Ben Carson says his home was struck by anti-Trump vandals

William Cummings | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Ben Carson's home in Virginia was vandalized with anti-Trump rhetoric After the racially-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Anti-trump protesters vandalized Ben Carson’s Virginia home. Josh King has the story (@abridgetoland).

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson said in a Facebook post Wednesday that his home was recently struck by anti-Trump vandals.

Carson said his home and that of a neighbor were "vandalized by people who also wrote hateful rhetoric about President Trump." He said he was out of town when the incident occurred and "other kind, embarrassed neighbors cleaned up most of the mess before we returned."

Carson shared the story in a post about how to rise above the "racial and political strife emanating from the events in Charlottesville last weekend."

He also recounted how one neighbor raised a Confederate flag when he bought a farm in rural Maryland several years ago:

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.

The neighbor who raised the Confederate flag eventually became friendly, Carson said.

"That is the likely outcome if we just learn to be neighborly and to get to know each other," he wrote.

Carson cited both stories as instances where "less than kind behavior was met by people taking the high road."

"We could all learn from these examples," Carson said. "Hatred and bigotry unfortunately still exists in our country and we must all continue to fight it, but let's use the right tools."

In earlier posts about the violence that broke at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday, Carson called on people to "reject the forces of division on all sides of the political spectrum" and he said it "is sad watching the political pundits arguing about whether President Trump went far enough in condemning the instigators of the violence in Charlottesville."

Carson argued that a divided America is more susceptible to attack from "radical terrorists."

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