It’s official. Paul Nehlen, the racist candidate in the first congressional district running in the GOP primary against House Speaker Paul Ryan, has had his Twitter account suspended. As a private organization, Twitter is certainly within its rights to suspend Nehlen’s account. However, they are making a mistake.
Nehlen is an anti-Semite, a racial provocateur, and has even personally profited from his own campaign for public office. If there was any chance of him winning an election, I would gladly drop my policy against campaign donations and donate all I could to stop him. He is an evil, vile man.
He is also a candidate for public office.
The irony of Nehlen getting suspended by Twitter is that it was Nehlen’s posts on social media that revealed the real Paul Nehlen. It was Nehlen’s Twitter post of the list of Jewish media that revealed he is an anti-Semite. Nehlen’s other posts unmasked his racism, including one during his last campaign when he said he wanted to deport all Muslims.
It was those social media posts that finally convinced the Breitbart website to stop supporting him. It was those social media posts that finally prevented Nehlen from getting more support from Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and even Sarah Palin.
(By the way, shouldn’t they be apologizing for not listening to Wisconsin conservatives when they were warned to stay away from Nehlen’s campaign in 2016? They helped build this monster. And any Wisconsin Republicans that did support Nehlen in 2016 should be put on notice that their support for him won’t be forgotten, too. And any Democrats, too.)
So if it wasn’t for Nehlen’s social media posts, he would be just another fringe candidate challenging “the establishment.” But because Nehlen’s views were out in the open where everyone could see them, it became impossible for any decent Republican to support him. Nehlen is now more marginalized than ever.
And that’s ultimately the problem with Twitter suspending Nehlen’s account, and the accounts belonging to people like Nehlen. We’re better off knowing what these people actually believe. It’s far more important to know the truth about Nehlen than it is to worry about being offended. If Twitter insists on shutting down these accounts, all they are doing is hiding the truth about the account holders’ vile natures.
Many Twitter users are celebrating Nehlen’s account being shut down. What they don’t understand is that the next racist candidate, cognizant of Twitter’s policies, may do a better job of concealing their racism. Who benefits from that?
Twitter should focus their attention instead on getting rid of the fake accounts and the bots that spread false information from fake “news” websites, many of them foreign in origin. Twitter could also do a better job of policing accounts to make sure they aren’t benefiting from fake Twitter followers, often purchased for the purpose of inflating the follower numbers and retweets.
Leave the real racists alone so they can expose themselves. It’s a far better public service than trying to police actual political speech lest someone gets offended.
