One of the most captivating reactions to the first assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump came from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
He said things that clearly did not align with liberal views, such as saying that it was “rad” when Trump stood up and raised his fist in the air after being shot in the face.
Mark Zuckerberg said Donald Trump’s immediate response to the shooting was “tough” and inspiring – without endorsing the former president.
The Meta CEO spoke exclusively with @emilychangtv on The Circuit https://t.co/Y1s1HmhotX pic.twitter.com/DQI10NHzhq
— Bloomberg (@business) July 19, 2024
READ MORE: Mark Zuckerberg’s unexpected reaction to Trump’s assassination attempt
I thought that was an captivating development, although I also wondered if he was just trying to cover himself, as Trump may be taking office soon and he may have wanted to get on good terms with him. He also said he would not be as politically dynamic as he has been in the past.
Now there is Further information on internal issues at Meta that suggest evolution might be real. If that were true, that would be a pretty amazing thing.
Zuckerberg complained in June about the “backlash” due to the “politically sensitive aspects of his philanthropic efforts,” one could put it.
And he regretted hiring staff for his charity who tried to push him even further to the left on some issues.
In low: he was fed up.
The report said he no longer supported anything at his charity that could be seen as partisan and that he had “curbed employee activism at Meta.”
According to these people, he also spoke to President Trump twice in one-on-one phone conversations over the summer. Some interpreted this move as an attempt to mend the long-strained relationship between the two men.
“I think I was not very well versed in the political environment and fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem,” Zuckerberg said during a current interview at a live podcast event in San Francisco.
In his testimony before Congress, he also revealed that the Biden administration “pressured” him to censor on COVID. He said he would not repeat the political donations he made in 2020 that caused such concern because they did not make him appear “neutral.” He has said he regrets those donations.
READ MORE: Zuck comes neat and confesses to Jim Jordan that Facebook has been censoring Americans at the behest of the Biden-Harris administration.
The New York Times calls the movement of Elon Musk and Zuckerberg part of a larger shift in Silicon Valley. I’ve seen this myself on X, with other tech entrepreneurs, especially in the last few months, who are waking up after seeing things like the video of Trump’s actual remarks blowing the “fine people” hoax. They see things like the radical leftism regarding Gaza. And they see things like Biden’s cognitive issues and see what the Democrats have done in response. You can see it unfolding in real time.
That’s a fascinating paragraph. If true, he’s abandoned the Democrats for being too far left, just like Musk did.
Privately, Mr. Zuckerberg now considers his personal political views to be more libertarian or “classical liberalism,” according to people who have spoken to him recently. That includes a hostility to regulations that restrict the economy, an embrace of free markets and globalization, and an openness to social justice reforms — but only if they don’t go as far as what he considers far-left progressivism. And Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, are privately appalled by what they perceive as rising anti-Semitism on college campuses, including at their alma mater, Harvard.
Now there is one petite question, since he says “globalism” when he rejects far-left progressivism. He may not yet realize that one is part of the other and that it still needs further development. But if the rest is true, he is already at odds with the Democrats in his mind.
Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan were surprised by the activism in their philanthropy, according to people close to them. Following protests over the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, a CZI employee asked Mr. Zuckerberg during a staff meeting to resign from Facebook or the initiative due to his unwillingness at the time to moderate Mr Trump’s comments.
That incident and others like it angered Zuckerberg, the people said, and turned him away from the foundation’s progressive policy work. He viewed one of the initiative’s three core divisions – the equity and opportunity team – as a distraction from the organization’s overall work and a destitute reflection of his bipartisan viewpoint, the people said.
In 2021, Zuckerberg and Chan decided to stop the group’s internal policy work and instead fund two bipartisan groups focused on those issues. Many of the roughly 30 staffers focused on policy quit, were transferred, or sent to those two groups.
In doing so, he essentially trashed all the parts of the social rights movement that got on his nerves and politicized things.
With a novel internal policy, Zuckerberg reportedly also wants to restrict politics within Meta.
It banned employees from discussing issues such as abortion, racial movements and wars in the workplace. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, was a proponent of the policy and was supported by Mr. Zuckerberg, two people familiar with the matter said.
Although he says he is not politically involved, it is captivating that he is trying to reach out to Trump and other Republicans to repair relations. He has told Trump that he has “no plans to make similar donations” as he did in 2020. He also called Trump during the RNC and said he was “praying” for him after the first assassination attempt. He has also called Trump and apologized personally after Meta mistakenly removed images of the attack that were circulating and people feared censorship.
If that’s true, it sounds like things are going well and truly on and he’s already far along, brought back down to earth by the radical left. That’s often the way it is – you think it’s one thing and then you face the reality first hand. Now he sees the problems of the progressive left because they have affected him personally.
He has a long way to go before people believe that a real conversion is taking place here. Still, you have to think that it is not good news for the Democrats if he takes his marbles and his millions and quits the game.
