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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Well, Trump has shown that the populace is accepting of businessmen as leaders. I'm sure if the rumors are true Zuckerberg won't be the last to think they can parlay success and fame into political power, and he wasn't the first (Reagon comes to mind).

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Reagan was an actor, not a businessman. He did shill though.

Zuckerberg is waking up to how easily manipulable the portion of Americans who voted for Trump are. It's too easy. Just look at the republican response to sb18 in CA. The counseling association was suppossed to be working on an initiative to help but I'm starting to worry.

I believe it's fair to say that both sides are easily manipulated...not just those on the right.

I used to believe the same thing until the aftermath of this election. It's not even remotely in the same ballpark. It's like the Dunning-Krueger effect except there's two more peaks in the 0-20% range, and a lot of people with an island of intelligence in their career path outside that range.

it's actually very much in the same ball-park. The sheer fact that many liberals believe that a sizeable portion of Trump's supporters are fascists, or that he himself is a fascist, is proof of this. In fact, in my experience right-leaning people tend to be more skeptical than left-leaning people - too skeptical in some cases, leading to things like conspiracy theory and climate change denial.

Living around a great number of conservatives, but interacting with a great number of liberals online, my experience is that it simply goes both ways. It's a much-remarked-on idea that "red" and "blue" America are increasingly more divided. If you see people being skeptical today, it is rarely based on the content of the idea but rather on the political implications of it. Right-leaning people are suspicious of things that left-leaning politicians say or promote, and vice versa. I don't think either party, as a whole, is more skeptical or, conversely, more incredulous. Ideas have become more political, and to the extent that one idea is more or less accepted at face value it is probably because that idea has already been normalized by the mass culture.

I know far more people who believe Trump represented military aggression and big business while Hillary'just wanted to help people;' which is a very strange idea given that Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, and Saudi Arabia donated more money to her than any of them donated to anyone in history.

Meanwhile Obama prosecuted more whistle blowers than any candidate in history after campaigning to protect them. Then dropped 26,000 bombs on Muslims last year.

What about the evidence that came out that the Iraq War's WMDs were a fsbrication of the Bush admin's? Who has gone to jail over that? I personally know Americans murdered in this fabricated war for profit and oil. Even insiders like Greenspan wrote about how that Iraq War was for profit and oil.

The people who are represented are not the working class, productive and honest citizens. You are all too tied up in the Dems vs Repubs debate and other politics to notice this though.

Oh no I'm actually completely with you on that one. I think Bush and Obama were two sides of the same coin, although I don't think anyone knew that in 2008.

So..

You're saying your own personal denial of this election's results led you to double down on accepting your own personal biases as fact and justify your resulting increased conformity in believing 'what should have happened' onto others whose non-conformity bothered you?

Not a Trumper, but the 'boo hoo' media pity-party in the aftermath of this election has been oh-so delicious to watch after seeing through the level of spin in the last couple of years...

"But we told them to vote for Hillary, and they didn't! What went wrong??? Must be 'facism' and 'russian fake news'! Anything but people actually disagreeing with the moral/philosophical/political position I have absorbed without thinking from MSNBC-Universal-Vivendi funded Saturday Night Live skits!"

But yes, absolutely, the 'conformity' is entirely on the 'right'..

No, that's not even remotely close to what I'm saying or believe, you've constructed a strawman.

But your comment is shockingly similar to what I've heard from people who still support Trump irl. Do you personally ever talk about what's actually happening in washington, or just stick to this he-said she-said crap?

Yo dawg, I heard you like strawmen...

There's some truth in this (I assume), but there is quite a bit of evidence that those on the right value conformity with a leader's views more than those on the left. The infamous poll results on the Syrian strike[1] show this behavior. I'm not sure this counts as manipulation exactly, but sometimes the effect is the same.

[1] https://cmgajcjaybookman.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/syriapo...

There's some truth in this (I assume), but there is quite a bit of evidence that those on the right value conformity with a leader's views more than those on the left

It's tough to justify this generalization in a world where leftist leaders like Stalin, Castro, Mao, and Chavez are still warm in their graves.

It's fairly well-documented that viewers of right-wing news channels like Fox are extremely poorly informed compared to viewers of other channels.

This isn't up for debate. The numbers are both objective and unequivocal.

What's a successful actor if not a very specific type of businessman? (but yes, I meant to include a caveat there acknowledging that and forgot).

HMM...i thought it was against the HN rules to be politically partisan...apparently not, as long as you take the "correct" side...

Trump is about American nationalism, and he resonated with the poorer parts of the country by talking about making America great again. He's also "old school". Zuckerberg is in most ways the opposite.

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