History repeats itself.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Ten score and fifty years ago on July 4th, 1776, the thirteen newly united states of America declared their independence from the British Empire. Asserting the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, born with certain unalienable rights, these thirteen states invoked their right to alter or abolish their current government. This decision was not made lightly—”Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes”—but the Empire’s list of injuries and usurpations had grown too long for the colonies to bear. Two hundred and fifty years later the Trump administration is now repeating many of the same abuses as King George III.

Let facts be submitted to a candid world

Most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of twenty-seven complaints and accusations levied at the British Crown, “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

By my count President Trump has hit at least twelve so far.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither

President Trump has repeatedly threatened to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship. The Department of Justice recently began the largest denaturalization effort in US history, attempting to revoke the citizenship of seventeen Americans. Monthly naturalizations are at the lowest levels ever recorded by USCIS data. The President lowered the number of refugee admissions from 125,000 to 7,500 annually—except for white South Africans. He attempted to raise the fee for new H-1B visas to $100,000. USCIS has seemingly stopped approving green cards for any reason other than family and employment, totaling a 50% decline from 2024. He banned or restricted visitors from forty countries, potentially preventing the entry of one in five legal immigrants.  

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance

In March 2025 employees of the “DOGE” program illegally trespassed into the US Institute of Peace headquarters and summarily fired its staff, recruiting DC law enforcement to help them break into the building. A federal judge later declared these DOGE officers “illegitimately-installed leaders” who had no authority or basis for taking over the office. Similar stories played out across Washington DC in early 2025 as DOGE employees descended on federal agencies to illegally cancel programs, shutter offices, and fire staff. Much of substance was lost during this time of pillaging, including millions of Americans’ personal information and, catastrophically, USAID. The federal deficit continues to climb to record highs, worsened by severe staffing cuts at the IRS. 

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures … For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us

The nation’s capital has been under military occupation for 327 days. President Trump first mobilized the National Guard on August 11th, 2025, on the basis of a “crime emergency” despite DC’s violent crime rate having fallen to thirty year lows. Part of this order included seizing federal control over the city’s Metropolitan Police Department with the first ever invocation of Section 740 of the Home Rule Act. 80% of DC residents opposed the deployment, with 61% reporting that they feel less safe as a result. The President previously told military leaders they should consider U.S. cities to be a “training ground” and described the occupation as “a war from within.” In California the President illegally deployed the military onto the streets of Los Angeles in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and has attempted similar deployments in cities like Chicago and Portland. The historical parallel is particularly relevant for DC’s occupation, as its lack of statehood plays a key role in Trump’s ability to exercise his power against the will of the people. District residents have long pointed out the irony of the nation’s capital city being subject to federal control without Congressional representation. DC’s license plates read “End Taxation Without Representation” for good reason.

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States

In January 2026 federal agents from ICE and Border Patrol were filmed murdering two American citizens in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Jonathan Ross, the agent identified as Renee Good’s killer, has not been arrested for his crimes or even fired from his job. As far as I know, neither have Jesus Ochoa or Raymundo Gutierrez, the men identified as Alex Pretti’s killers. Federal law enforcement prevented local Minneapolis police from accessing crime scene evidence and has refused to pursue any investigation into the killings. Federal agents have taken to intimidating those who criticize these killers, showing up to polling places to threaten legal action against a woman for advocating that Jonathan Ross be indicted. Prior to Good and Pretti’s murders, Ruben Ray Martinez was shot and killed by Homeland Security agent Jack Stevens in Texas. The Department of Homeland Security claimed Stevens fired in self defense after Martinez “intentionally ran over” the officer, despite bodycam footage clearly showing otherwise. There will be no trial, not even a mockery of one, for the federal agents who killed these Americans.

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent

On April 2nd 2025 President Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariff agenda, the highest peacetime tax increase in American history. These taxes were levied on foreign trade with every country on Earth, including some countries that don’t exist. The Supreme Court has since declared most of these tariffs illegal, and ordered the administration to begin refunding American companies for the tens of billions that Customs illegally seized over the past year.

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

The President and his closest advisors have repeatedly advocated against the concept of due process and fair trials. Administration officials have made efforts to suspend habeas corpus. Over 280 men were detained and shipped overseas to the El Salvadoran prison CECOT, known for its cruel conditions and use of torture. According to the National Immigration Law Center none of these men were given any opportunity to defend themselves in court. The President enabled these detentions and removals with an illegitimate invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, claiming that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was staging an invasion of the United States. During a meeting with the leader of El Salvador Trump expressed his desire to send American citizens to CECOT. 

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments

The DOGE-born ransacking of the federal government claimed many victims, but none more disastrous than the shuttering of USAID. With absolutely zero legal authority, Elon Musk and a small group of loyal followers recklessly dismantled a statutory agency responsible for saving tens of millions of lives. American employees were left stranded in foreign conflict zones and critical relief programs were unable to respond to natural disasters. Some operations managed to survive under the State Department and the legal entity known as “USAID” technically still exists on paper, but the actual agency and its staff are no more. If there ever was a “most valuable” agency in the United States government, it would most likely be USAID. For less than half a percent of the annual budget, USAID programs prevented approximately 90 million deaths over the past two decades.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us

The Trump administration routinely denies federal funding to Democratic states. Only 23% of disaster relief requests from states with a Democratic governor are approved, compared to 89% from states with a Republican governor. Motivated by their immigration crackdown in Minneapolis—the same crackdown that claimed the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—the federal government has repeatedly halted Medicaid payments to Minnesota. The President regularly describes Democrats as “the enemy within” to military leadership. As mentioned before, he has illegally deployed the military on US soil against Democratic governors’ wishes. While threatening a similar deployment to the city of Chicago, President Trump depicted himself dropping napalm on the city’s skyline and posted, “Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR” to his personal social media account.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us

Following his loss in the 2020 election, President Trump orchestrated a massive election denial campaign that culminated in an attempt to submit fraudulent Electoral College votes and stage an insurrection at the Capitol building to pressure lawmakers into changing the results. Five people died during or immediately following the insurrection and 174 police officers were injured. Four more officers would die by suicide in the following months. 1,575 people were arrested for their crimes on January 6th, 1,030 of whom plead guilty.

President Trump pardoned all of these insurrectionists on his first day back in office. 

Since then dozens of these insurrectionists have been arrested on other charges, including several cases of child sex crimes. Enrique Tarrio, who received the longest January 6th sentence of 22 years, is now enjoying his free time cozying up to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

What, if not a revolution?

Luckily there are more options available to us than there were for America’s founding revolutionaries. We already live in a democratic republic, enshrined in the world’s longest-living Constitution. Midterm elections will be held this fall—despite Trump and Republicans’ efforts to rig them in their favor—and 2028 Presidential campaigns will spin up soon after. Ordinary Americans need not take up arms against a tyrannical regime, not yet and hopefully not ever. This does not diminish the stakes at all. The frog in a boiling pot metaphor is woefully out of date: the water’s been bubbling for years. What was written off as delusional hysterics in 2016 are now daily headlines a decade later. Defeating our modern-day oppressors may not require a capital-r Revolution against the government, but it does require a revolutionary change to our government. As the Declaration states, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”—emphasis on alter or abolish.

Merely electing new leadership is not a solution to the Trump presidency. Too many guardrails have broken and fatal flaws revealed to paper over with a new face in the Oval Office. The Republican Party cannot be allowed to wash their hands of this experiment with fascism. America will survive Donald Trump but she cannot survive thermostatic oscillation between attempted national suicide and cleaning up the mess every four to eight years. We have already tried a return to normalcy. Donald Trump’s first presidency ended in disaster: nationwide civil unrest and economic turmoil amidst the worst public health crisis in a century. In response the Democratic Party nominated and elected Joe Biden, a lifelong establishment politician and Vice President to the most beloved American politician alive. We all know what happened next. Regardless of how much personal blame you place on Joe Biden, he clearly failed to accomplish his most important task: preventing another Trump presidency. Something more must be done.

I do not pretend to have all of the answers for a future Democratic President or Congress, but I do have the first one. The Trump administration and its enablers must be completely and thoroughly destroyed with the full force of the law. That will require the political will to both ruthlessly enforce existing laws and create new ones. The Declaration of Independence was not a blueprint for what would become the United States; debate and contradiction were no strangers to the nation’s founders. Indeed the Declaration’s most obvious contradiction—that all men are created equal while one in five Americans were enslaved—would lead to civil war a century later. What the Declaration served as was a rallying cry for what they unanimously agreed to be intolerable. In the coming years competing Democratic politicians and factions will spend plenty of time, money, and effort to define what the future of liberalism will look like. No matter what vision you like best, we should all agree that we can no longer afford to believe that Trump and his Republican Party are a temporary anomaly. 

[A]ccordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed … Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

To celebrate America’s 250th birthday let us remember what she was born to do.

Featured image is "Long Live The King," White House 2025.

There is no sentence in America more famous than “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” Declared before the world 250 years ago. In second place is simply the phrase “We, the People,” In both cases, much of the text around these famous words is forgotten, along with its significance. But the ideas that we are all born equal, that we have inalienable rights, that the People are sovereign: these are at the core of the American democratic religion.

Ours is a religion of saints and martyrs. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington always vie for the highest seats, with Lincoln always close behind. Madison is the saint of institutions and political architecture, FDR perhaps the last elected official to truly gain that status.

After centuries of white men and presidents, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. were added to this canon of American saints—at some point and in some regions of the country. But a canon of saints is precisely what continued to get handed down. Perhaps some schools in some districts took some time to dwell on the unsaintly qualities of some of these figures, or the systematic character of certain persistent evils in our history.

Yet by and large they have not and still do not. Americans have always taken our history with a heavy dose of hagiography. And so American children who grow up with enough intellectual curiosity to read history with clear eyes frequently end up feeling betrayed by the lies their teacher told them. An all too common story for left-liberals is pure disenchantment. Adults on the right, meanwhile, double down on the mythology at the expense of reality.

Disappointed cynicism and defensive idolatry both have a similar thought-terminating quality to them. An unwillingness to face the weight of reality in its totality. America is not merely the arc of history bending towards justice, nor merely justice delayed or outright denied. It is not merely the promise implicit in the Declaration of Independence nor the genocide of indigenous peoples. It certainly is not “somewhere in the middle.”

America is both.

“The pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness” and the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Slavery and abolitionism.

John C. Calhoun and Harriet Tubman.

Reconstruction and Redemption.

Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Division.

MAGA and the Resistance.

Jonathan Ross and Renée Good.

We’re the country that built continent-crossing railroads and sky-scraping towers and the country that has forgotten how to do exactly that. We’re the country that built the greatest system of publicly funded science in the world and the country that is burning that system down for no particular reason. The arsenal of democracy and unable to keep up with Russian munitions production. The country of PEPFAR and the country that pulled the rug out from millions of sick children worldwide. The country that defeated the slave power and fascism in war and the country who pursued wars of arrogance in Vietnam and Iraq. The country of the Golden Door and the country of mass deportation. The country of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and of Trump’s UFC match.

America is both. Accepting this does not mean surrendering to the way things are. It means accepting responsibility for your part in that history. Your responsibility to do what you can to nudge us towards being more of one than the other, away from fascist consolidation and towards 21st century Reconstruction.

America is both, and has been for 250 years.

Today we will no doubt see many quotes from Thomas Jefferson, a troubled figure who very much embodies both sides of our history. I will instead quote a different and more recent troubled figure: “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Featured image is John C. Calhoun by George Peter Alexander Healy, and a mural of Harriet Tubman, picture taken by Wikimaribarre

Samantha interviews Professor Omar Wasow, challenging him to reflect on the first year of the second Trump administration. What forms of resistance have worked? What forms have been less successful? Why is the regime trying to "recreate 2020," and why are they failing? Professor Wasow tells a story about why nonviolence, adaptation, and creativity are essential building blocks for retaking power.

Neon Liberalism can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Samantha and guest Will Stancil talk the murder of Renée Good and the Trump administration's larger assault on Minneapolis. Will is on the front lines of monitoring ICE in Minneapolis, working with his neighborhood rapid reaction group, and remains a vital commentator and activist in this disturbing time.

Will recounts witnessing ICE abductions, confronting ICE agents, and the personal experience of living in a city under siege. He also talks the larger questions of how resistance has been organized, why this isn't 2020 all over again, why this isn't about immigration, but terror—and how we can beat them.

Neon Liberalism can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

A recent leak of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s group chats has revealed that he’s quite happy to see our university system destroyed if it will keep out foreigners and humiliate the elites who “actively discriminated against” people like him. The messages are at times quite shockingly racist in their content, referencing how “the combination of DEI and immigration” are “two forms of discrimination” that “systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”

Less shocking but no less notable is his contempt for elite centers of learning. He declares “Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point,” a remarkably delusional statement. Andreessen has made no secret of the fact that he feels he and his tech oligarch peers have been betrayed by elite institutions and the Democratic party. But the reality is that they are the ones who have betrayed not only their country, but the very system which made their fortune and status possible.

The partnership

The history of the Internet is a history of the peculiar partnership of government, academy, and industry that are the foundation of the American model of innovation and growth—warts and all. Most people have heard of ARPANET, the precursor to the more broadly available Internet. That came about as a result of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) scientists Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, who developed TCP/IP, the protocol that allows computers to talk to one another and still forms the basis of the Internet today. 

In 1971, recent MIT graduate Ray Tomlinson was working at a firm with access to ARPANET and developed the current basis for email. That same year, Abhay Bhushan—an international student from India in a master’s program at MIT—developed the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

The web specifically, including HTML which websites are written in, was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and others at CERN—an example of how investment in advancement anywhere produces benefits well beyond the countries that invest in them. Berners-Lee developed a rudimentary browser to test the concept, but the first browser to gain any traction was Mosaic, developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 1993. In 1994, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded “a large grant” to NCSA to continue developing Mosaic.

Among those who worked on Mosaic at NCSA was Marc Andreessen. He is also, of all the names mentioned so far, the only person who went on to become a billionaire, and indeed is one of the 2000 richest men on the planet. He was well positioned to take a product to market because of the work he was able to do as part of a research organization (NCSA) within a public research university. We have already covered the specific federal grant that went to Mosaic. After reaping the benefits of that public infrastructure and investment, Andreessen went to the private sector, where he developed Netscape Navigator, eventually selling his company to AOL for billions of dollars.

Obviously, much of Andreessen’s fortune has come from his subsequent successes as a venture capitalist. Yet without that very first success, there’s little chance he could have become a big time VC in the first place. And now he has betrayed the very system that made his success possible; the system in which he and a handful of others like him have profited disproportionately relative to their contribution.

Industry’s role

The American system is not an unbridled free market, and that’s a good thing. It is also not central planning, either, and that’s a good thing as well. America in the second half of the 20th century sought to create a mixed system that offered the best of every component. Public financing would provide a stable stream of resources for work that was potentially beneficial to the public yet difficult to make a business case for. Alongside actual government agencies doing research and development directly, universities and other research organizations created the institutional environments that fostered productive research and scientific collaboration. Finally, investors and entrepreneurs searched for opportunities to take something to market. 

This does not mean that industry’s role was merely taking what government and the academy developed and offering it to consumers. Businesses can conduct original research as well; for example, in 2023 private firms spent $735 billion on R&D. But the main role of industry in practice is to take things the final 20 percent (or less) they need to go to be ready for the public. A good deal of R&D itself is more about setting aside time and funds to work out the kinks of things originally conceived somewhere in the partnership between government and the academy. This is an incredibly important role and one that is easy to underestimate the value of. If you build out cable infrastructure 80 percent of the way to populated areas but no one ever builds the rest, it is effectively worthless. And 20 percent of the problem doesn’t necessarily mean 20 percent of the difficulty. Sometimes, that last mile is quite hard indeed, and the particular approaches and incentives of business make them the best suited to the task.

On the other hand, sometimes the last 20 percent is much less than 20 percent of the difficulty. Netscape is very much one such case. The Netscape team did not develop HTML, which the browser rendered, nor the websites written in it. They did not develop TCP/IP, never mind the hundreds of thousands of miles of cables and the server infrastructure that made it possible for the tiny ARPANET to become the public Internet. They created one piece of software that performed a simple task well enough to deliver to the market, and they successfully achieved mass adoption. More critically for Marc Andreessen’s personal fortune, Netscape the company was acquired before Netscape the product was ultimately supplanted by competitors.

Again, the difficulties of achieving mass adoption should not be underestimated. The ability to write code that runs at scale may be a relatively hard skill that is straightforward to gauge, but the softer skills of sales and business do matter and aren’t automatic. Innovations cannot change people’s lives if they are never adopted. One part of industry’s role is simply figuring out what particular configuration of an innovation appeals to the public and doing the work to deliver it to them.

Nevertheless, even in this, Netscape’s task was relatively easy. People simply had to download it—on computers built by someone else, running an operation system developed by someone else, connecting to a network built by many others. Yet of all these legions of people doing the work to deliver computers capable of browsing the web, only Marc Andreessen and a handful of others (such as Bill Gates) became megarich, while the rest had largely ordinary salaries.

The deal

The justice of allowing so few to profit so disproportionately has been constantly debated in American history, including the entire era of the partnership of government, the academy, and industry. Nevertheless, while tax rates at the top have varied—although effectively much less so than one might think from changes in the top marginal rate—we have largely tolerated the enormous gains of the few in industry. One defense of this outcome is that the entire point of industry is for private actors to take on the risk of their actions, meaning they stand to lose if they make mistakes and could potentially lose everything. Of course, even this simplifies matters. Private businesses can receive public grants, and the government has frequently stepped in to bail out troubled firms if they are perceived as important enough (or more cynically, are politically connected enough). But most businesses do not receive public grants and cannot credibly expect to be bailed out by the government, and so their owners face the very real risk of failure. High rewards for succeeding are the flipside of shouldering high risks. And both the risk of losses, and the possibility of large rewards, aligns private actors in ways that are beneficial to the public—if constrained within a proper system of laws and regulations.

One can think of industry’s role in this system as a deal made with the government and indeed, with society. It goes like this: you, the investors and entrepreneurs of industry, will figure out which of the innovations that government and the academy and other researchers have done 80 percent of the work on might be valued by the public. You will take the risk that your judgment is incorrect and do the work to carry it the last 20 percent of the way to mass adoption. This will give you the chance to become very rich as a result, which we will tolerate, even if your wealth is disproportionate to your particular contribution, because industry’s role overall is very valuable.

On the other hand, you will be subject to regulatory and political scrutiny, because all of this only works if what you are doing is actually for the public good in the end. There are plenty of things that industry gets its hands in that turn out to be ponzi schemes, outright fraud, or well meaning but ultimately harmful to the public. They do not have perfect incentives to self-police these matters, and even if they did, people are people—quite capable of self-deception and seeking short term gains. The regulatory state exists for a reason.

But of course, there is no such deal. To speak of “deals” of this kind is to indulge in the kind of fiction all too common in the social contract tradition, where rhetoric slips seamlessly from acknowledgement of a fiction to treating it as an empirical fact. We live in a huge, continent-spanning, polyglot, pluralist society, where unanimity has never been in the cards. Many people were never happy with the level of regulation, thinking there was too much or too little. Many people felt (clearly correctly) that the existence of billionaires in our system was not just unjust but actually dangerous for the stability of our politics. Others felt that allowing entrepreneurs to become billionaires was essential for innovation, and indeed far more essential than any of the work performed by government or the academy. Rather than a deal, there has just been a constant renegotiation of the arrangement since the very beginning of it, from FDR to Reagan to today, and the many cycles of turnover in Congress and state governments in between. There are no permanent victories or permanent deals in politics, and this is especially the case in a free and democratic society.

Marc Andreessen believes there was a deal, however. A “Deal, with a capital D” that “was just something everybody understood.”

You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro-gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

Left unclear are what the “sins” in question are supposed to be or how much of his money Andreessen actually gave away. At any rate, Andreessen feels that this deal has been broken. It was broken by elite universities, who turned the children of elites into “America-hating communists.” And it was broken by the Democratic Party, which “decided that we were to blame for Trump.” The communist millennials who entered the workforce in the 2010s sought to destroy every institution they touched, including the companies invested in by Andreessen-Horowitz, and the Democratic-controlled media abetted them. This escalated when Biden came into office and, for example, “They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I.”

Since “the Deal, with a capital D” had been broken, Andreesen and his cohorts had no choice but to throw their lot in with Trump, who now is making those dealbreakers pay the price. And it’s going swimmingly, from Andreesen’s point of view. He is no longer bound by the terms of “the Deal,” which required him to pay lip service to “all the fashionable and appropriate social causes” such as human rights and equal dignity. 

To his dying day, Andreessen will surely believe that they are the traitors, that he was the one who was betrayed. But the only traitor is Andreessen himself.

The treason of the tech oligarchs

The partnership between government, the academy, and industry was a sweet deal for investors and owners like Andreessen in which they reaped the largest personal rewards of any actor by far. This partnership has been tremendously beneficial for the world in advancing the frontiers of science and technology. And it has been even more beneficial for America itself, our influence in the world, our quality of life, and our military capacity. And it is exactly this partnership that Andreessen has betrayed.

Andreessen and the tech reactionaries were not betrayed by “American-hating communists” backed by the “Democratic machine;” they simply could not be content to be merely rich. Out of spite towards those who disrespected them and contempt for liberal democratic governments that attempted to hold them to the obligations of citizenship and the law, Andreesen and his peers have betrayed the very arrangement that made them wealthy and influential. 

Research universities have been targeted since the very first week of the current Trump administration, and in a way that would put research centers such as NSCA, where Andreessen got his start, at risk. NSF, which paid out a grant for NSCA’s cutting edge work on the Mosaic browser, has faced drastic and illegal cuts and will almost certainly face more for the rest of Trump’s term. Meanwhile, after regulators suspected that the cryptocurrency industry was rife with ponzi schemes (or they ran “incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto” in Andreessen’s words), the Trump administration will be giving the industry an enormous bribe. The tech oligarchs want government cash but not obligations, wealth without duty or any of the basic burdens of citizenship. The rewards of success without the risks of failure, and indeed, they want to be rewarded even when they fail.

They have betrayed the society that enriched them, and have put us at serious risk of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, lawlessness, and stagnation. They have betrayed the values that made that society great, values which they apparently only ever held superficially because they believed it would make them appear respectable. They can no longer be trusted. When the wheel turns once again, the matter of their treachery must be revisited, and a new arrangement must be reconstructed from the wreckage of the old one.

Featured image is NCSA Blue Waters, by HorsePunchKid