Right-wing podcaster and Trump adviser Steve Bannon leveled a billionaire venture capitalist and other "oligarchs" of the tech-right, including Elon Musk, who embraced the MAGA movement.
Marc Andreessen — who recently sat for an interview and explained how he drifted away from the Democratic Party into the MAGA camp over the last few years — became a topic of discussion between New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and Bannon in an interview that aired Friday morning.
In opening the interview, Douthat noted he talked to Andreessen two weeks ago about the "newest faction in Trumpworld, the so-called tech right." As he introduced the populist Bannon — who hails from what Douthat called "Trumpism Classic" — Bannon immediately took issue with his characterization of Andreessen.
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"Ross, thank you very much, but I got to correct you right out of the box. Please don’t tell me, because I read your column, that you consider Marc Andreessen a part of the right. Marc Andreessen and the oligarchs are nothing but a bunch of progressive leftists that had their Damascene moment between 10 and 11 o’clock on the evening of Nov. 5 when the Trump movement won Pennsylvania."
Bannon added: "The oligarchs are not conservative. They’re certainly not on the right. Everything they’re doing — crawling on their bellies, to try to get into and pollute this movement — is because they see the raw political power of this movement. I find it disgusting and revolting."
Later in the interview, Bannon continued to take issue with Douthat's characterization of Andreessen, again insisting Andreessen is an "oligarch."
"They’re 100 percent oligarchs. They believe in technofeudalism," said Bannon.
Bannon asserted that the tech-right is in D.C. for one reason: They either knew Trump would win, or they came to the capital after he won.
"I mean, Facebook’s Damascene moment wasn’t until 10 o’clock that night. Now he’s down there. They’re oligarchs who believe in technofeudalism. They have nothing. They’re not even on the spectrum where we can argue against Rachel Maddow and AOC and Bernie Sanders on the spectrum. They’re not on the spectrum. They’re a totally different thing," he alleged.
Elsewhere in the hourlong interview, Bannon said the tech oligarchs all want "eternal life."
"You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction 'Dungeons & Dragons' guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every [expletive] step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that," he raged.
Bannon continued his rant against the so-called technofeudalists — tech industry titans that he says were given a deal by the federal government allowing them to become extremely wealthy in exchange for the U.S. becoming the tech capital of the world — saying they must be stopped.
"If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world," he said. "And you see this in artificial intelligence. We have no controls over this. We’ve allowed these monopolies to exist. And now we know they’re getting their ass handed to them, I think, by the Chinese Communist Party."
