Thiel: The article about me “was an attempt to damage my fund, to damage me, to damage my reputation and take me down.”
“A Silicon Valley friend thought he would’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize if it weren’t for what Gawker wrote about him.”
Thiel evades Holiday’s question about whether or not this was about protecting his business interests.
(Which is funny considering he just said the article was an attempt to damage his fund!)
Thiel just brought up the 4th Amendment and a claim that this protects privacy between private actors as well as public ones.
If we lose our privacy, “we lose our freedom and we lose our ability to think.”
Holiday pressing Thiel on Facebook and Palantir’s privacy issues. Thiel brushes aside FB because it’s users giving away their info. Palantir he claims is good for privacy because it’s targeted. Hmmmmmmm.
Hey @RMac18 Aron D’Souza is in the audience tonight.
(Thiel’s understanding of the legal aspects of Bollea v Gawker is... thin at best.)
Thiel with a kayfabe and a shoot reference, @unikunka and @Kremsicles.
Thiel: “By the end of the trial, I’d told probably twenty people.”
“The biggest political problem we have is the problem of political correctness.”
Holiday: “Where’s the line between what Milo does, whose book you blurbed, what James O’Keefe does, whose legal bills I know you’ve paid, and what Gawker does?”
Thiel: “Well you know it when you see it.”
Thiel: “Well you know it when you see it.”
Applause as Thiel says he still supports Trump.
“There were lots of but fors during the election. ‘But for her rapist husband, Hilary would have won. But for the email server...’ I posit a new but for. But for political correctness, people would’ve been honest to pollsters and Clinton could’ve known what was really going on.”
(The polls in 2016 were dead on, by the way, and the final outcome was within the margin of error. So Thiel is plain wrong here.)
I’m going to transcribe some key moments from the talk. This quote from Thiel is blatantly false: the Gawker side fully knew the case was going to go to trial and a settlement was very unlikely. Counsel back in 2014 called the suit existential to Gawker’s existence. 
“It was such a cool thing to do.”
Now we are getting to the core of who Thiel is. He’s expressed disdain for democracy in the past. Here’s a hint why: he doesn’t believe that consensus is right.
Ah yes, if 99% of your country believes clean air is good or murder is wrong, clearly now we live in North Korea. What Thiel espouses here is the fetishization of the Devil’s Advocate.
Or maybe Trump is bad for the people who work at Facebook? How does Peter feel about precincts where 93% voted for Trump? Does he think they are also anti Political Correctness?
