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.
Douthat: This is all happening by 2016, when Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, which we’ll treat as a decisive break toward whatever the next phase of Silicon Valley ideology is. But in 2016, the Democratic Party as an institution actually started putting sustained pressure on Silicon Valley. What you’re describing with radicalized employees is pressure, but it’s not Washington, D.C., getting involved. It’s only after the election that Silicon Valley is seen as responsible — through Facebook, through social media, through Russian disinformation, through allowing disinformation for getting Trump elected. That’s the point at which the Democratic Party in Washington starts putting pressure on tech companies. Does that seem fair?
Andreessen: That’s 100 percent true. That’s completely correct. I would just say that I went through the description of ’13 to ’16 because when the main Democratic machine kicked in and decided that we were to blame for Trump, the overwhelming response for basically everything, other than Peter, was just like, “Yep. You got us. We’re guilty. We did it.” Because, as you know, it’s, like, wall-to-wall coverage in the news. I’m reading The New York Times every day, and I’m watching MSNBC every night, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have we done?”
Douthat: Are you watching MSNBC every night at that point, Marc?
Andreessen: Yes, every night. Brian Williams. The last remaining honest news anchor in America. The guy you can really rely on, the guy you can really trust to tell you the truth. Eleven o’clock or eight o’clock out here, every night it was, “It is Day 167 of the Trump interregnum of having a Russian spy in the White House.”
And it was an hour of just “The world is ending.”
Douthat: Didn’t you have companies to invest in, though?