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Marc Andreessen, the billionaire tech tycoon who co-founded Netscape, has recently been making the rounds on various podcasts to talk about how the Democrats mistreated him and forced him to become a supporter of Donald Trump. Andreessen’s obnoxious muttering would not go unnoticed, given the number of guys in the tech industry who denounced the “woke” to explain their support for MAGA. But a new interview published by the New York Times on Friday is interesting, if only because the Times cleaned up its writing to make Andreessen sound like a badass.
Andreessen spoke with New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat and said that the hour-long interview was pushed into audio mode through the show. A Matter of Thought. But the people who actually listened to the audio heard something that the readers did not learn. Apparently, Andreessen thinks Hillary Clinton was actually president from 2017 to 2021 and not Donald Trump.
Andreessen was complaining about how left-wing ideas have infiltrated all aspects of American culture in the late 2010s, with Silicon Valley companies under fire from all corners. They are the people who read Time records saw this from reading the investor’s statement:
Andreessen: So you’re in this sandwich from all your areas, and then you’ve got the press coming to you. You have activists coming at you, and then you have the (Federal) government coming at you.
Douthat: But wait, the federal government is being run by Donald Trump right now, right?
Andreessen: Not really.
But if you actually listened to the audio, this is what you heard:
Andreessen: So you’re in this sandwich from all your areas, and then you’ve got the press coming to you. You have activists coming to you. And then you have the government coming at you. And, of course, the federal government changed a lot under Hillary and even, sorry… the federal government… we’ll talk more.
Douthat: But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump…
Andreessen: Not really.
Douthat: …in this situation, right? So this is, I mean, this is a strange thing about the story, right?
It makes sense to clean up the text to remove repetitive words or “um” and “ah” to make things easier to read. But to remove the entire line that says “the federal government changed dramatically under Hillary,” is ridiculous.
The New York Times defended the decision to drop the byline in an email to Gizmodo on Friday.
Jordan Cohen, the Times’s senior media director, wrote: “In the audio of the interview, it’s clear that Marc Andreesen misquoted Hillary (you can hear him trying to correct himself). “Oftentimes we edit the text to make it clear so it doesn’t make mistakes, which is what happened here.”
The problem with that explanation is that Adreesen didn’t fix it himself, but added the idea. Doutha goes on to question Andreessen about how Hillary fared when Trump had “real power” as president. And Andreessen asks this question, asking “can you explain that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020?”
“Not very well.” I can’t say that,” says Douthat. “At the same time, it was not the case that the Democratic Party in 2018 or 2019 was able to pass new laws, either to raise taxes or to regulate Silicon Valley in various ways.”
Although 2016 and 2020 were the years in which the US presidential elections were held, Trump took office in January 2017, so Andreessen would be technically correct that Trump was not in power in the first year he mentions, 2016. he meant it. They are trying to say that Trump was not in control of the government because there was a “deep state” of obstruction of his will.
When Gizmodo reached out to the Times, we saw how guys like Curtis Yarvin, a right-wing blogger, believe in this idea of a “big church” that is where the “real” power is said to be. Yarvin thinks that liberal organizations and those in journalism and education have a lot of influence on society. Little did we know when emailing the Times that they were about to publish interview with Yarvin Saturday morning. Yarvin says in the interview that he communicates with Andreesen.
Another Times Times interview with Andreesen is so simple that it feels like a waste of time to even mention it. Andreessen seems to feel like a terrible victim of the modern world, with enemies on all sides constantly judging him. Andreessen sees tech startups as the true heroes of the community who were able to start companies, make huge amounts of money, and give that money away as they saw fit to receive endless praise.
But now that people are raising questions about why billionaires should be allowed to make filthy riches without being held accountable, they often suck at the government’s breast, to dictate how charity is distributed in life. The real answer, of course, is to tax billionaires to fund social welfare, but Andreessen doesn’t like that idea. You can listen to the whole episode YouTube if you really want to submit to this garbage.
These guys have it all, billions of dollars, power and influence, and they still see themselves as victims in a society where Donald Trump is about to become president. They desperately wanted the one thing they couldn’t buy, and that was the love and admiration they believed to be compassion. Almost people have tried to ask in recent years why the rich keep giving money all the time but they feel like it is in a system that is not good. And the ruling class can’t stand it.
