David Sacks is Not on the Level

Everyone's favorite Silicon Valley right-wing populist does not have America's best interests at heart. He is an aspiring oligarch in the world of strong men he wants to see come to be.

Note: This piece was originally posted on my Medium blog on July 6th. I wanted to republish it because it’s especially relevant now.

One of the greatest mistakes in reasoning about the future is assuming that it will be like the past. When people have asked me about Ray Dalio’s cyclical view of history, my response has typically been something along the lines of, “I think he’s looking at faces in clouds”.

I don’t think America is in decline. Nor do I think the United States is an “empire” in the frame of historical empires it’s often compared to. Most notably the Roman Empire. In fact, I think the analogy is downright wrong, misleading and confers a dangerously simplistic understanding of history. Which is unfortunate, because I think knowing history really matters. Because while I’d argue that historical analogy is not a reliable way to make predictions about the future, I’d also argue that making reasonable predictions about the future is tied to historical understanding, if for no other reason than the present is contingent on the historical context in which it finds itself situated. Decisions made in the past, have a direct effect on circumstances and possibilities of today, and tomorrow. In social science, this truth is sometimes referred to as “path dependence”.

I do think it’s worth going doing a bit of a cul-de-sac on the notion that the United States is an empire, controlled by a set of highly corrupt interests, hellbent on manufacturing war, in order to profit from the production of materiel for those wars. In a certain telling of history and understanding of our current context, the primary explanation for why there is a war in Ukraine today, is that a group of “neoconservatives” in Washington DC, who excitedly hoped to provoke Russia into a war, that they could in turn use to enrich themselves by selling Ukraine weapons, was an underlying through-line that motivated the United States, across multiple administrations to avoid a diplomatic solution. The presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, as well as Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks, argue that this is the primary force in the political economy driving us inevitably towards a catastrophic nuclear confrontation with the Russian Federation. In their telling of history and the current circumstances, Putin is a bad man, but he is responding to a malign set of interests in DC, hellbent on manufacturing a war with him for profit.

Even worse, they believe that this cabal has been in control of Washington for over a half century, that Kennedy’s uncle, the late President John F. Kennedy, and his own father, were murdered by the CIA over their attempts to dislodge the “military industrial complex’s” control over the federal government.

A surprising number of people believe that this narrative is true. And it’s unsurprising that if you think this is true, it's going to color your view of the war in Ukraine in interesting ways. Indeed, these individuals also believe that that the 2013 protests in Ukraine, sometimes referred to as “Euromaidan”, which ended with President Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster from power, was itself as CIA coordinated coup, to force Ukraine into NATO and the European Union.

It ignores the fact that Ukraine’s government had fully negotiated an association agreement with the European Union, which had the support of nearly 80% of Ukrainians. Despite this fact, figures like Kennedy and Sacks, insist that given the fact that Yanukovych was democratically-elected, that his 11th hour decision to refuse to sign the agreement, and declare that Ukraine would instead pursue an economic bloc with Russia instead, was a legitimate political action, and the reason why this wasn’t allowed to happen, was because the CIA didn’t want it to. The Ukrainian people really had nothing to do with it. Their argument is that because Yanukovych was the legitimately elected president of Ukraine, that his decision to tear up the association agreement with the EU and decide to align Kyiv more closely to Moscow was the democratically legitimate choice, and the millions of Ukranians that rose up against him on this, were actually the anti-democratic actors, by refusing to accept Yanukovych’s legitimate decisions as president to decide to align Ukraine with Russia, in spite of that sentiment being deeply unpopular. Elections have consequences. This is what they’re saying.

It’s worth mentioning that the protests in Kyiv had been peaceful until the evening of February 18th, 2013, when Yanukovich ordered Ukranian security forces to violently suppress the protests. That night, eleven protesters were killed by police.

This brought about a wave of outrage across Western capitals, including the United States, which spoke out against the Ukrainian government’s violent suppression of the protests. This decision to support the protesters at this moment, is characterized by the likes of Kennedy and Sacks as the United States “backing an illegal coup”.

It should be pretty clear at this point as we move through these facts that what these individuals see as “legitimate” — Yanukovich’s decision to tear up a negotiated agreement supported by 80% of Ukrainians was legitimate. The decision by him to align Ukraine with Moscow was legitimate. The attempts by the vast majority of Ukrainians to stop him in the streets was illegitimate. The decision the United States an others to back those protesters was “imperialist”.

There’s a pattern here. The pattern is that the will of the Ukrainian people is irrelevant. They should have done what they were told by their deeply unpopular president. And after his government massacred eleven protesters in the streets of Kyiv, the protesters should have recognized the legitimate authority of an unpopular president to do a deeply unpopular thing, to move away from the EU and become close friends with Moscow, which most Ukrainians saw as a malevolent force, having attempted to assassinate its political leaders and corrupt its politics. Even worse, they look at this and think, the CIA and military industrial complex were the principle actors standing in the way of what they saw as Yanukovich’s completely legitimate attempt to turn Ukraine into a Russian satellite state.

I think it should be pretty clear at this point that the likes of David Sacks have absolutely no care for democracy in any reasonable sense. He has, in fact, enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump — the first president in the history of the Republic to refuse to participate in the peaceful transfer of power. Which is the bedrock of our system of self-government.

Sacks will defend his view as “realist”. He invokes the perspectives of famed political scientist John Mearsheimer and deranged pro-Putin figure Douglas Macgregor as voices of reason. Sacks also consistently shows he believes the Russian narrative — as communicated by Kremlin-controlled media outlets — is more reliable and objective than what he sees as the purely propagandistic Western media. Up to and including the Russian arguments that the government in Kyiv is infected by Nazism.

On the infotainment podcast he co-hosts with his fellow venture capitalist friends, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedburg, he has successfully warped the perceptions of his co-hosts into his topsy-turvy world of what you might call the “Russian view”. That view being that America, not Russia, is responsible for all of this. That our refusal at diplomacy, that our insistence on NATO expansion, and our misguided alignment with the popular uprising against Yanukovich, all provoked Putin.

Even on the question of NATO, the fact that the vast majority of Ukrainians want to be part of the NATO alliance is an irrelvant fact. Our failure to meet their proposition with an emphatic “no”, is itself an imperialist move on our part. Our refusal to refuse to be their friends, and let Russia have their way with the Ukrainian people in what Sacks sees as Russia’s backyard and in their proper “sphere of influence” is imperialism on our part. What the Ukrainians want is irrelevant. Ukraine is to Russia as Canada is to the United States in this deranged worldview.

The fact that there’s no popular uprising in Canada against Ottawa being friends with Washington DC, and the fact there was a popular uprising in Ukraine against Yanukovich trying to be friends with a murderous tyrant that had attempted the poisoning assassination of their president, Viktor Yushchenko, is irrelevant. What matters is how the dictator in Moscow views it. How would we like it if after the United States had occupied and ruled Canada for half a century, under brutally totalitarian rule, then tried to disrupt their democratic emergence, assassinated their pro-democracy leaders, and then had their deeply unpopular pro-American prime minister try to force American integration down their throats, and the people rose up in mass protest? We’d never put up with that! The Monroe Doctrine!

This is literally what Sacks is saying. There’s nothing approaching morality, or concern for democracy in his stance. He’s more than happy to appeal to democracy to defend the legitimacy of Yanukovych — who was clearly in the can for the Kremlin. He’s quick to deny the democratic legitimacy of the current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He denies the democratic legitimacy of a popular uprising that by all accounts, represented a good three-quarters of the Ukrainian population, and the constitutional process used by the legislature to remove Yanukovych from power, after his dramatic breach of faith.

Despite Sacks’ claims that he is advocating for peace, a closer examination of his arguments reveals a clearly different agenda. He’s not arguing for peace; he’s arguing for submission — both to Putin’s aggression abroad and to Trump’s authoritarianism at home. In the international arena, Sacks’ version of ‘peace’ in Ukraine would essentially mean capitulation to Putin’s demands, disregarding the will and sovereignty of the Ukrainian people. This “peace” would come at the cost of democratic self-determination and would effectively reward Russian agression. Which he clearly sees as Putin’s just desserts, within his legitimate “sphere of influence”. Domestically, his enthusiastic endorsement of Trump, despite the latter’s unprecedented assault on the peaceful transfer of power, betrays a similar preference for strongman rule over democratic principles. In both cases, Sacks disguises his support for authoritarian figures under the veneer of “realism” or “anti-imperialism”. However, this stance is neither realistic nor anti-imperialist; it’s a call for a submission to power, whether wielded by Putin or Trump. Sacks’ arguments, when stripped of their pseudo-intellectual trappings, amount to little more than might-makes-right philosophy dressed up in geopolitical wisdom. This worldview, if adopted, would not lead to peace but to a world where autocrats are emboldened and democracies are suffocated. It’s a vision of “peace” achieved through the silencing of dissent and the crushing of democratic aspirations — a peace of the graveyard for freedom and self-determination.

David Sacks is a deeply cynical man, who is so obviously less interested in the truth, than he is on his own selfish-interest and creating the conditions for the protection of those interests above all. Even to the exclusion and in the case of the Ukrainians, the violent forced submission of their collective agency. They are nothing more than hapless puppets in a great power struggle between the US and Russia, with the US seen as a trespasser in Russia’s backyard — which in his mind, Ukraine is nothing more than. He’s got a fortune, power and influence, and he doesn’t want to be worrying about geopolitical events which could inconvenience him.

No. David Sacks is not on the level.