Preview/Update on David Sacks Part II
Hey everyone, I hope your summer is going well. I’m currently finishing up the second part of my David Sacks deep dive and thought I’d share part of it as a preview of the middle of the article. The article itself will be much longer than the first part and have a lot more polish. I’ve chosen a section that actually doesn't concern Sacks as much as his frequent collaborator, Jason Calacanis. I’m going to have this second part out in whole by the end of August at the absolute latest. Until then, enjoy this excerpt.
Sacks’ first crusade actually began on January 5th, 2021, when he posted an article on Medium titled “The Killer D.A.”. This article was about the death of San Francisco resident Hanako Abe in a hit and run drunk driving incident. Sacks decided to use the woman’s final Instagram post as the cover for the article and is the first thing you see upon opening it. The driver, Troy McAlister, was a repeat offender out on parole, apparently thanks to the policies of new San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin. Sacks essentially blames the death of Boudin’s policy of avoiding incarceration as the only solution to San Francisco’s crime problems. Sacks slams Boudin in particular for his idea that decarceration is a potential solution that can stop the conditions that create criminals in the first place. One sentence that Sacks was proud enough of to highlight in his article is: “It’s bizarre and alarming to hear a district attorney argue that jail is not a deterrent and actually a threat to public safety. It’s like hearing a fire chief declare he doesn’t believe in water.” [21]
Sacks wasn’t the only one embarking on this crusade, he was joining the ongoing effort of his podcast co-host, Jason Calacanis, who had started to take action a few days earlier. To fully understand the implications of Sacks’ support and the nature of San Francisco crime politics, I think Calacanis’ actions need to be examined. Not only did he spark the outrage that Sacks’ would capitalize upon in the short term, he would also sow some of the seeds of destruction for Republicans going into the 2022 midterms.
Now, I try to keep my writing objective, but what Calacanis did under the guise of a concerned citizen is borderline disgusting, especially considering his means. Calacanis' response to the death of these two women was to create a GoFundMe, which seems like a fine idea at first, a lot of people do that when someone dies. But Jason hadn’t made this GoFundMe for the victims, he made it to hire a journalist to report on Chesa Boudin. If you remember from the fact that Jason is the host of a podcast about rich guys, Jason is a centimillionaire [22], and this GoFundMe was for $75k. The fact that a man who has more money than a regular person would know what to do with was using the memory of a slain woman whose body wasn’t cold yet to further his political agenda is something I find deeply sickening. On the GoFundMe for Hanako’s family, you can see Jason’s name in the list of donations, credited with giving $500 to the victim’s family. This was the same amount Jason gave to his own GoFundMe, and $500 more than he gave to the other victim of the fatal incident, who never got a promoted fundraiser from any San Francisco billionaires.
Maybe it was because the other victim, the 60 year old Elizabeth Platt, had family members that spoke up differently about how they wanted her to be remembered. A few days after she was killed, Elizabeth’s sister, Alison, talked to NBC Bay Area about what her sister would have thought of the outrage over Chesa Boudin, which had already subsumed reporting on the fatal incident. “(Elizabeth) would have opposed the three strikes law that could have kept the man accused of killing her in prison for life instead of driving a car on New Year's Eve. (...) Liz likely would have opposed recalling the district attorney who some are now blaming” [23]. The interview also indicates that Elizabeth may have been experiencing trouble finding permanent housing, despite being a resident of the city for over 40 years. But none of this mattered to Jason Calacanis, he got what he came for, and all for pocket change.
Jason doesn’t see it this way, however. He envisions himself as a community organizer, a conduit for the people’s righteous fury towards unaccountable public officials. He regularly brags about his success with this GoFundMe, and did so again recently as of the time I’m writing this. I think I could have been a bit more polite in asking him about why he’s so proud of not using his own money, but it got a response from Calacanis. He told me that the reason for this was that he didn’t want “SF Lunatics” to be able to say it was a personal project. I’ll say here what I said in response on Twitter, if what Jason did with this money was supposed to stop the ‘SF Lunatics’, it didn’t work. In fact, it empowered the lunatics, because that's what Jason is, a hysteric avatar of the rot that makes San Francisco one of the most expensive places on earth. A Brooklyn resident that only moved to the Bay Area in 2015. A proud investor in Uber, the harbinger of the Gig Economy, which razed to the ground many of the remaining protections that lower and middle class Americans relied on to feed their families. A known associate of serial child rapists, Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell [24]. It makes sense that Calacanis’ didn’t give any money or support to the other woman supposedly killed due to the negligence of the Boudin, because there is a good chance Elizabeth Platt wouldn’t have been on the street that night if she had a permanent place to stay, something that Jason made almost impossible for many people that were residents of his beloved San Francisco almost as long as he had been alive. What if that’s why Jason’s fundraiser had so many donations of over $1,000 from names that match Bay Area tech moguls? What if it wasn’t just Jason that realized the horrifying truth that their pursuit of greater and greater fortune had them using an entire city of real people like a child’s box of toys? What if it was guilt catching up with the children that just succeeded in getting rid of a toy they didn’t want to play with anymore. Either way, it was time for a new toy, a toy that would repeat back whatever you said to it.
Enter Susan Dyer Reynolds, food critic, former newspaper owner, not politically correct, Harley Quinn enthusiast, pitbull advocate. But Reynolds is something above all else, a core value that animates her career and personality more than any other, Susan Dyer Reynolds is willing to work for the right price. She came across Calacanis’ radar January 3rd, 2021, when a friend that lived in San Diego tagged her under the original announcement by Calacanis asking for any journalists interested in covering the story. Reynolds introduced herself as someone currently working on a piece about Boudin, as well as someone without many other distractions since selling her publication, The Marina Times [25].
The Marina Times is a still operating but formerly independent community newspaper in San Francisco, having been purchased by the LA based Street Media in late 2020 [26]. Despite the sale of the Marina Times, it would appear Reynolds is still working there in some significant capacity, not only does she still write for them to this day, she had at least one article in the January 2021 edition, and runs the paper’s Twitter account like its a second personal account (it says in the Times’ bio that all tweets are from @SusanDReynolds). Reynolds has also been involved in a fair amount of controversy involving that account. In a spat with district supervisor Dean Preston over support for defunding the police in June, 2020, Reynolds quote tweeted Preston’s statement from the Marina Times account. Now, it’s already strange for a newspaper’s account to pick quote tweet fights, that's for individual journalists and the op-ed sections to take care of usually. What is even more strange was the rather graphic and threatening nature of the statement Reynolds made.
“Do you have a child @DeanPreston? If so, suppose that’s child was kidnapped, raped, and killed like Polly Klaas. Would you want the police to respond to your call? Would you want your child’s killer in prison? If you abolish prisons you’re OK with that killer doing it again? (thinking emoji)” [27].
This kind of conduct was not looked upon kindly by Preston and at least one other fellow supervisor, who proposed in a December budget meeting that the city stop buying $3,800 in advertising from the paper. They argued that not only did the paper make coded threats against Preston’s family, but that the paper repeatedly violated journalistic standards and would report any anonymous tip it received as fact. This meeting happened in early December, and the Marina Times was purchased by Street Media on the 22nd of the same month. It is unknown if the two are related.
Ten months later, Reynolds was back in the spotlight, Jason’s check was cashed, and she released her first article about Chesa Boudin on her Substack. By this point, the war against the D.A. had been raging for a while, which Reynolds had been skirmishing in on Twitter. September 9th, 2021, the article itself dropped, covering the events surrounding the fatal incident. It was mainly about the supposed failure of Boudin to prosecute and lock up the drunk driver; it was essentially the same article that David Sacks had written at the beginning of the year. Speaking of, it may be time to return to the hero of our story.
I like to think of Sacks’ efforts against Boudin as his First Crusade, as it was the first political issue he engaged in using his large public persona. Even if it technically concluded after Sacks’ Second Crusade I’ll detail shortly. Much like the historical First Crusade, it was a success, with Boudin being recalled by a 10 point margin in June of 2022.
The pro recall campaign was extremely well off financially, with over 2/3s of the $7 million it had coming from one PAC, Neighbors For A Better San Francisco, which was funded by a variety of Bay Area moguls. This isn’t to mention the indirect ways that cash was spent on this recall, if you remember our friend, Jason, essentially crowd sourced almost $60,000 to ‘hire an investigative journalist’ who happened to be extremely critical of Boudin. That same journalist received an additional $100,000 in a “grant” from Neighbors For A Better San Francisco. Sacks himself gave $75,000 to the recall campaign, which the new D.A. appointed by mayor London Breed was heavily associated with. When the results came in, and the new D.A. was appointed, David Sacks had finally done it. He conquered Jerusalem, taking it back from what he saw as heathens ruining his beloved city. Big Tech’s divine will was once again ruling its most holy city, and devout followers could travel in peace on its streets once again.
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