explained:
Last month, Carson detailed how he protected his white high school classmates the day after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination. Race riots ravaged Detroit’s Southwestern High, which enrolled more black students than white students.
Carson, a junior lab assistant with a key to the school’s biology workroom, shepherded his frightened friends to the lab to shield them from the violence, he told the Wall Street Journal.
It makes sense that in a party of largely white conservatives, Carson would try to position himself as someone who saved whites from a mob of angry blacks, but here we are. Like the other allegations, the Carson camp can't provide any corroborating evidence to back up this claim, and given the false West Point and Yale tales, we have little reason to believe this story is true either. Carson has a quite a credibility problem he'll have to answer for in the coming days if he's serious about running for president. The reality is though, he probably isn't.
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