Free Speech: Why a Tech Titan Backed Trump

Why did Marc Andreessen -- inventor of the first internet web browser, and perhaps the prime venture capitalist in Silicon Valley today -- switch from his longstanding support of the Democratic Party and back President-elect Donald Trump this year?

Because, in his view, the Democrats who claim to be the great scourge of "disinformation" are threatening to embed disinformation in the bedrock of society. At least that's my interpretation of Andreessen's comments in a wide-ranging interview with The Free Press cofounder 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. 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." However, unlike many Trump supporters, he does not fasten upon the obvious partisan example: Secretary of State Antony Blinken's 2020 campaign enlistment of 51 current or former intelligence officials to depict Hunter Biden's laptop as bearing "the hallmarks of Russian disinformation."

That Democratic disinformation operation suppressed facts about Biden family corruption during the campaign year, but not forever, as President Joe Biden's pardon of his son showed.

Andreessen is concerned less about transitory partisan finagling and more about possibly permanent suppressions of truth. An example he cites is the claim that "the COVID lab leak hypothesis was 'misinformation' and broadly censored on social media."

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 in February 2020, they 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. 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 the 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. One can argue further that, unlike the Hunter Biden laptop coverup, this was not necessarily a partisan operation: It began during the Trump presidency and was uncovered in part by actions of the Biden administration.

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.

For Andreessen, the key moment came after Jon Stewart went on Stephen Colbert's show for an eight-minute segment in which he pointed out that it "literally cannot be a coincidence that you have the Wuhan institute of bat viruses," as he told Weiss.

After that, he said, "I was in a discussion at one of the big internet companies, where the discussion was like, 'Did you see the Jon Stewart thing? Ha ha. That was really funny. I guess we should stop censoring the lab leak theory now. Ha ha.' And literally, they stop censoring it that day."

So his theory seems to be that if you want free expression and exchange of ideas in an AI world, it's better to install a president such as Trump, whom the great establishments of government, journalism and academe will strive to rebut, rather than a Democrat whose comforting presence will leave them inclined to accept any convenient untruth.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.