Republican Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen, who is running in a primary to unseat House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, has been permanently banned from Twitter, a representative of the social media platform confirmed to Madison365.
“While we normally do not comment on individual accounts, I can confirm that we have permanently suspended this account for repeated violations of our terms of service,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an email.
Nehlen had taken to Twitter to defend his decision to tweet a racist image of the United Kingdom’s Prince Harry and his fiancee, American actress Megan Markle. Markle’s mother is African American.
Nehlen’s tweet Friday used an image with Markle’s face replaced with an artist’s rendering of so-called “Cheddar Man,” a prehistoric Briton who DNA analysis recently found likely had dark skin and blue eyes.
The tweet drew heavy backlash, including from Markle’s Suits costar Patrick Adams, who wrote to Nehlen, “you’re a sad and sick man with no sense of shame or class.”
Oh @pnehlen – you’re a sad and sick man with no sense of shame or class. Get a life. And don’t go anywhere near MM – she’s got more power, strength, honor and compassion in her fingernail than you’ll ever know in this lifetime. Way above your weight class.
— Patrick J Adams (@halfadams) February 10, 2018
Nehlen tweeted in his own defense Sunday morning, complaining that the Cheddar Man study used bad science “to ‘prove’ whites never existed.”
“I made a joke of it. It’s not a laughing matter, so I chose to laugh about it,” he wrote.
Nehlen’s Twitter feed contains a steady stream of racially charged images and messages, including links to videos about “The Jewish Role in the Porn Industry” and a series of images about “White Victims of Black Crime.” Most of these images refer to homicides that took place in the 1970s.
Huffington Post listed Nehlen in its recent feature, “All the White Supremacists Running for Office in 2018.”
