FACT CHECK: Did Ben Carson Call Homelessness ‘A Gift From Heaven’?
An image shared on Facebook claimed that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said, “You see, a hurricane is God’s way of saying you are meant to be homeless. So in a sense, your homelessness is a gift from heaven.”
Verdict: False
There is no record of Carson making such a statement.
Fact Check:
During his 2016 presidential campaign, and now his tenure as a cabinet secretary, critics of Carson have pointed to controversial comments he has made; he once compared Obamacare to slavery, for example. But this image, which claims that Carson called homelessness a “gift from heaven,” is false. (RELATED: Did Ben Carson Say, ‘Before Obama, People Barely Noticed Skin Color’?)
The Daily Caller found no evidence of Carson making such a statement on the campaign trail, while at the Department of Housing and Urban Development or at any other time. The media has not reported on any such statement.
The photo of Carson shown in the meme comes from a May 2015 town hall he had in Baltimore, Maryland, yet no reporting about that visit contains the quote in question.
Carson has been previously criticized for calling poverty a “state of mind.”
“I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind,” he said in 2017. “You take somebody who has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street and I guarantee you in a little while they’ll be right back up there. And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom.”
