President’s Twitter account blocks 13-year-old critic

ATLANTA CJ Pearson, the 13-year-old Augusta resident who has gained popularity as an outspoken YouTube critic of President Barack Obama, has apparently earned Obama’s notice: Pearson said earlier Wednesday that he’s been blocked on Twitter by the president’s account (@POTUS).

“Well, this sucks,” Pearson tweeted Wednesday afternoon, with a screenshot apparently showing that he had been blocked.

His being blocked cannot be independently verified. But Pearson first rose to fame as a conservative activist early this year, when he published a YouTube video headlined “President Obama: Do you really love America?” It subsequently went viral, and he said his Facebook page was then temporarily locked.

His YouTube channel now has more than 15,700 subscribers, with recent videos discussing Common Core and “the real problem facing the black community” (Pearson is black), and highlighting his appearances on Fox News.

His most recent video was a rebuke to the president’s White House invitation to Ahmed Mohamed, a Texas teen arrested after school officials mistook his electronic clock for a bomb and which many held up as an example of racial profiling.

That video has more than 1.8 million views, though Pearson has drawn criticism for his views as well, often in the comments on his videos.

Pearson was also behind a recent bill that would have lowered the minimum age to hold office in the state legislature.

“Maybe it is best to be a political activist,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in February. “Maybe run for office. Maybe I do have aspirations to one day be the governor of Georgia. I know that I do love America. It is the greatest country in the world, and it is time we started acting like it.”

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