Twitter Suspends ‘Alt-Right’ Candidate Paul Nehlen After Meghan Markle Tweets
Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen has grown closer to white nationalist leaders and thinkers in recent months. Image by Twitter
By Aiden Pink February 11, 2018
Twitter suspended the account of congressional candidate Paul Nehlen, the “alt-right” congressional candidate who has associated himself with white supremacists.
The reason for the suspension is currently unclear, and Nehlen has not yet spoken out about it on Facebook, his other primary means of communication. But Wisconsin news site Channel 3000 speculated that it may have had to do with a Photoshopped tweet superimposing the head of “Cheddar Man,” a dark-skinned 9,000-year-old Mesolithic man “rebuilt” from the DNA of a skeleton in southwest England, on the body of Meghan Markle, the fiancee of Great Britain’s Prince Harry.
Twitter has in the past few months done “sweeps” of racist and abusive Twitter accounts as part of its bid to make the website more user-friendly.
The tweet engendered controversy in the U.S. and U.K., to which Nehlen responded on Sunday morning.
“Publishing an article disappearing whites or dispossessing whites of their homelands is wrong; made worse when claiming ‘science’ to ‘prove’ whites never existed,” he wrote. “I made a joke of it. It’s not a laughing matter, so I chose to laugh about it.”
Nehlen, who is running in a Republican primary to unseat Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, was previously suspended from Twitter for a week after the social media network said he made anti-Semitic posts.
Nehlen had earlier issued a series of tweets castigating the “Jewish media,” complete with images of Jewish (or supposedly Jewish) journalists at major media outlets with Stars of David imposed on their headshots.
After returning from his suspension, Nehlen released a list of more than 80 people he claimed had attacked him, with more than 70 of them Jewish.
Nehlen has continued to associate with far-right and anti-Semitic figures like former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
Nehlen lost his 2016 race to Ryan 84%-16%.
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink
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