Junior Taylor Major, one of four candidates for the Missouri Students Association presidential election, was asked to resign from MSA Senate on Oct. 9 after offensive tweets surfaced.

The tweets were from Major’s former Twitter account, @BitchesAndIdeas, and contained offensive material. The account has since been deactivated.

Of the 23 tweets obtained by The Maneater, the tweets made derogatory comments about women, white people and fundamental Islamists.

Senate Speaker Mckenzie Morris confirmed that Major resigned but declined further comment.

Major does not deny that he wrote the tweets.

“I take full responsibility for those tweets,” Major said. “They were wrong.”

The tweets were from a Twitter account active two years ago when Major was a freshman senator, he said. Major said he has not tweeted from the account since Dec. 29, 2011; although, one screenshot obtained by The Maneater was dated Dec. 2, 2012.

Major was unaware of this tweet, but said, “If it’s there, it’s there.”

The account was then reopened sometime before or during the beginning of this semester, according to source who asked to remain anonymous. Most recently, nothing new was tweeted; however, the name changed to “who?” and the photo icon was a black box.

Twenty-three screenshots from the Twitter account, which had a total of more than 7,000 tweets, were passed around among MSA executives during the weeks leading up to Major’s resignation, the source said.

On Sept. 29, Major said he met with a Department of Student Life employee who told him that people in MSA found the tweets to be offensive and suggested he take down the account.

“I would’ve been fine leaving it up … just to compare then and now, but some people were unhappy with it,” Major said.

Major took the account down that Monday.

The tweets were brought to the attention of Student Government coordinator Farouk Aregbe and Morris. On Oct. 3, Major had a meeting with them, after which Major resigned from Senate.

“Someone in MSA saved (the tweets) and decided to show them to people in MSA, and people were concerned, so I was like, ‘Fine, I’m leaving Senate,’” Major said.

Major said that although those tweets were becoming public, he did not have reservations about running for MSA president.

“The account is no longer active, and secondly, that’s not who I am anymore,” Major said. “I understand that those things are wrong. That’s not who I am. The person running for Mizzou president is completely different.”

Major said those tweets were made due to lack of education and from the urban culture he grew up in on the south side of Chicago.

Major said he became more educated second semester freshmen year, the semester after the offensive tweets. When an MSA bill dealing with the salary of Danica Wolf, the Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center coordinator, came up in the Budget Committee, Major said he went to the center to learn more about Wolf and the center.

“I grew up to be a different person,” Major said.

Major said he does not have a different perspective on what he tweets.

“I tweeted what was on my mind, but now there are different things on my mind,” he said.

Since then, Major had received positive feedback about his current Twitter account, [@taylorjohnmajor](https://twitter.com/taylorjohnmajor). The RSVP Center thanked Major for his retweets on Sept. 21.

Major said the reason the screenshots surfaced was purely political. He said the presidential campaign is supposed to be about ideas and someone is trying to misrepresent him as the person he was two years ago.

“The fact that someone chose to make (the tweets) public now is so ironic,” he said. “… It was 1000 percent political.”