“Team Mitch,” the extremely online campaign squad for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who seem so utterly unfazed by the nationwide hatred for them and their candidate, found themselves in Twitter timeout today after they posted a video of protesters outside the Senator’s home wishing ill will on the Kentucky lawmaker.
The crew claims they were suspended for posting the video containing “violent” content, although the screen captures they included don’t include the specific rules that Twitter said they were in violation of. The original Twitter account that posted the video — the protesters themselves — were not suspended, giving rise to the suspicion that the omitted parts of Team Mitch’s screen captures tell a different story.
It’s far more likely that they were suspended for actually appropriating the video without consent, which a copyright holder may immediately report to Twitter. It could also have been the fact that the Team declared without proof that the people depicted in the video were “Amy McGrath supporters.”
They could have, in fact, been suspended over an entirely different tweet altogether, although we are loath to admit there might be someone on Team Mitch that knows how to photoshop a violation notice from Twitter. If it was, it would be the smallest surprise in the world to find out it was the one they sent of a bunch of white frat boys pretending to choke and assault a cardboard cutout of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The comments in the video were very carefully not “threats” per se, but rather a laundry list of terrible things that protesters would like to see happen to the Senator, and the organizer of the protest, Chanelle Helm, said she didn’t regret a thing she’d said in the video. She told the Lexington Courier-Journal:
McConnell doesn’t care about people who actually do break their necks, who need insulin, who need any type of medication, because they want to stop and prevent health care for all. And that is something that every American out here wants. There’s only a few Americans who don’t want that, and those people are politicians and their cronies.”
It seems Team Mitch has decided that they value their social media platform more than their principles, however, and they have thus deleted the tweet that got them suspended.
I doubt very much this will be the last time, however.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr
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