Phil Johnson, Executive Director of Grace to You, announced on Wednesday (March 8) that he has been released from “Twitter jail” after being locked out of his account nearly five months ago for suggesting that a school hiring a drag queen as a crossing guard for kindergartners was “taxpayer-funded grooming.”
In addition to Johnson’s involvement with the John MacArthur-affiliated Grace to You, he also serves as one of the elders of Grace Community Church, where MacArthur is pastor. According to the church’s website, Johnson edits most of MacArthur’s major books.
Johnson has over 72,000 followers on Twitter, but hasn’t been able to post anything since the middle of October 2022.
The tweet prior to the one that got Johnson banned was a retweet from the Libs of TikTok reporting that a Denver, Colorado, school brought in a drag queen to be a crossing guard at an elementary school during National Walk and Roll to School Day. The school referred to the drag queen and other volunteers as “Celebrity Crossing Guards,” posting pictures of the drag queen greeting young children on their way to school.
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Johnson wrote, “Harbinger of a new ‘progressive’ strategy for gr**ming school children: Drag Queen crossing guards.”
The Grace Community Church elder followed up that tweet by telling his followers that “hiring drag queen school crossing guards for kindergartners is essentially taxpayer-funded grooming.” Johnson’s tweet was flagged by the pre-Elon Musk owned Twitter for “hate speech,” and he was locked out of his account.
Johnson said that Twitter support never acknowledged his many appeals nor offered him a “fair hearing or a rational reason for why they regarded his tweet as hate speech.”
The now deleted tweet also stated that “encouraging public school teachers at the elementary level to force-feed gender-confusing ideologies to their kids is government-sponsored grooming.”
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Although Johnson deleted the tweet to regain control of his account, he said that he still stands by his opinion.
On the first night of Grace Community Church’s annual Shepherds Conference, Johnson posted, “Now Twitter has quietly erased the dictum informing me that if I deleted the offending Tweet they would regard that as a formal GUILTY plea to the charge of ‘hate speech.’”
“So now I have deleted the Tweet, although I stand by it and deny that it was ever ‘hate speech.’ Therefore now (after 145 days in Twitter jail without even the privilege of a single phone call) I am finally free to Tweet again,” Johnson concluded.
