Conservative radio host and blogger Erick Erickson was locked out of his Twitter account for 12 hours on Friday for alleged “hateful conduct.”
According to Twitter’s rule against “hateful conduct,” a user “may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
With that in mind, here’s what Erickson tweeted that resulted in his suspension:
“Elizabeth Warren set to introduce the Wrecking American Prosperity Under Marxism, or WAMPUM Act, wherein she gives everything away for free.”
Wampum refers to the traditional bead made from shells that are used by Native Americans to make jewelry.
Erickson, however, was not in any way referencing actual Native Americans. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) famously, falsely, claimed to be Native American for decades, and allowed Harvard University to claim her as a minority professor while she taught there. Just last week, she was criticized for these claims once again – by the New York City-based radio show “The Breakfast Club.”
The Daily Wire’s Amanda Prestigiacomo previously reported that co-host Charlamagne Tha God called Warren “the original Rachel Dolezal.” Dolezal was made famous for presenting herself as an African-American even though she is white. After getting caught, she claimed to be “trans-racial” even though she previously sued her alma mater for discriminating against her for being white.
This is clearly what Erickson was referring to in addition to Warren and other progressives’ promises to make things free, such as college tuition. He was also making a joke about her dishonesty toward her heritage. For this, he was suspended.
On his blog, The Resurgent, Erickson posted a picture of his tweet and Twitter’s claim that it violate the platform’s hateful conduct policy, writing that he had “expected to get suspended from Twitter for angering the transgender community for refusing to conform to their language,” but not this.
“I continue to maintain Twitter is a garbage platform run by garbage people and yet again am reminded that is true,” he wrote.
He is now back on Twitter.
Dan McLaughlin, attorney and contributing columnist at National Review, called the suspension of Erickson, and the claim that he was somehow being hateful, “insane.”
“If the standard is that you can’t satirize politicians over their dishonesty…that’s gonna be a real problem in 2020,” he tweeted.
In October 2018, Warren even took a DNA test to try and prove her ancestry. It determined she had a lower probability of being Native American than the average American. In February 2019, she finally apologized to the Cherokee Nation for taking the test.
