The world’s richest toddler is at it again. Elon Musk, a very stable tech genius, is throwing a temper tantrum over Mark Zuckerberg launching the Twitter rival Threads. You would think a capitalist such as Musk would welcome a little healthy competition, but he doesn’t seem keen to compete in the business arena. Instead, he has challenged Zuckerberg to a “literal dick-measuring contest”. Musk, who is 52 years old, prefaced that invitation by tweeting: “Zuck is a cuck.” It’s not clear whether he had professional help crafting this zinger or if it came to him in a flash of brilliance.
How is Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, enjoying all this, I wonder? She probably thought she would be stewarding a struggling tech company’s return to greatness; instead, she is managing a manbaby’s outbursts. She probably expected she would be leading complex strategy meetings; instead, one imagines, she is being briefed by her underlings about what a cuck is.
Perhaps Yaccarino already knows exactly what a cuck is. It hasn’t escaped notice that the former NBC Universal executive follows a large number of proudly rightwing Twitter accounts including Catturd, whom Rolling Stone once described as “the shitposting king of Maga Twitter”. If you spend any time in the haunts of the online right, you are bound to hear a lot of cucking; it is one of the most beloved insults of angry white men.
For those of you who lead healthy offline lives and are not familiar with the term, cuck is slang for a feeble man with progressive-ish views (anyone to the left of Mussolini) and stems from the word “cuckold”, meaning a man whose wife is unfaithful. In 2014, during Gamergate, the antiquated insult was revived on rightwing message boards. (It’s hard to explain Gamergate to anyone who isn’t “extremely online”, but, in brief, a female gaming journalist broke up with her boyfriend, sparking a furiously misogynistic movement that significantly influenced the rise of the modern right.) In 2016, the word gained even more traction in a Reddit message board called r/The_Donald. Donald Trump staffers started using it; Steve Bannon, for example, once called Jared Kushner a cuck. From there, it infiltrated the mainstream.
Over the years, cuck has become a dangerously amorphous term. While it isn’t inherently a white supremacist word, it has taken on racist and antisemitic connotations. For some people, it’s a reference to racist fetish pornography. It’s also, one linguist has argued, a coded way to talk about antisemitic “great replacement” theories.
Meanwhile, for others, it’s just a silly word to be used in jest. “While it might have once been possible to distinguish out-and-out white supremacists from [so-called] ironic Nazis, now the different groups were learning the same language,” noted Tim Squirrell, an expert in extremism, in a 2017 article about the evolution of cuck.
Say what you will about the far right; they are cunning linguists, alarmingly adept at packaging hateful concepts into silly terms that can be defended as “just a joke”. “Incels”, for example, routinely talk about women as “femoids”, a contraction of “female humanoid” used to signal that these men don’t consider women to be fully human.
Memes also do a lot of heavy lifting: Pepe the frog, a beady-eyed cartoon amphibian, has been co-opted as an “alt-right” hate mascot.
It’s not just me saying the far right are strategic about how they sanitise hateful language; they have admitted it themselves. In 2017, for example, the style guide for the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer was leaked. “Generally, when using racial slurs, it should come across as half-joking,” it instructed. “Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, nonironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.”
So, was Musk joking when he called Zuck a cuck? Or was it something more sinister? I can’t say for certain. But the fact that one of the world’s richest and most influential men is proudly using far-right terms? That is not funny at all.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
