Sen. Rand Paul Tuesday blamed Twitter and its policies for a threatening package that popped up in the mailbox at his home in Kentucky, saying the social media site “thinks its funny” when “C-list celebrities” post tweets saying they hope he’s attacked again.
“We get threats daily on Twitter,” Paul told Sirius XM’s “Julie Mason Mornings.” “Twitter won’t even return our phone calls.”
His comments came after an envelope package containing white powder and a threatening message showed up for him.
The outside of the envelope showed a photo of a bruised and bandaged Paul with a gun to his head and a printed threat, saying “I’ll finish what your neighbor started you motherf******.”
The threat referred to a 2017 attack by Paul’s neighbor, Rene Boucher, who slammed into the senator while he was doing yard work. Boucher was sentenced last summer to eight months in prison after pleading guilty to assaulting a member of Congress.
Paul, though, complained that Twitter thinks it is “jolly well hilarious and a joke” for someone to ridicule him and to say “‘well, you had six of your ribs broken, a damaged lung, pneumonia twice, part of my lung removed, coughing up blood for a year.'”
On Sunday, singer Richard Marx, a frequent critic of Republicans, tweeted, in response to news that Paul will not get the COVID-19 vaccine, that “if I ever meet Rand Paul’s neighbor I’m going to hug him and buy him as many drinks as he can consume.”
Paul told Mason that the package was sent immediately to the FBI, but he still blames “the stoking of anger on the left and also I blame Twitter for allowing that anger.”
Paul also insisted that having “six of your ribs broken, a damaged lung, pneumonia twice, part of my lung removed, coughing up blood for a year” is not a joke.
“There was a picture, a horrific video from about a month ago where an Asian man is hit by a guy running full blast and it ends up killing the Asian man,” Paul told Mason. “That’s exactly what happened to me. I had someone running headlong down a hill who hits me from behind while I’m wearing hearing-cancellation headphones. I don’t see him or hear him. I’m hit, carried 10 feet in the air.”
He added that three of his ribs were “transected completely,” but still, “every day people think it’s funny to wish that on me again, and Twitter says, ‘oh, that’s humor.'”
But, Paul told Mason, “it’s not that funny to the guy that spent months and months in agony and went through a surgery and a year and a half later. Part of my lung (was) removed (and I) nearly died from an infection after that surgery. I frankly don’t think it’s that funny, but Twitter really wants to police the right and doesn’t care if the left wishes violence on the right.”
Source: Newmax
