"The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal. When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.... So of course you have to go overseas to get qualified PhD candidates, most of the native born kids who could have been in that pipeline were cut out of it.... I was born in 1971 in Iowa and grew up in Wisconsin. My cohort of citizens was told that we just had to put up with this as a cost of prior American bigotry even though the discrimination was now aimed at us. And for the most part we did. But the insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020 totally shredded that complacency. And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore. The universities are at ground zero of the counterattack since they are BOTH actively discriminating against us AND primary origin points and propagation vectors.... They declared war on 70% of the country and now they’re going to pay the price...."
Wrote Marc Andreessen in a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders.
My prompts to Grok were "What does Marc Andreessen mean by 'my people'?" And then: "That's going to be seen as racist by a lot of people. Why wasn't he smart enough to use different words? One answer would be that he meant to signal to white people that they need to come together and fight for their own interests." Answers:
here.
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71 comments:
My daughter can attest to this, every PhD program she applied to was already filled with either Chinese or Indian candidates.
Very well said by "the Good Mark". Surprised to see a member of the 1% say it so well. Bravo.
"That's going to be seen as racist by a lot of people. Why wasn't he smart enough to use different words?"
Which people? Perhaps there's your answer.
Acting like properly guilty white people without first thinking of ourselves as white people is going to be tricky.
My people seems clear enough. If others can claim a cultural identity, why the hell can't rural descendants of those who fought and labored to create a country where once great universities flourished.
Sure, it was a poor choice of words, but he was speaking truth to idiots and knaves. Academia got bored with America and Americans and turned its back on the country and its people.
His "people" might be Midwesterners. 70 years ago, Harvard and MIT were excited to get bright young Iowans. Now they don't care and are embarrassed by them.
Wrote Marc Andreessen in a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders.
"Wrote" and "chat" need a little clarification. I imagined him sitting in a corner and furiously scribbling while the others were talking, but I suppose some newfangled technology was used.
Standford is also the home of the corrupt fraudulent faculty parents of convicted democrat campaign bundler Sam Bankman-fried. The whole place needs to be prosecuted and go to prison under RICO.
Further proof that all higher "education" is simply organized white collar crime.
Why didn't he speak out earlier when this all STARTED happening at the universities? WHy didn't you and your generation of academics, ann? Do you know how hard it is to undo what mediocre people in power create? Do you know what was lost when so many talented people were relegated to the sidelines because of discriminination?
Of course not. What's on the telly tonight, ann?
I heard him say the same thing in a podcast yesterday, and he specified Midwestern middle class people. They also happen to be predominately white. He brought up the percentage of foreign students at prestigious universities is now well over half.
Using AI to find answers to technical questions or historical facts makes sense since it has access to a huge amount of information. However, we still must be careful that it got the facts correct. You better check to see if all of the references are real! Using AI to answer questions about what a person meant is fraught with danger. AI is not human. It cannot properly discern the motives of a person. Think of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Would you trust HAL to know what Dave’s intentions were.
I am old, but even my Master's program in Chemical Engineering, in 1990, was 80% foreign students. I went to school in Ohio, so not one of the elites. However, this is consistent everywhere you go for a Masters or PhD in a hard science or Engineering. Look at Penn State, Ohio State, and even Iowa State. If your TA teaching Chem 101 speaks English and is a citizen, you are lucky.
It is difficult to think of a more hostile environment for straight white men than a college campus. By the late 90s, we saw that the women coming out of law schools were more assertive than most of the men. (Not surprisingly, these women then proceeded to make Biglaw firms an equally hostile environment for all but a few Alpha males.)
Why the hell do you think Grok "knows" anything about why Andreessen--like every other person of any ethnic or cultural background--refers to "my people?" And how is that "racist?"
By 1980, at the College of Engineering at Berkeley, the joke was that I was easy to locate in any class. "Just find the guy without black hair"
"My people" = Midwesterners. People in what the coastals consider fly-over land.
Stick with me here.
I've long felt that we've viewed the kids in the poorest areas of our cities- the ghettos- as 'disposable'. We do nothing to change the pattern of their lives from generation to generation. We have years- decades now- of poor kids in the worst neighborhoods, locked into the worst schools in our nation. They are typically born to a single parent, and just to walk to and from school is a daunting task. They are regularly threatened or groomed to become gang members- as the old are killed off, replacements are needed. And not seeing any way out, they drift into gangs, or off to the side.
We, as a society literally toss out generations of kids- potentially the finder of the cure for cancer, the next great physicist, future engineers, teachers, architects, etc. We just...toss them away and give it no second thought. Every 2 years a Democrat will come by and offer up words and some cash to get the folks in those poorest areas to come out to vote.
Andreesen is saying that the same thing, in a different way, has been done to the people in the Midwest and South. They have been considered "throw-away". Not to be concerned with at all. There is no respect, not even an acknowledgement of their existence. And most certainly not to be taking up space at MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, etc. etc.
So...in essence. Our nation has been cranking out foreign students from our finest universities and sending them back home to raise the economies and research in India, China, and other countries. While here at home, we are taking the majority of our young people- from our inner cities, from Midwestern cities and towns, from Southern cities and towns- and basically ignoring them, disregarding them.
It's like a great athlete trying to compete in the Olympics with one leg tied to one arm, unable to move. We are literally handicapping our own nation, so that our universities can get wealthier.
You should listen to the entire talk with Andreesen.
Marc is a high-level genius. He "invented" the internet. He's a grad of Illinois.
Why is it that everyone assumes that only a certain number of schools with a brand are the best and only places to get an education?
The way I see it is that so-called second tier schools like Creighton, Illinois and others can teach the kids who got rejected at the Ivies.
One of Bill Gates' top Leftenants was from Ashland, Nebraska and went to UNL: Jeff Raikes. His family has a meat market in Ashland and a farm.
The guy who invented Twitter with Jack Dorsey was Evan Williams, a UNL dropout. Ev supposedly owns nearly all the farmland in his former county.
We're Not the Crazy Ones
My people.
Could it be that the great revolt 50+ years ago against working life, 9 to 5, the Rat Race and grey flannel suits and another brick in the wall blah blah created an opening for more ambitious foreigners?
Who hire their own.
Nobody remembers that right?
Good for Mark. I don't think anything will really change until the boomers die off. They didn't suffer from AA and are still think its a 90 percent white country, and pat themselves on the back for being so non-racist and "generous". Most younger white people understand its a racial world, and they're getting the worst of it.
When Whites stand up for themselves it's racist- Thanks for the AWFL perspective. That's the one that has been driving the internal insanity, rage, and treason against the USA for decades. Andreesen is 100% correct.
Instead of "white" wouldn't "European" be a more accurate identifier. This whole woke attack on Western societies is more about culture than race it seems to me.
a little jealousy perhaps on Marc's part. Didn;t they ever let him come to the big kids table? And now that he is a billionaire he can expound on his petty grievances so that we all "care"? No
The suicide of our great universities is not a "petty grievance". It's an existential threat.
Quite sure Mark's people are same as mine: men or women who get my 80's movie references. Don't over complicate it.
Was it a poor choice of words, or just an even-handed one, which people have been conditioned to react to?
By the way, when most of your post-graduate students are imported, the education / training / innovation you're providing is mostly exported.
For the edification of Icky Vicki, the original Little Old Lady from Pasadena, as a graduate student at the University of Illinois he invented the world’s first web browser. He is a very intelligent person and we should listen respectfully to what he has to say.
Except I see that Icky Vicki no longer identifies as being from Pasadena. Did she get burned out by the Eaton fire? Vote Democrat and get screwed over.
The Stanford Faculty Senate admitting that Jay Battacharya and Scott Atlas were right and they were wrong would be a good, though small, first step back to respectability for Stanford.
Elite universities are no longer American, they are global. The infuriating part is that our robust system of land grant colleges are more attuned internationally than to their home state. It's not much different than Washington DC, which is no longer the seat of American governance but the imperial capital of a global empire.
Let's ask Grok, "Why, oh why, isn't Andreesen as smart as our hostess?"
Victoria, you should respond to Andreesen’s arguments instead of trying to personalize them. I think it is a damned shame that young people are mistreated on account of race. Do you think it was just a petty grievance when young black people in the south were told to step aside so that white students could take their place?
victoria said...
a little jealousy perhaps on Marc's part. Didn;t they ever let him come to the big kids table? And now that he is a billionaire he can expound on his petty grievances so that we all "care"? No
7/12/25, 11:21 AM
And thank you for illustrating my point.
RCOCEAN II said...
I don't think anything will really change until the boomers die off. They didn't suffer from AA and are still think its a 90 percent white country, and pat themselves on the back for being so non-racist and "generous".
7/12/25, 11:08 AM
And RC OCEAN is also 100% correct here. vicki from pasadena is a libtard boomer who likely lives in a muti-million dollar home that was provided to her by a white man, husband or father, and lives an upper class life of luxury and safety because of the efforts of white men, but she is ungracious, ungrateful, and rebellious. Sits in her ivory tower and cheers on the terrorists making life miserable for the normies.
How often have we heard the elites or 1%ers contemptuously refer to "those people" (explicitly or implicitly) when referring to those country bumpkins in "flyover country?"
Now, we're supposed to be upset when this guy utters, "my people?"
MIMS!
DEI? Check. Globalism? Check.
Anything else?
When I was a Physics Grad student in the 90's, at the U of Oregon, about a quarter of the Physics grad students were Chinese, and they were always the upper quarter on exams. This was rather dispiriting to "my people", until we came to realize that they already had doctorates from Chinese institutions. Where they had used pirated copies of the same texts we were just being introduced to.
You couldn't really blame the university. The Chikes had excellent GRE scores, much better than the Americans'.
I was on the admissions committee for a physics dept graduate program. It was common knowledge that the Chinese GRE scores were bogus.
The sorrows of empire. Thinking you can rule the world while letting the country fall apart.
“One answer would be that he meant to signal to white people that they need to come together and fight for their own interests.”
This made me chortle a bit. Did anyone think White people wouldn’t be ferocious players of the Identity game the instant minority-status gave them permission? DEI was always going to be a suicide pact for all involved.
the Founders of Harvard and Stanford, thought there was something noble to export to the world, their successors do not, in part because of the mind arson,
My prompts to Grok were "What does Marc Andreessen mean by 'my people'?" And then: "That's going to be seen as racist by a lot of people. Why wasn't he smart enough to use different words? One answer would be that he meant to signal to white people that they need to come together and fight for their own interests."
Of course Ann is going to dodge the point. Ann was personally involved in the racism, sexism, and bigotry.
Yes Ann you supported Racism and Sexism. You actively helped. But mostly it was class warfare. You didn't want competition from the muck for your offspring.
And now the pendulum swings.
We all know who Andreeson is talking about when he says "my people." It is average Americans middle and working class and not part of the gentrified elite.
But Ann wants to make it racist and obfuscate. Shocking.
This was about limiting opportunities for poor people. Now the Proletariat is going to rise up and take the Aristocracy down.
I hope they take the retirements of the University system employees to pay off student debt. That was one of the most disgusting generational wealth transfers in history.
Original Mike said...
"That's going to be seen as racist by a lot of people. Why wasn't he smart enough to use different words?"
Which people? Perhaps there's your answer.
Exactly.
It is almost as if racism is a cover to avoid the point Mark made.
The problem for the current crop of Aristocrats is they weren't smart enough to make a rapprochement when they had power.
But Aristocrats have almost never been smart enough to avoid their fate.
Who cares? I had a serious boyfriend in college who was a genius and worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week in the lab.
In 1985, he could barely get into any medical school, though our school had unmatched science and math credentials, and he had perfect scores on the appropriate tests.
He told me it was because of foreign students taking all the seats. He took a third-tier school, rose rapidly after graduation, and died at 35 as a child cancer researcher of acclaim at UCLA.
Our loss.
Moses said, “Let my people go.”
Mr Hart got into HLS so there is no problem.
In manufacturing based Fortune 500 companies there is a definite trend to hire grads from regional universities and particularly from state engineering concentration schools. Ivy\near Ivy grads are kind of toxic now, except perhaps in Wall Street and banking.
In the 1980’s I had cousins that lived on a farm that was even more rural than normal. Their high school was small and did not have advanced classes. They got all a’s and were shocked when they flunked out of good state schools. We need good online national high schools so all kids can get AP classes. Even if as a supplement.
When I hear one of these Titans-of-Industry types say "my people," my first thought is he means the people who work for him. It has long been a standard part of their vernacular. "Great, have your people get in touch with my people to hash out the details."
So when he said "My people are furious," I figured he meant his people, the ones on his payroll.
I find Ann's use of Grok off putting. I come to Ann's blog to find out what she's thinking not what some poorly programmed machine thinks.
Can you imagine how much American life would be if we had avoided affirmative action, DEI and the New Left of the 1960s. Would our cities be safe and gleaming with new infrastructure? There is a reason our biggest cities are dying. Leftist theology has turned them into festering sores that need to be lanced and cleaned out.
In manufacturing based Fortune 500 companies there is a definite trend to hire grads from regional universities and particularly from state engineering concentration schools. Ivy\near Ivy grads are kind of toxic now …
I’ve been retired for a full decade now, but back in the day I refused even to look at the resume of an Ivy League college hire. These guys never seemed to believe that they had to prove themselves — they were from an Ivy so that was that. I think the main thing they learned at their colleges was how to concoct semi-plausible excuses as to why their software module was late. Or poorly unit-tested. Or didn’t meet specs.
This Grok thing is becoming tedious. We want to know what you think.
From the context it's clear that "my people" refers to people who are disadvantaged by DEI and immigration. Are the disadvantaged White? If so, why is it "racist" to point that out? Those disadvantaged by Jim Crow were Black. Was it racist to point that out?
Josephbleau: “ We need good online national high schools”
I keep saying, individual AI instructors. And of course if they’re teaching AP, they are by definition teaching at the university level. So just AI the whole thing. Completely change the board. Tear the whole playhouse down.
Andreessen should spearhead an AI instruction revolution.
RR
JSM
Back in the 90s, Adobe made a practice of hiring from small schools. Sometimes very small. Chico State in N. California. Cal Poly SLO. And ex-Navy guys.
Worked ok for them, I think.
Steve Sailer has shown that of the elite schools, MIT is the only one to decrease its black admissions significantly since the SCOTUS ruling. From 15% to 5%, which is still higher than the racial IQ distribution would warrant, particularly with other elites hoovering up second tier black students so strongly. I'm pretty sure that does NOT include international students.
They didn't suffer from AA
Boomer females benefitted from it enormously.
Ducks.
That's going to be seen as racist by a lot of people.
Yeah, any time you get into race and racial issues, you're going to be seen as racist by a lot of people. It's the nature of race and racial issues. The whole point of race is to divide people!
His comment was only partially about race, by the way. He was also talking about spending all this money to educate foreigners and non-Americans, while punishing people here at home. You could, and probably should, take the "my people" reference to be a comment about the American people. And how it makes no sense for those in power to hurt Americans while they help foreigners. That's one big reason why Trump won.
Is Grok still a Nazi or did they fix it yet?
Anyone who sees 'my people' as racist is a jackanapes.
Getting in a little DEI practice here...
"Are the disadvantaged White? If so, why is it "racist" to point that out?"
Because it just is. Anything/everything "white" is racist.
"Those disadvantaged by Jim Crow were Black. Was it racist to point that out?"
No.
These are actually pretty easy questions.
Google says first boomers were 15 years old when AA took effect.
10th graders, paper routes, mowing lawns, McDonalds.
"1946 to
What Is a Baby Boomer? “Baby boomer” is a term used to describe those who were born from 1946 to 1964"
"In response to the civil rights movement, President John F. Kennedy created a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity in 1961 and issued Executive Order 10925, which used the term "affirmative action" to refer to measures designed to achieve non-discrimination."
"Google says first boomers were 15 years old when AA took effect."
Boomers have been blamed for the current financial problems with Social Security (brought to you by the silent generation) and Medicare (brought to you by the greatest generation) for years. Might as well tar them with the AA fiasco, too.
Is Grok still a Nazi or did they fix it yet?
Apparently, it's still tormenting Will Stancil with not bringing lube.
With respect to earlier commenters, Marc Andreessen neither invented the Internet nor the first web browser. The Internet long predated the World Wide Web, which also predated Andreessen's work on the NCSA Mosaic web browser at the University of Illinois.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed what would become the World Wide Web, and he wrote the first web browser and web page in 1990. Andreessen's web browser came along in 1993. Andreessen's claim to fame is that the NCSA Mosaic browser was the first browser to get widespread use across multiple platforms. After Mosaic, he started work on Netscape Navigator.
It's hard to pin down exactly when the internet became the Internet, but recognizable components of it existed in the 1960s. Certainly by the 1980s, people were using "the Internet" to refer to a specific network with specific characteristics, as opposed to the more generic technical meaning of "internet", i.e., two or more interconnected networks.
Let's not give AIs even more erroneous information. We have enough hallucinations already.
In order to restore faith in higher education, Trump must cut Sanford and MIT's funding and give it to the unaccredited "university" of Austin.
"Google says first boomers were 15 years old when AA took effect"
Clinton was 25 when AA was put in place by Nixon in 1971. He supported it his entire life, as did Bush. As did Obama. Even Trump hasn't said a word against it. And its even worse for Pre-Boomers like biden, Pelosi and Mccain.
Biff with the necessary fact check.
Mosaic/Netscape was an important step, but neither the first step nor the most fundamental.
What make me laugh most is the people praising him but calling him Mark. Let me tell you, the Marc's of the world are very quick to correct that mis-spelling. Just email one, you will see.
"That's going to be seen as racist by a lot of people."
A liberal's judgment of what's racist is worth exactly nothing.
@Biff, if you want to be pedantic there’s no one stopping you, but I was a sufficiently near the cutting edge of technology to be a member of program committees for various international technical conferences (most notably ACM SIGMOD/PODS) and I was unaware of any successful web browser prior to Mosaic. I suppose it’s a bit like the relationship of Ford’s Model T to the Patent Motorwagen invented by Karl Benz.
If you really wanted to destroy the sleazy business model of the exploitive universities, you would ban then from asking people for their tax returns in exchange for financial "aid" (which is just price discrimination, the likes of which a car dealer would be sent to jail for trying to pull).
You'd require that the "sticker price" of the college be what the average student pays, not the inflated bogus price that schools use to make families think they are getting some kind of a deal.
You would ban colleges from accepting foreign students if they had unaccepted American students in their applicant pool with identical or better qualifications.
The higher ed finance system is just as awful as the medical finance system: in the latter, doctors and hospitals are REQUIRED to charge ruinous prices to the most vulnerable people (those without health insurance, but not official in "poverty") so that they can claim to giving a huge discount to insurance companies and the government. Likewise in higher ed families are required to declare all their assets and income and THEN are told what the price will be: imagine walking onto the lot and being told "Every car here is 250K in price, but let me see your financial records going back 4 years and I'll tell you how much you'll be paying."
"It was common knowledge that the Chinese GRE scores were bogus."
If you mean they were fake, I don't think so. The GRE is supposed to measure your subject knowledge, not your IQ. And those Chikes definitely already knew everything we studied in the first couple years of grad school. They all passed the Masters and the Qualifier on the first try, unlike over half of the Americans. They already had Chike doctorates, but they wanted American doctorates. And, a lot of them hoped to get American jobs, so they wouldn't have to go back.
When I was TA in the Electronics for Physicists class, there were two Muslim guys from Libya who were partners. They always did everything together, and they always got 10 out if 10 on their lab reports. I later learned that one of them had been living in Married Student Housing for five years, and had a seven-year-old daughter, that he took back to Libya after he graduated. I should have flunked him.
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