Politics
Why Did a 13-Year-Old Conservative Star Apparently Hoax the White House?
Young conservative vlogger Coreco JaQuan Pearson , 13, says the President blocked him on Twitter over his Conservative views. (Youtube screenshot)
David Weigel, THE WASHINGTON POST
(The Washington Post) – On Thursday afternoon, 13-year old CJ Pearson warned his 43,900 followers not to believe what they read. The black Georgia teenager, whose activism and online success had made him a youth outreach chairman for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), had been trading messages with a reporter for Glenn Beck’s news site, The Blaze. Oliver Darcy, a reporter for the site, was asking Pearson to prove — as he had claimed, to great viral attention — that President Obama had truly blocked him on Twitter. In lieu of proof, Pearson was calling for help.
“In a few minutes, @oliverdarcy is going to release a hit article on me and I’m going to take it,” Pearson wrote. “Because here’s what the PR folks are saying: say you lied and apologize to avoid backlash. But, instead, I choose to stand by my word. While the article will be incriminating, all we have in politics is our word and I stand by it. Nevertheless, I’m disappointed in @theblaze.”
It was one of the more confusing moments in a story born to confuse. Coreco JaQuan Pearson’s profile had been growing well before the Twitter story, thanks to his precocious and silver-tongued video denunciations of the president. The most successful had come just this month, when Pearson locked his eyes on a webcam and asked — rhetorically — why a president who so blatantly disrespected police officers had so quickly invited Texas teenager Ahmed Mohamed to the White House, after being disciplined for bringing to school a homemade clock that administrators mistook for a bomb.
“Mr. President, when cops are being gunned down, you don’t invite their family to the White House,” Pearson said. “You never did. But when a Muslim kid builds a clock? Well, come on by.”
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