You may have noticed that Blue Hog Report’s Twitter account has been absent for the last 10 or so days.1 The reason for that is that Sen. Trent Chancey2 Garner (R-El Dorado) is a whiny baby.
Let me back up.
On Thursday, October 18, after getting Rep. Laurie Rushing (R-Not Hot Springs) served, I checked Twitter and noticed that Issue 1 had been stricken from the ballot by the Arkansas Supreme Court. Knowing that Garner, a noted corporate whore and hater of an independent judiciary, would have something to say about this (correct) ruling, I moseyed over to his Twitter account.
Sure enough, I saw this:
The court’s decision on Issue 1 shows they fear the people having a voice in our legal system. The court chose their power over the will of the citizens.
There will be consequences, starting with their budget next week. #arpx #arleg #TortReform https://t.co/Rrt4uZtXYl
— Trent Garner For Senate (@Garner4Senate) October 18, 2018
In response, and based on all then-available evidence, I wrote:
Scrolling through the comments of that post, I then saw this bit of uninformed idiocy:
So, possibly more full of piss and vinegar than I needed to be, I replied:
Now, were either of my comments necessary? Of course not. Nothing on Twitter is necessary. As twitter comments go, however–where Cesar Sayoc is allowed to make death threats without being suspended–I didn’t think either comment was noteworthy.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up the next morning to find that my account was suspended for seven days. Why? Because Garner had complained about those comments. He had also gone back a few months and retroactively decided that these tweets were just too much for his precious self to handle:
Annoyingly, to begin the suspension, I would have to delete the posts. Yet, to appeal to suspension–which I wanted to do, I could not delete the posts until after the appeal was ruled upon. Meaning that, if the suspension was upheld on appeal, the 7-day suspension would really be 7 days plus however many days the appeal took. Still, given the kind of stuff that is allowed to remain on Twitter all the time, I figured the appeal was worth it.
Last Monday, I received Twitter’s response. The suspension was upheld because–and get this–my tweets amounted to harassment based “on race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
Seriously.
Imagine the kind of thin-skinned baby you have to be to complain that you are being harassed based on any of the comments above. That’s Jason Rapert-level cowardice. It’s certainly not the kind of reaction you would expect from someone who touts his Green Beret background at every possible chance.
It’s more the kind of thing you would expect to see from someone who…just hypothetically speaking…harassed a girl or girls in high school to the point that restraining orders were filed. Or was kicked off a high school football team for attacking a coach. Or had a military career come to an abrupt end under very questionable circumstances that might, hypothetically, have involved drugs and/or guns.
Not that I am saying Sen. Trent Garner did those things. Just that his whininess about a few tweets is the kind of thing you might expect if he was the type of person who did those other things.
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*Obviously, this title is a lie. But I love the idea of Garner complaining to Twitter about a tweet linking to a post with that title.