Cupcake Truck Tweets Anti-Semitic Rant, Has History of Awful Twitter Opinions
We always knew there was something sinister about the cupcake, with its sickeningly sweet butter frosting and almost always too-dry cake. Or, perhaps it’s because we’ve always equated them with Bloomberg-era New York. Regardless, in what is perhaps the final crumb of the achingly slow, endless death of the cupcake, a Brooklyn-based cupcake truck has been tweeting some unsavory things in the past few months.
Word came on Thursday via Tablet Magazine that the now-defunct Cupcake Crew, whose Brooklyn owners competed on the Food Network program Cupcake Wars in 2012 and attended the 2011 Vendy Awards, had tweeted, then deleted, the following message:
This wasn’t the only instance of hateful speech, however. In fact, the anti-semitism had appeared since at least January, when the Twitter user, currently unknown but assumed to be owner Frankie “Cupcakes” Francollo, Tweeted the following comment about murdered Brooklyn landlord Menachem Stark:
http://twitter.com/CupcakeCrewNYC/status/420543223871070208
Throughout the World Cup, @CupcakeCrewNYC also repeatedly described losing teams as being “assraped,” and next to Tweets touting Italian-American pride (complete with Mussolini quotes) were ones dusted with xenophobia:
http://twitter.com/CupcakeCrewNYC/status/467164334544928768
In March, @CupcakeCrewNYC claimed to be “laughing hysterically” to “anti-Semitic French comedian and provocateur Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who is notorious for popularizing the quenelle gesture, a reverse Nazi salute, among his French fans,” according to Tablet:
Hysterically laughing listening to French comic Dieudonne #VivaLaFrance
— Cupcake Crew (@CupcakeCrewNYC) April 1, 2014
The brand’s social media presence can be considered questionable at best far earlier than that, however—even earlier than the truck’s reported closure in April 2013 (though according to their Twitter, the Cupcake Crew may have been in business as late as June 2013), which means that claiming that someone had hacked their Twitter is a shaky defense.
For one, @CupcakeCrewNYC had been Tweeting about smoking weed and Mussolini as early as 2012, which they continue to do. Note that all of the following Tweets were sent before the closure in 2013:
Funny shit when these Halal vendors try acting like a street boss.They can't even pronounce the word AMERICA #LandOfTheFree
— Cupcake Crew (@CupcakeCrewNYC) February 22, 2013
What's with all the dudes coming to the truck ordering 1 mini? Fellas thats sooo Beeeyotch! Man up eat a full size #GetSomeBalls
— Cupcake Crew (@CupcakeCrewNYC) February 20, 2013
420-You know what to do #LightersUp #HolidayTrees
— Cupcake Crew (@CupcakeCrewNYC) December 27, 2012
What might be even more strange, however, than these unfortunate Tweets are the fact that they are—and have always been—interspersed with completely normal, sane messages like ones you might expect from a mobile dessert vendor:
All done in midtown west for the day.Over 200 cups of HOT CHOCOLATE served.Big shout out to everyone who braved the cold for a cupcake #NYC
— Cupcake Crew (@CupcakeCrewNYC) January 4, 2013
The deceptively unoffensive Tweets have even continued on in the year since the Cupcake Crew’s closure, as it now seems to be a mouthpiece for promoting Valducci’s pizza. We’re not sure what the connection is there—likely, either Francollo knows the owners or is simply a fan of their ‘za.
He can be seen in the video below claiming that all of his cupcakes are “baked with love:”
But in what’s perhaps the biggest irony in this not-so-sweet cupcake controversy is the fact that, as Tablet points out, Cupcake Crew would like you to know that their services are available for both bat and bar mitzvahs. So.
Our email request for comment was returned with a delivery fail notification. But hey, maybe we’re just being a bunch of oversensitive, “tight jean wearing,” politically correct transplants.
Living in Bk the word "gentrified"has taken on a meaning of its own.The invasion of tight jean wearing PC transplants makes me yak #BK4US
— Cupcake Crew (@CupcakeCrewNYC) May 16, 2014
Follow Rebecca Jennings on Twitter @rebexxxxa.