david sacks
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David Sacks, a tech entrepreneur who has been a key figure at major companies like PayPal, warned during an interview Tuesday night that Apple is doing the same thing in the United States that they are doing in communist China.

Sacks made the remarks during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson when asked about how Apple can be stopped from potentially booting Twitter off its App Store.

"What Apple is doing in China is not that different from what Apple is doing in the U.S.," he said. "They are willing to engage in censorship on a global basis on behalf of their true paymasters. And by paymasters, I don't mean consumers — Apple has them completely locked up. What I mean is the party in power, whether that's in Beijing or Washington."

"This is the quid pro quo that MAGA Democrats have made — of course, by MAGA Democrats, I'm referring to Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon," Sacks continued. "They have the most lucrative monopolies in history and want to continue minting money undisturbed. And in exchange for that, they will donate lavishly [to] the Democratic Party, and they're willing to kneecap their political opponents with censorship if that's what the party in power requires."

WATCH:


TRANSCRIPT:
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: But in the meantime, we are very happy to be joined by David Sacks. He's one of the founders of PayPal. He spent the last 25 years as a major figure in the tech world and has been watching very carefully what's happening with Elon Musk after the acquisition of Twitter. David Sacks, thanks so much for coming on. If Apple did this, it would, it seems like it would effectively destroy Twitter as the force that it currently is. That would be an abuse of monopoly power. I think everyone [would] agree. What can be done to stop that?

DAVID SACKS, TECH FIGURE: Well, yeah, I agree with you, Tucker, that, you know, what Apple is doing in China is not that different from what Apple is doing in the U.S. They are willing to engage in censorship on a global basis on behalf of their true paymasters. And by paymasters, I don't mean consumers — Apple has them completely locked up. What I mean is the party in power, whether that's in Beijing or Washington. This is the quid pro quo that MAGA Democrats have made — of course, by MAGA Democrats, I'm referring to Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon. They have the most lucrative monopolies in history and want to continue minting money undisturbed. And in exchange for that, they will donate lavishly [to] the Democratic Party and they're willing to kneecap their political opponents with censorship if that's what the party in power requires.

CARLSON: You know, the traditional libertarian position on this, which I ascribed to for many years, I'll just say it, was that, you know, the First Amendment protects Americans from having their speech hampered by the government, okay? But all speech takes place online at this point. We know that there are direct connections between the tech companies and the government currently in power, they're censoring people at the direction of the U.S. government. So really, if you censor Twitter, you're eliminating my right to speak freely as an American, which is a constitutional problem. So why can't someone take action against this?

SACKS: I think you're right. I mean, what's basically happened here is that the government has found a kind of loophole in the First Amendment. The First Amendment as stated, it only applies to government, to Congress. But if the government can basically get big tech to do its censorship for it, it can claim that this was done by private actors. The problem is that the town square has been privatized. When content got digitized, it got centralized in the hands of a few big tech companies. And the problem here, though, is that these big tech companies aren't just acting on their own. They're acting, you know, at the behest of the government in Washington. And, you know, whether it's the Biden administration or various senators on the Judiciary Committee, they have suggested to these companies that their monopolies might be broken up if they don't take down more content. And so big tech has gotten the message. They want their monopolies to continue undisturbed, they want to keep minting money. And so they are responding by practicing this censorship.

CARLSON: I just got to finally ask you a personal question. So you've been in this business, at the top of this business, you know, all your life effectively, I'm sure you've seen everything in the tech world. Were you shocked to learn that Apple was preventing nonviolent protesters in China from communicating with each other?

SACKS: It is pretty shocking because the way that it was done, Tucker, was they had an update, it was like 16.1.1 or something like that. And they didn't say, normally what they do is when they do an update, they put in the release notes what they're changing. And they said in the release notes they were changing, you know, doing bug fixes, and so on. They didn't mention that they were limiting the use of this AirDrop feature. Normally, Apple is very proud of their releases, and they're eager to tell consumers what it is that they're doing. But in this case, for some reason, they didn't mention it, and you have to wonder why.

CARLSON: It's so dark. It's unbelievable. And I know that you come on the show and speak your mind at some cost to yourself, given the world that you live in. So I'm appreciative that you're willing to.