Ben Carson: Uneducated people are easily tricked into voting for free education

GOP presidential hopeful Ben Carson on Wednesday seemed to give contradicting statements when he said it was very easy to mislead uneducated people into thinking that providing college education was a good thing.

The remarks, made at Liberty University in Virginia, seemed to be a swipe at Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who has said that higher education should be funded by states and the federal government, according to The Hill. Carson said doing so would lead to "the destruction of the nation."

The model is currently in practice in other highly-developed countries that have yet to be destroyed, like Germany and Finland.

Carson, who believes that the Egyptian pyramids were built by the biblical figure Joseph, cautioned against being ill-informed without addressing the role higher education plays in informing.

"It becomes easy to swallow things," the retired neurosurgeon told the audience. "If you don’t understand our financial situation and someone comes along and says, ‘free college for everybody,’ they’ll say, ‘oh how wonderful,’ and have no idea they’re talking about hastening the destruction of the nation."

Carson has run into strange territory recently, where claims he has made about his past have unraveled amid scrutiny. Journalists could find no evidence of tales Carson told about shielding white students in his high school biology lab from 1968 race riots, or that he was a violent youth who tried to stab a friend.

A claim of receiving a full scholarship to elite military academy West Point was questioned as West Point doesn't offer scholarships to students, all of whom attend free of cost.

But Carson, a devout Christian, has chalked it all up to being unfairly treated by the "gotcha" media, telling the crowd at the Christian university he has relied on his faith to remain unfazed, according to The Hill.

Watch Carson's remarks, as posted to YouTube, here: