‘Conservatives’ Selling Their Soul To Zuckerberg Were (Of Course) #NeverTrump
Tom Pappert
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After a gang of establishment conservatives dogpiled on Big League Politics for condemning their ill-informed stance on tech censorship, we dug into their Twitter history and discovered — no surprise — they were vehemently #NeverTrump in the 2016 campaign.
On Friday, Big League Politics wrote an article exposing the naivete or complicity of Campus Reform media director and former Marco Rubio stooge Cabot Phillips on the issue of tech censorship. In response, Phillips and his fellow establishment conservatives spent the next several hours attempting to smear Big League Politics on Twitter. Phillips is the son of Tim Phillips, president of the Koch-funded group Americans For Prosperity, which is lobbying Congress to defend Big Tech from any antitrust measures.
After investigating who was joining in on the dogpile, we discovered many of Phillips’ supporters, including writers for The Resurgent, Town Hall, former College Republicans officials, and others were obnoxiously against President Donald J. Trump in the last election.
It began with one Big League Politics journalist searching the Twitter history of Phillips for tweets containing “Trump”, and discovering page after page of anti-Trump posts.
We then moved on to Caleb Hull, who called into question Big League Politics’ bombshell exclusive that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam had a racist photo in his medical school yearbook showing him either in Ku Klux Klan robes or blackface.
While Hull apparently deleted hundreds of tweets mentioning President Trump, we found one he missed from 2018, in which he attempted to slam the president for replacing Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State.
Big League Politics then examined prominent individuals who used the “like” feature to express support for Phillips and Hull.
These include former president of the Berkeley College Republicans, Brad Devlin, media strategist and Resurgent writer Gabriella Hoffman, College Republicans National Committee official Ben Rajadurai, Town Hall contributor Micah Rate, NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck, and Washington Examiner contributor Angela Morabito.
All of these individuals had volumes of anti-Trump tweets published from 2015 through 2017, though many made a 180 degree turn and suddenly began defending President Trump after he was inaugurated president in 2017.
Devlin, for instance, called the entire Republican primary field “pathetic”, including conservative superstars President Trump, Sen. Rand Paul, and Sen. Tex Cruz.
However, he seemed to have deleted most of his more offensive tweets. The other names mentioned were not so careful.
Morabito engaged in the conspiracy theory that former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewendowski assaulted failed journalist Michelle Fields during a campaign event, and insinuated that President Trump “bought off” Breitbart News.
She also mocked President Trump’s immigration policy of “extreme vetting”, likening it to reality television.
From here things escalated quickly.
Houck called himself “proudly #NeverTrump,” wrote that Trump’s candidacy depressed him, claimed he was incompetent and unintelligent, and gleefully claimed that President Trump would never win the election. These are only some of the most egregious anti-Trump tweets we discovered.
Meanwhile, Rajadurai was busy claiming that C.J. Pearson, the youthful African American conservative, only endorsed President Trump to receive attention, revealing that he dislikes Sen. Elizabeth Warren only slightly more than President Trump, condemning the president is a racist, and shilling for failed presidential candidate Jeb(!) Bush.
Rate compared the Republican Party under Trump to a “dumpster fire”, claimed President Trump welcoming Stephen Bannon onto the campaign represented an olive branch to the Alt Right, and called President Trump a “choke artist” with no path to victory in the general election. He also declared that President Trump was not a conservative.
Hoffman was perhaps the most prolific anti-Trump Twitter user of the bunch in 2016, comparing President Trump to Smeagol from “Lord of the Rings”, slamming him for keeping his eyes open (yes, really), celebrating a crowd of lobbyists and Republican establishment members booing at the president during the early debates, and claiming that President Trump’s supporters had been “hoodwinked.”
She also was convinced that Sen. Cruz and Rubio could team up to “take down” President Trump’s candidacy long after the then-candidate’s electoral victory was all but assured.
However, at least Hoffman remained consistent over the years prior to changing her tune after President Trump’s inauguration. She had called him a “Trojan Horse Liberal” in 2011.
Perhaps this should come as no surprise to those who have been closely monitoring these #NeverTrump stooges over the years, but it would appear the vast majority of those celebrating big tech companies censoring and banning prominent conservative voices like Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos were all vehemently anti-Trump during his candidacy.
After all, if those who used their voices to help President Trump get elected in 2016 are banned, the formerly #NeverTrump conservatives who have embedded themselves in the America First movement may finally get their wish of seeing the president fail electorally in 2020.
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