Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
gitaarik | on: Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon
So that's the interesting thing about it; he gets the votes from it, so apparently many people agree with him? Only in public nobody seems to agree with him? How is that possible?
npteljes | parent | next
>Only in public nobody seems to agree with him? How is that possible?

Societal taboos for example can create a division like this. You can see this divide between truly anonymous forums vs moderated conversations online.

krige | parent | next
Most of his voters have no idea what his campaign or promises are, and that's intentional, see mexican voters apparently surprised by his anti-mexican stance now.
gitaarik | root | parent
> see mexican voters apparently surprised by his anti-mexican stance now.

Source?

And it seems people don't particularly like Trump, but vote on him because he seems to be the only one that wants to do something about illegal immigrants:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/us/politics/trump-policie...

And I understand that it's even frustrating for legal immigrants, who waited for years to get citizenship, that illegal immigrants don't have to do anything and get it right away.

triceratops | root | parent
>illegal immigrants don't have to do anything and get [citizenship] right away

Do they really? How? Asking for a friend.

gitaarik | root | parent
Well during Biden's administration it was like that. Now that Trump came into office they already stopped coming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MPcGL3Tfac

Here they explain why immigrants rather chose the illegal path opposed to the legal path during Biden's administration.

Now even before Trump came into office, the stream of illegal immigrants have already almost completely stopped:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/world/americas/migrants-t...

So yeah, we can argue about the details, but it is clear that during Biden's administration it was way too easy for illegal immigrants to get into the US, which is unfair for the legal immigrants that went through much more trouble to get there.

Aside from that, the constant flow of illegal immigrants also caused a lot of issues in the states near the borders, and obviously for the country as a whole.

loading story #42804585
beowulfey | parent | next
This is representative of the dichotomy we face within society, in that we rarely associate with people who have different opinions than us, even when we think that we do regularly. It is the paradox of our social circles that overlap but never interact.
sebzim4500 | parent | next
>Only in public nobody seems to agree with him

What? In my experience his supporters literally never shut up about how they are the silent majority. The irony seems entirely lost on them.

kubb | parent
The trick is inside or brains. We’re having trouble dealing with detailed percentage breakdowns and differentiating between groups of people.

Instead we think of “the average person” and project that on everyone.

You looked at the small libertarian interest group, and based on that projected how everyone is. Now you look at hacker news and you’re projecting how everyone is. This projection is where our reasoning fails.

gitaarik | root | parent
Yeah but to be honest, most mainstream media channels that I see criticize Trump a lot. And the media that praises him is often seen als radical / extreme / whatever right.

So, either the old government is in power of the mainstream media, or people are secretly on the right and don't speak out about it. Or maybe a combination of the two.

kubb | root | parent
It’s the selection of media that you see. Try watching Fox. Try listening to Joe Rogan. Try going on a clean YouTube account and watching random videos for a week. It’s there.

You made a false dichotomy, but I’m sure you can figure that one on your own.

There’s also the other aspect where you align your views to the views of your group.

There are places in the US, where being a Republican is absolutely the core of what you are, and you will adopt and genuinely love any candidate from that party.