How the Democrat Party Pushed Silicon Valley Into Trump's Arms

Ross Douthat, a damp neocon at the New York Times, interviewed tech mogul Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape.

He talks about how leftwing campus politics infested the tech industry, until the parasites gained control over the host.

Andreessen: I think the Valley before me, from the '50s through the '70s, was normie Republicans. They were businesspeople, C.E.O.s, investors, and they would have been, I assume at the time, big fans of Nixon, big fans of Reagan. That era was basically over by the time I arrived. I met a few of those guys, but when I got there in '94, it was in the full swing of Clinton-Gore, the restoration of the Democratic Party and recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force.

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As a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, "Oh, of course, I'm a normie Democrat. I'll be a normie Democrat forever."

Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood...

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you're a Democrat, you're pro--gay rights, you're pro-abortion, you're pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in '96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat.

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Douthat: When did you start to have doubts about the synthesis of Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party?

Andreessen: The breakdown was during the second Obama term. It took me by surprise. I think maybe the one person it didn't take by surprise is our mutual friend Peter Thiel. As with a lot of things, I think he saw it coming earlier than I did. But it definitely took me by surprise.

And just to give full context there: I had met Obama in, I think, '06 or '07, when he was a new senator. And he seemed great. It's the perfect package. It's literally everything that you could possibly dream for in a president. He has all the right social views, and he seems like an inheritor of Clinton-Gore. He says all the right things about capitalism at the time and about entrepreneurship. He's clearly in love with tech.

You may recall the 2012 election. It was literally the story of social media saves democracy, like it was literally that Barack Obama, the good guy, uses advanced technology, including the internet and social media to save the country from the Nazi fascist Mitt Romney. And this was, like, wall-to-wall positive press coverage.

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And then basically, in retrospect, what happened is after Obama's re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 2016, things really started to change.

The way the story gets told a lot now is that basically Trump was a new arrival in '15, and then basically lots of changes followed. But what I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014 and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, at least among kids. And I think, to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes.

Douthat: Those changes you're talking about, are they fundamentally about policies being made by the Obama White House, or are they fundamentally about the big shift leftward among young people that clearly started in that era?

Andreessen: So I would say both, and the unifying thread here is, I believe it's the children of the elites. The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.

They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we're not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies.
We're also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other, and so all of a sudden you have this influx, this new cohort.

And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.

Douthat: But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want?

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Andreessen: Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it's very analogous....

It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from "Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society" to "Capitalism is evil and should be torn down."

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: "When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?" And that was the thing.

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: "[expletive] it. We're burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil."

Douthat: But they're working for you. These are people who are working for you.

Andreessen: Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won't name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, "I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us."

They're professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you'd get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you'd have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there's way too many white men on the management team. "Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don't you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we're not emitting any carbon."

So you just take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they're spending a huge amount of time at the company, basically organizing around that. And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies this kind of person never got to be anywhere close to 100 percent of the work force.

But what happened is they became, like, 20 percent, maybe 30 percent. And then there's this big middle of "go along, get along" people who generally also consider themselves Democrats. And they're just trying to follow along with the trends.

So you take this activist core of 20 percent, you add 60 percent of "go along, get along" people, and all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, "Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda." What people say from the outside is, "Well, you should just fire those people."

But as a C.E.O., you can't fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can't go hire kids out of college, because I'm just going to get more activists. And so that's how these companies became captured.

He talks about Trump's election and the freak-out on the left. The left demanded answers to the question "How did we allow Trump to win?" And the answer, of course, "because social media companies made him win."

And he was actually eager to help undo the crime of making Trump win. And he and his fellow tech executives were eager censors and eager propagandists.

But... the Democrat Party just kept demanding more and more.

First of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven't already disabused yourself. The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong.

That's like, Goal No. 5 or something. There's four goals that are way more important than that. And that's not just true in the big tech companies. It's true of the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500.

I would say Goal No. 1 is, "I'm a good person." "I'm a good person," is wildly more important than profit margins. Wildly. And this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go completely bananas in all their marketing. It's why you saw them go bananas over D.E.I. It's why you saw them all cooperating with all these social media boycotts. I mean, the level of lock step uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the C.E.O.s of the Fortune 500 and what's in the pages of The New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and in the Ford Foundation -- they're just locked together. Or at least they were through this entire period.

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Here's the reason: It's the famous cliché "We live in a society." These people aren't robots. They're just not. They're members of a society. They're members of an elite class. They either come from the top, most radical education institutions, or they are seeking as hard as they can to assimilate into that same class.

Then, by the way, you're not just doing that yourself. You also have a family. And if your kids are in college, I mean, God help you, they're coming for you. Then you've got your radicalized employee base, and you maybe could have nipped the radicalization five years earlier, but now you can't, because it's now 80 percent of your work force.

By the way, you also have your shareholders, and this is where things get really bananas. A big part of the tipping point was when the major shareholders turned and became political activists.

So you're in this sandwich from all of your constituents, and then you've got the press coming at you. You've got the activists coming at you, and then you've got the [federal] government coming at you.

Douthat: But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump in this period, right?

Andreessen: Not really.

Douthat: I mean, this is the peculiar thing about the narrative, right? You're saying everyone is possessed by all these fears, and I grant you, they're powerful fears, but they are in an era when, officially, the Republican Party and Donald Trump are in the White House and have not complete but real power in Washington, D.C.

Andreessen: Well, did they? Like sitting here today, would you describe that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020?

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Andreessen: So things got much worse after 2020. So the part I would agree with is that things got much worse for tech, after they took formal control of the White House. For sure, that's right.

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And then of course, Covid hits, which was a giant radicalizing moment. And at that point, we had lived through eight years of what was increasingly clearly a social revolution. Very clearly, companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.

Things got really aggressive during that period. And so I go from watching Brian Williams every night and just being lied to 500 nights in a row to, basically, reading the Mueller report, reading the Horowitz I.G. report and being like, "Oh, my God, none of this is true."

And then you try to explain to people, "This isn't true." And then they get really mad at you because how can you possibly have any sympathy for a fascist?

Douthat: So you are radicalizing in the late Trump years.

Andreessen: Yes, for sure. There were quite a few people like me. Now, none of us were sticking our heads up at that point because, to be clear, it was way too dangerous.

None of us were particularly moral heroes at that point. But there were lots and lots of underground peer-to-peer discussions from 2018 through to 2021 saying, "OK, things are off the rails." And my point is, we were softened up for the Biden radicalization. Then when the Biden administration turned out to be far more radical than even we thought that they were going to be then that's what generated the response that ultimately --

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Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on "Rogan." Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on "[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You're going to do what we want or we're going to destroy you."

Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.

They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That's really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics. The crypto attack was so weird that we didn't know what to make of it. We were just hoping it would pass, which it didn't. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to A.I. that we realized we had to get involved in politics. Then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term.

Below, another tech titan describes his Red Pill moment: When he finally saw the full, unedited clip of Trump's Charlottsville remarks, he realized the media had been straight-up lying to him for years.

KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat

NEW: Tech billionaire and lifelong Democrat Mark Pincus reveals his "Red Pill" moment, sparked by Mike Solana's Pirate Wires and the "very fine people" hoax, culminating in him voting for Donald Trump.

"I started reading @PirateWires and @micsolana, and I thought he was a little crazy at first because he would write these articles, and one he wrote was about how the Ukrainian soldiers had swastikas on their helmets, and the NYT photographers would ask them to take the swastikas off for photos."

"I said that can't be true, and then four months later, it was in the NYT buried in the middle of the paper, and I kept seeing stories like that that he would be early on. So, I started feeling more uncomfortable and queasy with what was going on with mainstream media."

"Then, in May 2024, I read an article that talked about Trump's speech in Charlottesville, where he said there are good people on both sides, and the article said it was completely propaganda and didn't actually reflect what he said. That he denounced the Nazis a bunch of times in his speech, so then I went and watched that video, and that was my red pill moment."

"I think it was for a lot of people because it wasn't just the media or politicians spinning it. That speech was one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump. Then you see Biden say that's why he had to run a second time, and Obama says it, and Biden brings it up again at the DNC."

"They clearly know they are misrepresenting things, so for me, that was beyond uncomfortable. Now, I have to go back to first principles and look at the primary data, listen to only original speeches by people, and I just realized I couldn't trust the mainstream media."

What was your Red Pill moment?

posted by Ace at 03:15 PM

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