Nobody likes Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO has lower favorable ratings across the board than President Donald Trump, according to some polling. But since Zuckerberg runs a Silicon Valley social network, he is especially loathed by Republicans, like the senators who last week accused him and his counterparts at Twitter and Google of censoring conservatives.

Such criticism is unfounded. In fact, in a real way, Zuckerberg should be lauded a patron saint of the American conservative movement. And right-wingers should also be praising George Soros, another one of their undeserved bogeymen. Both are paying big money to limit governments involvement in our lives, a pillar of the intellectual foundation of modern-day conservatism.

This is the face of someone paying to enact a conservative ideal in American government.

In whats become a stylized ritual, Republican senators lined up to bellow at Zuckerberg at a hearing last Wednesday, their punishment for Facebooks treatment of the New York Posts recent report on the contents of Hunter Bidens laptop.

Yet in the aggregate, Facebook does conservatives an enormous service. Right-leaning posts perform particularly well on Facebook, multiple studies show. Most days, the list of the best-performing posts on Facebook is a list of whatever Dan Bongino or Ben Shapiro are thinking that day.

On top of platforming their ideas, Zuckerberg is also bankrolling a classic conservative ideal. Not too long ago, classic conservatives like the Buckley family and libertarian conservatives like former Republican U.S. Rep. Ron Paul presented a united front on the drug war.

Since the drug war allowed law enforcement to enter Americans homes and disrupt their lives for making personal choices about their bodies and their habits, the drug war was considered one of the most obvious examples of a big and intrusive government availableand thus, anathema to a classic conservative.

In an example of horseshoe theory in action, the dogma around legal drugs has switched, and Republican lawmakers have become some of the drug wars staunchest defenders, with the liberals they deride as socialists some of the loudest and most reliable voices calling for an end to prisons stuffed with drug users. And both Zuckerberg and Soros have ponied up cash to actually change these policies.

On Oct. 1, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the policy-slash-philanthropy outfit founded by pediatrician Priscilla Chan and her more famous husband, contributed $500,000 to the campaign to pass Measure 110, a ballot initiative in Oregon that would decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugsall drugs, including hard drugs.

Soros is also doing this. A monster among conservatives for his support for the American Civil Liberties Union and other perceived progressive causes, Soros has for years been one of the biggest bankrollers of drug-policy reform. His Open Society Foundation funds the Drug Policy Alliance, the New York-based policy shop that advocates for drug-policy reform. And DPAs political shop, Drug Policy Action, is the biggest bankroller of Measure 110. Contributions to that effort total about $2.3 million, according to the most recent campaign finance filings.

Bankrolling small government, amplifying conservative voices. Add in Facebooks natural resistance to government regulationthe company was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, and would not benefit much from stricter government regulation of either its service or the internetand you have an outfit that adheres to politics that are closer to classic conservatism than anything else.

There are some flaws in the orthodoxy. Measure 110, for example, doesnt eliminate government involvement in drug policy. Instead, it would redirect money from law enforcement to drug treatment and counseling. Then again, conservatives have been happy to jump on the revenue train generated by legalized marijuana, with former Speaker of the House John Boehner joining the board of legal marijuana company Acreage Holdings.

You could argue that modern-day conservatism doesnt bear much resemblance to the classic small-government model. You would probably be right. Still, its hard to see how Mark Zuckerberg hasnt done anything but a service to conservatives online. And at least in Oregon, both he and Soros are putting cash on the barrel to bring about a classic conservative ideal.

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Why Mark ZuckerbergAnd George SorosAre Actually Conservative Heroes - Forbes