Tonight, Peter Thiel, an openly gay immigrant hailing from San Francisco, will address the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. His speech will close out the coronation of Donald Trump as the nominee claof his party, which three days earlier finalized a platform affirming the definition of marriage as “between one man and one woman.”
Thiel may seem an unlikely warm-up act for a raving nativist like Trump. But the pair are actually an impeccable ideological tag-team. In fact, Thiel outmatches Trump both in the preposterousness of his capitalistic ambition and in the sheer pathology of his political inconsistency.
Like Trump’s, Thiel’s speech will be one of the few in Cleveland (or Philly, for that matter) worth viewing in full, if only because the libertarian billionaire is, even more so than the man he’s opening for, a bizarre and fascinating man—his support for Trump is just one more strange item on a long list. And, unlike those who have taken the stage before him, Thiel isn’t a retired general, washed-up actor, incendiary evangelical, or reality show star, but a complicated member of the Silicon Valley elite.
Many Americans found Thiel the same way they found Donald Trump: on a screen, presented as something between caricature and real-world business figure. In The Social Network, Hollywood’s 2010 rendition of the Facebook creation myth, Thiel’s character appears briefly to write Mark Zuckerberg a $500,000 check and suggest that he utterly betray his best friend and co-founder, Eduardo Saverin — a fictionalized version of one of the greatest moments of treachery in modern business history. And unless you’re within or near the tech bubble, this may be your only impression of Thiel, who, despite his titanic stature in the startup sector, never crossed over to the national stage before Thursday night.
It’s a testament to Thiel’s contradictions that he’s so poorly understood even back home. In Silicon Valley, the tech sector was amazed when Thiel backed Trump as a party delegate, aberrant behavior in a community that sees itself as essentially open-minded and tolerant. How could a California futurist, who co-founded PayPal and beat every other VC in town to Facebook, support Stone Age politics? Thiel, who was born in West Germany, was a lifeline to startups founded by and employing people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, and now supported a presidential candidate who’d like to make life considerably harder for many of those same people.
In truth, extreme ideology was old hat for Thiel by the time Trump’s 2016 campaign began; he’s been a strong donor for both Ted Cruz and Ron Paul. Thiel gave hundreds of thousands of dollars over multiple campaigns, going back to at least 2009, to support Cruz, the Texas senator who pledged to make his opposition to gay marriage “front and center” in his presidential campaign and proposed a constitutional amendment to preserve bans on the practice. During the 2012 campaign, Thiel donated over $2 million to a Paul-supporting Super PAC.
Thiel has also postured as a libertarian, and even as his ideology shifts toward something more nihilistic — The Economist now calls him a “corporate Nietzschean” — he continues to rail against government programs like Medicare and Social Security. Meanwhile, he is chairman and co-founder of Palantir Technologies, a mass-surveillance-software company that makes a good deal of its money selling to the government; Palantir’s clients reportedly include the Department of Defense (including the NSA and various military branches), the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA. Thiel is, inexplicably, pro-monopoly. And don’t forget that Peter Thiel believes death is nothing but a bug in the feature set of mankind, and one he can buy his way out of.
What, if not ideological incoherence, could make Thiel a better pairing for Trump, for whom free trade is bad, but corporate interests are good; military spending is good, but military intervention is bad; immigrants are bad, and he married one? Voters love Trump’s wealth and crazed chatter — Thiel is just one more “self-made man” with bombastic theories to drive them wild.
Trump supporters (clearly) don’t mind some hefty dissonance between policy talk and stories of grand success in business. If anything, the former tends to annoyingly distract from the latter. So even though Thiel, like Trump, is a bundle of grandiose, self-negating ideas that don’t add up to much of anything, he has an easy job crafting a script for himself.
He can tout his co-creation of job creator PayPal (perhaps best not to mention its five foreign-born founders).
He might rant about how political correctness is tanking the United States, a topic on which he is a published author.
He can flaunt his shrewd early investment in Facebook, the source of his billions.
He can even tantalize convention-goers with his vision of a floating techno-libertarian archipelago, far from the reaches of the federal government (no Syrian refugees allowed, of course).
Or perhaps Thiel could repeat his 2009 suggestion that American democracy suffered when the right to vote was extended to women (casual misogyny has polled well so far in this election).
But where Thiel and Trump are perhaps most aligned is in their shared disdain for a free press.
Trump, of course, tolerates the media only when it functions as something approximating his own personal megaphone. Otherwise, Trump is relentlessly anti-media, a stance that has become a key part of his anti-establishment campaign: Like most politicians, the press is “phony,” “dishonest,” and “disgusting,” and Trump is its victim.
The media is really on a witch-hunt against me. False reporting, and plenty of it – but we will prevail!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 15, 2016
Accordingly, Trump has declared that under his presidency, he will “open up our libel laws so when [the press] write purposely negative and horrible and false” articles, “we can sue them and win lots of money. … We can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”
Trump calls the press here the "world's most dishonest people." Crowd turns towards press pen, booing. #TrumpRally
— Rachel Alexander (@rachelwalexande) May 7, 2016
Trump’s comments were widely understood as an open attack on press freedom, even if the mechanics are unclear (under the 1964 Supreme Court ruling New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a cornerstone of the American free press, public figures like Trump may already sue journalists for incorrect and defamatory statements made with a knowing disregard for the truth, that is, for “purposely negative and horrible and false” articles).
Thiel also wants to coercively halt the speech he finds most offensive, but he has done so through a private legal campaign rather than legislation. For nearly a decade, Forbes revealed in two stories earlier this year, Thiel has secretly funded lawsuits intended to put Gawker Media, my former employer, out of business, because the billionaire does not like their work. Granted an exclusive interview with Thiel, the New York Times essentially confirmed that storyline.
Thiel insisted to the Times that he cherished freedom of speech and journalism but believed Gawker to be “a singularly terrible bully” that acted completely outside the public interest. Yet even as he acknowledged spending somewhere “in the neighborhood” of $10 million to finance multiple lawsuits to muzzle the web publisher, he refused to detail exactly how many cases he was behind or name any of the news articles at issue, save for one involving a sex tape, published by Gawker, starring wrestler Hulk Hogan and resulting in a $140 million invasion-of-privacy judgment against the company, a verdict that is now under appeal.
News reports have speculated that other Thiel-backed lawsuits against Gawker Media, via the same firm that represented Hogan, include two pieces by me; consider that an awkwardly indeterminate disclosure. One of those stories challenged claims by Massachusetts entrepreneur Shiva Ayyadurai (the plaintiff) to have invented email; similar stories have run in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. (Ayyadurai told Forbes and the Times that Thiel was not funding his case “to the best of my knowledge.”) Another was an in-depth feature involving a reporter named Ashley Terrill who claimed she was harassed and surveilled by a Tinder co-founder.
The editor-in-chief of investigative magazine Mother Jones has called Thiel’s campaign part of a “pattern of press intimidation”; the director of the First Amendment Coalition said it could have a “chilling effect” and make “editors … think twice before writing another critical story”; and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s journalism school called Thiel’s plot “sinister” and “especially troubling” because “even a successful digital publisher can be threatened with ruin by a concerted litigation attack.”
Thiel, of course, doesn’t see things this way. His strategy of “specific deterrence,” as he dubbed his intentional legal harassment of a disfavored news organization, represents another way, should Trump find himself unable to “open up” libel laws, for the wealthy and powerful to silence their critics — or anyone, really. Both Thiel and Trump, despite being wealthy white American men and therefore essentially disqualified from victimhood, have somehow cast themselves simultaneously as bullied and bully, and will find in Cleveland an audience of potential voters who feel the same way, both about the media and themselves.
How nice! The little paypal LGBT pig has come to roost at the RNC, thanks to disgusting liberals who promote homosexuality as normal.
Now they have produced Thiel.
Enjoy.
Peter thiel proud to be gay
http://celebritynyoz.com/?p=109
There is so much wrong about this article I don’t know where to start. It reads as an attempt to smear Peter Thiel. The guy is a genius, plain and simple. Look into his background and you’ll find more reasons to respect the man than belittle his opinion. He doesn’t like Gawker because they wrote articles out of their ass about him. Please don’t victimize Gawker, they are the worst kind of press and got caught for it. Get your facts straight and do your due diligence before publishing and you won’t get in trouble by the law. Every person is subject to the rule of law, journalists included. Saying that he is pro-monopoly is mischaracterizing what he said. He’s a libertarian and recognizes that competition is good for consumers, but not for the business. Any business wants to find a niche and become the dominant leader – that is what he means by trying to be a monopoly – an ideal state for a profitable enterprise but one that is very difficult to maintain in a capitalist economy.
Sounds like you don’t read much.
Both Thiel and Trump suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which explains their bizarre views and behavior.
You have to bring in “victimhood,” a beloved term by the social justice warriors, to defend your claim? Really? Pathetic.
Yeah, the minute I read, “Both Thiel and Trump, despite being wealthy, white, American men, and therefore essentially disqualified from victimhood…”, that’s where Biddle lost me (and I was largely in agreement, up to that point).
It’s just lazy-reasoning. And it’s a demerit to an otherwise sound argument. You can fit into any or all those demographic categories, and still be a victim of wrongdoing. And you can be a member of a minority group, female, immigrant, and poor, and not necessarily be a victim of anything other than the same slings-&-arrows that every person endures in life.
Perhaps that’s not 100% germaine to the article’s main argument, but I keep seeing this underlying assumption about the world (which is way too broad– and rather patronizing), pop up in liberal-leaning magazines. And that’s my 2-cents.
A Gay, Alt-Right, Nazi, Republican Thin skinned, Press hating, Nihilistic Billionaire , weirdo.. OMFG! white people are bloody crazy..
He was definitely on oodles of amphetamines last night—like a robotronic Dracula.
Let’s just cut to the chase. Off with his head.
To the shills in comments who defend Thiel’s funding the suit against Gawker. It was more than one — Thiel went shopping to find plaintiffs to sue Gawker into bankruptcy.
This should be illegal. We need federal anti-SLAPP-type legislation to prevent third party strangers to claims from shopping for plaintiffs. And before everyone screams that it’s fine charity — it’s not necessary for a strong and valid claim to have a Peter Theil. Solid defamation cases are taken every day on a contingency-fee basis.
And get over this bullshit that Gawker “outed” Pete Thiel. Theil is a public figure, and is supportive of a political party that is homophobic. (Moreover, in his Silicon Valley circles he was totally out.) Insisting that Peter Thiel admit he is something his political party is ardently bigoted against is good activist journalism.
You people, like Thiel and Donald Trump, are anti-free press. Since when should billionaires be able to fund multiple, simultaneous lawsuits in order to bankrupt media they don’t like? There ought to be a law preventing the obscenely wealthy from revenge litigation that can kill media they hate, and hopefully soon there will be.
In the meantime, why don’t y’all goosestep somewhere else?
#1: “Shill” is antisemitic. You couldn’t even say 3 words without being antisemitic.
#2: The man is free to give away his money to anyone he wants. This (the United States of America) is a free country. If Gawker doesn’t want to get sued for libel and slander, then it shouldn’t have engaged in libel and slander in the first place. Had Gawker not violated the law then they would not have lost the case no matter how much money Peter Thiel gave away.
I usually agree with the Intercept in their quest to protect personal privacy from an overbearing and invasive government. But in this instance I agree with Peter Thiel who stood up to a private media outlet that was violating personal privacy in much the same manner.
Ahh, I think you need to check your sources. Here’s the meaning of the word “shill”:
“shill |SHil| informal
(noun) an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others. verb [ no obj. ]act or work as such a person. ORIGIN early 20th cent.: probably from earlier from shillaber, of unknown origin. There are no known claims for an association between shill or shillaber and any Yiddish word. This is another case where ‘origin unknown’ continues to be the safest call. ”
In other words, “shill” is NOT an anti-semitic word.
Seems to me, “Person,” is just a “shill” for Trump, Thiel, and the rest of the Republican twits.
technically no. However, 9 times out of 10 when I hear the word used it is used in the middle of antisemitic slur. And Peter Thiel is Jewish. And Mona is implying that the only people who could possibly be supportive of Peter Thiel’s actions are being paid money by this Jewish businessman to do so. I haven’t been paid a dime, and I am not voting for Donald Trump. However, I think Gawker invaded the privacy of private individuals in much the same way that the NSA and the U.S. government has. I therefore do not shed a tear now that Gawker has to declare bankruptcy. Maybe if someone invades your bedroom and broadcasts the feed of you having sex on the internet without your permission you will change your opinion too.
Thiel is a Catholic. Look it up; Google is your friend
Even if it were rooted in Yiddish, that would not make it antisemitic. If it meant “usurer” that might mean something, but it doesn’t. And who even knew (as Person claims) Thiel is Jewish?
Ahh, I think you need to check your sources. Here’s the meaning of the word “shill”:
“shill |SHil| informal
(noun) an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others. verb [ no obj. ]act or work as such a person. ORIGIN early 20th cent.: probably from earlier from shillaber, of unknown origin. There are no known claims for an association between shill or shillaber and any Yiddish word. This is another case where ‘origin unknown’ continues to be the safest call. ”
In other words, “shill” is NOT an anti-semitic word.
Seems to me, “Person,” is just a “shill” for Trump, Thiel, and the rest of the Republican twits.
Nothing in your (inane) comment rebuts or refutes what I posted.
“Free press” doesn’t mean what you apparently think it means, Mona. The press has very great latitude and liberty to print. Particularly in the US. But it does not have unlimited license to print with impunity.
You mean, it does not have unlimited license to print anything about the wrong person with impunity. In the U.S. you get the law you can pay for, and some people who oversee the lucrative end of government spying can sure pay for a lot.
The answer to libel is not laws but a free media. And by a free media I don’t mean one where companies brandish software patents to prohibit competitors, nor one tainted by copyrights and the commercial lottery they create. I mean true media freedom where taxpayers put a portion of income tax toward independent funding organizations of their choice that pay grants to authors and inventors so that they can say what they want, subject only to the upvotes of the taxpayers and those the taxpayers choose to represent them. Such a market is full of media, so any one liar won’t affect much. I’m not saying there won’t be liars and balderdash, that always sold and it would continue to, but they would not have the same degree of central coordination as when a few media companies hold the public eye. More importantly, the feedback mechanism is weaker there – no longer ads to sell print that sells ads, but appeals for year-end funding that gets people to back certain arts organizations that give funding to many, many different recipients. (A necessary protection is to set an upper limit on how much a taxpayer can put toward one author; otherwise they’d award it all to themselves)
Now in the absence of a truly free media there are no perfect choices, but accepting the occasional publication of a minor detail about an oligarch or even a celebrity sex tape is better than accepting the occasional destruction of an entire publisher. It is better to have loose cannon news than no news at all.
To side with the “right” of some oligarch who spies over all our private data to crush any newspaper that prints something he doesn’t like — that is contemptible. I’d rather stand down by the beach and welcome Putin’s invading troops with flowers.
What is contemptible is the absurd notion that whatever someone scribbles deserves automatic public financial support. If you want to write someone a check for their work, no law prevents it. Knock yourself out.
That is not what I proposed. The independent funding organizations, chosen by individual taxpayers to disburse their funds, would decide whose work has merit, so there would still be standards, and there would still be differences in the overall compensation offered depending on the author’s productivity.
Your comment is vacuous and means nothing; it certainly doesn’t rebut or refute anything in my comment to which it “replies.”
Motive matters. The jury unanimously held Gawker published with malice in this instance. You have so far failed to demonstrate how this jury was wrong in that determination.
How the suit against Gawker was funded is a red herring unless you can also demonstrate the jury was bought off. If not, the merit of the case before the jury was determined by their deliberation, not by who fronted the money to write checks to the lawyers.
Just to be clear about events leading up to this lawsuit:
On October 4, 2012, Daulerio posted a short clip of Hulk Hogan and Heather Clem, the estranged wife of radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge having sex.[70] Hogan (who went by his real name, Terry Gene Bollea, during the trial) sent Gawker a cease-and-desist order to take the video down, but Denton refused. Denton cited the First Amendment and argued the accompanying commentary had news value. Judge Pamela Campbell issued an injunction ordering Gawker to take down the clip.[71] In April 2013, Gawker wrote, “A judge told us to take down our Hulk Hogan sex tape post. We won’t.” It also stated that “we are refusing to comply” with the order of the circuit court judge.[72][73] Hogan filed a lawsuit against Gawker and Denton for violating his privacy, asking for $100 million in damages.[74]
During the trial AJ Daulerio, a former Gawker editor, told the court that there would be a public interest in promoting child pornography of the children of celebrities if they were over the age of four.[75] Daulerio later told the court he was being flippant about child pornography.[76]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker_Media
Refusal to follow a judge’s lawful order followed by flippant comments before a jury about charges brought against them will often earn their just reward.
Gawker repeatedly shot themselves through both feet with no outside assistance. Stupid is as stupid does. And Darwin systematically administers the only known cure.
Taking down a publisher based on a “flippant” comment made by a single editor is not a reasonable way to do law. For all I know, Thiel might have offered money to more than just Hulk Hogan’s lawyers!
The fact that Hogan was screwed over by his employers based on material on the tape is very obvious evidence that it *was* newsworthy. I mean, if the fact of something being published changes what millions of pro wrestling fans are watching on TV, that’s *news*.
Now as it happens, I don’t believe that people should have to live in fear that an employer is going to screw them over because of some personal comments. I think people have a *right* to be racist, no matter how stupid the philosophy is, and I don’t think that we should tolerate employers becoming political enforcers who are supposed to follow every bit of social media and pry unreasonably into private lives. Had Hogan sued the *WWE*, that would have been something I could agree with. They’re the ones that cost him the money! But Thiel didn’t pay him to sue the WWE.
Here we are, with America dangerously close to elect a fascist Regime, under Fuehrer Drumpf. His Alfred Rosenberg is another German, Herr Thiel. You can’t make this up. Absolutely terrifying.
Thiel is the standard Trump supporter with a thin patina of wealth.
Peter “pull the ladder up” Thiel
I got mine, f— you!
I used to come to The Intercept for independent journalism. Sadly it’s no longer independent and no longer journalism. I expected better of Greenwald and Scahill; clearly I misjudged the enterprise.
The journalism has really take a dive here, def slanting to one side. Arguably they are probably trying to become more political, essentially more main stream. Sam is just very bitter his old site is getting shut down. What Thiel did definitely seems like a crusade, But Sam conveniently leaves out the reasoning—Gawker outed him for being a homosexual. Moreover, even though Thiel backed the Hogan case, it still was a horrendous abuse of the press to evade someones private matters…and a court determined that.
I think *all* fair-minded people are very bitter that news sites can just be shut down for publishing the truth. We are all very bitter that even as censors come for legitimate journalism, the rest of the industry slumps into a spam and spin machine that exists solely as a disorganized mob trying to gather a few crumbs from Facebook’s table. And we all are very bitter for what we know is happening next – when it becomes actively dangerous to discuss news stories, such as this story, because word of mouth has become the only way the news has left to spread and so it becomes the top prospect for enforcement. There are already a lot of countries like South Sudan and Honduras and Mexico where the safest, most legal, and probably the most *moral* way to say anything other than a paean of prostitution to the powers that be — is to pull out a knife and carve it into the living flesh of one of the elites who control the machineries of deception.
“Thiel has secretly funded lawsuits intended to put Gawker Media, my former employer, out of business, because the billionaire does not like their work.”
The bottom line of this article.
Author resents Gawker being taken down in a lawsuit as an attack on “the press”. The press doesn’t have immunity from civil suit and Gawker was financially reamed for its excesses.
The award of damages to Hogan was made by a jury, not by Thiel or Trump or anyone else outside the court system. Members of that jury evidently stick to their judgement when asked.
Gawker will appeal. My guess is they may pay out less but the jury finding against them will still stand.
Give it a rest. 90% of the media are shills for others.
The truth?, surely you jest
Rman
Otto… Otto parts?
Hi Sam, Could you clarify what Pierre Omidyar’s thoughts are currently on Mr. Thiel? Trying to be sure that one of the funding streams of The Intercept is not actually directly connected to and benefiting from someone who is against open/free media and a seemingly careless Trump supporter. Much appreciated.
Yeah, this is leaning toward yellow journalism here. You obviously hate the man, but I only feel stupider after having read this article. Editorials can be okay, but here it is difficult to separate your opinions from facts.
The backstory to the Peter Thiel/Palantir story can be found in Annie Jacobsen’s excellent history of DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain”
The pre 9/11 story:
So this program was essentially waiting in the wings for the right moment – then along comes 9/11 and the Patriot Act:
What was the agenda of the TIA program?
The software was designed to mine and analyze all that data. This is what every authoritarian government on the planet dreams of, the ability to monitor all citizens all the time for any subversive activities. The Bush Administration liked it, a lot:
Then the program was exposed in the press in 2002, and Rumsfeld, eager to invade Iraq, denied it had ever been implemented and got on with cooking up lies about Iraqi WMDs. The program was covertly continued, however:
The government’s development and use of PRISM is detailed in the Snowden documents and Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide.
This is where Palantir and Peter Thiel come in. Via the CIA venture fund, In-Q-Tel, Palantir recieved millions in early funding, and took on Condi Rice and George Tenet as advisors. See the following hagiography from Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/
This privatization of a government mass surveillance program had one big agenda – it was highly profitable for the government insiders linked to Palantir:
Recall the NYPD spying on Occupy Wall Street? Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on the Arab Spring in Bahrain? JPMorgan’s criminal role in the 2008 economic collapse?
That more or less gives a basic picture of how the whole program has operated, from its beginning days with DARPA, the spread to other agencies like the NSA, and on to the private sector and the big cash payoff sales to corporations and dictatorships sales, all with complete disrespect for the U.S. Constitution. (Incidentally, this is also why any connections between the CIA/NSA fund Paladin Capital and the CIA-funded Palantir Technologies would be of interest).
What it all comes down to is a pack of sleazy Soviet Brezhnev-era corrupt insiders getting fat on bloated government contracts; your standard military-industrial Cold War era game.
Time to turn off the funding spigot, we can’t afford this crap any longer.
You seem well informed.
Did I miss the part where you mentioned that Thiel is a member of American Friends of Bilderberg, Inc., which is where his ties to Richard Perle, who introduced him to Admiral Poindexter, from which he got his funding from the CIA to continue on with Poindexter’s pet project (Total Information Awareness) today known as Palantir in the private sector.
Connections are important (besides his being best friends with Ann Coulter, of course).
Trump and Thiel are clearly terrible, but so are Gawker and (based on “despite being wealthy white American men and therefore essentially disqualified from victimhood”) Sam Biddle.
It is interesting how both sides (in what we are told to believe is a two sided world) can be wrong simultaneously.
If we had an infinitely-sided world populated by humans of the same levels of intelligence and knowledge have in this one, most of them would still be wrong, on every issue.
As for Biddle’s comment about wealthy white American men, the only possible minor error in the construction is that “immune” might have been better than “disqualified.” The observation is exactly on-target and just plan fucking right.
Of wealthy, white, and man, the most powerful of these is money. A contingent claim on service literally is the ability to control behavior. Everybody has their price…
What is this dreck? I expect better from The Intercept.
So I assumed your are quoting Peter Thiel directly; that is, you did interview him for this post? Otherwise, is nothing more than a moderately researched editorial rant. Must have gotten you tons of eyeballs though. Good for you!
Gawker outed someone who didn’t want to be out. Sticking your nose into other people’s personal business is risky in a lot of ways.
When the author said Trump is against immigration while marrying an immigrant, he basically vindicated Trump’s critique of the media. The assertion is false and the author almost certainly knows it or should know it.
This bit here, “disqualified from victimhood,” is somewhat contradictory. Instead of being a passive victim, they hit back and being Alpha males, they hit hard. Mr. Riddle and Gawker are still smarting from it.
And so on and such like. However, this article has piqued my interest a bit. I won’t watch the speech since I don’t own a television. I’ll read about it later.
Theil was already out. Moreover, he’s a public figure, and supports people and a party that are virulently anti-gay.
sad that being gay and conservative is seen as wrong & devalues all opinions.
It’s risky if they’re somebody who’s made billions in the spy-industrial complex. It’s not legally risky if you’re just forcing your way into people’s rooms for reality television, provided you have some security goons and one of the usual pathetic excuses they have for forcing themselves on poor people. Then it’s risky for them to touch you, even to keep you out.
(I’ll admit to watching Cheaters, even though I despised their strongarm we-can-touch-you-but-you-can’t-touch-us tactics; and even though I knew well in advance of the airing of the final knifing episode that it did not have nearly as satisfying a conclusion as I’d have liked, I must admit to yelling “Kill, kill, kill” in hopeless hope with a volume and fervor to rival any football fan. Only… alas, it was staged anyway, including the press reports, and the damned thing lurches on somewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheaters )
Dropped on his head at a very young age?
Palantir was one of the main targets of Barrett Brown’s ProjectPM before Brown was sent to jail on trumped-up targets. I see now projectpm and echelon2.org are both down – I wonder what if anything remains of that data – I should have tried to do more with it before, obviously. Tracking the people who control your life is obviously a dangerous pursuit.
Palantir is also very heavily into antivirus software and industry associations. (I don’t mean anything untoward by that – not one thing Edward Snowden ever disclosed made any suggestions that the free programs that tirelessly sort through your files might be trying to spy on you. Which means it doesn’t happen, because he’s from the NSA and he’s here to help us, right?)
Should have linked: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-spy-agency-contractors-have-already-abused-their-power/
First generation immigrants tend to personally benefit from The Declaration of Independence and US Constitution while lighting them on fire infront of others. Some immigrants don’t realize their authoritarian ways and some do (blame it on their foreign cultural background/exposure). A reality US citizens born here are unfamiliar with.
We all think that immigrants just step in to our “inalienable” way of life like stepping into a food line. No!…… That’s as foreign as NASCAR is to Filipinos.
Is it really adversarial journalism for Biddle to say he doesn’t like a Trump supporter? None of the journalists here like Trump so he appears to be repeating the obvious. It’s almost like he hit the submit button just to submit something.
Why would he want us to voluntarily spend time watching somebody he hates so much?
He sounds more believably libertarian than Trump does.
Damning with faint praise? ;^)
One could pick apart your article like fleas from a dog but I’ll just mention one thing: stone age politics? Why oh why are Trump’s politics “stone age?” Keeping jobs onshore and enforcing immigration laws are now “stone age.” Imagine that.
Keep on smearing Trump, and when Glenn Greenwald cuts you off try sending off your articles to Mother Jones, I’m sure they’d love to have you.
Picking fleas off a dog? This is almost physically impossible, just like it’s impossible to reasonably think that an idiotic carnival barker like Trump will ever make any positive changes with regards to restoring jobs or improving the immigration situation. He’s saying this stuff to get elected, and in a really vile and dangerous way. Trump is a protofascist who cares, pathologically, only about retaining more power cuz he feels his incoherent positions are the only ones that matter. But the fools who support him feel his positions have credence because he hit the jackpot and struck it rich.
“Dangerous and fascinating”? When did this turn into People magazine?
Interesting, this guy has ties to the deep state. I wonder if he helped overthrow the Ukraine to make it safe for vulture capitalists like our Pierre Omidyar, who also helped finance the overthrow the Ukraine. It is the height of hypocrisy that the Intercept would complain about this guy, considering their own financial roots.
jamie spews a total non sequitur:
Whatever Omidyar did vis-a-vis Ukraine has no bearing on Peter Thiel’s attacks on American media and his authoritarian-motivated support for Donald Trump.
Mona is correct. Omidyar was evidently involved (along with the US government and other actors) in what was nothing less than a violent coup with the frontlines consisting of genuine, real-live, honest-to-goodness Nazis, as part of a decades-long plan to encircle, confront and destabilize Russia (predictably, it has failed miserably).
And that has nothing to do with the evil creep Peter Thiel and this story.
Whataboutery.
Donald Trump has NO objections to free press, none. His complaint is that people do not have the freedom to object to lies the US media tell. In britain, lying in the press is a crime. It’s a shame that it is not a crime to lie in America. Opinions, likes, dislikes, are soup dejour, but lying is different.
The lying thing has put America into the hellish existence of wallstreet thieves and wmd war criminals. On the basis of lies, we have torture, guantanamo, genocide of Palestinians, police who murder, spying on all Americans, secret laws, secret courts, secret prisons and a literal competition on which media can enforce the most believable lies. Hillary Clinton has no problem lying. The problem with telling lies is believing lies and making decisions based on lies. And queen Hillary will insist her new clothes are real and probably get very insulted if you dont believe her.
And the Republican administrations were a bunch of Boy Scouts. Thiel and Trump are proof just how much the Republicans will lower their values if you are rich.
The issue isn’t the free press, it’s the foreign defense budget that Peter Thiel lives off of, and his push to get Trump to keep that gravy train flowing.
Think of Clinton backers Haim Saban and Boeing CEO Jim McNerny and the foreign and domestic military budgets that Boeing and Israel live off of, for the analogous relationship on the DNC side.
I suppose you could say that Hillary Clinton has taken a whole lot more money from her backers, both for the Clinton Foundation and for her private financial accounts, than Trump has from his, if you want to differentiate them.
Clinton is guaranteed to keep that gravy train flowing; the RNC, by having Thiel speak (and see also Chris Christie on ‘a strong national defense’) is sending a signal that it will do the same.
Welcome to Brazil! We too can have favelas with raw sewage running down the street! And the gated communites will be just fabulous. They’ll have gold-plated toilet seats in there, and then America will be Great!
You literally do not know what you are talking about:
Donald Trump proposed it make it much, much easier to sue American media for reporting about him that he doesn’t like. It is easier to do that in the UK, and as a result press freedom is chilled there as it is not in the U.S. where our Supreme Court has properly not permitted defamation suits to destroy a free press.
“You literally do not know what you are talking about:”
You should change your name to that so you don’t have to cut and paste it every time you make a comment.
That would certainly come in handy for replying to a troll such as you.
Forget the name-changing. Let’s just do kinda like the old joke about prison jokes: all heard so many times they tell them by simply calling out their numbers.
We could use two-character identifiers.
C3: “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
CS: “You know we don’t pay any attention to you, so why not just stop writing those book-length screeds?”
And so on. . .
And yet I’ve lost count how many times in the last decade or so I’ve finally found the most objective reporting of news in the UK press, most recently more often when it comes to American news. Hmmm…..chilled, not stirred up and with ingredients missing?
Th UK media is not objective; neither is the American media. In any event, purported objectivity — in which the journalist supposedly takes The View from Nowhere — has little if anything to do with defamation law chilling speech.
“Donald Trump has NO objections to free press”
Of course he does his m.o. is to bully and beat into submission anyone he does not like, or doesn’t like what they say, particularly about him – if he can’t buy them off. He’s famous for it. Court cases are his weapon of choice and very effective too, it is horrendously expensive. Many huge businesses will tie their opposition up in court for years, decades, knowing full well that they themselves are in the wrong. Their aim is to bankrupt their opponent, waste their resources, exhaust them, make them give up. Even when someone wins a case they have effectively lost everything else by the time the case finishes. It’s a bullying tactic.
Libel laws in the UK have done more to destroy Press Freedom than the D-notice, journalist’s self-censor, they weigh up protecting their sources and pursuing important news, sources are harder to come by because they cannot rely on confidentiality, editors won’t take the risk or can’t afford the expense of a trial. It has weakened the press considerably.
Trump just wants complete control and apparently he believes because he has money he can buy that control with his weapon of choice: a court case.
Well said indeed, Mr. Biddle. Glad to see you at The Intercept.
The Republican National Convention is a monster, misfit mash. Trump must be seriously desperate.
There are some unhinged people, including some who comment here, who think Donald Trump is pro-labor, pro-working class and anti-big business.
Peter Thiel is an obscenely wealthy boor, and while his politics may indeed seem incoherent, he’s not supporting Trump because he expects Trump to be pro-working class or in any other way enlightened.
A gay billionaire can support a party that’s as homophobic as all hell, because with his money such hate cannot reach him personally. He can afford to indulge his base and vile worldview because of his wealth, confident that nothing bad can happen to him if Trump’s views — and those in the GOP platform — prevail.
And welcome Sam Biddle to The Intercept. Great catch for the outlet.
Just so long as the Intercept doesn’t start leaking Hulk Hogan sex videos. . . ;)
http://www.recode.net/2016/7/21/12241474/peter-thiel-billionaire-gawker-rnc-beliefs
Peter Thiel is a real nutter, no doubt, but he’s just one part of that whole constellation of NSA / CIA government contractors and their investment funds based in and around Silicon Valley. I appreciate that Mr. Biddle may have an ax to grind with respect to Thiel, but let’s take a broader look at what Thiel really represents, right?
Via: The Information (mostly paywalled investor news coverage)
Now we get to the real issue: what will Trump do with the bloated U.S. defense budget? Recall Thomas Drake, for example, blowing the whistle on the Trailblazer NSA program that dumped $1.2 billion (minimum) into this sector with nothing in return? A huge classified cash cow for the politically connected.
Have Thiel speak is something of a signal that Trump will not be cutting this budget, anymore than Clinton will. Basically that means all the Trump rhetoric about ‘rebuilding America’ is a load of politically expedient bullshit, just as it with Clinton, because without major cuts to the defense budget, you can forget about infrastructure repair or job creation programs.
What Thiel will be doing is hyping the ‘threats’ to justify continued government contracts that line his pockets, guaranteed.
I too welcome Mr. Biddle, but I’d also urge him to dig into Peter Thiel’s associates and compatriots (Paladin Capital, of Woolsey-CIA/Minihan-NSA, would be a good place to start.)
It’s Palantir, which I won’t forget because:
And yes, more on Thiel’s interests in the natsec-security complex would be great.
Palantir is a privately held technology company that survives off classified government contracts.
Paladin is an investment fund run by the ex-CIA director (Woolsey, of bogus Iraqi WMD claim fame) and the ex-NSA Minihan, which invests in companies that survive off classified government contracts, with a curious link to Israel via investments in Endgame Solutions, zero-day exploit specialist and probably involved in creation of the Stuxnet virus that targeted Iran before going out of control; highly dangerous as Stuxnet could also be used to drive nuclear reactors into meltdown.
These two outfits, Palantir and Paladin, exist within the same general circles of NSA/CIA classified investing and contracts, the same kind of corrupt ripoffs of the public that Thomas Drake exposed, and the resulting retalition against Drake is one of the reasons Snowden chose to do his whistleblowing the way he did, making this an excellent subject for any Intercept reporter.
And, of course, Mr. Woolsey’s involvement in the bogus Iraq WMD claims in Fall 2001 (as the liaison to Blair) and onwards makes him a perfect candidate for war crimes trials in the Hague; at the very least he should be giving evidence in any Bush-Blair-Cheney-Rumsfeld trials.
Ah, thanks. I either didn’t know that or had forgotten it. What a disgusting network of vipers.
Perfect.
“. . death is nothing but a bug in the feature set of mankind, and one he can buy his way out of.”
Love it. Can’t wait for the speech.
Hey Biddle, what’s up.
Nice 2 c u.
Biddle try not to cost Glenn any advertising doubloons.
Hey, Sam! I always liked your work at Gawker and I’m happy to see you working for another outlet that isn’t afraid to rock the boat.
Thiel has the classic rich-guy outlook (just like Drumpf) where he’s happy to make and enforce rules upon the masses that conflict with his personal interests, because he knows that those rules won’t apply to him. It’s unforgivable when somebody else does it, but it’s perfectly fine when he does it. It’s the same thought process that Drumpf had for forgiving Pence’s backing of the Iraq war, whereas Hillary’s support for the war is absolutely beyond the pale.
You make some good points about the shared ideological incoherence between Thiel and Trump, but your claim that Thiel is somehow more interesting than Trump is a tyro’s error in political analysis. Even when he loses Trump will remain an important political figure in US political history, having smashed power structures created by some of the wealthiest and smartest people on the planet to defend their privilege. Compared with a man like Trump, who has won the backing of tens of millions of voters, Thiel is a marginal and unknown figure at best. If you are interested in power Trump’s success is absolutely amazing, even if you can’t stand him. Max Weber no doubt would have cited his career in his famous essay on politics as a vocation and used his career as part of his analysis of the different sources of authority. Still, you make some good points in the article. (Clearly Thiel’s backing of Cruz is a form of weird denial. Ditto a lot of Tr
There is this general belief that making money especially in high tech makes you smart on social and political issues. For example, Gates and Facebook founder know more about education that education professions. But a more similar figure to Thiel is William Shockley, one of the co-inventors of the transistor which has given us our modern technological era. Later in life Shockley began to advocate that black people were inferior to white people based on some UN tests of African children who by the way, had been infected by a brain parasite. You scratch your head and wonder how such people can believe in their bullshit.
The Cult of Neoliberal Capitalism fosters the worst in humanity. Equal opportunity sociopathy.
this
A scary-ass motherfucker.
I like your writing. Welcome to The Intercept!!