Wednesday, November 09, 2016

PSA: Regarding Peter Thiel

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Rolfe Winkler today titled "Silicon Valley Investor Peter Thiel Wins Bet on Trump" (you may or may not be able to read the whole thing -- WSJ pulls a lot of weird paywall nonsense.

The upshot of the piece is that Thiel backed the right horse when he threw $1.25 million at the president-elect's campaign back when almost nobody (except me) thought he was going to win the election. All of which is very interesting, but here's what brought me up short:

A staunch Libertarian, Mr. Thiel identified the undercurrent of economic distress that political pundits failed to appreciate but that exit polls showed drove so many voters to the polls.

If Peter Thiel is a "staunch libertarian," Pol Pot was Murray Fucking Rothbard.

Thiel postures as a "privacy advocate." What he means by that is that if Gawker publicly notices he's gay, he'll help Terry Bollea, aka Hulk Hogan, sue Gawker into bankruptcy for publicly noticing that Hogan had sex with someone else's wife. Somehow using lawfare to suppress speech that bugs you has become a synonym for "libertarian."

In reality, Thiel is exactly the opposite of a "privacy advocate" -- or a libertarian. His company, Palantir Technologies, produces software to power the US surveillance state and warfare regime.

Peter Thiel is an authoritarian scumbag, not a "staunch libertarian."

That is all.

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