An Oakland County-based health care professional says social media posts involving her children by former Michigan GOP Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock have “crossed the line.”
Julia Pulver is a career nurse and patient advocate who now works as an expert nursing consultant after two unsuccessful runs as a Democrat for office in 2018 for state Senate and in 2020 for state House.
On Sunday, Maddock, who is married to state Rep. Matt Maddock (R-Milford), posted a tweet in which she referred to Pulver’s children as “incredibly sad and messed up,” adding, “Democrats like them are willing to sacrifice their own children.”
@revlupneb Pulvers have incredibly sad and messed up kids and will forever have that burden to bear. Democrats like them are willing to sacrifice their own children…@gnppac
— meshawn maddock (@MeshawnMaddock) July 24, 2023
Pulver and her husband, Ben Pulver, have been outspoken advocates for the LGBTQ+ community, which includes three of their four children, a trans son, a cis son and two non-binary kids.
In response, Julia Pulver noted Meshawn Maddock’s legal woes and speculated that likely played a role in the attack on her kids.
Maddock is one of 16 Michigan Republicans charged last week with submitting false electoral votes in December 2020 in support of former President Donald Trump. Each faces multiple felonies including election law forgery, and conspiracy to commit election law forgery.
“I’m guessing attacking my family & insulting my children are how she’s distracting herself from thoughts of her impending trial & possible long prison sentence for being a fake elector,” she tweeted. “And for the record, our kids she’s attacking are 16, 14, 13 & 10 yo.”
And the hits keep coming! I’m guessing attacking my family & insulting my children are how she’s distracting herself from thoughts of her impending trial & possible long prison sentence for being a fake elector.
And for the record, our kids she’s attacking are 16, 14, 13 & 10 yo. pic.twitter.com/msNpWJfDqP— Pulverize Hate
(@VotePulver) July 24, 2023
Another tweet by Maddock included an insinuation the Pulvers purposely placed male genitalia in front of their kids, while one from the Grand New Party PAC, founded by state Rep. Steve Carra (R-Three Rivers), a Maddock ally, asked Ben Pulver if he had “chemically castrated” his transgender child.
Requests for comment were made to Maddock and Carra, but have not been returned.
It is also not the first time Maddock has been under fire for social media posts.
In September, while still co-chair of the state party, she tweeted out a homophobic attack against U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, while earlier in the year Maddock blasted Michigan Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist, who is the first African American to hold the position, as a “scary masked man.”
In an interview with the Michigan Advance, Julia Pulver said it was no coincidence that Maddock’s tweet tagged her husband, as he has been active in responding to right-wing talking points.
“Whenever he calls them [right-wing extremists] out on some sort of hypocrisy or disinformation or just weird fetishization like the Kyle Rittenhouse event that they had, their response to his criticism for the last couple weeks is to attack our family by name, and now especially focused on our children, accusing us of all of the weird fever dreams that they have about what it means to actually be the parent of a kid who’s in the LGBTQ spectrum,” she said.
Pulver said she feels compelled to speak out now that the attacks have ramped up from generalizations to accusing her and her husband of personally harming their children.
“We’re the low-hanging fruit in their little hate vineyard,” she said. “I’m not even in politics anymore. I’m not running for anything. I am just outspoken. But when I see people who want to hurt my kids and who want to turn them into monsters to further their political careers, then I do have a problem with that and I’m going to say something. I feel like they kind of crossed the line. They can come after he and I all they want, but now they’ve just started saying derogatory things about our children, and that’s not OK.”
Ben Pulver told the Advance that the attacks were out of the blue and completely uncalled for.
“It was surprising,” he said. “It was not connected to what was being discussed. I responded to them on political issues specific to what they had posted and they came back with attacks on our kids. It was a mismatch.”
Julia Pulver said the “attacks are very inaccurate either on both a personal level with our family and our children, and in general.
“Gender affirming care for our kids, who are between ages of 10 and 16, and this isn’t even all of them, just the ones that are exploring who they are, comes down to respecting their chosen names and their chosen pronouns. That’s it,” she said.
As a nurse, Pulver said it’s wrong to equate hormone blockers with chemical castration.
“They have no idea what young people have the need for hormone blockers,” she said. “… These are the same medications that have been used for decades to treat a condition in young children called precocious puberty,” in which a child’s body begins changing into that of an adult too soon.
In the case of transgender children, they are only prescribed by a doctor following a confirmed diagnosis of gender dysphoria and extensive therapy.
“Those are used to help just buy a little more time so that they can have more counseling, they can have more psychiatric treatment,” she said. “They can have more time to figure out exactly what they’re going to be doing in their lives. It is temporary; it is reversible; it is not castrating. They use all of these very loaded words so it makes it seem like parents are just experimenting on their kids and cutting them up and shoving chemicals in them.”
Others have joined Pulver in condemning the attack on her children.
Sommer Foster, executive director of Michigan Voices, tweeted out her support.
“Imagine being a whole ass adult attacking children, in a public forum, because you don’t like the political views of their parents,” said Foster. “As someone that has met the Pulver kids, they are incredibly sweet, kind, and thoughtful — they don’t deserve online abuse.”
Emily Busch, a Democratic candidate for Congress seeking to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. John James (R-Farmington Hills) in the 10th District in 2024, also expressed support.
“How childish and hateful. I’m so sorry,” she tweeted.
16 Michigan Republicans charged with felonies in 2020 fake elector scheme
Pulver said she’s grateful for the support.
“We have a huge community of people behind us,” she said. “We are very secure in ourselves as parents and the decisions we make for our children. But not everybody has that. And I want to make sure that anybody else who’s out there who doesn’t have the same sort of support system that we do, that they’re not fooled by these people. I don’t want vulnerable people to see them attacking us and for us to say nothing. I don’t want them to be able to virtually bully all of these other parents who are struggling in this either new phase of their kids’ lives or something that’s been ongoing that they have been not sure how to handle.”
Pulver said she has no plans to return to politics at the moment, but wants to try and offer some assistance to parents dealing with similar issues.
“The kind of parents that are going to help their kids survive adolescence and still have good relationships with them through adulthood, are the kinds of parents who are going to ignore all of that noise and just listen to their kids, listen to their kids’, doctors, listen to their gut and not feel like they have to tell their kid that they’re wrong and that they are somehow disturbed or crazy or anything like that,” she said. “They’re OK.”