A young boy from Minnesota has gone viral after recording a heartfelt video challenging Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson over his comments that a Muslim should never become president of the United States.
Yusuf Dayur, a 12-year-old middle school student from Eden Prairie in the Twin Cities area, posted his response to Facebook after Carson made the remarks on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he stated he would not advocate for a Muslim to lead the country and that he did not believe Islam was consistent with the Constitution. The video has since been viewed more than 117,000 times.
In the clip, Dayur drew a direct parallel between Carson’s position and the discrimination faced by Black Americans during the civil rights era, when many argued a Black person could never reach the White House — a barrier that was ultimately broken by President Barack Obama.
He addressed Carson personally, asking how the candidate would have felt if someone had told him he could not run for president because of his skin colour, his race or his religion, before explaining what the comments had meant to him personally.
“I wanted to become president since I was two or three years old, when I barely knew how to walk,” Dayur said in the video. “I was going to preschool and I would brag to my little, tiny friends that I’m going to become president one day. And you basically shattered my dreams because you said a Muslim person could not become president.”
Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, is currently considered one of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination and sits in second place in polling, four points behind Donald Trump. Rather than walking back his remarks, Carson said the controversy had driven a surge in campaign donations, claiming contributions had been arriving faster than his team could process them and that his campaign had raised one million dollars within 24 hours of the previous debate alone.
The contrast between the two responses — a multimillion dollar fundraising boost on one side and a child’s video about shattered ambitions on the other — has drawn significant attention online and reignited debate about religious discrimination in American political life.
