Hulk Hogan and the Lawsuit That Changed Journalism and America

I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed over its true engine of power and motive force. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to run the GOP while wrangling the far-right Freedom Caucus. In fact it was the Freedom Caucus that ran the GOP through a tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately tractable figures like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could ditch the front man and run the GOP directly from the Freedom Caucus, which has been the story of the Trump Era.

That lawsuit [Hogan's Peter Thiel backed $140 million libel suit against Gawker over a sextape] was a critical event of our time, and Gawker’s destruction was a body blow to the First Amendment. Hogan’s lawyer, Charles Harder, wasn’t just any libel lawyer. He had whole new ways of going about it. After Harder’s victory for Hogan, his new approaches to attacking media companies were quickly folded into the Trump political movement, not just the strategies but Harder’s firm itself. You see them again and again in numerous Trump and MAGA world lawsuits.

Josh Marshall @ TPM (doing a fundraiser right now, journalism worthy of your support)

The Hogan/Thiel takedown of Gawker in 2016, dawn of the Trump era, does look now pivotal. 

Big Tech realizes it can buy control of the online social media space. As if the whole fake news hoax conspiracy politics of Trump was in some sense rooted in billionaires figuring out how to press manage Silicon Valley Babylon. I've always been partial to the image of Trump as the revenge of the repressed id of the republican party; the paranoid style in American politics in its most garish and grotesquely imperialist form. And there is some of that in there for sure but "front" for the Freedom Caucus is actually a far better historical detail. From the "birther" thing on of course he was going to be their guy. 

But it's the totality of the takeover of the republican party that still so astonishes me. It goes to show, again, the pursuit and defense of political power, as Walter Karp argued, Schumpeter, Machiavelli, etc, can so easily overwhelm whatever democratic values or ideological pieties or even burning current issues. 

Realpolitik, basically, is the pursuit and holding on to power to no end other than holding on to it at any cost.