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<i>Politico</i> seems to be trying out a new stance on Trump — 22 Comments

  1. It should come as no surprise that our MSM is horribly biased in favor of Leftism.
    The Left is consistently, historically biased. It achieves control by lying, everywhere its ugly head is raised. No matter where.

  2. But was it really “denial”? Or was it righteous anger at the kangaroo court proceedings, and faith that truth would ultimately prevail? Is it denial if Trump wins as he seems to have thought he would? Or was it the left that was in denial?

    All perfectly said. I like to believe some old school, liberal-not-leftist, Democrats are asking themselves precisely those questions. But I confess I’m sometimes guilty of wishful thinking.

  3. Time will tell and all that, but I believe a good many Democrats are relieved to have Daddy and commonsense back in the White House.

    They will find ways to justify their relief.

    We best not interrupt our enemies while they are not making a mistake.

  4. neo writes, “The idea [that ‘Trump Is a Great President’ (but is ‘Still Trying To Be a Good One’)] is similar to the idea of Time’s ‘Man of the Year’ award, which is that ‘greatness’ is measured by impact, whether bad or good.”

    I was instantly reminded of Louis Farrakhan referring to Adolph Hitler as “great” in 1984:

    “Here, the Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call him Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He wasn’t great for me as a black person, but he was a great German, and he rose Germany up from the ashes of her defeat by the united force of Europe and America after the first world war.

    “Now, I’m not proud of Hitler’s evils against the Jewish people. But that’s a matter of record. He rose Germany up from nothing. Well, in a sense you could say there’s a similarity in that we’re rising our people up from nothing. But don’t compare me with your wicked killers.”

    Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/04/12/second-farrakhan-controversy-caused-by-calling-hitler-great/b3b4ed46-8263-4875-a793-5789a29f74ab/
    . . . albeit quoting from The Chicago Tribune

    (Still quoting from The Washington Post source) “Asked about those comments, Farrakhan said, ‘I don’t think you would be talking about Adolph Hitler 40 years after the fact if he was some minuscule crackpot that jumped up on the European continent. He was indeed a great man, but also wicked. Wickedly great.'”

  5. The Left; a dysfunctional combination of a refusal to acknowledge fundamental realities and a willingness to lie about that refusal.

  6. The article quoted sounds like more filth from Politico.
    ———————————————————————-
    I don’t read Politico, but I note that Sundance links to them a lot, and the excerpts he quotes seem like fairly objective reporting.

  7. It’s easy, Trump is one those who likes to fight for the fun of the fight! The Left will never ever understand that!

  8. Related to this change of mind by politico is the move by some in Silicon Valley to the right. The interview of venture capitalist Mark Andreeson by Ross Douthat is getting a lot of attention. Here’s a link to a podcast of the interview

    https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/matter-of-opinion/id1438024613?i=1000684362806

    The Ace discusses it here

    https://ace.mu.nu/#413320

    And Victor Davis Hanson discussed it on his podcast

    https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-victor-davis-hanson-show/id1570380458?i=1000685418790

    Neo, as a student of political changes, what do you think about the sincerity of people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and their changed attitude towards Trump? Do you buy the rationalization by Andreeson of the reasons for their change?

  9. Re: Tech CEOs and Trump

    Bob Wilson:

    Scott Pinsker offers his thoughts on the subject:

    –“The Billionaire Tech Bros, Their MAGA Conversion, and a Con You Haven’t Considered Yet”
    https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2025/01/24/the-billionaire-tech-bros-their-maga-conversion-and-an-angle-you-havent-considered-yet-n4936326

    Pinsker’s theory is that the Tech Bros understand AI’s ferocious appetite for energy and water. The Trump administration will support the quest for ASI — Artificial Super Intelligence — to the tune of $500 bil for Project Stargate. So of course the Bros going to make a deal with the Trump administration.

    Which is true and astute.

    Nonetheless, as a minor tech veteran of Bay Area/Silicon Valley, I will say DEI is just not in our DNA. These CEOs and employees are fiercely competitive. There is plenty of blood on those steel-gray carpeted floors.

    Just ask Mark Andreeson about the time Microsoft threatened to cut off his company’s “air supply.” That company, Netscape, is now just a footnote in internet history.

    Sure, those CEOs came up in posh, trendy universities. In sentimental moments they may catch those DEI feelings. But they still are sharks.

    If getting ahead in the Obama/Biden socialist utopia meant playing the DEI game, they played it.

    Now they don’t. And they will be happy not to.

  10. From “Sherlock:” [B]ecause Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and I think one day, if we’re very lucky, he might even be a good one.

  11. Bob Wilson:

    I think their change is more pragmatic than political and more shallow than deep; more practical than philosophical.

  12. Excellent analysis of the tech billionaire’s conversion, huxley. IMO, it’s spot on. Money talks and BS walks.

  13. @ Bob Wilson > “The interview of venture capitalist Mark Andreeson by Ross Douthat is getting a lot of attention.”

    I read the transcript & commentary at Ace.
    Wow. Just wow.
    It’s very long, and I wish it was a transcription of the full video, but Andreeson does not pull any punches, takes responsibility for his own actions, and really lays out what was happening. Direct link to the post:
    https://ace.mu.nu/archives/413320.php#413320

    Douthat: Those changes you’re talking about, are they fundamentally about policies being made by the Obama White House, or are they fundamentally about the big shift leftward among young people that clearly started in that era?

    Andreessen: So I would say both, and the unifying thread here is, I believe it’s the children of the elites. The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.

    They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we’re not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies.
    We’re also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other, and so all of a sudden you have this influx, this new cohort.

    And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.

    Douthat: But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want?

    Andreessen: Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left.

    Here’s the reason: It’s the famous cliché “We live in a society.” These people aren’t robots. They’re just not. They’re members of a society. They’re members of an elite class. They either come from the top, most radical education institutions, or they are seeking as hard as they can to assimilate into that same class.

    Then, by the way, you’re not just doing that yourself. You also have a family. And if your kids are in college, I mean, God help you, they’re coming for you. Then you’ve got your radicalized employee base, and you maybe could have nipped the radicalization five years earlier, but now you can’t, because it’s now 80 percent of your work force.

    By the way, you also have your shareholders, and this is where things get really bananas. A big part of the tipping point was when the major shareholders turned and became political activists.

    So you’re in this sandwich from all of your constituents, and then you’ve got the press coming at you. You’ve got the activists coming at you, and then you’ve got the [federal] government coming at you.

    Douthat: But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump in this period, right?

    Andreessen: Not really.

    RTWT or listen to it.

    Ace also included this bit, and an excerpt from the source tweet, where Pincus reveals he made the radical decision to actually look at the video instead of just reading about it:
    https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1880677951920013332

    NEW: Tech billionaire and lifelong Democrat Mark Pincus reveals his “Red Pill” moment, sparked by Mike Solana’s Pirate Wires and the “very fine people” hoax, culminating in him voting for Donald Trump.

    “That speech was one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump. Then you see Biden say that’s why he had to run a second time, and Obama says it, and Biden brings it up again at the DNC.”

    “They clearly know they are misrepresenting things, so for me, that was beyond uncomfortable. Now, I have to go back to first principles and look at the primary data, listen to only original speeches by people, and I just realized I couldn’t trust the mainstream media.”

    Where have we heard that story before?

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  15. Marc Andreessen also spoke with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution earlier this month:

    https://www.hoover.org/research/marc-andreessen-its-morning-again-america

    It’s an hour and fourteen minutes long but well worth watching. Andreessen touches on the “radicalized college kids” phenomenon and his own political journey.

    Andreessen grew up in a small town in Wisconsin and went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is a top public research university but not a feeder for the American ruling class. I saw him demonstrate an early version of NCSA Mosaic–the first widely adopted graphical Web browser–in the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) Software Development Group’s auditorium on the UIUC campus in late 1992-early 1993. Larry Smarr and Joe Hardin were the NCSA project managers; Andreessen and Eric Bina did the coding. Andreessen was a long-haired undergraduate then.

  16. What Harris is essentially saying is:
    “I’m a punk…AND I LUV wastin’ yer time….cuz I’m in a bit of a hole at the moment….”

  17. Hubert:
    “I saw him demonstrate an early version of NCSA Mosaic…”

    That is so cool! I first saw Mosaic (I think it was pre-Netscape) circa 1996 and only had a faint inkling of what it portended.

    Mike Plaiss:
    Definitely. Here’s to hoping that at least some of the old school dems will see things the way they actually are.

  18. Sparkee: I thought it was cool and that it had interesting implications for my then profession, but that was it. I did not know that I was witnessing the birth of a new medium and a world-changing event.

    Netscape Navigator was the commercial successor to Mosaic. It was a joint venture between Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Clark and Andreessen, who had just graduated from UIUC and moved to California. Netscape rapidly overtook Mosaic in popularity; we started using it in my office at UIUC in 1994-1995.

    Those were heady and hopeful days–just writing about them here makes me remember how it was.

    Alas, nothing gold can stay. This 2021 post–“Requiem for an Electric Dream”–from an apparently dormant blog captures the promise of those early years in Silicon Valley and how it all eventually went sour:

    https://antidem.wordpress.com/2021/05/31/electric-requiem/

    The author–“AntiDem”–made some of the same points Andreessen makes in his interviews with Robinson and Douthat. Among our commenters, I believe Huxley was there (in what AntiDem calls “the old Silicon Valley”) around the same time.

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