Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

by Ryan Holiday

The historian E. P. Thompson said that history never happens as the actors suspect,

that history is instead the “record of unintended consequences.”

There is always something you didn’t expect, always some second- or third-order consequence.

system, Thiel would come to believe that maybe there weren’t enough lawsuits.

That people should try more.

And so he puts more money behind the idea, funding in 2016 a star...

He learned another important lesson in that Florida courtroom, this one also about America—that

that average and ordinary people cared little for the assumptions of the so-called elites.

But Thiel and Trump agreed in theory on at least one thing: that America had lost some form of its greatness and could be made great again.

That his advocacy for Trump as a business leader and his campaign

against Gawker as a cultural menace would combine to create a wicked, almost unanimous backlash seems to catch Thiel on his back foot.

Peter had gone after Gawker because he believed that he was a private person and deserved a private life, but the great irony of his victory over Denton was that it had made him a celebrity—one

whose every action was now, by definition, news.

Thiel’s victory over Gawker had proven Gawker prescient: that he was deserving of coverage and that people would love to hate him.

“Contrarians may be mostly wrong, but when they get it right, they really get it right.”

we live in a country where the media would give literally billions of dollars of free publicity to a candidate they despised

and were then shocked when the man ended up being elected.

Peter endorsed Trump because of the trial. It gave him an appreciation for the dynamic of the country and for Middle America.

I don’t think Peter Thiel would have been involved with Trump at all without this case.”

One is a conspiracy, the other a crime of opportunity.

And so we have the inexorable march of unintended consequences bending the moral arc of the universe in god knows what direction.

A young man and an ambitious lawyer pair up with a billionaire to deal with a gossip blog and find themselves backing a presidential candidate they couldn’t imagine backing under any other circumstances.

They find themselves involved in forces they can themselves barely c...

the Hogan case was an example of the timeless reminder that

actions have consequences.

Many people were radicalized by the conspiracy and the campaign.

Where that energy will go is an alarming unknown.

Peter thought he’d be greeted as a liberator, that Gawker was a scourge that once eliminated would allow for ...

If anything, the opposite ha...

The candidate he helped put in office embodies many of the bullying traits that...

problem became a mongoose problem. You launch a conspiracy to protect your privacy and make yourself famous. You seek to rid the world of a bully and you find yourself with Trump.

the end of a conspiracy can be not unlike the beginning of it:

an intolerable status quo.

It would be a little

more elegant if the reading public recognized their own contribution, that they get precisely the media that they click on and talk about.”

I’m not sure that happened. I wi...

Maybe all of it is a w...

There is still significance in what happened.

A smart man observed that inertia is difficult to overcome in politics,

but once it has been, momentum is even harder to stop.

They had experienced these powers at levels previously inconceivable to them and now quite naturally would look for more opportunities to wield them.

What will power do to them? Will it corrupt them?

One of the worst things that can ever happen to a leader is to unconsciously associate resistance and criticism with opportunity.

When everyone tells you you’re wrong and you turn out to be right, you learn a dangerous lesson: Never listen to warnings.

And so the reason that few conspiracies are followed by additional successful conspiracies is because of this process an...

Neither Nick nor A.J. emerged from this story powerful or victorious, but one could make the argument—as is often true in conspiracies of this nature—that

they may have gotten the better end of it.

There is at least character in their struggle, as there is in all adversity....

Do these new norms constitute a “chilling effect” on free speech? Perhaps, and we don’t yet know what a more cautious media will look like.

you “can’t just exact revenge at no cost to yourself.”