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How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump's Arms
Opinion
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.
Jan. 17, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
Ross Douthat
Hosted by Ross Douthat
Below is a lightly edited transcript of an episode of “Matter of Opinion.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
{snip}
Andreessen: I’m happy to talk about all of that. I started out in rural Wisconsin and farming country — basically the polar cultural and political opposite of Silicon Valley in many ways, for a very long time. By the way, I didn’t discover until much later that I’m an archetype. Tom Wolfe wrote a famous profile of Robert Noyce — who was the original founder of Intel, the original C.E.O. and the father of the chip industry — and actually Noyce and I followed very similar paths. I never met him, and he was an earlier generation, but he grew up as an Iowa farm boy, and I grew up as a Wisconsin farm boy. A lot of other people like us over the years have made this trek.
And then basically I’m a product of the great land grant universities, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It was a huge leap to actually leave the state and go to a university that large where I came from. And they had this incredible influx of money at the time from the federal government for supercomputers and what turned out to be the internet. ... Actually, by the way, that was led by Al Gore when he was in the Senate. I always thought he got unfairly treated by how people describe this later. ... But he led the push —
Douthat: He took the lead on inventing the internet.
Andreessen: So the famous quote is, “I invented the internet.” He never said that, I’ll defend Al’s honor to the death. What he said is, “I took the lead in the Senate in creating the internet.” ... What he meant is that he was the tip of the spear for funding four national supercomputing centers. They picked four college campuses, and Illinois was one of them.
{snip}
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.
Jan. 17, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
Ross Douthat
Hosted by Ross Douthat
Below is a lightly edited transcript of an episode of “Matter of Opinion.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
{snip}
Andreessen: I’m happy to talk about all of that. I started out in rural Wisconsin and farming country — basically the polar cultural and political opposite of Silicon Valley in many ways, for a very long time. By the way, I didn’t discover until much later that I’m an archetype. Tom Wolfe wrote a famous profile of Robert Noyce — who was the original founder of Intel, the original C.E.O. and the father of the chip industry — and actually Noyce and I followed very similar paths. I never met him, and he was an earlier generation, but he grew up as an Iowa farm boy, and I grew up as a Wisconsin farm boy. A lot of other people like us over the years have made this trek.
And then basically I’m a product of the great land grant universities, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It was a huge leap to actually leave the state and go to a university that large where I came from. And they had this incredible influx of money at the time from the federal government for supercomputers and what turned out to be the internet. ... Actually, by the way, that was led by Al Gore when he was in the Senate. I always thought he got unfairly treated by how people describe this later. ... But he led the push —
Douthat: He took the lead on inventing the internet.
Andreessen: So the famous quote is, “I invented the internet.” He never said that, I’ll defend Al’s honor to the death. What he said is, “I took the lead in the Senate in creating the internet.” ... What he meant is that he was the tip of the spear for funding four national supercomputing centers. They picked four college campuses, and Illinois was one of them.
{snip}
9 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Those mean old activist college kids came into your Camelot and wanted to change things. So sorry you were forced to shuck your Dem facade and forced to align with the knuckledragger republicans. It's been so hard on your moral center.
Billionaire Asshat Blames Everyone Except Himself For His Reactionary Asshattery
Meet Marc Andreessen, whiny-ass titty-baby
.
GARY LEGUM
JAN 18, 2025
America’s Age of Broligarchs is upon us, officially commencing on Monday when Donald Trump takes power. Ahead of this dark moment in history, some of those broligarchs are giving the public a quick lesson in what a bunch of self-absorbed, arrogant, clueless, whiny-ass titty-babies they are. No wonder Orange Julius Caesar likes them.
We wrote last week about Peter Thiel and his deranged opinion piece that managed to sound like HAL the computer writing the Cliffs Notes for A Tale of Two Cities. This week’s charmless billionaire broligarch on some sort of twisted publicity tour is Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist mostly notable for both helping develop the Netscape browser that has not been in widespread use for a solid 25 years or so, as well as his unfortunate resemblance to Beldar Conehead, right up to his opinions sounding like Beldar consuming mass quantities of his own farts.
To put it more substantively, Andreessen gave interviews this week to both Bari Weiss and Ross Douthat about his expectations for governance in the Age of Broligarchs, his thoughts on government funding and waste, all the ways in which non-billionaires have been very mean and unfair to the geniuses of Silicon Valley like Marc Andreessen, how elite schools such as Harvard turn kids into full-blown communists demanding the implementation of all sorts of Stalinist dogma like diversity in the workplace, what he imagines average, everyday taxpayers really think and want, the awesome and wide-ranging genius of Elon Musk, and whatever other topics are rattling around in that entitled and quite oblong head of his.
To put it yet another way, if by the end of an interview even such a cloistered and obtuse mediocrity like Ross Douthat has become incredulous at your absence of anything resembling empathy towards voters or understanding of all the ways they rely on a functioning federal government in their day-to-day lives, well, you really need to step back and re-evaluate all of your assumptions.
{snip}
Meet Marc Andreessen, whiny-ass titty-baby
.
GARY LEGUM
JAN 18, 2025
America’s Age of Broligarchs is upon us, officially commencing on Monday when Donald Trump takes power. Ahead of this dark moment in history, some of those broligarchs are giving the public a quick lesson in what a bunch of self-absorbed, arrogant, clueless, whiny-ass titty-babies they are. No wonder Orange Julius Caesar likes them.
We wrote last week about Peter Thiel and his deranged opinion piece that managed to sound like HAL the computer writing the Cliffs Notes for A Tale of Two Cities. This week’s charmless billionaire broligarch on some sort of twisted publicity tour is Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist mostly notable for both helping develop the Netscape browser that has not been in widespread use for a solid 25 years or so, as well as his unfortunate resemblance to Beldar Conehead, right up to his opinions sounding like Beldar consuming mass quantities of his own farts.
To put it more substantively, Andreessen gave interviews this week to both Bari Weiss and Ross Douthat about his expectations for governance in the Age of Broligarchs, his thoughts on government funding and waste, all the ways in which non-billionaires have been very mean and unfair to the geniuses of Silicon Valley like Marc Andreessen, how elite schools such as Harvard turn kids into full-blown communists demanding the implementation of all sorts of Stalinist dogma like diversity in the workplace, what he imagines average, everyday taxpayers really think and want, the awesome and wide-ranging genius of Elon Musk, and whatever other topics are rattling around in that entitled and quite oblong head of his.
To put it yet another way, if by the end of an interview even such a cloistered and obtuse mediocrity like Ross Douthat has become incredulous at your absence of anything resembling empathy towards voters or understanding of all the ways they rely on a functioning federal government in their day-to-day lives, well, you really need to step back and re-evaluate all of your assumptions.
{snip}