Loser candidate Paul Nehlen is finding that his angry, antisemitic, racist rhetoric is making him unpopular in an increasing number of places, the latest of which being the Wisconsin Republican Party.
I’m going to tell the story using gifs from the movie Mean Girls, mostly because I think they’re funny, but if it manages to offend the delicate sensibilities of Nehlen and the alpha male image he and his followers like to pretend they actually possess, all the better.
Nehlen first infested the political scene when he challenged Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) during the 2016 elections. Ryan easily swatted him down by a 68 point margin, but the lesson Nehlen drew from this is that he should double down on the crazy and the hate.
So he’s been gathering an online army of trolls who mindlessly follow his every move. “On Wednesdays, we wear brown [shirts]!”
Nehlen got in trouble with the Twitter Powers That Be after a series of posts using hashtags and memes favored by the alt-right.
Oh my God, Paul, you can’t just make memes claiming Jesus believes #ItsOkayToBeWhite.
He followed that up with several tweets attacking members of the media for being Jewish, including a graphics listing their names and photos, along with a Jewish star by their faces indicating if they were Jewish themselves or had a Jewish spouse. Nehlen had the audacity to complain when people criticized this as antisemitic.
Twitter suspended him briefly and demanded that he take down the “Jewish media” tweets (you can see screenshots in this post from last month). Nehlen and his minions were outraged, and he began whining that Twitter was unfairly censoring him, threatening to sue Twitter, and started tweeting using hashtags like #ShallNotCensor to complain about it.
Stop trying to make #ShallNotCensor happen. It’s not going to happen.
And, in fact, it did not happen. Nehlen repeatedly kept tweeting screencaps or imgur links of the exact content Twitter had made him delete, and then followed that up with a racist meme attacking Meghan Markle, the fiancée of Britain’s Prince Harry.
Twitter had enough, and dropped the perma-ban hammer on him. He had apparently offended a long list of Twitter users, because multiple people tweeted images like this after he was banned, indicating that they had been one of the many to report him.
Not only was Twitter unmoved by Nehlen’s hashtag campaign against their “censorship” of him, they banned or temporarily suspended a number of his supporters.
The Wisconsin Republican Party finally had enough too, officially telling Nehlen he could not sit with them any longer.
As Madison.com reported, each of the county Republican party organizations in Wisconsin to which Nehlen paid dues for 2017 have refunded his money or donated it to charity. He had not yet paid any of them for 2018, and the party publicly cut ties with him.
“Nehlen and his ideas have no place in the Republican Party,” said Alec Zimmerman, spokesman for the Wisconsin GOP, declaring that Nehlen “is not a member of the Republican Party of Wisconsin” and would not be allowed to rejoin.
Nehlen, of course, objected to these actions by what he called the “traitorous, spineless apparatchiks” of the party, and vowed to continue his campaign to unseat Ryan.
You’re a racist, Paul. Duh.
You’re just embarrassing yourself at this point.
So do everyone a favor and go home.
Follow Sarah Rumpf on Twitter: @rumpfshaker.
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