Setting aside most of a 5,200-word piece to instead cast essentially tone- and mood- based objections against a 49-word aside is a good example of the reflexive

Setting aside most of a 5,200-word piece to instead cast essentially tone- and mood- based objections against a 49-word aside is a good example of the reflexive negativity-bias & nit-picking that's inherent to the "mass demoralization campaign" Andreesen perceives. In the passage Primack criticizes, Andreesen names some of the euphemisms he associates with "bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die". These are abstractions, with lofty labels, that now provide overdue-for-reexamination rationalizations for the sort of stagnation, statism, bureaucracy, gerontocracy, corruption, & cartelization he decries. Those loyal to the particular activist-campaigns & shibboleths that Andreesen calls out were unlikely to be on-board with his level of optimism, anyway. So letting those people self-identify, & disassociate from his ambition, helps his cause. He's not trying to win a faculty election among the bien-pensant of narrative-control.