(I made an updated version of this that I decided to publish as its own new article, keeping this one for posterity’s sake)
If you’re in the loop on American political news, you’re probably aware of Ron DeSantis’ Twitter Spaces announcement that he was running to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. You may have also heard a Twitter Spaces conversation hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a Democratic primary longshot. High profile in both of these conversations was Twitter CEO Elon Musk. But Musk was joined both times by another person, it was another South African born, PayPal launching, angel investing, Republican leaning, populist branding, woke despising, stock portfolio falling guy in his early 50s. This man is represented in the call by a profile picture showing him in a light wool coat against the background of a stock photo tropical beach. But instead of having the suave, if somewhat distant and unfocused demeanor of Musk, this was someone that clearly knew what he wanted, this was someone that had political ambitions extending much further back than Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. This was David Sacks.
Born in South Africa in 1972, David Oliver Sacks spent the first five years of his life in the country until moving with his family to the United States [1]. He then went on to get his undergraduate degree at Stanford. It was at Stanford that he met his most important connection. You might think this person was Elon Musk, who claims he went to Stanford but dropped out after only two days [2]. But, in reality, the person that shaped David Sacks’ more than anyone was Peter Thiel. This was because Sacks had picked up writing for the Stanford Review, a right wing libertarian school paper founded by Thiel, and eventually became Editor-in-Chief. Sacks characterized the review as being a group of “new campus radicals” in opposition to existing on campus left wing radicalism [3].
Sacks was not simply in lock-step with Thiel. The two may have found each other to be ideologically aligned, but Sacks was the one more willing to get his hands dirty. According to George Packer in his book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, Thiel founded the newspaper as a vehicle for this fight against leftism. As Thiel graduated in 1989, he wrote one final column in the Review, vowing to fight at every turn the leftists trying to destroy Stanford. But the 80s were coming to a close and Thiel’s more esoteric concerns over western civilization weren’t going to leave campus on their own. Luckily for Thiel, David Sacks had a new approach. Sacks expanded the scope of the Review beyond criticisms of political correctness in the curriculum. He didn’t just talk about how ‘multiculturalism’ effected the curriculum changes, he made sure to tell you why you shouldn’t feel compelled to support the protests for Indigenous People’s Day. He ragged on how your tuition money was being wasted by hiring professors to teach ridiculously named classes [16]. But most importantly, Sacks knew that sex and crime sell, and he could garner a lot of attention by combining those two things. “Under its new editor, Thiel's friend David Sacks, the Review moved on to speech codes, gay rights, and sex (in 1992 an entire issue was devoted to rape)” said George Packer. This particular issue included a piece by Sacks which described in gruesome detail the rape of a 17 year old girl by a Stanford senior, coming to the conclusion that she could have said no, but chose not to.
“Under its new editor, Thiel's friend David Sacks, the Review moved on to speech codes, gay rights, and sex (in 1992 an entire issue was devoted to rape)”
Sacks’ didn’t just go through a dorm room libertarian phase in college that was partially reignited by a love of tax breaks once he became successful, he was fully committed to the political project. In 1995, a year after graduating from Stanford, he co-authored his first book with now formal associate Peter Thiel, titled The Diversity Myth. The book is an attack on academia’s diversity oriented curriculums, with Stanford in particular used as a frequent example. It later expands to a critique of multiculturalism as a whole, warning against its influence on broader society [5]. It was published by the Bay Area based libertarian Independent Institute. It became Sacks and Thiel’s first major political success, but not one that they would like you to remember.
In 2016, the pair were forced to disavow statements made in the book a few weeks after then candidate Donald Trump’s “Grab ‘em by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape surfaced [6]. Thiel was an early supporter of Trump, and even pledged an additional $1.2 million to his campaign after the tape was made public [13]. Even though Sacks himself donated almost $40,000 to the Clinton campaign, and an additional $28,000 to the DNC itself (according to FEC filings), he still had to deal with the obvious backlash of being the co-author of these statements. As for what the pair actually wrote, much of it could charitably be described as having not aged well. In a section on campus sexual assault, Sacks and Thiel wrote:
“a woman might ‘realize’ that she had been ‘raped’ the next day or even many days later. Under these circumstances, it is unclear who should be held responsible. If the alcohol made both of them do it, then why should the woman’s consent be obviated any more than the man’s? Why is all blame placed on the man?”
Given that the book is heavily based on The Stanford Review, and based on how Thiel and Sacks clearly had different areas of interest as editors-in-chief, some inferences could possibly be made on which of the pair was more responsible for that particular passage.
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