How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms

[Timber Rattler]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html

Ross Douthat: I’m someone who follows politics primarily and Silicon Valley secondarily. And the alliance between the tech industry and the Democratic Party has always seemed like a solid fact of American politics. I could see the leaders of the tech industry souring on certain aspects of progressive politics, especially the parts that cast them as special villains. But I didn’t expect so many figures in Silicon Valley, starting with Elon Musk, to throw their support, money and social media clout behind Donald Trump in 2024.

My guest is one of those tech leaders, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. For decades he was, in his words, a “good” Democrat. But now he’s been spending time at Mar-a-Lago and advising on Trump’s transition.

Marc Andreessen, welcome to “Matter of Opinion.”

(snip)

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.

EXCERPT

This is a pretty good interview with a liberal Big Tech CEO who got "red pilled."

[Timber Rattler]

More...

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.

[Timber Rattler]

The red pilling...

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?

[Canuck Conservative]

Here's a part I liked -

"Douthat: What are the policies that shocked or surprised you about the Biden administration?

Andreessen: They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.

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. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing. Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas. Also just straight-up threats and bullying.

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...."

[jafo2010]

What is missing here is the full replacement of the white collar workforce with low cost foreign labor.  With Trump being fully supportive of the H1-b Visa Program, what is now 1.6 million foreigners here on H1-b Visas could turn into 5 million, then 10 million, and then 50 million.  And Trump will support this progression every step of the way, now that he can no longer run for POTUS.

So my question is, how many Americans need to be displaced with low cost foreign labor before Americans wake up to the betrayal?

[PeteS in CA]

Tech company manglers' attention should have been grabbed when Jesse Jackson tried his shakedown on AMD, decades ago.

I'm so old I remember when CEOs of Silicon Valley high-flyers Tandem Computers, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems brought in and gave podiums to Bill Clinton. Bill has outlived all three, by decades.

If American white-collar people in tech are being replaced by supposedly low-paid H1b visa holders, how are the sons and daughters of liberal elites getting jobs in tech companies. The decades-old (the IEEE was peddling it in the 1980s) moldy H1b visa stereotype is, ummmm, complicated by reality.

[Fishrrman]

From the original article:
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.

Nothing new here.
I saved the following excerpt from Whittaker Chambers' "Witness", published in 1952:
=================================================
After that confrontation, I returned to my office at Time and went through the motions of working. Everyone was kind. No one pressed me. One day Henry Luce called me up and asked me to come to supper.

There were three of us. The second guest was a nimble, witty European whom I shall call Smetana. At supper, most of the talk was between Luce and Smetana. I was a rather silent guest. I was too fresh from the shadows; bright conversation hurt my mind. In fact, I had left behind the world of Time and those who lived within it. It was only the friendliest of fictions that I still belonged to it.

No one mentioned Communism or the Hiss Case until we sat over our coffee in the living room. Mrs. Philip Jessup had just used her personal good offices to try to get me off Time. Luce was baffled by the implacable clamor of the most enlightened people against me. “By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave,” he said, “the upper class should be for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?”

“You don’t understand the class structure of American society,” said Smetana, “or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.”
=================================================

[MeganC]

Tech company manglers' attention should have been grabbed when Jesse Jackson tried his shakedown on AMD, decades ago.

I'm so old I remember when CEOs of Silicon Valley high-flyers Tandem Computers, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems brought in and gave podiums to Bill Clinton. Bill has outlived all three, by decades.

If American white-collar people in tech are being replaced by supposedly low-paid H1b visa holders, how are the sons and daughters of liberal elites getting jobs in tech companies. The decades-old (the IEEE was peddling it in the 1980s) moldy H1b visa stereotype is, ummmm, complicated by reality.

A close friend of mine made her first fortune on Silicon Graphics. Your mention of the firm made me think of her. Thank you! She died in 2019.

[Hoodat]

Trump's promise to pardon Ross Ulbricht also played a role, at least among the Libertarian crowd, especially after the Biden regime help themselves to $5 billion in bitcoin from him while he wasted away in jail.