CNN pundit S.E Cupp has had enough of Trump fans calling her a “cuckservative.”
In a column for CNN, Cupp lashed out at the people who criticised her and other conservatives for attending a behind-closed-doors meeting at Facebook’s headquarters earlier this week, to address concerns that the company has a liberal bias. Headlined “Conservatives need Facebook, and Facebook needs us,” Cupp called for more conservative engagement with the social network while attacking Trump supporters for allegedely sowing division within the movement.
Cupp began her article by highlighting some of the abuse she’s received on social media since the meeting:
This week I went to a meeting at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. And then I became a bimbo, a cancer, and a scumbag. Behold Twitter:
@HenrySwissinger: @secupp @CNN @facebook Bimbo@Animal1984Farm: @secupp @CNN @facebook #NeverTrump cucks are a cancer. Some people love to be used and abused!
@I_the_Prattler: @secupp <she is the EPITOME of everything that’s wrong with the CORRUPT @GOP edifice These #scumbags help to keep in power the corrupt! @CNN
Working on the assumption that most of her critics were Trump supporters, Cupp expressed her growing frustration with the presidential candidate’s loudest fans. In particular, she critiqued their use of the word “cuckservative” and their willingness to attack others in the movement.
Questioning the Trump orthodoxy (which, incidentally, is rarely intelligible if ever at all conservative) is the thing that now makes a conservative a “cuckservative,” a pejorative term to describe a weak, emasculated “sell out” to the establishment wing of the party. This now includes conservatives like me, with previously pristine records of right-wing fanaticism, at least as classified by the mainstream press, and ranging from Glenn Beck to the National Review, Ted Cruz to Paul Ryan.
She also took a not-so-subtle swipe at Breitbart’s stance on the behind-closed-doors Facebook meeting, which we refused to attend.
I was surprised to learn there is apparently another option, which was to refuse to go, complain that no Trump representatives were invited (they were, one attended), slam Facebook’s overture as a “pat conservatives on the head” session, blast the people who do attend as “cucks” and sit in the corner and sulk.Which is what a number of invitees decided, disappointingly.
Like Glenn Beck, Cupp appears to have bought Zuckerberg’s argument that his social network wants to accommodate conservatives, despite widespread evidence that the platform has already clamped down on anti-immigration conservatives in Germany.
Zuckerberg and his team assured us they were investigating that issue, take it very seriously, and do not have any evidence it is systemic. The mission of Facebook is to provide as big a platform to as many people as possible. Subverting voices is anathema to that mission (as well as its business model, more to the point).
Cupp also wrote that it would take “transparency” for Facebook to assure conservatives. Incidentally, the lack of transparency in this behind-closed-doors meeting was one of the reasons Breitbart didn’t respond when Facebook contacted us. We offered Zuckerberg a public discussion instead. He has yet to respond.
Cupp closed her article by urging conservatives and Facebook to work together, due to their shared love of free markets.
Instead of insisting conservatism and Silicon Valley are East and West Berlin, ideologically exclusive and wholly uninterested in one another, both need to acknowledge each other’s necessity. I went to this meeting because I want lifelong partnerships in Silicon Valley to connect conservative values and policies with as many people as possible, to make the world work more efficiently, to innovate around government bureaucracy and to empower the private sector.I was glad Facebook reached out to us, and would have been just as happy had I not been included. This meeting was a necessary step in the right direction — toward an alliance between two communities whose shared obsession with free markets could do a lot of good for a lot of people.
You can follow Allum Bokhari on Twitter, add him on Facebook, and download Milo Alert! for Android to be kept up to date on his latest articles.
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