"Gawker found out the hard way and you will too."

The puppet doesn't fall far from the sociopath

Blake Masters, a crony of billionaire Peter Thiel, is threatening to shut down a small news website that produced critical coverage of him. He's hired Trump lawyer Kory Langhofer, who basically got laughed out of court over the "Sharpiegate" conspiracy theory. https://t.co/pFRnkD8UyA

— Nick Martin (@nickmartin) May 9, 2022

For those who came in late.

That attitude combined with sharp, funny writing and a willingness to tell interesting, important stories that the rest of the press were ignoring made Gawker a remarkable success story. It also unsurprisingly pissed off tech messiahs, obscenely rich people, and the establishment press

The editors did believe in pushing the envelope, especially when the target were rich white men doing despicable things. They were also reckless and self-destructive and had a huge problem with authority. Combine that with a desire to be provocative to the point of shocking, and you guaranteed that any enemy with deep pockets and a deeper grudge would have plenty of ammunition.

It was right wing billionaire and cartoon villain Peter Thiel who finally came after them. Thiel was a member of the PayPal mafia along with Elon Musk. According to a mutual acquaintance "Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart" showing that for all their other flaws, both men are reasonably good judges of character. 

Thiel’s politics are not central to this story [they are now -- MP], but it is worth noting that he’s arguably the biggest Trump supporter in the tech industry (now even more so) and is also on the record as believing that it was a mistake to give women the vote.

Rather than take open action, Thiel went the coward's route and secretly bankrolled a lawsuit then engineered it so that Gawker was forced into bankruptcy. When word leaked out of his involvement, he showed no shame (because shame’s not really a big emotion for sociopaths). Instead, he immediately started depicting himself as a courageous defender of privacy (which was pretty ripe coming from someone who'd made a billion off of Facebook, but remember what we said about shame), and he was given the world’s best piece of journalistic real estate to do it from.

Thiel’s NYT opinion piece was as bad as you would expect -- self-serving and highly distorted – but even if it had been objective and honest, the very fact that the paper handed him the biggest gift it had to bestow meant that the gray lady was actively supporting the billionaire who set out, not just to punish, but to silence a publication that criticized him and his circle. 

Both Thiel and Masters are far-right extremists who also display that special blend of arrogance and Dunning-Kruger we've come to associate with venture capital. This combination lead Masters to say the quiet parts out loud and go on the record as wanting to overturn Griswold. 

As problematic as Roe is for Republicans, Griswold is potentially far worse. Most people want some form of legal abortion; almost everybody wants access to contraception. The GOP strategy has been to downplay it or, better yet, change the subject. Masters put it on his website.

When the Arizona Mirror talked about this in an article headlined "GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters wants to allow states to ban contraception use," he was horribly offended, insisted they misrepresented his words, and immediately removed the reference to Griswold from his campaign site.

Masters was also upset with how his earlier statements on World War II were being interpreted. While he may or may not have praised the Nazis (it comes down to whether or not you consider calling something "poignant" a form of praise), he was certainly willing to see their side of things. From Jewish Insider:

“I’ll stop just short of claiming that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor, etc.,” Masters elaborates. “But clearly, we have seen here that blindly accepting the official historical account as absolute truth can be (and usually is) a grave and ignorant mistake. Are we really to believe the hackneyed paradigm of the gentle and peaceful America that contentedly minds its own business until some anti-democratic foreign band of lunatics inexplicably attacks us? That America only flexes its military might when the security of world peace or democracy itself are in jeopardy? I need not connect the dots and illustrate the obvious parallels with the current American wars and foreign policy.”

Unexpectedly, Masters concludes his article with what he describes as a “particularly representative and poignant quotation” from Goering, a high-ranking Nazi official who was known as Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man: “Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Of course, it is unlikely that like Masters (or more importantly, Peter Thiel) meant this to be anything more than a thuggish act of intimidation. It is worth noting that while publications such as Business Insider and Jewish Insider have also reported on Masters' not-exactly-anti-Nazi writing and insistence on overturning Griswold, thus removing the right to buy and use contraception, the only publication being threatened with suit as far as I can tell is the small and vulnerable Arizona Mirror.

That tells us a lot about Masters and Thiel, but nothing we didn't already know.