Dec. 6: Trump Is All-In on Tech

MAGA rallies aroung Hegseth; Eric Adams flirts with GOP; The shooting you didn't hear about

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The Big Story

In a move that should presage a new era for the American technology sector, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday announced that he was appointing venture capitalist David Sacks as his “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.” Sacks, the former chief operating officer of PayPal (and thus a member, along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, of the “PayPal Mafia”), founded the social networking platform Yammer, which was sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion; served as CEO of Zenefits; and co-founded the venture capital firm Craft Ventures. To most people, though, Sacks is known primarily for his role as co-host of the popular tech business-focused All-In Podcast—and for his vocal support of Trump in the 2024 election.

In addition to having him on All-In, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his Pacific Heights home in San Francisco on June 6, more than a month before the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, which prompted Musk and other tech figures to endorse the president-elect. The fundraiser represented a sea change in Silicon Valley’s political orientation; it signaled that tech founders, who played such an important role in Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, were less set on Joe Biden than many thought. One of the subplots of the 2024 election, kept mostly beneath the surface until the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen aired his industry’s grievances on Joe Rogan’s podcast in November, was the belief from many founders that the Democrats were killing the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries.

The reason Democratic tech-constraint was more subplot than plot is that both Biden and Harris were cagey about their administration’s aims. While Biden did release Executive Order 14091 on Oct. 30, 2023, which gave latitude for more than a dozen agencies to police AI companies on a broad range of fronts, the fading president wasn’t wholly engaged in making a case to the public. The same could be said of Biden’s “crypto crackdown,” as Axios called it. While Biden did not campaign as an anti-crypto president, his FDIC was engaged in sending “pause letters” to regulated financial firms, asking them to stop expanding activities with these currencies, and was pressuring banks to get out of this growing industry. According to Andreessen and multiple other tech founders, the Democratic regime was aggressively “debanking” leaders within the crypto industry, informally exerting pressure on banks to refuse business from individuals and entities deemed troublesome, absent due process.

While there are reasonable concerns associated with potentially financially destabilizing cryptocurrencies, and broader challenges associated with artificial intelligence, there is a greater risk in hamstringing a superpower’s ability to compete on the forefront of technological innovation. The Biden administration’s policy on these matters was mostly intended to broadly squelch behind the scenes, via serious penalties.

Now, the American technology industry will be unleashed in these sectors, absent much constraint. This policy shift has massive implications, many of which are likely unknowable given the dynamic nature of the aforementioned technologies. What’s certain, for now, is that Trump’s administration has an optimistic orientation toward these formerly repressed industries. And the reaction to the move is only further evidence of the strange realignment we’re living through, with both Democrat-supporting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec cheering on Sacks’ appointment.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Walter Russell Mead on how Trump destroyed the GOP establishment by taking Southern politics national

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The Rest

→Following the squashed Matt Gaetz nomination for attorney general, vocal elements of the online MAGA machine are drawing a line in the sand in defense of Trump’s secretary of defense nominee, Pete Hegseth. On Thursday, activist and Trump ground game operator Charlie Kirk threatened Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, who is reported to be orchestrating a behind-the-scenes campaign to sink Hegseth: “Primaries are going to be launched. The old RNC, the old way of doing things is dead, okay?” Kirk wrote. “If you support the president’s agenda, you’re good. You’re marked safe from a primary. You go up against Pete Hegseth… you get a primary challenge in Iowa.”

→Embattled New York Mayor Eric Adams continues to trend MAGA. Fresh off vocally defending Daniel Penny against the Manhattan DA in the “subway chokehold case,” Adams signaled in a local TV interview on Friday that he’s not ruling out rejoining the Republican Party. While Adams, who is currently under indictment from the Biden Justice Department, may have reason to court Trump’s favor, it’s also true that his deep-blue city underwent a sharp red shift in the last election. Adams was a Republican from 1997 to 2001, during the reign of Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

→In our Video of the Day, the issue isn’t the issue, the issue is the revolution:

That’s a popular Free Palestine TikToker rejoicing over the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City earlier this week as “karmic justice.” In theory, of course, a cold-blooded assassination of an American health executive has nothing to do with Gaza, until you remember that “Palestine is a climate justice issue,” in the words of Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency grantee Climate Justice Alliance. Translation: It’s all part of the same progressive omnicause, which is why former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, a Long COVID fanatic as well as a vocal critic of the Biden-sponsored “genocide” in Gaza, was also praising Thompson’s death in Bluesky posts and Substack post earlier this week.

→And while the country’s attention has been focused on the high-profile murder of Thompson, that wasn’t the only shooting to happen on Wednesday. In Oroville, California, a deranged homeless man shot two kindergartners at a Seventh-Day Adventist school in solidarity with Gaza and Yemen before turning the gun on himself. Both children survived, but the 56-year-old shooter left behind a note explaining his intention to pursue “countermeasures involving child execution” on behalf of the “International Alliance.” The shooter went on to explain that these countermeasures were a protest against “America’s involvement with genocide and oppression of Palestinians along with attacks towards Yemen,” according to The Jerusalem Post.

→Quote of the Day

“To have a transgender child has made me so much more interesting.”

That was actress Annette Bening, speaking outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti earlier this week. While the court’s debate pertains to whether Tennessee should be allowed to ban what those in legacy media might (euphemistically) call “gender-affirming care for minors,” Bening offered a reminder that, to some, especially in the narcissistic Hollywood set, this serious topic is just one more way to get attention.

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TODAY IN TABLET:

Rebel Yell, by Walter Russell Mead

Part II: How Reagan-Bush Republicans awakened the Balrogs of economic, immigration, and identity politics that Donald Trump used to crush them

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Novelist Boualem Sansal Is Being Murdered by the Algerian Government

Ask yourself why you're not hearing about this story

by Liel Leibovitz

Boualem Sansal, one of France’s most acclaimed authors, disappeared on Nov. 16. For more than a week, his whereabouts were unknown. Finally, and under mounting pressure, the Algerian government admitted that it had seized Sansal and was holding him on charges of “endangering the nation.”

Sansal was born in Tissemsilt, in Algeria, and trained as an engineer. He also completed a Ph.D. in economics, and went to work for the Algerian government. He was a content and richly rewarded bureaucrat, working for the Algerian Ministry of Industry, but his homeland, he realized, was changing, falling under the sway of Islamism. And so, Sansal, by then a 50-year-old man with no previous literary experience, began to write.

His first novel, 1999’s Le Serment des barbares, was a hit, though it made some people uncomfortable. The book tells the story of an aged detective who investigates two murders and learns more than he bargained for about the corruption of Algerian society during the nation’s "Black Decade," the bloody civil war that claimed as many as 150,000 lives between 1992 and 2002. It won a host of awards, and it made Sansal, who grew up right down the block from Albert Camus’ house, a celebrated French writer.

Which soon proved a problem. In 2003, after narrowly surviving the devastating earthquake that shattered Algeria, he published Dis-moi le paradis, a novel about a man who travels in postcolonial Algeria and witnesses the chaos, incompetence, and corruption of its first years as an independent nation. The tone was too candid for the government’s taste, and Sansal was forced to leave his position in the ministry.

Most authors would take the hint, and pursue more subtle stuff. Sansal went the other way. In 2008, for example, he published Le village de l’Allemand, translated into English as The German Mujahid. It tells the story—based on a real-life account—of a Nazi officer who flees to Algeria, helps the National Liberation Army violently kick out the French, and retires to a small village. When his children discover his secret identity, they have to wrestle not only with their lurid family lore but also with the question, virtually undiscussed before or since in the Arab world, of the affinity between Arab leaders and the Nazi party and ideology.

The work, advocating moral responsibility over tribal prejudice, infuriated many in his native country, but by then Sansal didn’t care. He was, he frequently said, a man exiled in his own homeland, committed first and foremost to telling the truth. So when an invitation came, in 2012, to attend Jerusalem’s Writers Festival, Sansal gladly accepted.

As a writer, he told the Israeli press at the time, he was sensitive to words and how they were used, and couldn’t stomach the thought that most Arab countries frowned upon people speaking freely about “Israel” or “the Jews,” a form of censorship, he added, that poisons minds and hearts.

"As soon as there is freedom of speech,” he said, “it will be possible to disagree with Israel if one wishes to do so—only without the hate. This is the reason I traveled to Israel and this is the reason I will return. We can argue about a certain Israeli policy, but the most important thing is to be friends.”

The same year, Sansal won a Editions Gallimard Arabic Novel Prize, but the award’s sponsors, France’s Arab Ambassadors Council, revoked the 15,000 euros promised to the winner, arguing it could not reward anyone who had visited, and had nice things to say about, the Jewish state. The council’s decision, the director of France Culture radio later revealed, was influenced in large part by Hamas, which successfully lobbied the council’s members to punish Sansal.

“I wouldn’t wish Hamas upon my worst enemy,” Sansal said in response. “It is a terrorist movement of the worst kind. Hamas has taken Gazans hostage. It has taken Islam hostage.” And the Arabs, he added, had “shut themselves in a prison of intolerance.”

Some French intellectuals stood up for Sansal. Many others marked him as reactionary, someone who foolishly defied the "red-green alliance" that brought together radical Marxists on the one hand and fervent Islamists on the other under one trendy banner. When his next book, 2084, was published in 2016, it received mixed reviews. A riff on George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, the book tells the tale of a postapocalyptic civilization governed by a fundamentalist cult that bears more than a passing resemblance to Salafism. And to many on the chic left, it was just another example of benighted boobs hating on the religion of peace.

“In twenty years, when the Islamophobic waters of France have ebbed, we will wonder how we could have gotten so excited about such a slow thriller,” wrote the editor at the time of the magazine Paris Match, adding that “fear is an excellent appeal” and that Sansal was merely exaggerating the threat Islam posed to the Western world.

Earlier this year, Sansal, feeling that his own safety in Algeria could no longer be guaranteed, became a French citizen. President Macron attended the ceremony. And yet, the writer refused calls to stay away from his native land. Like all writers worth a damn, he refused to cower and chose, instead, to fight.

And now he’s in custody, held by an authoritarian regime and accused of imaginary crimes. And while some of the literary world’s braver souls are standing up and demanding his release—a tip of the hat, as always, to the brave Salman Rushdie—most of our bien-pensants are silent. The same mediocrities who collected awards while squawking about the fictitious genocide in Gaza are once again siding with the marauders, betraying a far greater writer seized for the sin of adhering to humanism’s core commitments.

Every reader must demand the immediate release of Boualem Sansal, or, at least, the complete ostracization of the Algerian government until he is freed. And until Sansal is back home with his loved ones, the least we could do is show our respect to his courage and his values, the values of Western civilization, by spending the days he languishes behind bars reading his books and praying for his safe return.