Bari Weiss Promotes the New Trumpscum Tech Fascism: The Case of David Sacks

[David Shasha]

The Quiet Political Rise of David Sacks, Silicon Valley’s Prophet of Urban Doom

By: Jacob Silverman

Last month, Chesa Boudin, the former district attorney of San Francisco, spoke with the leftist podcaster and political commentator Katie Halper on YouTube about the recall campaign that removed him from office in June. Soon after taking office in January 2020, Boudin, a former public defender who had promised a program of criminal legal reform, police accountability, and decarceration, was held responsible for San Francisco’s crime and social dysfunction by a coalition of business leaders, tech moguls, and even some of his former subordinates at the district attorney’s office.

Speaking to Halper, Boudin gave a passionate defense of his policies, while also zeroing in on the moneyed forces arrayed against him. “There’s no limit to how much you can donate to a recall in San Francisco,” he said, “and it’s very easy to hide the true source of those funds.” 

The interview wrapped up, but the conversation wasn’t over. Halper invited her audience to discuss on Callin, a growing podcast platform, “the astroturf recall” that removed Boudin. But there was a glaring, unacknowledged irony: Callin, which has attracted a swathe of very online journalists from the left, right, and murkier ideological corners, was co-founded by David Sacks, a venture capitalist and longtime tech executive who was one of Boudin’s earliest and most vocal opponents. Sacks had branded Boudin “the Killer D.A.” whose policies caused innocent people to die. He told former Fox News star Megyn Kelly that there was “chaos and lawlessness in San Francisco,” a product of “Soros D.A.s” with their “progressive agenda of decarceration.” He challenged Boudin to a public debate—“if you have the huevos,” Sacks said—and then accused him of backing out of an agreed upon appearance on All-In, the popular podcast Sacks co-hosts with fellow tech investors Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg. Sacks was also one of the biggest recall donors; at one point in 2021, nearly one-third of all donations against Boudin came from him. Halper was trying to parse Boudin’s loss on a platform run by the man who had helped lead it. (“Under a system of global capitalism and tech monopolies, all platforms have owners,” Halper said. “But I don’t speak for them, and they don’t speak for me.”)

After serving as PayPal’s founding chief operating officer, followed by stints as chief executive of Yammer and Zenefits, Sacks, 50, now leads a venture capital firm called Craft Ventures. While not yet a household name like his pal Elon Musk, he’s a regular across conservative media and on Twitter, where he has more than 400,000 followers, and exerts a growing influence in the political battles playing out in the tech industry. Sacks is part of the Tesla CEO’s “shadow crew” of friends and consiglieri, according to The Wall Street Journal. Text messages that were recently disclosed as part of Musk’s legal battle with Twitter showed that Musk sent his friend Sacks a tweet by conservative huckster Dinesh D’Souza expressing support for Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Sacks said he retweeted it. In other messages, the two discussed a potential monetary contribution from Sacks for the Twitter acquisition. In early October, Musk proposed a negotiated settlement to Russia’s war in Ukraine that mirrored arguments Sacks had made in a piece a week earlier for The American Conservative. Political consultant Ian Bremmer later wrote that Musk said he had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had influenced Musk’s peace offer. Musk denied Bremmer’s report. On Twitter, Sacks backed Musk’s proposal and argued that the backlash generated—for example, against Musk’s suggestion that Russia should be given the Ukrainian region of Crimea—was the product of a “woke mob” that, Sacks later wrote in Newsweek, would cause the next world war. In a tweet, Musk praised the Sacks piece as “exceptionally well-said.”

Sacks is quietly becoming the leading practitioner of a new right-wing sensibility that has emerged in the political realignments provoked by Trumpism and the pandemic. On foreign policy, it offers a blend of isolationism, Trumpist nationalism, suspicion of the deep state, and the anti-empire realism of John Mearsheimer. Domestically, the vision is more muddled, a series of angry poses, a politics of pique, much of it playing out on Twitter, Callin, YouTube, Rumble, Substack, and other online media, especially among people who may have once counted themselves on the left but now can’t countenance the sight of homeless encampments. It’s The Young Turks host Ana Kasparian dedicating an episode to “violent criminals being let off easy” in California; Jacobin columnist Ben Burgis calling critics of Kasparian’s reactionary takes on bail reform and other criminal legal system issues the “silliest scolds of the online left”; and Nando Vila, a Jacobin contributor and onetime host of The Jacobin Show, arguing that fighting false perceptions about crime is “definitely a losing battle, because all you have to do is see that it is real” in the form of homelessness, which has been increasingly criminalized.

These dissident leftists are joined by a growing number of tech and finance elites with reactionary politics. There’s billionaire William Obendorf, who also bankrolled the Boudin recall and is on the board of two anti-Boudin nonprofits, one of which paid Boudin replacement Brooke Jenkins $153,000, and Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and Democratic donor who praised Donald Trump’s election and became a dedicated defender of Kyle Rittenhouse. For a brief period in 2021, Clubhouse was the locus of these reactionary political currents—the hangout spot, really, for internet-famous venture capitalists and techies chafing against Silicon Valley’s traditionally liberal culture. Though the app didn’t sustain its early momentum, it inspired a number of imitators.

In the fall of 2021, Sacks launched Callin with $12 million in series A funding. Building on its predecessors, Callin offered both live and recorded audio discussions, podcast hosting, and ways for users to interact with hosts. The company made deals to bring aboard established journalists and podcasters, and the site’s sensibility quickly became defined by post-left, contrarian, or otherwise reactionary libertarian types such as Jesse Singal, Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, Benjamin Norton, Michael Tracey, Briahna Joy Gray, and Matt Taibbi. Many have taken on Sacksian talking points about unchecked urban crime and the alleged failures of defunding police that haven’t been defunded. Sacks himself has a now dormant Callin show called Purple Pills that featured guests like Boudin antagonist Michael Shellenberger, who sought to replace Gavin Newsom in the failed California gubernatorial recall, on “why progressives ruin cities.”

Sacks declined requests for an interview, both directly and through a representative. But his writings, media appearances, political donations, and professional network say a great deal both about his political rise and the way tech elites now exercise power.

Steeped in the inflammatory milieus of social media and Tucker Carlson demagoguery, Sacks and his fellow travelers often seem less to stand for anything than against the status quo—against criminal legal reform; against the public presence of homelessness; against a tradition of Democratic urban governance that, by indulging in identity politics, has failed to solve economic and social ills. They are angry, and they want the government, which they see as simultaneously incapable of doing much good, to work for them again.

Whether or not you buy into this doomer vision, it’s evolving into coherence, with increasing purchase in right-wing circles. This nascent movement’s talking points have the kind of blunt simplicity that, if not convincing, at least rack up retweets: Democrats are hysterically woke; liberalism has failed; drugs, crime, and homelessness are destroying cities; Black Lives Matter was only about riots. In this corner of the political imagination, crime, drug addiction, and homelessness are outrageous horrors—but mostly for how they threaten the daily peace of responsible, productive citizens. In an interview with Megyn Kelly on the day of the Boudin recall vote, Sacks said that the influx of fentanyl into the United States was China’s “payback” for the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, calling Democratic politicians “useful idiots for the Chinese Communist Party.”

This ethos was perhaps best described by Vice’s Edward Ongweso Jr. and Jason Koebler when they called this year’s mayoral race in Los Angeles the “Nextdoor Election,” referring to the social app that has become an epicenter for racist and classist complaints about crime and homelessness. It’s a draconian version of call-the-manager politics—it’s time to let the police, the custodians of capitalist order, do something.

The symbolic epicenter of this movement is San Francisco, but really it’s the entire curdled utopian dream of California. In the eyes of rich techies who have seen their beloved metropolis fall into decay, vast inequality, and social misery, the state is dead. Their disappointment and alienation has melded with traditional Republican disgust toward liberal cities (and their non-white residents) to paint a picture of irredeemable urban squalor. These frightened urbanites are echoing the Trumpist drumbeat that cities—particularly in California—are dangerous, dark places that must be tamed. But despite California’s violent crime rate increasing by 6 percent in 2021, the state’s violent crime rate (466 per 100,000 residents) is far lower than its 1992 peak of 1,115 per 100,000 residents.

A low point of this hand-wringing came in August, when Boudin recall backer Michelle Tandler issued wild-eyed warnings about San Francisco dogs becoming addicted to meth by eating feces. Tandler worked at social networking service Yammer when Sacks was its CEO, and she’s frequently praised him on Twitter, where she’s accumulated a large following as a blistering “anti-San Francisco influencer,” according to The San Francisco Examiner, even though she now resides in New York City. In 2020, Sacks’s Craft Ventures made a seed round investment in a Tandler-led startup called Life School, and they both made donations on August 6, 2021, to the campaign to recall three members of the San Francisco school board. In December 2021, Life School announced a pivot—from classes teaching basic life skills to “an audio-first company” offering interviews with “experts about basic life skills.” The new company, a Substack-hosted publication called Growth Path Labs, provides brief podcasts with titles like “How to Give Critical Feedback” and “How to Fire Someone (with Humanity).”

The godfather of the movement is Peter Thiel—the billionaire venture capitalist, Gawker slayer, leading Republican donor, early Trump backer, PayPal co-founder, and Palantir founder and chairman who has expressed his indifference, at best, to democracy. In his political disciples—and former employees—J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, Thiel has found candidates to run on his belief system, right-wing Christian nationalists who are pro-business, pro-gun, and able to cater to conservative culture warriors. Call it PayPal mafia politics. The extensive corporate and political network that began with Thiel, Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, and other early employees of the payments company—not all of whom share the same right-leaning politics—includes the lesser-known Sacks, PayPal’s founding COO.

Despite Sacks’s ties to the online post-left and his efforts to speak for San Francisco’s disenchanted Democrats, his record of campaign finance donations tells the story of a die-hard Republican. Sacks has helped power the political ambitions of traditional Republican politicians as well as Masters and Vance. He also donated to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and more recently to Kyrsten Sinema, “once again sticking a thorn in the side of progressives,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2021, he gave $70,223 to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He also donated $60,000 to Republican Miami Mayor Francis Suarez’s Miami for Everyone PAC, whose lead donor is Sacks’s podcast co-host Chamath Palihapitiya.

Now, Sacks is set to push his political project, and his money, further. Over the summer, an organization called Purple Good Government PAC filed its first donor report. The PAC’s existence has yet to be widely reported, and his representative declined to answer questions about its plans, but the organization’s filings include people from Sacks’s network. The PAC’s treasurer is James Kull, a financial adviser who signed a mortgage for a Miami mansion purchased last year by an LLC whose address matched one used by Sacks. The PAC raised about $280,000 in the first six months of 2022, including $125,000 from Sacks and his wife. Three donors—EarthLink founder Sky Dayton, e-commerce entrepreneur Diego Berdakin, and the Dohring Family Trust—gave $50,000, with each entity giving separate payments of $5,000 and $45,000.

The PAC has dispensed about $135,000 so far, most of it in the form of a $100,000 donation to Friends of Ron DeSantis leadership. A representative for Sacks declined to say whether the venture capitalist would support DeSantis over Donald Trump in a 2024 Republican presidential primary, but the money talks. Last October, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for the Florida governor and once tweeted his hopes for a Newsom-DeSantis matchup in 2024. In a further indication of DeSantis’s close contact with this tight-knit group, the court-disclosed Musk texts included an exchange with Palantir co-founder and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who said that DeSantis called him to offer help sealing Musk’s Twitter bid.

Under Thiel’s guiding example, Sacks is forming his own political donor network. Last December, he hosted a fundraiser for Vance. In April, Sacks donated $1 million to Protect Ohio Values PAC, which supports Vance. Around the same time, Trump endorsed the Hillbilly Elegy author. Both the donation and the endorsement were reportedly brokered by Thiel. On September 15, Sacks co-hosted a Republican fundraiser with fellow PayPal mafia member Keith Rabois. Guests included current GOP Senators Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, and Republican candidates Masters, Mehmet Oz, and Vance.

Despite his contributions to Vance, Sacks has barely tweeted or written about him. His $1 million donation received little media attention. But in March, Sacks praised Vance’s calls for U.S. military restraint in Ukraine. “This is why I’m proud to support @JDVance1,” tweeted Sacks, rounding it out with a MAGA reference. “It’s time to put America first.”

Thiel and Sacks met at Stanford, where they worked together on the Thiel-founded Stanford Review. In 1992, the Review published “The Rape Issue,” which included a piece by Sacks defending a student who had pleaded no contest to statutory rape. Sacks considered the crime “a moral directive left on the books by presexual revolution crustaceans.” According to Thiel biographer Max Chafkin, “Sacks included a graphic description of the encounter, noting that the 17-year-old victim ‘still had the physical coordination to perform oral sex,’ and ‘presumably could have uttered the word, ‘no.’” Rabois, who later became Sacks’s PayPal colleague, was also a contributor to “The Rape Issue.” In 2013, Rabois resigned as Square’s COO after being accused of sexual harassment.

Later, Sacks and Thiel wrote op-eds about economics and politics for The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1995, they published a book called The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus. Angry, trollish, homophobic, fixated on identity and campus politics, The Diversity Myth could easily be produced today, with panic about “woke” culture substituting for every mention of multiculturalism, which is wielded throughout as a bitter epithet. In the book, Sacks and Thiel revisited the Stanford rape, writing that “a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret.” (In the authors’ moral universe, almost anything can be derisively labeled as “multicultural.”) When the line resurfaced in Forbes in 2016, both Thiel and Sacks apologized, although the book contains plenty of other similarly minded sentiments. They accused sexual assault activists of vilifying men and promoting fraudulent “‘advocacy numbers,’ not real facts,” writing that “the rape crisis movement transmits its exaggerated fears to freshmen yearly.” The Diversity Myth was a deeply political book—not only in its screeds against multiculturalism and sexual assault education—but also in its production. It was sponsored by the Independent Institute, a libertarian think tank, and it was helped by Republican operatives and politicians of the era. The authors acknowledged the advice of Tom Duesterberg, who was Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff; a former FCC commissioner; congressional staffers; and conservative political theorists, think tankers, and economists. They also announced that “a special thanks goes to Keith Rabois and the other victims of multiculturalism interviewed for this book.”

In 1992, while a first-year law student at Stanford, Rabois and two friends stood outside the home of a university lecturer and yelled homophobic slurs. Representative comments included: “Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” Afterwards, Rabois wrote to The Stanford Daily, “The intention was for the speech to be outrageous enough to provoke a thought of ‘Wow, if he can say that, I guess I can say a little more than I thought.’”

Stanford’s administration basically conceded the point: The school condemned Rabois’s behavior, saying that “this vicious tirade is protected speech.” There was a lot of outrage, letter writing, and some campus struggle sessions about misogyny and bigotry within Stanford’s institutions—genuine attempts at social critique that are duly made fun of in The Diversity Myth. But there was no formal effort to punish Rabois. Instead, after becoming locally infamous, Rabois transferred to Harvard Law School, before moving on to PayPal and a successful tech career that made him fabulously wealthy. In the long tradition of conservative victimology, that makes Rabois a martyr.

Sacks’s early success at PayPal was naturally linked to Thiel, the company’s founding CEO. Sacks grew wealthy and powerful as part of the same tech and political networks for which Thiel and Musk are now leading figures. Sacks’s net worth hasn’t been reliably reported in public. Besides the Miami mansion worth $17 million, he owns a $23 million Hollywood Hills home and a $20 million home on San Francisco’s “Billionaires Row.” In addition to a fortune made as an executive, he’s a crypto investor who bought early into Solana, a popular crypto token.

Sacks has said that his political views have “evolved” from libertarian to “populist.” In a podcast interview with Bitcoin influencer Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano, Sacks said he had “working-class views” in line with a transforming Republican Party. He cited the work of Ruy Teixeira, a liberal political scientist who co-authored the influential book The Emerging Democratic Majority with John B. Judis, but recently joined the American Enterprise Institute, after arguing that Democrats’ “professional class hegemony” has made the party out of touch with working people’s concerns. Or, as Sacks describes it, everything is run by Democrats with college degrees, who enact “the tyranny of woke progressivism.” Even big corporations, Sacks tweeted, are run by Marxists, echoing the long-held belief of DeSantis that companies like Disney promote a “woke ideology.”

Like others in his tech orbit, Sacks is deeply concerned about perceived threats to online speech. A supporter of Musk’s Twitter takeover, he’s argued for a less-moderated Twitter, free from the censoriousness that conservatives accuse tech companies of cultivating. In an April interview with Fox News, Sacks said that we are living in a McCarthyist moment of “un-American movements’’ to stymie free speech. Comparing Musk’s proposed purchase of Twitter with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sacks said, “It was the first time that you saw somebody stand up to this galloping wave of censorship that we’ve been seeing.”

But while Sacks’s project and carceral sensibility have scored victories including Boudin’s recall and the successful launch of Callin, it’s now facing significant headwinds. In August, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, a progressive prosecutor in the Boudin mold, survived a second recall attempt. Trumpist reactionaries like Masters and Mehmet Oz are locked in tight races and Doug Mastriano, running for Pennsylvania governor, will probably lose. Thiel is quickly burning goodwill with Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell—though Vance may limp over the finish line. Few people beyond the right-wing technorati seem to take seriously Curtis Yarvin, Thiel’s monarchist court philosopher and the de facto intellectual grise of this movement, who once said that America should be run in a manner that “feels like a startup.” That seems like a dim prospect when recent Thiel-funded startups—a Candace Owens–endorsed “anti-woke bank” and a conservative dating app started by a Trump appointee reportedly investigated by the Department of Homeland Security for financial crimes—have teetered between online mockery and outright failure.

For now, there are some loud, rich, and very online players espousing these ideas—with support from some corners of the GOP, and most recently Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her departure from the Democratic Party by denouncing its adherents for their “cowardly wokeness,” “anti-white racism,” and their tendency to “demonize the police but protect criminals at the expense of law abiding Americans.” But their ability to appeal beyond their cohort may be limited—can it scale?

Thiel, at least, seems to be shifting his focus to this question of political pragmatism—and perhaps a rejection of Sacksian doomerism. Speaking before the National Conservatism Conference on September 11, Thiel called for Republicans to find a “positive agenda” to present to the public, one that can “scale” beyond their own cloistered group of similarly aggrieved conservatives. “The temptation on our side is always going to be that all we have to do is say that we’re not California,” Thiel said. “It’s such an ugly picture, it’s the homeless poop people pooping all over the place, it’s the ridiculous rat-infested apartments that don’t work anymore, the woke insanities, there’s so much about it that it feels like … shooting fish in a barrel. It’s so easy, so ridiculous to denounce.”

In the same speech, Thiel praised Ron DeSantis as “offering a real alternative to California,” but worried that rising home prices in Texas and Florida meant that these supposed alternatives were replicating California’s mistakes. Instead of addressing these issues, Republicans were performing their congenital form of what Thiel called “nihilistic negation”—that is, the kind of reactionary obstructionism that has helped bring us to this point. In an age of widespread political cynicism, it plays well on social media, which privileges conflict and sensationalism.

The sort of social media envisaged by Thiel, Sacks, Musk, and other tech moguls might come to fruition if Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter closes, per a judge’s ruling, by the end of the month. It will also be a boon to Musk’s friends who invested in and supported the takeover. The recently disclosed text messages showed Musk being peppered with pitches about rejuvenating Twitter from PayPal mafia members and sycophantic hangers-on. In one set of messages, in which names were redacted, someone discussed letting “the boss himself”—Trump—back on the platform. The comments included some war-gaming and bluster about deplatforming political enemies. Masters was floated as a so-called VP of Enforcement. If there is to be a new regime adjudicating speech on Twitter—which would be set to go private under Musk’s ownership, removing it from certain corporate disclosure requirements—it might be overseen by people like Masters who share the same worldview as Sacks.

The positive, Sunshine State–style program promised by Thiel in his September speech has yet to materialize—DeSantis is currently in federal court defending his decision to suspend progressive prosecutor Andrew Warren for pledging not to prosecute abortion-related crimes. And Sacks is still in thrall to urban pessimism, a stance popular in San Francisco where Mayor London Breed recently said—to applause from a crowd—that drug dealers have more rights than “people who try to get up and go to work every day and take their children to school.” The day after the Boudin recall, Sacks went on Tucker Carlson to celebrate his victory and denounce the Democrats’ radical agenda of “decarcerationism.” Carlson credited Sacks with funding the recall and allowing “democracy to take place.” Sacks explained that Democrats and their “woke billionaire” supporters—George Soros, Reed Hastings—were deeply committed to the decarceral program, so it would be necessary to take the fight elsewhere. “This sort of playbook here is going to have to be replicated across the country.”

This story was produced in partnership with the Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing.

From The New Republic, October 18, 2022

 

How Big Tech Is Strangling Your Freedom

By: Bari Weiss

David Sacks is a paradox. The entrepreneur and venture capitalist helped lay the foundations of the digital world we now live in: He was one of the members of what's known as the PayPal Mafia, alongside people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Max Levchin. He’s also been an early investor in some companies you may have heard of: Airbnb, Facebook, Slack, SpaceX, Twitter, Uber. 

At the same time, he is something of a whistleblower from inside the world of tech. If you’ve read David’s essays for Common Sense—and if not, now’s a great time to revisit them—he believes that Big Tech has far too much power. The fact that a handful of billionaires get to decide what we are (and aren’t) allowed to say in the digital public square is something that the Framers would have been repelled by—and that all Americans should oppose.

Today on Honestly I spoke to David about the rise of America’s social credit system and how we can defend our civil liberties in the age of the internet. Among other things, he makes the provocative argument that we should strengthen the notion that discrimination based on “creed” means discriminating based on a person’s political views.

If you listen to the whole thing you’ll hear David on Russia, crypto, and much more. But if you remain pod-resistant, enjoy the highlights below. — BW

On America’s social credit system:

BW: You have been making the case better than anyone else that, despite the fact that we live in a liberal democracy with a Bill of Rights and a Constitution and a First Amendment, whether most Americans are aware of it or not we also are living inside a soft version of a social credit system. So for the people who hear that and think: ‘That’s ridiculous. This isn’t China.’ I want you to make the case.

DS: Let’s start by defining what a social credit system is. A social credit system is a system that pretends to give you civil liberties and freedom. It doesn't overtly send you to the gulag for expressing dissent. Rather, it conditions the benefits of society—economic benefits, the ability to spend your money—on having the correct opinions. If you don’t, then your ability to participate in online platforms is diminished or curtailed entirely. That's the situation that we are gradually heading towards. 

Back in the days when we were creating PayPal, in the early 2000s and late ‘90s, there was really a sense that technology and the internet would expand people's ability to engage in speech and commerce. And for the first two decades of the internet, it really did. But for the last half-dozen years or so, we've really been restricting that access and trying to curtail it. The power of restricting people in both speech and commerce has taken on a life of its own. Those restrictions keep growing.

I'm not the one who's changed. Big Tech changed. I didn't leave Big Tech. Big Tech left me.

BW: When did you start to see the change? 

DS:  If you go back to the Arab Spring and the Green Revolution there was generally a sense of triumphalism. Back then, the CEO of Twitter said that we are the free speech wing of the free speech party. That’s how Silicon Valley saw itself. Ten years later, you have the widespread view that Silicon Valley needs to restrict and regulate disinformation and prevent free speech on its platform. You'd have to say that the turning point was 2016, when Trump got elected against the wishes of pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley. That was a little too much populism for them. And they saw social media as being complicit in Trump's election.

BW: So the populism of the Arab Spring or in the Green Revolution was good. But the populism of Trump was not.

DS: Yes. It was a message they very much didn't want to hear. So they began to believe that the message was somehow inauthentic. That it was engineered by Russian disinformation, and that their platforms had contributed to it and that they needed to crack down and restrict free speech so that it never happened again. 

Regardless of what you think about Trump, I think that was just the wrong message to draw from that election. I think Trump won because, quite frankly, the Democrats fielded a horrible candidate. He narrowly won—it was less than a hundred thousand votes in a few key swing states in which Hillary Clinton barely campaigned. But rather than blame her or her campaign managers for running a bad campaign, they blamed social media and themselves for what happened and how. Since then, they have been backpedaling on the idea of free speech.

On deplatforming and Silicon Valley’s speech cartel:

BW: Let’s talk about deplatforming, which some have compared to having your “digital tongue ripped out.” 

The first major case of deplatforming I remember was Alex Jones in 2018. First, Facebook removed all of Alex Jones's content, saying he had glorified violence and violated their hate speech policies. Within days, Apple, Spotify and eventually YouTube, where Jones had millions of followers, followed suit. Jones was the guy who said that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, that the murdered children were crisis actors. What the parents of those children have lived through because of his conspiracies is unspeakable. So most people I know thought: Good riddance. Why should this guy have the ability to make money off of YouTube ads? Tell us why it was wrong for people to cheer.

DS: Because censorship always starts as something people like. And then it turns into something that they don't. It starts with censoring somebody who's widely hated saying outrageous things, but eventually it gets used on somebody who you yourself like. That's what we've seen over the last several years. Censorship power keeps growing. It keeps getting applied to more and more cases.

The most recent example was before the 2020 election. You had reporting come out from the New York Post about Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine. It has now come out that this story was entirely true. Yet it was labeled disinformation and censored from social media networks so that the American people could not take it into account before the election.

Or think about Covid. For over a year the lab-leak theory was censored. Now, the lab-leak theory is widely regarded as either the most likely theory or at least tied with the so-called zoonotic theory for the origins of Covid. And yet people who espoused that theory, scientists who were acting in good faith on social networks on YouTube, were censored for having that opinion.

BW: You've used the word cartel to describe how these companies operate. Typically, people hear the word cartel and they think of mustache-twirling evil guys in smoke-filled rooms. Explain to us what you mean by that word.

DS: A cartel is an economic term that refers to when companies that are supposed to be competitive with each other instead act in concert. You see this with regard to price fixing, for example: two companies that are supposed to be competing with each other actually come together or signal to each other that this is what the price should be, and they basically agree not to compete on that dimension. What a cartel does is effectively create a monopoly even though there may be multiple players in the market. 

What’s happening in the case of speech is that you have all these big tech companies coming together and acting in the same way. They all implement the same policy with regard to censoring speech. They all kick the same people off their platform. So even though they're supposed to be competing with each other, even though competition should be driving them to want to appeal to a larger and larger audience and not kick people off, they do.

The person who admitted this was the case was Jack Dorsey in January of 2021. Twitter was the first to kick Donald Trump off. And what Dorsey said was that Twitter did not realize what a backlash it would cause by de-platforming a sitting president of the United States. He said: We thought we were just acting on our own, and there are plenty of other places that Donald Trump could go to get his free speech. But then what happened? All the other sites followed suit. And it became like the action of a government because everybody started doing it. 

Dorsey described well the process by which this happens, which is one of these big tech companies takes the lead, and then all the others follow suit. It's like signaling. And it becomes like a speech blockade. And when each company basically joins the blockade, the pressure grows on every other company to do the same thing. Otherwise, they're subject to a boycott or a rage mob on Twitter. They're basically pressured into it. The pressure keeps growing on all the others to do the same thing. The thing that's very vexing about the problem is it appears to be decentralized. It's not like there's one centralized actor. But the collective effect is that they all do it.

BW: I want to understand why or how it happens. Are the people running these companies all on a Signal group together? Why are they all deciding to make the same choice?

DS: The pressure comes from both above and below. You've got the United States Senate basically saying: ‘Nice little social network you got there. Real shame for anything to happen to it.’ So that’s pressure that's coming from Washington. You've got the coercion of private companies by these enormously powerful people in government who are using the levers of government power to conduct antitrust lawsuits against them, to push bills through Congress to break them up, or otherwise harm their businesses. That's what's going on from above. 

From below, you've got the employees and the tweet mobs and basically forming these boycotts and subjecting the management of the company to pressure. 

It would take a very strong leader to stand up to these pressures. And corporate executives tend not to have a tremendous amount of spine to begin with. But then, on top of it, they're somewhat sympathetic to the ideology, and the result is they just give in.

BW: I think the sympathetic view of the CEOs in charge of these companies is that they're somehow being held hostage. But you're actually saying that they're kind of sympathetic to the new, radical ideology themselves.

DS: They’re part of the same political elite. They all drink from the same monocultural fountain. They all went to the same universities. 

It really takes a strong founder to stand up to the pressure. Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, is one. He finally had enough of these pressure tactics and boycotts, and he declared that at Coinbase we're going to leave our politics at the door. You're free to have your own political views on your own time, but we're not going to discuss these political debates inside the company and we're not going to be roiled by these controversies. We're going to focus on the mission of Coinbase. Basically, he was insisting on the old etiquette of the workplace, which is you come to work to work. 

He did it in a very smart way. He said: “Listen, this is the new policy, and if you don't like it, we'll give you a very generous severance.” Only five percent of the employees took that severance. The 95 percent of people who remained are so happy that they're not subject to all of these political debates and controversies. Of course, Brian was subjected to the obligatory New York Times hit piece for implementing this policy.

Most founders don't have Brian's courage. Rather, they are expressing their true thoughts in Signal groups with disappearing messages. Some of these groups I'm in, so I know what they really think, but they just don't have the courage to stand up. If they could all do it at the same time and implement the Coinbase policy, I think it would create a meaningful change. But none of them wants to become a target.

Civil liberties for the digital public square:

BW: The criticism that I hear a ton in response to what you're saying is: David, these are private companies. If I invent YouTube and I pay for the servers of YouTube and I've set up the whole architecture of the company, why can't I do what I want? Same with Facebook. Why don't I get to decide that I don't want some kind of clickbait or fake news or whatever on my thing? I'm going to police it. Who are you to tell me I can't?

DS: I think it's a very disingenuous argument. The same people who say that these social media companies, these big tech companies, should be free to do whatever they want because they're private companies are the same people pushing six bills through Congress right now to restrict and regulate those companies because they see them as monopolies. So they don't even believe their own argument. They all start making these libertarian arguments when these big tech companies are restricting speech in a way that they like. When they agree with the outcome, they want to give these companies the freedom to produce that outcome. 

We need to fundamentally understand that free speech in our society has been privatized. The town square has been privatized. When the Constitution was written, the internet didn't exist. Back then, the town square was a physical place that you could go to, and there was a multiplicity of town squares all over the country. There were thousands of them and anybody could put their soapbox down and speak, and anyone could gather around and listen. That’s why, if you look at the First Amendment, it doesn't just protect freedom of speech and of the press. It also protects the right to peaceably assemble. 

Well, where do people assemble today? They assemble in these giant social networks that have these gigantic network effects. That is where speech, especially political speech, occurs. And if you are shut out of that digital town square, to what extent do you still even have a First Amendment? To what extent do you have a right to speech? Well, I don't think you do. If you were to grab your soapbox today and go on the courthouse steps, they'll think you're a lunatic. You have no free speech right in this country if you are kicked off of these social networks. 

So, I don't think it's good enough to say, well, these are private actors and, therefore, they can do whatever they want. Those private actors have too much power. They have the power to decide whether you, as an American, have an effective free speech right in this country. I think that's unacceptable. I think the Founders, the Framers of the Constitution, would never have permitted that.

BW: Are you saying that in the 21st century, in the digital world, that platforms like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are more like . . . sidewalks?

DS: Kind of, yeah.

BW: American law prohibits discrimination not just in public spaces but also in private businesses. You cannot discriminate based on a person's race, religion, disability, sex, national origin. Are you suggesting that in our new world that someone's political views should be seen like those other categories? That in the same way you can’t kick someone off YouTube because they're gay or black or Christian, you shouldn’t be able to kick someone off because they're a political conservative or a TERF?

DS: I think we're probably going to need something like that. The fundamental American principle is that you can't discriminate against someone because of their race, color or creed. Historically, creed has not necessarily meant political ideology, but I think it may need to. If we don't create some kind of protection, discrimination against people on the basis of their political views is going to continue.

It would be possible to create a social media moderation policy that is rooted in First Amendment principles. That way, at least social media moderation will be grounded in case law that's been developed over decades by the Supreme Court as opposed to being made up by these social networks as they please.

Build your own Facebook?

BW: What do you say to the people who argue: If you don't like the way YouTube conducts itself, if you don't like the way Facebook conducts itself, no problem. Go make another one. Why is that not an acceptable solution to this problem?

DS: This is what you heard when Twitter and Facebook banned Trump. Their argument was: Go to a different app. And then Apple and Google banned Parler, which was the different app. And then the argument was, Well, that's not censorship. Just go create a website. And then Amazon Web Services started banning websites. So, at some point, when are you going to say this is an undue imposition on free speech? What am I supposed to do? Go create my own internet? All I wanted to do was post a tweet. Let’s not be obtuse to the power of these monopolies. I think people are being selectively oblivious to the network effects. 

BW: We hear that phrase a lot: network effects. What does it mean?

DS: A network-effect business is one where the value of the service increases with the number of users. So if you think about Twitter or Facebook or the phone company, the more people who are on the service, the more value it has to everybody else. The value actually increases exponentially because the number of connections that can be made increases exponentially every time someone joins the service. If you or I want to create our own Twitter clone, it'll be very, very hard to do that because nobody else will be on it. So you have this huge chicken and egg problem. This is why these social networks are so powerful. They’ve got these huge network effects based on the fact that everybody is already on them, and it gets very, very hard to try and create a competing one.

From deplatforming to debanking:

BW: It used to be that we’d hear a lot about deplatforming. Now, increasingly, we are hearing about debanking. What does it mean?

DS: It means that you are denied access to a financial service—your access to your money or to your ability to conduct a transaction or to pay people—based on your political views. All of that gets restricted because your views are deemed unacceptable by the people who run these services.

BW: Give us an example. Maybe we can use the company you helped build, PayPal, and its creation of what you've called their no-buy list, a play on the idea of a no-fly list.

DS: Back in the early days, we believed that our mission was to expand access to the financial system. Today PayPal, under new management, is working to deny people access. They’ve actually partnered with a couple of left-wing partisan groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, to create lists of users and groups to ban from the platform. They've actually announced this. They're proud of this.

Now, these are groups with a storied history. I think they did very good work historically in the past. 

BW: It’s the same phrase you used before. I didn't leave the ADL, the ADL left me.

DS: Right, exactly. They used to be fairly bipartisan or nonpartisan in their denunciation of antisemitism. But the ADL has changed. It's under new management, and they've broadened their portfolio from antisemitism to cover anything they consider to be hateful or extremist. And their definition of extremism is basically anything that disagrees with conventional Democratic Party politics or orthodoxy. So the ADL opposed the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. It basically partnered with Al Sharpton to boycott Facebook for allowing hate speech on their platform, which is pretty amazing given Al Sharpton's history. The point is that the ADL now is using their historical capital and applying it to all these fairly conventional political debates. So when they partner with PayPal to create a list of banned groups or accounts, they've massively expanded the list of people who can be thrown off these services. If you just express a political opinion that dissents from the orthodoxy you can now be kicked off these platforms.

BW: I want to explain how we went, in such a short time, from people getting booted off of PayPal, for example, to governments wielding this power. A few weeks ago we saw massive protests in Canada of truckers who gathered in Ottawa and also at critical junctures of the border to protest Canada's Covid mandates. What Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did is that he invoked something called the Emergencies Act, which allowed the Canadian government to issue a directive that required all kinds of financial institutions—banks, credit unions, even crypto wallets—to stop providing any financial or related services to anyone associated with the protests, even if they were nonviolent, which the vast majority of the protests were. So it didn't matter if you were a protest leader or if you contributed $15 via GoFundMe, or even if you had sold a protestor a cup of coffee. Their accounts were frozen. Their money was stranded. They couldn’t use their credit cards. This is exactly what you have been warning us about, right?

DS: One of the most indefensible aspects of what Trudeau did is that the freezing of accounts was done retroactively. Meaning: at the time that the protesters engaged in their civil disobedience or the people donated to them, it was a perfectly legal activity. And yet their accounts were frozen based on having contributed in the past, again, at a time when it was completely legal. So what you had was not just the fact that you had this unprecedented expansion of aiding and abetting liability to anyone who contributed to the cause, but that that liability was being retroactively determined. In other words: anybody who had views that Justin Trudeau believed were unacceptable could be retroactively subjected to this punishment. 

That precedent must have a chilling effect on speech moving forward. If, today, you are a citizen in Canada contemplating making a contribution to a political cause that you believe that Justin Trudeau doesn't like, the precedent has been set that, at some point in the future, Trudeau could look back at that contribution and basically freeze your account for having made it in the past, even though it's completely legal at the time that you do it. That’s one of the worst aspects of this whole thing. That’s going to have a chilling effect on people's willingness to contribute to causes that Justin Trudeau doesn't like.

So what can we do?

BW: Where do we go from here? What can either individuals do or the American government do to protect us from the kind of authoritarianism that you're warning about?

DS: I think we have to reinvigorate our civil liberties. I don't think we’re going to get that from the current administration because, frankly, a lot of the pressure for censorship and deplatforming is coming from the Democratic Party. This is not a partisan point. If you look at polling about views about censorship and deplatforming, there is a huge divide between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. If you go back ten years ago, both parties had the same views on censorship. They were against it. Everyone was in favor of free speech, but there's been a huge divergence. And so I think it's going to take a new administration—presumably, the next Republican administration—to want to take action. And we're going to have to reinvigorate our civil liberties by realizing that these private actors have huge amounts of control over our right to speech, our right to commerce, our right to make a livelihood, and they should not be able to exercise those powers. They should not be able to use those powers to deny us those liberties. 

That's going to require the Republican Party to embrace a role that it has not historically engaged in, which is to be a little bit more of a regulator of private companies. You have to go back all the way to Teddy Roosevelt. TR was the trust buster. He basically said these monopolies have too much power and we need to bring them to heel. That’s why Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore. He stood up for the rights of the common man against the power of these gigantic monopolies. 

I think that the next Republican who's going to be successful has to take a page out of TR’s playbook here and say: we do not represent the interests of these oligarchs and these big, powerful companies. We represent the interests of the working man and woman trying to have the right to free speech, to make a living, to conduct payments. And it should not be up to tech oligarchs to decide who has those rights.

From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, March 29, 2022, re-posted to SHU 1053, June 1, 2022