Aspen Ideas: Mark Zuckerberg For President

The Federalist ^ | 6/28/2017 | Ben Domenech

[mac_truck]

Greetings from lovely Aspen, Colorado, where I am attending the Aspen Ideas Festival as part of their scholar program. I have no idea how I ended up in this program, as I did not apply for it, and my relationship with the Ideas Festival over the years has been mostly made up of mocking their event subject matter on Twitter (“Rotary: rediscovering the beauty of a phone which expects something of us, as opposed to the reverse” #aspenideas). But I am here nonetheless, ready for the live recording of PodSaveAmerica and the session on whether Robots are the future of Jazz. Already I have had a lovely conversation with a fellow attendee about one particular Aspen Idea: That Mark Zuckerberg would actually be a great candidate for president in 2020.

I am serious. Or at least, they were. But there is an internal logic to it, if you think of the problems plaguing America as being the lack of a leader who balances technocratic globalism with a more attuned sense of voter priorities and West Coast communitarianism. Zuckerberg has been traveling across the country of late meeting with all sorts of communities, making for increasingly odd pictorials of the young tech billionaire chatting with people very much unlike him. But we shouldn’t assess Zuckerberg’s awkwardness as a crippling defect in a field that is likely to be made up of people almost 40 years older than he is. Zuckerberg would enter such a contest with the greatest knowledge of the electorate and analytics of any candidate. (He also comes with his own deep state, and enough blackmail for half the country: “Mr. President, why no nominee for AG yet?” “I dunno, Jim, why do you spend so much time looking at those old pictures of Tammy from Waco?”)

[MAGAthon]

look who is listed as a Speaker:

Aspen Ideas: Speakers: Dmitri Alperovitch
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, CrowdStrike
In 2016, he revealed the suspected Russian intelligence agencies’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee, events which unveiled the scope of cyber -influence operations against the US elections...
In 2016, POLITICO Magazine named him to its POLITICO 50 list of influential thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics...
https://www.aspenideas.org/speaker/dmitri-alperovitch

[x]

It would be ironic if it turned out that Aaron Sorkin's movie that brought down his candidacy.

[mewzilla]

Iger...Froderick!

[BBell]

But he’s married to a Chinese girl. That should count for something.

[Red in Blue PA]

At least we would know Mark loves Walls.

[Fedora]

Good catch.

[Fedora]

Zuckerberg is an enemy of America like his ally George Soros.

[kingu]

Four little letters kind of are a huge anchor around Bob Iger’s neck... E - S - P - N. The channel that people are unsubscribing from faster than cable companies can give it away for free.

[RayChuang88]

While that is true, almost everything else Iger has done has been financial gold: the purchase of Marvel Entertainment, the purchase of Pixar, the purchase of Lucasfilm, and the money printing machine that are the Disney theme parks.

Like I said earlier, Iger is very well-known to Democratic Party donors and to Wall Street fund managers. That might be critical in a 2020 election run.