David Sacks Shares What It Was Like To Trash ‘Forever Wars’ At The RNC

Last week on the “All-In” podcast, billionaire tech mogul David Sacks gave a behind-the-scenes look at admonishing the “forever wars” with a speech to the Republican National Convention (RNC).

“They sent me some ideas for remarks and then I completely rewrote it with my research assistant/writer,” Sacks said. After some back-and-forth, Sacks said convention organizers “by and large” allowed him to “do what I wanted to do” within a six-minute time frame.

“The big thing I had to learn was how to use the teleprompter,” Sacks added, explaining how he had to train backstage on how to read a speech with the device while addressing both a massive convention crowd and Americans watching through television at home. “The most important thing is I got to say the substance of what I said.”

“Not universally popular,” co-host David Friedberg interrupted. “You basically called for an end to the conflict in Ukraine and to stop funding Ukraine’s defense against Russia. And that’s not a popular opinion in the Republican Party, is that right?”

“Well I went further than that,” Sacks clarified. “I said that this was not an unprovoked war. It was a provoked war. I said the Biden administration provoked the war with talk of NATO’s expansion.”

Friedberg said Sacks “went out on a limb more than most other speakers” to promote an opinion “fairly contrarian” within the Republican Party.

“Well I think that most of the people in the Republican Party and including most people on the floor actually agreed with me,” Sacks said, noting an applause line when he charged President Joe Biden with provoking the war.

“President Biden sold us this new Forever War by promising it would weaken Russia and strengthen America. Well, how does that look today? Russia’s military is bigger than before, while our own stockpiles are dangerously depleted,” Sacks said at the RNC. “Every day, there are new calls for escalation, and the world looks on in horror as Joe Biden’s demented policy takes us to the brink of World War III.”

“I never actually intended it to even be an applause line,” Sacks said on Friday’s podcast. “I just thought it was an important thing to state the truth.”

“It was very much a speech that attacked the forever wars,” Sacks added. “It attacked the warmongers and complemented President Trump for keeping us out of wars and complimented him for being strong but also having the savviness and the ability to negotiate with our adversaries to keep us out of wars.”

The four panelists went on to discuss the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, as a military veteran of such wars and an Appalachian-native popular with Silicon Valley while representing heartland communities dismissed for decades by the American elite.

“He’s superb,” said Chamath Palihapitiya of Vance. “I cannot say enough good things about this guy.”

Vance, Palihapitiya said, is “a bit of an enigma.”

“His views are so unique and he comes from a background that is very similar to mine,” Palihapitiya added, given the Ohio senator’s historic rise from rural Appalachia to the upper echelons of business and politics.

“He came from nothing,” Jason Calacanis said.

“Less than nothing,” Palihapitiya said.

“It’s very unusual to get somebody who has MAGA plus tech on their side together,” Sacks said later in the conversation. Sacks characterized Vance as a “legacy pick” whose nomination cemented a “new emergent Republican Party” under former President Donald Trump away from corporatism responsive to Wall Street elites to “a populist party that actually represents the people.”

Calacanis labeled “the tent of the Republican Party at this RNC” as “the most wide open tent I’ve ever seen in politics” demonstrated by the presence of rapper and television personality Amber Rose, who spoke on the first night of the convention.

“I realized Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, or straight. It’s all love,” Rose said. “And that’s when it hit me: These are my people. This is where I belong.”

Rose also appeared in a Trump-themed parody music video of the song “Ice Ice Baby” which played at the RNC’s second day.

The podcast panelists called Rose, “excellent,” “fantastic,” and “absolutely radiant.”

“I thought her speech was effective,” Sacks said, wherein Rose “described her evolution and her journey from someone who believed the media’s lies about Trump thinking that he was a racist to actually meeting the man herself, realizing that the way they had portrayed him was basically a slander.”