The fantasy world of libertarian plutocrats

Well, here’s one answer to the question of why the Trump administration is engaged in total war with scientific research:

Influential tech investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen recently said universities will “pay the price” for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against supporters of President Donald Trump, according to messages he sent to a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders reviewed byThe Washington Post.

The billionaire’s messages also cited Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, a respected institution at the heart of Silicon Valley that has incubated tech companies such as Google. Andreessen and his wife have donated millions of dollars to the school.

“I view Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point,” Andreessen wrote in screenshots of messages sentMay 3 and reviewed by The Post.

The investor described a “counterattack” against universities in his messages and called for the National Science Foundation, a federal research funding agency, to receive “the bureaucratic death penalty.”

“mAInLY PoLITICal LObByING OpErationS FiGHtiNG aMeRican iNNoVaTiON At ThIS pOINT.” Research being set back by generations based on arguments that are just pure nonsense.

And needless to say, the racism behind this is overt:

“The universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack” from Trump voters, Andreessen wrote, alleging colleges favored immigrants over Americans and promoted DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies intended to increase race and gender representation.

“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal,” Andreessen wrote. “When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”

The idea that “children of the Trump voter base” have been cut “out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America” because of “DEI” is just absolutely absurd. But of course the real argument is that it’s bad that anybody but white peo…I mean, “children of the Trump voter base” has any access to [elite] higher education or corporate America at all.

We can also be pretty confident that when he’s talking about “children of the Trump voter base” he’s not talking about the working class ones:

I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.

It’s a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.

I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …

And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.

“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”

I’m taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks, though I can’t be sure those were his exact words. Marc, if you’re reading, feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory. Maybe he said “quiescent,” or “docile,” or maybe “powerless.” Something, certainly, along those lines.

Elon gets a lot more attention but Andreessen might be more influential in Trumpland, and he’s at least as pernicious.