While Twitter permanently suspended the account of former President Donald Trump for “inciting violence,” the platform continues to allow Twitter users to make physical threats and threatening comments to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and his family.
Quick Facts
Sen. Rand Paul has already been assaulted once by his neighbor, Rene Boucher, leaving Paul with several broken ribs and lung damage. This week he received a threatening message along with a suspicious powder. The message, which contained a picture of a bruised and battered Paul and drawing of a gun to the senator’s head, read, “I’ll finish what your neighbor started you [expletive].” The powder was later tested by the FBI and was determined not to be poisonous.
Hateful comments about Paul have continued to be posted on Twitter — and Twitter has yet to ban a single user despite the fact that such threats and images clearly violate the platform’s terms of use regarding violent language.
In an interview on The Water Cooler with David Brody, Paul said, “But it’s still terror, you know, these people are still trying to terrorize us. But it’s not just in person.”
He claims, “People are being fomented and encouraged by Twitter. Twitter is allowing people on a daily basis by the thousands to wish that I would be assaulted, to think that it’s just hilarious that I was assaulted and nearly killed by an assailant a couple years ago, and thinking it’s just great fun to encourage people to do this on Twitter. And Twitter doesn’t take any of this down.”
He added that there are “people every day on the left wishing me violence and encouraging crazy people around the country to attack me.”
In a statement, Paul wrote,
“I take these threats immensely seriously. I have been targeted multiple times now, it is reprehensible that Twitter allows C-list celebrities to advocated for violence against me and my family. This must stop. Just this weekend Richard Marx called for violence against me and now we receive this despicable powder-filled letter.”
Marx, a pop singer whose biggest success was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, tweeted Sunday, “I’ll say it again: If I ever meet Rand Paul’s neighbor I’m going to hug him and buy him as many drinks as he can consume.”
Paul’s wife Kelley responded, “For years people like @BetteMidler have cheered Rand’s horrific attack and serious injuries. The former teacher of the year @RodRobinsonRVA tweeted that Rand’s attacker was a ‘hero’ and urged Mitch McConnell’s neighbors to ‘step up.’ Why is he still teaching?”
She added, “I am sick of the hatred and vitriol from people who boast of their ‘empathy and compassion’ in their bios. Rand will continue to stand up for our constitutionally protected liberties. He will keep questioning the ‘experts.’ We won’t be intimidated. And yes, we have guns.”
There is a very simple answer to why Twitter allows such behavior: political bias. Twitter bans accounts not because they promote violence, but because they question leftist orthodoxy. Twitter didn’t ban President Trump because he incited violence, Twitter banned Trump because they wanted to deny Trump a voice.
This is not uncommon. Twitter routinely allows hateful comments and threats from the left with the harshest punishment being forcing someone to take down a tweet (as was the case with Marx, whose tweet was finally removed three days later, after the Pauls received the death threat and contacted the FBI). However, the social media platform permanently bans conservatives for saying such fact-based comments as, “Men do not have a uterus.”
Twitter will do very little to stop the incitement of violence against Paul on its platform. No one on the left will. In the meantime, they will continue to act shocked and horrified by such “violent” rhetoric as, “Men cannot give birth,” and so-called racist remarks like, “Identification should be required for voting,” and take quick, decisive, and oftentimes permanent action.
For the left, it’s all a political game. Sadly, the truth and the lives of conservatives and their families mean nothing to them.
