Nick Denton is a terrible person in my opinion; a gossip columnist and the things he often published were pure trash. Anti-semantic drivel, outing people against their will, and other salacious click-farming nonsense. Let’s not forget that Gawker lost a jury trial and the verdict bankrupted him. That Peter helped fund the case doesn’t change that the jury found Gawker liable. Gawker’s actions caused their demise. If you want to play with gossip and attempt to destroy people, you have to be prepared to suffer the legal consequences when the targets seek legal recourse. Blaming Peter for the destruction of Gawker is ridiculous — Gawker did the thing and the thing had consequences.
As far as the article claiming that Peter Theil’s philosophy borders on fascism — that’s complete nonsense. Libertarianism is the opposite of fascism. Suppressing free speech, forcing businesses to close — all of the Biden era Covid policies — that’s fascism. Remember the days when we couldn’t talk about vaccine injuries? Or the times when scientific journals scrubbed articles that contradicted the prevailing directives on masks? Specifically articles published with flu studies that showed surgical masks as ineffective. One day, the articles were there, the next day, those articles seemingly disappeared aside from within the print versions which are harder to scrub for obvious reasons. Remember the social media bans for even expressing skepticism about mRNA covid shots? How about sharing opinions on the lab leak theory? What about the Santa Monica surfer who was arrested for surfing in the ocean with nobody within a half mile of him? That’s faciscm.
Fauci was unelected yet wielded incredible power, Sara Cody in Santa Clara county — also unelected yet had the sweeping power to shut down everything in her county during Covid. I never voted for her. Yet she had the singular, unaccountable power to destroy businesses and destroy children’s education. Covid-America was almost pure fascism, yet nobody on the left wants to have that conversation. People complain about Elon being “unelected,” while forgetting that Sara Cody shut down an entire region — including private businesses and schools.
Reducing the size and scope of government is not fascism. Using lawfare to go after political enemies is fascism. People are attempting to redefine words such as fascism in order to make their political opponents look scary, but ironically the real fascists are the ones calling everyone else fascist.