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}