No, You're Just A Criminal: Marc Andreessen's Foreign-Backed Techno-Mormon Grift Is Dangerous

It’s always interesting hearing Silicon Valley libertarians sound off.

Marketing the dream

Do you have a right to start a private military? What about your own private money? What if you have a secret society that uses its own money?

Do you have a right to start a cult? What if that cult is backed by a foreign government intent on overthrowing the United States? Is it freedom of religion then?

No, I’m not talking about some Silicon Valley current thing; I’m talking about the original American start up — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Yes, we’ve been over all this before and it didn’t end particularly well.

By way of background I am part Mormon. My own personal credo — Just Do The Right Thing — is pretty clearly some kind of odd derivative of the Mormon “Choose the Right.” I have many Mormon friends, including some who are still members.

I agree with the Mormons that the Constitution was a divinely inspired document and I made a serious study of it in college with some of the leading scholars, including Lincoln scholar Harry V. Jaffa. Lincoln died defending the Union and that sacrifice has had a big impact on my political thought. In his simple logic, Lincoln pointed out that you can’t have a more perfect Union with fewer members in it.

I take this stuff very seriously and every decision I make I ask if its good for my soul, good for my family, and good for my country. All of my investments fit this rubric in some way. I’m not interested in being rich if the country I love suffers. You could make a case that every investment I’ve made is about strengthening the power of that Union.

Alas, there’s another aspect of Mormonism I find interesting — “Follow the Prophets” — and there’s a case to be made that a lot of Mormons suspend their critical functions and follow along. There’s a power in that and I can see why Mormons just go along with whatever the authority figure tells them.

I don’t mean to single out the Mormons, who I nevertheless suspect were bred for their followership and credulity. I suspect that’s true of a lot of people — they just follow the leader, the start up guru, the podcaster, the reverend, etc. Maybe that’s the story of America. For all of our talk of being unconventional thinkers there are a lot of followers here. We can’t all be sovereign individuals now can we?

The temptation if you’re one of these charismatic figures is to form a cult which enriches you and your family to the exclusion of everyone else. Indeed if you probe the history of the early Mormon church you’ll find that that’s precisely what Joseph Smith as doing. It started with a bank — the poorly named Kirtland Safety Society — and ended with a private army — the Nauvoo Legion and the Danites, the Mormon kill squad which may or may not have been disbanded.

The Nauvoo Legion ultimately had more 3,000 troops, more than the U.S. Army at the time.

Ultimately every cult is interested in political power. Ultimately every start up is interested in political power.

The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith ran for President in 1844. He was the original third party candidate designed to split the vote on behalf of his foreign backers — the British — who sought to limit the American reach across the continent.

Upset about how his religion wasn’t accepted, Smith stood accused of treason and even an assassination attempt against a former Missouri Governor. The State of Missouri sought to extradite Smith from Nauvoo, Illinois to face these charges.

There were plenty of people, including a few Mormons, who ultimately broke from Joseph Smith and who put their commitment to America ahead of their religious obligation.

I think a lot about the kind of courage that this required. It’s not easy to move against a cult particularly when your family is a part of it.

After all, my family, despite being Mormon royalty, opposed Joseph Smith and became the original Mormon heretics. Smith had had his revelations at the Johnson Family Farm in Ohio — a farm my family ran.

Several of Smith’s disciples — what he called the Quorum of the Twelve — were direct relations of mine, including my sixth great grandfather Lyman Johnson who became the first Mormon heretic. Their lives were difficult and they were persecuted. That targeting continues to their descendants.

There was even an oath of vengeance:

You and each of you do covenant and promise that you will pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation, and that you will teach the same to your children and to your children's children unto the third and fourth generation.

Defending the Union wasn’t easy. It took grave risks which even Mormon historians recognized but Lyman Johnson met the challenge by joining up with the Union.

(By the way Keokuk, Iowa — where many Mormon heretics settled — is where Howard Hughes’s family wound up before going to Houston. We’ll discuss this more in a later post.)

But these Mormon heretics were right. There isn’t a right to have a private army, there’s not a right to have multiple wives, or to have your own banks, or your own currency.

It isn’t innovation to try any of these things but treason against the Union. It’s an attack on the dollar, on the peace and tranquility that’s essential to the rule of law.

So why do we tolerate it now?

Is it just because the cult members are rich?

Is it just because they’ve bought off the FBI or visited the CIA?

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James H. Clark and Marc Andreessen: Is this grooming?

This weekend I was listening to Marc Andreessen's discussion of banking with Joe Rogan and I couldn’t help but smile. Andreessen seems to honestly believe he has a right to commit securities fraud or start fake banks.

Oh silly was I, pitching his venture capital firm with Clearview.AI, the facial recognition company. Apparently I was too revolutionary for that most revolutionary of venture firms. I wanted to strengthen the American system, not tear it down.

It’s pretty disturbing how Andreessen not so subtly drew distinctions between America and the United States as if the form of the U.S. Constitution didn’t give birth to American life. There is no America without the Union.

This isn’t a controversial argument. My ancestors knew it all too well but then my ancestors were the ones actually involved in building the American way of life.

My ancestors didn’t win every fight but they were always on the side of liberty and yes, that includes those who descended from the Decembrists, or the family members who fought in the English Civil War. Or the King Phillips War. Or the American Revolution and on the side of the Union — to say nothing of World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the War on Terror.

Over the years I’ve come to believe that many venture capitalists don’t really understand America — they only market its love affair with technology back to itself.

Nicholas Carr writes in Utopia Is Creepy:

The greatest of America’s homegrown religions — greater than Jehovah’s Witnesses, greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, greater even than Scientology — is the religion of technology. John Adolphus Etzler, a Pittsburgher, sounded the trumpet in his 1833 testament The Paradise within the Reach of All Men. By fulfilling its “mechanical purposes,” he wrote, the United States would turn itself into a new Eden, a “state of superabundance” where “there will be a continual feast, parties of pleasures, novelties, delights and instructive occupations,” not to mention “vegetables of infinite variety and appearance.”

Isn’t this exactly what Andreessen believes? And it isn’t it precisely what he’s failed to deliver on?

These tweeting fools are more like the fan boys than shotcallers, more marketers than hustlers. But it’s hard to sell an inferior product. It’s hard to get people buy into things which are fake.

With careful sleight of hand they’re more interested in seeming pro-American than in being pro-American.

Andreessen Horowitz passed on Clearview.AI but I stayed in touch. Its fintech division wanted my help in introducing them to the right people in the Department of Commerce and Treasury so that they could move all of the PPP money through the federal government. I wisely demurred on helping them beyond a few introductions.

I do sometimes wonder if, in fact, a lot of this stuff is an example of people being more American than the Americans. It all feels very Mormon.

Does Marc Andreessen have secret Mormon lineage? Here he is with Jim Clark (phD Utah) and Jim Barksdale (ole Miss). We’ve discussed the Mormon routes of Mississippi elsewhere and it’s fairly obvious that when you dig into Clark nothing is quite as it seems.

Clark graduated from the University of Utah, was married four times and bought property from the Ziff publishing family, whose member Robert clerked for Chief Judge (and Mormon) Monroe G. McKay of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Salt Lake City. Supposedly Clark is a Catholic but I’ve never heard of a Catholic named Clark. He was a computer science professor at the University of Utah.

Andreessen’s “generally a fan” of and was a supporter of Obama in 2008 but now he’s “more pro-Romney.” Andreessen defended Brendan Eich.

Marc Andreesen’s father-in-law is the late John Arrillaga. Rather hilariously Arrillaga once told Andreessen that the real money is in real estate but you have to sell the dream to get them to pay the rent.

Arrillaga was partnered up with Mormon billionaire Richard Perry. “Richard Peery, an early Silicon Valley real estate mogul, teamed up with John Arrillaga to buy farmland in the 1960s and turn it into office parks,” wrote Homequirer in its review of the richest Mormons in the world.

When Andreessen is demanding people return to the office, consider that his family owns the office parks.

If that’s utopia, count me out.