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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

This isn't people being turned off Oculus because of a voting preference of a founder. This is him funding smear campaigns for a fascist. Now that money is considered speech under citizens united, boycotts, etc. must be as well until we can get it overturned.

Palmer wants to directly fund Trump with your Rift expenditures:

> Our adversaries have enormous power, and the best way I can continue to fight the good fight is to keep doing well in business and funding good causes with the proceeeds.

https://archive.is/4OuYq#selection-3341.176-3341.346

This isn't some citizen sharing his opinion proportionately to his vote or his social status, this is him using money to amplify his voice and control discourse.

Hillary has PACs, etc. that do the same. We should work to get money out of politics, but in the meantime it seems fine to vote with your wallet in cases where your money is being used as speech and you disagree with the speech.

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"This is him funding smear campaigns for a fascist."

This sort of "Trump is literally Hitler" rhetoric is anything but constructive. I'm sad to see that so many in the tech community are willing to operate at this level.

Republicans are not Nazis. Good people support Trump. They are your neighbors and colleagues.

You're behaving like the fear-mongering oppressors you claim to despise.

Good people supported Hitler too. He had about the same level of support that Trump does.

Hanna Arendt documented "the banality of evil" quite well. That nice neighbor who always smiles and says hello, but votes to ship Muslims to a concentration camp? They're evil.

No one has called for Muslims to be shipped to concentration camps.

Frankly, the most intolerant voices I've been hearing this election cycle come from the left -- calling for conservatives to be purged and blacklisted at every turn.

Progressives seem to have whipped themselves up into a moral panic.

Sad times.

Trump has praised Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese, as well as restrictions on movement, property ownership, and possesion of radios as an appropriate model for how to deal with Muslims.

You're spinning what he said. I'm not voting this election, but I'm 100% against outrage culture.

'When asked whether he would have supported Japanese internment camps, Trump told Time that he could not say for certain.

"I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer," he told the magazine. "I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer."'[1]

1). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12...

He's praised Eisenhower's Operation Wetback. Many, many times.

I think real fascists would be embarrassed by him, because he isn't good at politics.

He isn't?

He wiped Bush, Cruz, and even the superstar politician Rubio off the map, spending a fraction of what they did in doing it as well.

Say what you will about his views, many of which I personally find refreshing, but saying he isn't a good politician flies completely in the face of the facts of this election cycle.

Yes fine, but even a mediocre politician knows how to avoid being called racist, sexist, and especially fascist.

When you want people who hate politics, politicians and political correctness in any form to vote for you, then getting called a racist and a sexist just separates you from the status-quo pack and makes you seem more appealing.

That Trump could avoid the bad press if he wanted, but doesn't, suggests that he welcomes it. And, to his credit, it seems to be working for him. He's been able to harness a sense of mass disenfranchisement and anti-establishment rage that the Republican Party has been unable to tap into, despite their best efforts.

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