Why did Marc Andreessen — inventor of the first internet web browser, and perhaps the prime venture capitalist in Silicon Valley today — switch from his longstanding support of the Democratic Party and back President-elect Donald Trump this year?

Because, in his view, the Democrats who claim to be the great scourge of “disinformation” are threatening to embed disinformation in the bedrock of society. At least that’s my interpretation of Andreessen’s comments in a wide-ranging interview with The Free Press cofounder Bari Weiss.

“My concern is that the censorship and political control of AI is a thousand times more dangerous than censorship and political control of social media — maybe a million times more dangerous,” Andreessen, a prime innovator of artificial intelligence, told Weiss. “The thing with AI is, I think AI is going to be the control layer for everything in the future — how the health care system works, how the education system works, how the government works. So that if AI is woke, biased, censored, politically controlled, you are in a hyper-Orwellian, China-style, social credit system nightmare.”

Like fellow tech titan Elon Musk, Andreessen has come to see the Democrats as “the ones who are trying to silence free speech.” However, unlike many Trump supporters, he does not fasten upon the obvious partisan example: Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s 2020 campaign enlistment of 51 current or former intelligence officials to depict Hunter Biden’s laptop as bearing “the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”

That Democratic disinformation operation suppressed facts about Biden family corruption during the campaign year, but not forever, as President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son showed.

Andreessen is concerned less about transitory partisan finagling and more about possibly permanent suppressions of truth. An example he cites is the claim that “the COVID lab leak hypothesis was ‘misinformation’ and broadly censored on social media.”

I have written often about the lab leak hypothesis and how denigration of it was concocted by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.

Finally, this month, a detailed report by the House Oversight Committee not only endorses the lab leak theory as the most likely explanation of the virus but also, as Ridley wrote in The Telegraph, “lays out in gobsmacking detail just how much senior officials allegedly have schemed to prevent information emerging.”

What they were covering up, it becomes plain now, is that Fauci was commissioning the Wuhan laboratory to conduct gain-of-function research, making the virus more contagious to humans, presumably to develop means of defense. The report explains in painstaking detail how Fauci, in testimony before Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), used a misleading definition when he vehemently denied authorizing gain-of-function research.

One can argue the attempted coverup by Fauci and others ultimately failed. One can argue further that, unlike the Hunter Biden laptop coverup, this was not necessarily a partisan operation: It began during the Trump presidency and was uncovered in part by actions of the Biden administration.

However, one must also add that the scientists who led the coverup retained the capacity to shape pandemic policy, pressing successfully for measures that proved to be harmful or unnecessary, such as school closures, masking for children, and vaccine requirements for those with natural immunity from previous infection.