The Silicon Valley Thought Police are demanding retaliation against top venture capitalist Peter Thiel for making a $1.25 million contribution to Republican Donald Trump.
Thiel co-founded the wildly successful PayPal and Palantir, and was an early stage venture capital investor in Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, Spotify, SpaceX, Lyft and many more. He has also helped numerous companies and mentored many of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs. As part of the small circle of Silicon Valley tech royalty, his net worth is $2.7 billion, which puts him at number 246 on the Forbes 400 list of the world’s richest individuals.
He then used his wealth to sponsor philanthropic activities through a nonprofit he created called the Thiel Foundation, which organizes and sponsors nonprofits that are working on radical new ideas in technology, government, and human affairs. Thiel has also been the main financial backer of the “Machine Intelligence Research Institute,” which is a world leader in pursuing technological singularity and artificial intelligence.
As a Silicon Valley insider, it would be assumed that Thiel would be a typical progressive who supports unlimited open borders and the full left-wing agenda. But Breitbart News reported, Thiel — who had written conservative criticisms of political correctness as a student — became more publicly political after he was viciously outed by Nick Denton’s Gawker in a 2007 article titled, “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.”
Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s tech editor, described Gawker’s political slant under Denton as “doubling down on the hateful feminist and race-baiting claptrap so loathed by anyone outside of Manhattan and American colleges, giving indications that its poisonous, lunatic feminist organ Jezebel will be the primary lens through which Gawker interprets popular culture.”
Thiel seemed to respond to the pain of his Gawker experience by becoming an open supporter of Ron Paul. Since 2007, Thiel has funded GOP outreach efforts to the gay community and been a solid contributor to Republican presidential campaigns.
Thiel also spent $10 million to fund litigation against Gawker victims, including the iconic professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, who was the subject of surreptitious filming and the Gawker release of a private sex tape. “The Hulk” in March won $115 million in compensatory damages and $25 million more for punitive damages against Gawker for violating his privacy rights. The since-bankrupt Gawker is in the process of being liquidated.
All of this is anathema to supposed free speech progressives. But in the ultimate sin to the “Left,” Thiel served as a Trump California primary delegate and became one of the few large donors to the Trump presidential campaign, which has set records by raising $360 million mostly from small donors of under $140.
Led by the infamous Ellen Pao, who lost a 2015 gender discrimination and retaliation suit against the prestigious Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, the Left moved to retaliate against Theil by starting an Internet campaign to have Thiel fired from his positions as a board member of Facebook and a venture capital partner of Y Combinator.
Pao, through her organization “Project,” also called on consumers, job candidates, partners and other fellow progressive travelers to retaliate against Thiel’s friends and business associates by ending relationships with any organization that associates with him.
The anti-Thiel witch hunt is patterned on the 2014 chaos generated when Mozilla co-founder and then-CEO Brendan Eich gave a $1,000 donation to Proposition 8, California’s successful anti-gay marriage ballot initiative. Leftist viral attacks quickly forced him to step down; since then, the Mozilla Firefox desktop browser’s market share has tanked from 13 percent to 8 percent.
Facebook and Y Combinator’s CEOs are both staunch Hillary Clinton supporters, but they know Thiel is one of the most brilliant strategists in Silicon Valley and his loss would cause real turmoil in their organizations.
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