David Sacks: Nonprofits need to manufacture problems in America to stay in business

David Sacks opens by contrasting the feedback mechanisms of for-profit businesses versus nonprofits. In business, he argues, market forces discipline organizations — if they fail to generate revenue, they go out of business. Nonprofits and NGOs, by contrast, survive through donor fundraising rather than by selling products or services. Over time, Sacks claims, the actual mission of these organizations becomes secondary to their ability to continue fundraising, creating a perverse incentive to manufacture or perpetuate problems rather than solve them.

Sacks is then asked why an organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn't focus on its stated mission — Southern poverty — and instead pivots to manufacturing narratives around racism. He responds with a historical theory: civil rights organizations were once pursuing a genuinely noble and legitimate cause, fighting the legacy of segregation and Jim Crow laws. However, he argues that no nonprofit ever 'declares victory,' even when their goals are largely achieved.

Using Barack Obama's 2008 election as a turning point, Sacks contends that the election of the first Black president to the highest office in the land was evidence that America was not, at its core, a racist country denying people opportunities based on race. Rather than declaring success and disbanding, he argues, these organizations moved the goalposts — shifting from a mission of equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes, which he characterizes as 'identity socialism.' He further claims that instead of being transparent about this ideological shift, these groups developed new terminology (referencing the 'anti-racism' movement emerging around Obama's second term) to obscure what was really a fundamental change in mission, one that he believes most Americans would have rejected if presented plainly.