KrangTNelson

About

KrangTNelson is a Weird Twitter user known for his leftist political opinions and several popular tweets, including a joke tweet about Antifa Supersoldiers that went viral and had him suspended from Twitter. After that moment, the person behind the account went on to write several pieces for Vice as a contributor. His name is a pun on the actor's name "Craig T. Nelson" and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles character Krang.

History

According to his Twitter account, @KrangTNelson^[1] joined Twitter in December of 2015. His first extant tweet was posted a year later,^[2] commenting on a conversation between journalist Eli Lake, a fan, and Chapo Trap House host @ByYourLogic (shown below).

Over the following year, @KrangTNelson built a following with several popular tweets related to political events and various Twitter memes. Some examples include a parody of the Hillary Clinton Watchmen Comic (shown below, left) and a Millennials are Killing… parody relating to Before The Liberals Find a Reason to Deface This Statue (shown below, right). The account was nominated for a Shorty award in 2018.^[5]

Antifa Supersoldiers

KrangTNelson gained attention outside of Twitter following a tweet in late October of 2017 in which he sarcastically claimed Antifa "Supersoldiers" were going to murder small business owners en masse. On October 27th, 2017, @KrangTNelson tweeted "can't wait for November 4th when millions of antifa supersoldiers will behead all white parents and small business owners in the town square" (shown below).

On Twitter, some critics of the Antifa movement interpreted the tweet as a sincere call for violence. In response, @KrangTNelson posted a compilation of tweets mocking those who took the joke seriously (shown below).

Additionally, the tweet was reported to Twitter for violating the site's terms of service, leading to @KrangTNelson's suspension on October 30th. This, in turn, led to his supporters posting his tweet, though they did not face the same punishment (example shown below).

That day, the conservative news site Gateway Pundit published an article titled "ANTIFA Leader: 'November 4th […] millions of antifa supersoldiers will behead all white parents'," referring to Tom Bloke's reposting of the @KrangTNelson tweet. The article was subsequently updated to acknowledge many saw the tweet as a joke. Meanwhile, others posted parody variations of the tweet (examples shown below). Also on October 30th, @KrangTNelson was unsuspended from the social networking site. The following day, he posted an article to Vice^[3] about his experience, the first of several posts he would write for the site.

Michael Ian Black Feud

On December 2nd, 2017, comedian Michael Ian Black tweeted about how Twitter users were taking "digs" at him by posting the jacket of a book he cowrote with Meghan McCain, daughter of Republican senator John McCain.^[4]

This prompted a response from @KrangTNelson, who over a series of tweets said that Black's friendship with McCain went against the values Black claimed to hold, such as access to health care (McCain opposed Obamacare).^[4] Black claimed to fight for "liberal values" every day, to which KrangTNelson responded that he should consider what those are. The exchange got more heated as Black accused KrangTNelson of hiding behind the anonymity of his account and escalated into Black attempting to point out KrangTNelson's hypocrisy for holding a passport while a the Rohingya were suffering a genodice in Myanmar (shown below, left). KrangTNelson then called a truce, seeing Black's joke in "extremely poor taste." KrangTNelson then wrote a post in Vice^[6] about the experience.

Search Interest

External References