Convicted Trump ally Roger Stone, who’s been permanently banned from Twitter for five long years, apparently believed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy the social media giant meant his banishment was over.
He was almost immediately disabused of that notion on Thursday when Twitter squashed his attempted comeback.
“Well bitches I’m back on Twitter,” Stone declared in a Telegram post on Thursday, per the Daily Beast. “I’m anxious to see how strong Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech is.”
(That Telegram post appears to have been deleted.)
Using @RogerStoneUSA as his handle, the Trump goon made his triumphant return on Twitter dot com…
…..aaaaand then came the banhammer, giving Stone only a brief taste of freedom before he was exiled once more.
“The account referenced was permanently suspended for violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our ban evasion policy,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Daily Beast on Thursday.
Stone confirmed the ban in a glum Telegram post, reporting that his account was up for “just six hours.”
“Just makes me like Telegram all the more, [a]lthough I wish more would follow me here,” he lamented.
However, Stone will also have you know that all this went exactly as planned!
“You might note then rather than seek to get my existing Twitter account with almost 1,000,000 followers reinstated I purposely posted a new account which I knew would immediately be banned,” he wrote in a separate Telegram post.
The episode came as conservatives cheer on Musk’s decision to buy Twitter, believing that the billionaire, a self-proclaimed champion of “free speech,” will undo the social giant’s bans on accounts that’ve violated its rules on hate speech and misinformation.
In fact, some conservatives like Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk and Fox News host Tucker Carlson are so eager to peddle the narrative of Musk being the right’s free speech savior that they’re already falsely claiming that their accounts have been unshackled – even though Musk’s deal with Twitter hasn’t closed yet and he therefore has no power over banning decisions.
However, unlike Kirk and Carlson, Stone seemed to truly believe the deal meant he was already free.
Twitter permanently banned Stone in 2017 for attacking CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Don Lemon and New York Times columnist Charles Blow over their coverage of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Several years later, Stone was convicted of obstruction of Congress and witness tampering in connection to the Russia investigation before then-President Donald Trump commuted his sentence in his bid to pardon and ultimately undo prosecutions related to the Mueller probe.
Since then, Stone’s been busy posting various rants on Telegram and becoming a born-again Christian, apparently using his new-found faith to pray away a, as he claims, recently spotted “satanic portal” above the White House.
