Marc Andreessen with Ross Douthat

I really like that big tech is on the trump train

Reading Instapundit this morning I found out that Marc Andreessen had done an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. I had no idea.

I’d gradually realized that Big Tech had done a 180 on the politics front, especially with Marc Andreessen’s appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience, The Free Press with Bari Weiss, Lex Fridman podcast. But I realize that Ross Douthat interview is the most important, because it was taking place in the lion’s den and published January 17, 2025.

Nothing remarkable. Just hammering in what Marc has been saying on all the other social media. When he says it at The New York Times, well. Here are the receipts.

Back in the Day

Al Gore: “What he said is, ‘I took the lead in the Senate in creating the internet.’” And when Marc was at University of Illinois — with big, government funded computers — “I did early research work there that resulted in the Mosaic browser, which broke the concept of the internet and the web through to the mainstream.”

But, in the 89-90 recession, he thought it was the end of the world. Then he and Jim Clark invented Netscape.

I thought I was in it at the very end, and then it turned out I was in it at the beginning of something new.

See! Even the eperts get it wrong.

And the Democrats were pro-tech.

Basically it was the pro-business Democratic Party. It was the pro-tech Democratic Party. It was the pro-start-up Democratic Party.

Dems go Anti-Tech

But then came Obama. “The breakdown was during the second Obama term. It took me by surprise.” And the center of it was The Kidz.

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.

And then in 2016 and the Trump 1.0 election, Marc started to feel pressure from Washington DC. Because the Democrats blamed social media for electing Trump. And in 2017, Marc was watching MSNBC every night and he agreed. It wasn’t until “reading the Mueller report, reading the Horowitz I.G. report and being like, ‘Oh, my God, none of this is true.’”

Come to Jesus Moment

In the 2018 to 2021 period chaps like Andreessen realized that Houston We Have a Problem.

The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation... Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways... Also just straight-up threats and bullying.

But nobody dared show their heads above the parapet. But the Democrats came after crypto and AI.

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.

Tech Flips Parties

Andreessen went to the White House in May 2024 to talk about AI, and got read the Riot Act by the senior staff.

Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups.

Oh dear me. They really don’t get it. The wokies really have No Klue.

That’s when Big Tech went public.

And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”

Talk about DOGE

There’s three parts to the DOGE effort: money, staffing, and regulation.

They have plans on how to do it that are, I would just say, light-years beyond anything I’ve ever heard of before.

As we are now finding out!

Look, you have the smartest entrepreneur of our entire generation, who’s, like, the conceptual genius of our time across multiple domains, who has put all of his intellect into this.

They have plans where when people see them, I think people are going to be like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that that is a way that you could think about this, and I didn’t realize that that’s the way that you could go about this.”

And don’t forget Mass Media vs. Independent Media.

The prior attempts to do this all happened under the old top-down media machine, and everything that happens now is going to happen in the full light of social media.

The New York Times article has 1800 comments. I wonder what they say.