Retired U.S. Army Green Beret and congressional candidate Joe Kent was locked out of his Twitter account for hours last week over a tweet defending Americans’ Second Amendment rights.
The Republican candidate for Congress in Washington State was suspended for more than 8 hours for apparently violating the social media platform’s rules.
“Today I was suspended for defending 2A & calling out WA state’s COVID policies including the potential of forced quarantine. I will NEVER stop defending our 2A & fighting COVID mandates,” Kent tweeted on Thursday after the suspension.
“When I get elected to Congress I will help Break Up Big Tech,” the veteran added.
In the tweet that got him suspended, Kent wrote, “We will never give up our guns. Gun laws are infringements of our god given rights. WA state is back at it, a week ago we caught the board of health discussing forced quarantine, now the legislature going after our 2A. No 2A + forced quarantine = Australia.”
Initially, Twitter did not provide any details on the offending tweet. Speaking to Breitbart News, Kent speculated that his suspension was due to his criticism of President Joe Biden “recklessly escalating tensions” between Russia and Ukraine.
“Twitter’s suspension of me is without cause,” Kent said. “In the past 24 hours I have tweeted my concerns about Biden recklessly escalating tensions with Russia over Ukraine. It is clear that Twitter is trying silence credible voices that are questioning Biden’s disastrous foreign policy.”
“This is big tech limiting my voice as an American and as a political candidate,” he continued. “It’s very telling that they focused on me over my take on an issue that has bipartisan establishment & mainstream media support; another war. The establishment is craving war and won’t tolerate dissent.”
This is not the first time Kent has been censored by Big Tech entities. Late last year, Kent was permanently banned from YouTube. Google – the platform’s parent company – did not provide an explanation for the ban at the time.
Kent has been an outspoken critic of the “permanent ruling class,” telling Breitbart in June 2021 that his disgust for the establishment and his support for former President Donald Trump is what pushed him to run for Congress.
“Trump tried to get troops out of Syria the first time, and we all saw what happened after that Secretary of Defense Mattis and the rest of the permanent ruling class in the Pentagon and the government turned against President Trump in an effort to keep our troops overseas and deployed,” Kent said, adding that Trump was “restoring the will of the American people to Washington, DC, and doing the right thing but for the security of our country.”
