Ben Carson Says ‘Slave Ships’ Carried ‘Immigrants’ and Twitter Is Not Having It

NAACP slams HUD Secretary: “Immigrants???”; “This can’t be real,” tweets Chelsea Clinton

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Ben Carson continues to defy the prevailing assumption that brain surgeons are smart.

The Housing and Urban Development secretary has found himself on the receiving end of intense backlash after referring to African-American slaves as “immigrants” during his first address to his employees at HUD.

“There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less,” Carson said on Monday. “But they, too, had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

Twitter erupted in condemnation from advocacy groups, including the NAACP, which slammed Carson with one word: “Immigrants???”

Watch Carson’s comments in this video:

Hollywood followed up with a hefty dose of outrage.

Jeffery Wright tweeted: “Don’t care what he once did. I wouldn’t trust Ben Carson to operate on a crawfish head. ‘Get out the kitchen, Ben. Step back from the pot.’”

And Samuel L. Jackson tweeted: “OK!! Ben Carson….I can’t! Immigrants ? In the bottom of SLAVE SHIPS??!! MUTHAFUKKA PLEASE!!!”

Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton also took to Twitter, saying, “This can’t be real.”

This isn’t the first time Carson has been mocked for distorting facts. A neurosurgeon, Carson seemed to question climate change in October 2015 when he told an audience at the University of New Hampshire that at “any point in time, temperatures are going up or temperatures are going down. Of course that’s happening. When that stops happening, that’s when we’re in big trouble.”

Carson also raised eyebrows when an old video of him claiming that Joseph — the biblical figure — built the Egyptian pyramids to store food surfaced during his failed presidential campaign (scholars contested his theory, insisting the Pyramids were built to intern pharaohs).

And in 2012 he argued that the Big Bang theory was part of the “fairy tales” pushed by “highfalutin scientists” as a story of creation.

Carson’s name soon shot up to the top of Twitter’s trending chart.

https://twitter.com/Nikki_T/status/838876835135926272

https://twitter.com/IvankaToWorkDay/status/838872016102944768

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