As part of her millennial outreach project, S.E. Cupp does lot of work to educate young minds in college campuses to educate them on conservative values. This speech is one such effort

​Source: Elon News Network

Conservative commentator S.E. Cupp visited Elon University Thursday, Feb. 27, to challenge students’ views of the United States’ “fractured political system.”

Cupp asked the audience, largely students, some adjectives that come to mind when picturing how conservatives view young people. The laundry list, which Cupp wrote down and displayed, included words like lazy, uniformed, selfish and irresponsible.
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While some conservatives belittle the Millennial generation, Cupp said, some liberals “pander” to youth. She said both the Democrat and Republican parties need the youth vote, now 80 millions strong and projected to be two-thirds of the population eligible to vote by 2020.

“I’m hoping that you can, over the course of you college careers and your later professional lives, maybe open your minds about some of the preconceived notions you have about the political movements within the two parties,” she said.

The Millennial generation, Cupp’s target audience, is unlike any other in history in its willingness to listen, to everyone from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to President Barack Obama.

But Cupp said she doesn’t blame young people for leaving both parties in droves and registering as independent in larger numbers than any preceding generation.

“I get that impulse,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to be associated with either party right now. Washington is terrible, and both parties have really tarnished their brands over the past few years.”

Senior Natalie Cuzmenco, president of the Elon chapter of the Young Americans for Liberty, a national libertarian organization, spearheaded the effort to bring Cupp to campus by securing funding from the SGA, her own organization, a political foundation and a private donor.
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“I’m so glad she came to Elon, and I think she’s different than a lot of the speakers we see her,” Cuzmenco said. “I wanted to come out and show people that there’s more out there than preconceived liberal notions of what a college student should be. I wanted to open their minds some.”

Though Cupp openly identifies as an outspoken conservative, in what she still calls a “largely liberal” media landscape, she said she encourages political dissent and debate that is reasoned and tempered. Her political analysis show, CNN’s “Crossfire,” seeks to host debates with experts from all over.

Past guests have included everyone from Sally Kohn, a liberal political commentator, to Peter Sprigg, with the conservative-minded Family Research Council.

As she has expressed many times on the show, Cupp doesn’t have a whole lot of hope for her own Republican party, calling it “out of touch” and “ill-equipped” to reach women and minorities.

“I don’t have a ton of optimism that the GOP as it currently exists will be able to reach a lot of women and minorities,” she said. “After 2012, liberals hammered the death nail into conservatives when it comes to reaching young voters.”

Not all young voters have thrown in the towel, though, according to freshman Bryan Sullivan, a member of the Elon University chapter of the College Republicans, a national collegiate organization promoting Republican ideals.

“It’s really motivating, in a way, to see a speaker like her here at Elon,” he said. “It’s definitely not something you see everyday.”

Cupp also got more specific, keying in on voter ID laws, the Affordable Care Act and the role of technology in influencing the youth vote.

“This administration does not speak your language,” she said of the Affordable Care Act. “It would have been really easy to hire some teenagers from Silicon Valley to make this work better.”

Cupp is also firmly against the concept of a federal minimum wage, as she said it doesn’t reflect fiscal realities between states. The costs of living in Montana and in New York are two different realities, she said.

“If we are to focus on making minimum wage jobs a long-term employment option, that’s not a fair deal for the people who get stuck in the cycle of working them year after year,” she said. “They’re a great temporary option for college students and others who are willing to work hard and make money.”

To get to the root of issues, Cupp said, people have to become critical news consumers, not trusting what comes just from CNN or Fox News or MSNBC.
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“I think we’d all do better, both as news consumers and producers, to challenge what we hear,” she said. “Don’t just sit back and watch. You have to craft the story from a culmination of different sources. You have to find the truth.”

S.E. is hardly a feminist. Neither she believes in identity politics nor she gets herself into one. Very rarely we see her speaking on topics "feminine" topics. When she opines on it, she often nails it and never gives insights to her personal experience through it. This is one such gem of an article from S.E

​Source: CNN

'The Biggest Loser': A warning from someone who's been there

Story highlights

• "Biggest Loser" winner set off discussion of what weight level is too thin
• S.E. Cupp says she experienced many kinds of eating disorders, including obsession with weight
• She says people can become addicted to the positive rewards of losing weight
• Cupp: Losing weight doesn't mean losing the pressures caused by body issues

This year, on the 15th season of NBC's weight-loss show "The Biggest Loser," Rachel Frederickson did exactly what the show producers, the celebrity trainers and the audience asked her to: She lost the most weight.

She lost so much weight, in fact, that many have decided she is now unhealthily thin. Jaws dropped at her final weigh-in. Social media exploded. At 5-foot-5 and 105 pounds, her body mass index is below what the National Institutes of Health considers healthy.

I won't speculate on her health. That's for a doctor to determine, and hopefully she's regularly seeing one. She says she's "never felt this great."

I think I know exactly how Rachel is feeling right now. In a word: intoxicated. And as I also know from experience, that intoxication can be deadly dangerous.

Growing up as a student of classical ballet, I floated in and out of all kinds of unhealthy eating disorders. I experimented with bulimia, starvation, laxatives and diet pills. Dancers knew plenty of terrible tricks. We'd eat carrots and use the bright orange to mark when to stop throwing up before all the nutrients and energy we needed to dance were expended. We ate tissue paper to feel full. We were caffeine addicts --some even snorted it. Many smoked cigarettes and a few did drugs.
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Our unhealthy habits at Boston Ballet even led to a "Dateline" investigation in 1997, when a friend and fellow dancer died suddenly at 22. She weighed 93 pounds. 

Not only did all of this make for very bad habits, but as an impressionable, insecure and developmentally immature adolescent girl, body issues were ingrained at the worst possible time, and when I was least equipped to deal with them.

My teen years were spent, irrationally, consumed with being too fat. There was depression. There were suicidal thoughts. There was therapy.

​When I finally left ballet, I found relief in the normalcy of college. That relief turned to excitement when I found friends -- and boyfriends -- who thought I was pretty great, even without starving myself. And that excitement turned to empowerment when I found a career in writing that turned me on and didn't care what I looked like. I left body issues behind. I knew who I was.

​Ironically, all that self-esteem spurred unexpected weight loss. I suddenly dropped 10, 15, 20 pounds without trying. I was eating healthily, working out occasionally, and enjoying my 20s. I'd never been happier. And then it happened.
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The compliments, the attention, the looks on friends' faces who hadn't seen me in a few months -- it was all euphoric. Watching the numbers on the scale tick backward, clothing sizes drop -- I'd chased that feeling for so long as a teenager, and it was finally happening. And as the compliments turned to concern I grew even more determined to hold on to that euphoria, to keep the weight off and maybe drop a few more pounds.

If someone didn't mention my weight loss, I was despondent. What was once occasional exercise became compulsive working out. Eating healthy turned into not eating. Instead of going out with friends I preferred to stay in, so I could not eat in private.

I hadn't been trying to lose weight, didn't even think I needed to. But when it happened inadvertently the euphoria was so addicting, I didn't want it to stop.

The good news is, older, wiser and having beat body issues before, I knew I didn't want to get sucked back in to a dark and compulsive life controlled completely by my weight.

I made a decision to never return to those addictions, no matter how good they felt. I stopped the feverish workouts. I returned to normal eating. I saw my friends again.

Years later, I make daily decisions to strike a balance between being healthy and being obsessive. And if the choice is between being 10 pounds overweight and 10 pounds underweight, I choose over.

It hasn't been easy. I have a job on television now and the pressure to look good and stay thin is immense. I simply don't pay attention to it.

I was recently a bride, and unlike many women preparing to walk down the aisle, I refused to embark on some crazy crash diet to look my thinnest in a corset, though the temptation was there.

And I am sure that when I have children, I'll worry about losing baby weight like every other new mother does. But I will do all I can to obsess over my baby and not those stubborn remaining pounds.

I'll bet that Rachel Frederickson can relate to much of my story. I bet that when she was at her heaviest she was unhappy, and maybe even depressed. I bet she never thought she could look the way she wanted. I bet she fantasized about what it would be like to be thin.

And now I bet she is intoxicated by the attention she's gotten for losing so much weight, intoxicated by the rush of losing another pound, by the boost in energy she has from working out. And I bet she has vowed to herself never to gain the weight back, never to return to the previous her.

I just hope that in addition to weight loss and workout techniques, the trainers and doctors on the show have equipped her to deal with the addictive behaviors that can result from successfully getting in shape. I hope they've warned her about a mental anguish that can be just as dark as the one she felt as a heavier woman, and maybe even more dangerous. And I hope they've told her that despite the thrill of losing the most weight, she will not become a "loser" if she gains some back.
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I'm proud of Rachel for getting healthy. And I hope she loves who she is. But the next year will be an important and potentially dangerous one for her, with addictive behaviors lurking around every corner. I just hope she's strong enough to avoid them.