Why Does Marc Andreessen Support Donald Trump?

 According to Michael Barone, Marc Andreessen – the person who invested the first web browser for the internet – switched from supporting Democrats to supporting Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Andreessen explained his view in an interview with The Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss. 

“My concern is that the censorship and political control of AI is a thousand times more dangerous than censorship and political control of social media – maybe a million times more dangerous,” Andreessen, a prime innovator of artificial intelligence, told Weiss.

“The thing with AI is, I think AI is going to be the control layer for everything in the future – how the health care system works, how the education system works, how the government works,” he said. “So that if AI is woke, biased, censored, politically controlled, you are in a hyper-Orwellian, China-style, social credit system nightmare.”

Like fellow tech titan Elon Musk, Andreessen has come to see the Democrats as “the ones who are trying to silence free speech.” …

Andreessen is concerned less about transitory partisan finagling and more about possibly permanent suppressions of truth. The claim that “the COVID lab leak hypothesis was ‘misinformation’ and broadly censored on social media” is one such example, he says.

I have written often about the lab leak hypothesis and how denigration of it was concocted by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.

Starting February 2020, Fauci and Collins conspired to get colleagues who considered the lab leak likely to write a paper disparaging that theory and endorsing the idea that the virus came from a live animal market.

No evidence of such transmission has been found, and presumably, Fauci and Collins’ control over millions of dollars in research funding helped persuade the authors to change their minds. After publication, Fauci airily referred the article to the press as if he had nothing to do with it.

Establishment press outfits were happy to play along, characterizing the lab leak theory as “already debunked” (The Washington Post) or a “fringe theory” (The New York Times). The latter outlet’s lead COVID-19 reporter offhandedly referred to its “racist roots.”

Facebook and pre-Musk Twitter, now X, followed the cues and suppressed the lab leak theory even as they suppressed criticism of masking protocols and school closures.

By March 2023, the Energy Department joined the FBI in concluding that the virus likely resulted from a lab leak in China. They were bolstered by multiple articles by former Times science writer Nicholas Wade, and by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book “Viral.”

Finally, this month, a detailed report by the House Oversight Committee not only endorses the lab leak theory as the most likely explanation of the virus but also, as Ridley wrote in The Telegraph, “lays out in gobsmacking detail just how much senior officials allegedly have schemed to prevent information emerging.”

What they were covering up, it becomes plain now, is that Fauci was commissioning China’s Wuhan laboratory to conduct gain-of-function research, making the virus more contagious to humans, presumably to develop means of defense.

The report explains in painstaking detail how Fauci, in testimony before Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., used a misleading definition when he vehemently denied authorizing gain-of-function research.

One can argue the attempted coverup by Fauci and others ultimately failed….

However, one must also add that the scientists who led the coverup retained the capacity to shape pandemic policy, pressing successfully for measures that proved to be harmful or unnecessary, such as school closures, masking for children, and vaccine requirements for those with natural immunity from previous infection.

Another thing one must add: The press and social media billionaires who went along with the scientists’ speech suppression acted on the assumption that they were frustrating the intentions of Trump and his supporters, whom they continued – and continue – to regard as something like Hitler and Nazis.

Any evidence in favor of things the Trump side was for, the media outlets felt an obligation to suppress….

The Barone article shows that Andreessen is interested in protecting free speech. Americans should support all people who are willing to work to protect free speech in our nation.