The Wall Street Journal called out Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson Thursday for wrongly claiming the Founding Fathers “had no elected office experience.”
In a Facebook post late Wednesday, Carson wrote: “Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience…What they had was a deep belief that freedom is a gift from God.”
The Journal pointed out the historical inaccuracy Thursday. Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, John Hancock and many other signer of the Declaration of Independence all held elected seats in colonial assemblies, Benjamin Carp, an associate history professor at Brooklyn College, told the paper.
A spokesman for the Carson campaign, when asked about the error, told the paper that the retired neurosurgeon had since edited his post to clarify the signers has no experience in “federal” office.
Carson isn’t the only 2016 Republican candidate who’s taken liberty with the Founding Fathers’ legacies.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) misquotes the country’s founders in his books and speeches so frequently that BuzzFeed reporter Andrew Kaczynski, who’s been fact-checking Rand since 2013, published a letter last month asking the senator to stop using fake quotes.
Paul dismissed Kaczynski as a “partisan hack” at the helm of a “ridiculous cottage industry out there of people who think they’re smarter than everyone else.”
This post has been updated.
