Oculus cofounder bristles at being “disqualified” for Trump support

After leaving Facebook, Luckey blasts "fake media" for "BS claims" on donations.

Kyle Orland

Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey hasn't exactly been eager to talk to the media since leaving Facebook nearly two months ago (a cosplay-focused Japanese interview notwithstanding). In fact, Luckey hasn't said much about the controversy surrounding his political giving since a short statement posted last September.

In Twitter posts yesterday, though, Luckey seemed to express exasperation at the public pressure he felt following publicized donations to Nimble America, a pro-Trump group that sold itself on "shitposting" and "meme magic," as well as later donations to Trump's inauguration effort. "I don't think someone should be disqualified from being the 'face of a medium' for supporting the President of the US, no matter the party," Luckey wrote in response to a poster who pushed back against "politics [that] support the oppression of people based on sexuality, race, religion or gender."
"If you think saying 'I support the President of the United States' makes someone a bigot who should be fired, we are just too far apart," he added in separate tweets. "You might want to loosen the restrictions on your ideological purity test, or at least figure out where the guilt by association line falls. Otherwise, you are going to have to have a pretty tough time in life—pretty much everyone supports someone who supports the President."
Luckey's tweets follow a Reddit post from last month in which Luckey defended trying to keep his political donations out of public view:

Some people want founders to keep their politics private and away from their business, others think they should do everything out in the open in a vocal way. You can't make everyone happy, and there are good arguments on both sides, but it is clear that people who happen to align with opinions held by the majority of the media come out ahead either way.
Regardless, the idea that anonymity = wrongdoing is a dangerous one. It is a significant factor in the ongoing erosion of our digital liberties, and is used to justify things like mass data collection and encryption backdoors. Nothing to fear if you are not doing anything wrong, right?
When a transsexual teenager with bigoted helicopter parents makes anonymous posts on a local support forum, is it because he feels it is wrong? How about fans of Bernie Sanders in the deep south who want to support their candidate of choice without alienating customers and employees who support Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? Whistleblowers in general? Those are not perfect comparisons, obviously, but it shows that there are plenty of reasons to do something anonymously in good faith. If you want to take issue with the actions themselves, fine, but trying to stay out of the political spotlight should not be condemned.

In another Reddit post days later, Luckey said reports that he had "hidden" Trump donations by passing them through shell corporations were "just more fake news from the reputable media. The company they are calling a shell corporation is actually an ongoing business with healthy revenue, multiple employees, and mostly non-cash assets—in other words, the opposite of every definition of a shell company."
Following up on that post, Luckey took issue with "multiple supposedly reputable outlets outright claiming that I paid teams of people to harass others online, that I funded the creation of white supremacist memes, and that I was somehow responsible for filling Facebook and Twitter feeds with said memes. All false..."
Back on Twitter, Luckey seemed reluctant to submit to interviews about his departure from Facebook or his political giving (Update: Luckey has refused an interview request from Ars Technica). While he said he can "appreciate the conundrum" media outlets face when he won't speak to them directly, he said he "[doesn't] think media should make claims with no evidence to back them up."