![]() These 1 percenters can just as easily destroy lives, abuse their powerful positions and hire teams of lawyers. So are the owners of The New York Times and every other major media outlet you can think of. Start with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is backed by hundreds of 1 percenters and works to enforce its own norms of “decency and respect” when it comes to boys’ and girls’ bathrooms.īy the way, Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media, is also a 1 percenter. ![]() If Thiel is a problem, so is the pro bono legal work of wealthy lawyers who donate their time and resources to causes that move them. Vox asserts that Thiel “sees his lawsuit as a public-spirited attempt to enforce norms of decency and respect for personal privacy.” Or, in other words, he uses the judicial system the same way liberals have for decades when trying to enforce their own norms, including those regarding abortion rights, gay marriage and basically everything else they value.Īctually, every contemporary major lawsuit of any political consequence has probably been funded in some way by a third party. Moreover, if liberal pundits felt some moral or ideological affinity toward Thiel’s motivation, they would be cheering him on. And not according to a circuit court judge who upheld the verdict. Not according to the jury that awarded Hogan more than $100 million. There’s a question that should not be lost in this debate: Is it an invasion of privacy to make public a sex tape without the consent of the person in it? In other words, was this lawsuit really “frivolous”? Not according to a judge. This would all be very upsetting if it were true. Thiel is “reinventing the concept of philanthropy so as to include weapons-grade attacks on America’s free press,” writes Felix Salmon on Fusion, who goes on to say that Thiel’s success has essentially given other billionaires a blueprint of how to put critics out of business. Those tools can be used by anyone with enough money, against any media target they choose, for any slight they perceive.” Even more hypocritical is the fact that many of the same people so distressed about the future of sex tapes regularly advocate policies that would allow the state to inhibit political speech.įor instance, Ezra Klein, editor-in-chief of Vox, writes: “What’s endangering Gawker is Thiel’s endless resources, and his apparently limitless appetite for revenge. ![]() There is little anxiety over third-party funding when we’re talking about the giant apparatus the left uses to implement its own will via the courts. ![]() But so far, the media’s hysteria about Thiel’s third-party legal funding has been unconvincing, especially when we consider who’s making the arguments.Īfter wading through thousands of angst-ridden words, I noticed that the case mostly boils down to two objections: Thiel’s motivations and Thiel’s money. Now, as someone who considers himself a near-absolutist on free speech, I’m open to hearing arguments for why we need tort reform in these sorts of cases or why Hulk Hogan’s suit undermines free expression. We recently discovered that Peter Thiel, the libertarian billionaire co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook, bankrolled wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuits against the blog network Gawker Media. ![]()
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