My Senator, Angus King, Wanted Me Kicked Off Twitter

After I endorsed his opponent

In September of 2018, my friend Eric Brakey, former and current Maine State Senator, was the Republican nominee for the Senate running against incumbent and former Maine Governor Angus King. I was also the head of Maine’s only organization that advocated for vaccine safety and vaccine choice, representing about 1k Maine voters.

King had put his foot in his mouth more than once by then.

In the run up to the election we wrote up a questionnaire for candidates so that they could give us their position on vaccine mandates, and vaccine safety. Senator Brakey was not just a friend, but a member of our organization, and had advocated for vaccine choice on the floor of the Maine Senate. But to be fair to our members, I needed to hear from Senator King on his position.

Additionally, at the time our group was advocating on the #CDCWhistleblower scandal. CDC vaccine safety researcher William Thompson had been recorded admitting that his vaccine safety research team had found links between MMR and autism in black males under age 3. He reported that they held a meeting and threw individual records of children in a trash can so they would be not be included in the final study.

Dr. Thompson had testified to the matter on tape in a private congressional meeting with a committee that was supposed to be investigating the breach. That testimony still has never seen the light of day, despite Rep. Bill Posey giving a speech about it on the floor of the House. We wanted the recorded testimony to be made public so we could hear it for ourselves, and potential risk to black males from the MMR would be made public and properly investigated.

So as one is supposed to do, we directed our concerns to our Senator Angus King. I received a letter in return to our request that King look into the matter. In it, he expressed confidence in the safety of the MMR, and referred us to Snopes.com for more information on the scandal. My facebook post after I recieved the letter:

So I decided to kill two birds with one stone, and just go over the King campaign office to ask them to answer our questons on his position on our issues as a candidate, and to stress that it was not a good look that he had outsourced his Senatorial investigative powers to Snopes and ignored our request for the videotaped testimony. Approximately half of our members were not conservatives, but most were single issue voters, and Brakey is very conservative, so they would have loved to be able to vote for someone who held more liberal positions as long as they would uphold vaccine safety and vaccine choice.

The visit was easily done, as Senator King and I lived in the same neighborhood, and his campaign office was between our two houses, and within walking distance of both. So I went over and introduced myself, and discussed with staffers that there were about a thousand votes that were likely going to Brakey because he had taken our issues seriously, and King had not. I encouraged them to perhaps send another response to our request on the #CDCWhistleblower investigation, and consider opposing vaccine mandates.

However, Angus for Maine made a different choice. To simply resent me the Snopes letter. My facebook post on it.

A week later I was put on Angus King’s “Suspicious” Twitter list.

Now there is no doubt that they knew exactly who I was, as I was the only known vaccine safety advocate in the state, pestering all the Maine legislators, appearing in The Press Herald and other Maine media for a decade, I had been in the campaign office days before the list was sent to twitter, and my twitter handle was my name. And Maine is small. Everyone in politics knows everyone else in politics. I was no bot and they knew it.

Thanks to Elon Musk and Matt Tiabbi for the Twitter Files #16 or I never would have known that my own Senator wanted my voice shut down.

So Elon, Can I have my twitter account back now?