(01-10-2018 03:30 PM)porscheguy Wrote: I don’t trust the Mercer’s. They give a lot of lip service to draining the swamp, removing corruption, etc. Just because the daughter homeschools her kids, does not mean she shares your values.... The important part here is Home schooling which resonates with middle class, Midwest fundamentalists so they say “those Mercer’s are just like us.”
The reality is those Mercer’s have nothing in common with regular people. They don’t. They don’t have the same worries, concerns, or difficulties that regular people encounter on a daily basis. Do you think they care about feminism, diversity, illegal immigration, etc? It means jack shit in their world. The concept of liberal or conservative means nothing to them. They’re above that stuff. If their neighborhood becomes too culturally vibrant, they hire extra security, build the walls a bit higher, or they simply move.
They don’t want to dismantle government. They’ll gladly throw it into chaos if there’s profit to be made....
They’re really no different from Soros and his lackeys. Don’t ever forget that.
The Mercers?
They’ll gladly throw it into chaos if there’s profit to be made.... - perhaps, but I'm yet to see any evidence for that claim. Aren't you simply reaching?
I've followed the Mercer story carefully since they emerged from the opposition pack of rich players among the GOP led by arch-libertarian Charles and David Koch.
For example, I recall the NYTimes quoting (my one-time neighbor) Stan Hubbard inveighing against the Koch's "Freedom Partner's " neutrality during the 2016 election cycle (For example, from 1 August 2016 SEE:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/...6fc14b0245)
The Koch's ritually ignored Trump for conventional politics-as-usual tested pols (SEE
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post...9579a2c3). But Hubbard was anxious and open to the door of backing Trump, the one the Mercer's walked through in August of 2016, which made way for an unprecedented triumph of Trump in the election.
And tellingly, Hillary won the billionaire's endorsement's for president by a 20 to 1 ratio.
I, for one, am glad that there are other "billionaire's" besides the Koch's the embracing libertarian goals of a smaller government and bigger free citizens to rise up!
Quote:The reality is those Mercer’s have nothing in common with regular people. They don’t. They don’t have the same worries, concerns, or difficulties that regular people encounter on a daily basis.
Yes and no.
To quote St. Paul born F. Scott Fitgerald, "the rich are different from you and me"...and Hemingway's retort of Hell yeah! "they've got more money," remains true. But the relevant question is this: too what degree are they different from our middle-class interests and needs?
What made Mercer family the outsider's source of inside (ie, wealthy and connected) support?
For one thing, Robert Mercer did physics at the University of New Mexico and a PhD in comp sci at the University of Illinois. While a doctorate in anything is elite, neither institution is anything other than non-elite.
And my understanding of the Mercer fortune is that it came late in his career, ie, the 1990s - the man's late 40s and mid-50s - and remains tied up Renaissance and perhaps other partnerships.
Journalists call him a billionaire but can only account for half that sum of his wealth (ie, he's a half-billionaire). Ergo, Mercer - like many of the rich - prefer their privacy to being in the public light. (And accordingly, the public-political work he does goes through his family foundation via daughter Rebecka [sp?].)
(And Mercer the math-and-gaming geek seems likely to be what journalist Megan McArdle calls the Asperger-libertarians - noting the high coincidence of the two during her pre-marriage dating life. [She eventually married Reason mag writer Peter Suderman.])
So, of course, Robert Mercer is different from most of us. For another thing, he's fortunate enough to have placed his best SUCCESSFULLY, and early enough in life to make it on his own.
That's not middle-class! And it's well-beyond the comfortably upper middle class. But it also appears to be an earned "success" that's more recent than many of the ultra-rich. And more recent within family memory. Because people of hardscrabble and hard-working origins remember how they became successful.
Does that not mitigate some (class-conscious or otherwise not unseasonable) distrust? In the absence of mendacity and manipulative, statist opportunism, I think it ought to.
I think
porscheguy's "nothing in common" claim about the Mercer's is as exaggerated and mistaken as the claim made by DLT, jr - that his father is like a Blue Collar billionaire - is impossible.
A final inference I've learned about the private Mercer's is that they are a large presence in the small, very small, global warming skeptics movement, public policy division. Robert Mercer himself abhors the bullying of the Left against dissident independent climate scientists. (I didn't know they were active in this realm until after Trump's election, and after having given my own money to the same organizations years before.)