Marc Andreessen, the billionaire tech investor who co-founded Netscape, recently spoke on various podcasts about how the Democrats were so mean to him and forced him to become a Donald Trump supporter. Andreessen’s obnoxious whining would otherwise go unnoticed, given how many tech industry dudes have blamed the backlash against “vigilanteism” to explain their support for the MAGA movement. But a new interview published Friday by the New York Times is interesting, at least because the Times cleaned up its own transcript to make Andreessen sound less like an idiot.
Andreessen spoke with New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat, and that hour-long interview was released in audio form through the show A matter of opinion. But the people who actually listened to the audio heard something that the readers failed to learn. Apparently, Andreessen thinks Hillary Clinton was actually president from 2017 to 2021, not Donald Trump.
Andreessen rambled on about how left-wing ideas permeated every aspect of American culture in the late 2010s, with Silicon Valley companies under fire from all sides. And people who read Times transcript saw this reading the words of the investor:
Andreessen: So you are in this sandwich of all your constituents, and then you get attacked by the media. You have activists coming at you, and then you have [federal] The government is coming for you.
Douthat: But wait, the federal government in this period is run by Donald Trump, right?
Andreessen: Not really.
But if you actually listened to the audio, you heard this:
Andreessen: So you’re in this sandwich of all your constituents, and then you have journalists attacking you. You have activists coming at you. And then you have the government coming at you. And of course, the federal government became violently radicalized under Hillary and then even, sorry… the federal government… we’ll talk about that later.
Douthat: But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump…
Andreessen: Not really.
Douthat: …in this period, right? So this is, I mean, this is the unusual thing about the story, right?
It’s perfectly normal to clean up your transcript to remove repetitive words or “um” and “ah” just to make things easier to read. But deleting the entire line claiming that “the federal government has become heavily radicalized under Hillary,” is just ridiculous.
The New York Times defended the decision to omit the line in an email to Gizmodo on Friday.
“In the audio version of the interview, it’s clear to the listener that Marc Andreesen is misquoting Hillary (you can hear him trying to correct himself),” wrote Jordan Cohen, the Times’ executive director of communications. “We typically edit transcripts for clarity to avoid presenting factual errors, which is what happened here.”
The problem with that explanation is that Adreesen didn’t actually correct himself, he actually doubled down on the idea. Douthat goes on to ask Andreessen about how Hillary governed when Trump had “real power” as president. And Andreessen questions the premise, asking “how would you describe Donald Trump running the federal government between 2016 and 2020?”
“Not entirely effective. I wouldn’t say that,” Douthat says. “At the same time, it wasn’t the case that the Democratic Party in 2018 or 2019 was in a position to pass some sweeping new legislation, whether it was raising taxes or regulating Silicon Valley in various ways.”
Although there were 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in the US, Trump took office in January 2017, so Andreessen would technically be correct that Trump had no power during that first year he cites, 2016. But that obviously not what he thought. He’s trying to suggest that Trump didn’t really control the government because there was a “deep state” that thwarted his will.
When Gizmodo reached out to the Times, we noted that guys like Curtis Yarvin, a far-right blogger, believe in this concept of a “cathedral” where the “real” power supposedly resides. Yarvin believes that liberal institutions and those in journalism and academia have a real impact on society. When we emailed the Times, we didn’t even know they were going to publish interview with Yarvin on Saturday morning. Yarvin mentions in the interview that he communicates with Andreesen.
The rest of the Times’ interview with Andreesen is so gibberish that it almost seems like a waste of time to even mention it. Andreessen seems to feel himself a terrible victim of the modern world, with enemies on all sides constantly condemning him. Andreessen sees tech founders as the true heroes of society who were once able to start companies, make huge amounts of money, and then dole out that money as they saw fit for endless accolades.
But now that people are asking questions about why billionaires should be allowed to amass obscene amounts of wealth without accountability, often while sucking the government’s teat, only to have the sole say over how the charity is dispersed later in life. The right answer, of course, is to tax those billionaires to fund things for the public good, but Andreessen doesn’t like that idea. You can listen to the whole episode at YouTube if you really feel like exposing yourself to this garbage.
These guys have everything, billions of dollars, power and influence, and they still see themselves as victims in a society where Donald Trump will become president. They are desperate to have the one thing they cannot buy, and that is the love and admiration they believe came with philanthropy. In recent years, average people have dared to ask why the rich should only give money whenever and however they feel like it in a system that is far from meritocratic. And the ruling class cannot stand it.