Billionaire Asshat Blames Everyone Except Himself For His Reactionary Asshattery
Meet Marc Andreessen, whiny-ass titty-baby.
America’s Age of Broligarchs is upon us, officially commencing on Monday when Donald Trump takes power. Ahead of this dark moment in history, some of those broligarchs are giving the public a quick lesson in what a bunch of self-absorbed, arrogant, clueless, whiny-ass titty-babies they are. No wonder Orange Julius Caesar likes them.
We wrote last week about Peter Thiel and his deranged opinion piece that managed to sound like HAL the computer writing the Cliffs Notes for A Tale of Two Cities. This week’s charmless billionaire broligarch on some sort of twisted publicity tour is Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist mostly notable for both helping develop the Netscape browser that has not been in widespread use for a solid 25 years or so, as well as his unfortunate resemblance to Beldar Conehead, right up to his opinions sounding like Beldar consuming mass quantities of his own farts.
To put it more substantively, Andreessen gave interviews this week to both Bari Weiss and Ross Douthat about his expectations for governance in the Age of Broligarchs, his thoughts on government funding and waste, all the ways in which non-billionaires have been very mean and unfair to the geniuses of Silicon Valley like Marc Andreessen, how elite schools such as Harvard turn kids into full-blown communists demanding the implementation of all sorts of Stalinist dogma like diversity in the workplace, what he imagines average, everyday taxpayers really think and want, the awesome and wide-ranging genius of Elon Musk, and whatever other topics are rattling around in that entitled and quite oblong head of his.
To put it yet another way, if by the end of an interview even such a cloistered and obtuse mediocrity like Ross Douthat has become incredulous at your absence of anything resembling empathy towards voters or understanding of all the ways they rely on a functioning federal government in their day-to-day lives, well, you really need to step back and re-evaluate all of your assumptions.
Just for one example, Andreessen at one point brought up his belief that the problem with government spending is that the little people (us) haven’t been exposed to all the terribleness of it, and that Musk and his phony Department of Government Efficiency and all his little billionaire friends are uniquely positioned to finally get people to see things the way these guys see them when they are bitching to each other while flying around on their private jets:
“Take what you would think would be a bulletproof program, like child disability in schools. It’s far from clear to me that the median taxpayer would support that if they really knew what that was. As you and I both know, what that has become is basically a medicalized mental illness. To the point where students in schools now are basically using fake diagnoses of mental illness in order to get drugs and in order to get extra time on tests. That whole program has run completely out of control, and everybody with kids knows that, but it’s not a discrete thing that people can wrap their heads around and understand.”
Andreessen seems to think that there is exactly one program addressing the needs of disabled schoolchildren, it’s somewhere in the federal government, and it is being gamed by parents who want little Timmy to get an extra 20 minutes to finish his math quiz.
Needless to say, this is not remotely how programs to mainstream disabled children in schools work, something Andreessen could have learned if he spent five minutes reading about the issue on the Internet, that marvelous tool he loves to brag he helped make accessible to everyone. Or he could talk to some of the parents who have had to fight government bureaucracy to access some of these programs and are currently freaking out that Trump’s promise to close down the Department of Education will mean an end to funding of said programs.
There was plenty more gibberish from Andreessen. But the one that really caught our eye is one he repeated to both Douthat and Weiss. This was his concept of The Deal, which is what he seems to think is some sort of understanding between society and billionaires that they get to do whatever they want and the rest of us just shut up about it forever:
“Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.”
Er, no. You really don’t. Just ask Andrew Mellon or Cornelius Vanderbilt or any other Gilded Age robber baron. Does the occasional library compensate for the immiseration and misery inflicted on society by vast gaps in wealth inequality, the consequences of which can be felt across the rest of society for generations upon generations? Seems obvious to us that it does not. Of course, we’re not a Mellon or a Vanderbilt.
“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.”
Ah, gay rights are simply a fashionable social cause, and not a vehicle for helping gay people live in a democratic society with all the same rights and freedoms that white straight men like Andreessen enjoy as a birthright from the moment the doctor yanks them out of the womb and slaps them on the ass.
Sorry, buddy, but there is no natural right to a positive obituary. And if you don’t get how your sneering condescension towards all the little people who are apparently supposed to be grateful to you forever because you helped code Netscape is incredibly off-putting and in no way a substitute for a more equal and equitable society, that’s a you problem, not a rest-of-society problem.
What, the rest of us are just going to live with your arrogant douchebaggery until you die, and then write fawning obituaries for you? How does that help keep the Education Department funded and functional today?
It doesn’t, of course. And a democratic society can and should argue about what we all think is the better approach in a constantly evolving world. We hope to one day live in such a society!
But as an excuse for turning into a thin-skinned right-wing reactionary publicly pissing his shorts because his employees and much of the public advocate for a more equitable world where everyone’s economic stability is not a gazillion times more precarious than yours, “wahhhh the poors were mean to me” is the weakest of weak sauce. And we guarantee that joining up with Donald fucking Trump and his merry band of Nazi-curious sycophants is now going to be the first line in that obituary you were so desperately hoping would say something nice.
Please support independent media, which is the only media left that is allowed to criticize blubbering charlatans like Marc Andreesen.
We need to start treating Thiel, Musk, Zuck, and Andreessen with the same contempt that the MAGAts deploy against George Soros. Hell, we wouldn't even need to lie...
"... you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.”
Techbro & Angry Dad stumbles blindly over Catholic Indulgences, declares self original thinker
Fck him