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Comment by Aunche | Hacker News Reader

Billionaires capitalize on identity politics and political division because it gets them advertising dollars. That's it. While I agree that economic policy certainly merits more discussion, an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about "the elite" isn't any more productive than an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about white people.

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Billionaires aren't all colluding, but their incentives are aligned, and they do individually use their money to advance a political agenda that regular people who don't own TV networks are powerless to push back against.

See: Rodger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Bill and David Koch

The capitalize on it because it keeps everyone focused on white vs black instead of rich vs poor.

They want you constantly thinking about race instead of thinking about wealth inequality.

They want you constantly fighting with your fellow workers instead of forming unions.

The rich aren't a single monolithic entity and it doesn't make sense to treat them as such. George Soros is an obvious example. Unless if you have concrete evidence, a blanket anti-rich narrative only serves as a vector for another rich person to inject their ideology. Plenty of people think that Donald Trump's feud with Bezos was proof that he was on the side of the working class.

The rich aren't, but the companies they run practically are, from a political standpoint.

Basically all large, multinational corporations now make their company logo rainbow for pride month, and all release the same sounding official statements about racial inequality on a regular basis, etc. etc.

It's almost impossible to find a large corporation that doesn't do this now. And their statements are so bland and generic that they are almost all identical, and completely interchangeable.

That's the symptom and not the cause. When people treat virtue signaling the same as positive change, it's natural for corporations to exploit that. It's a cheap way of building goodwill.

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