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. 

Political Violence and the Great Disinhibition

"Political violence is a curious and seductive thing. People routinely see aspects of intention and even valor in political violence notionally aimed at values they agree with, even when they don’t condone the violence itself. We can see this in the fanboying (and girling) around Luigi Mangione. And we can see it around the Jan 6th instigators. (No, I don’t think they’re comparable. You don’t see prominent elected officials cheering on Mangione.) My point here isn’t one of trying to figure out whose violence might be more justifiable. It’s that in cases of violence in the service of goals we might feel broadly aligned with we generally tend to see the violence in more linear and literal terms. The culprit believed very deeply in X or Y and was finally driven to violence because traditional means didn’t work. But it’s not necessarily like that. The train of causation and ideation can run in the opposite direction. You’re motivated toward violence and then you find an ideological framework to fit your hunger for violence into.

It’s this more general disinhibition that seems most relevant, a greater social hunger for violence that is worth taking stock of prior to the point it actualizes itself through one political narrative or another."

Josh Marshall @ TPM

Yeah, worth taking stock of the obvious "general disinhibition" towards violence promoted by Grump before electing him again. Anyway, been thinking something along these lines for awhile now. Civil war 2.0, or our national drift in that direction, will be less a territorial dispute, or regional bastions and frontlines, and more random violence and mass murders, where ideological or partisan motivation is an afterthought or twisted together in weird shapes. 

And this isn't to suggest that the urban vs rural/exurban conflict in America today isn't real. Coming from the burbs and then the sticks the divide has never appeared greater to me. But cities need rural agriculture and rural agriculture needs cities; cities are in fact the signal achievement of agricultural civilization. There's a realpolitiks in that that cannot easily be dismissed or broken up. 

Still think, though, Josh underplays in this post the way Grump has activated or accelerated the "general disinhibition" towards violence, or how much that violence skews towards conservative crackpots. There's lots of political violence in American history, sure, KKK, presidential assassinations, but is there any precedent for all the violent threats against public health officials, judges, election workers, and school board members we've seen since 2016, almost all of it republican leaning violent reaction? 

Certainly bigot hostility towards immigrants in US history is hardly new. There was a Red Scare after WWI. McCarthyism in the 1950s. All ugly episodes in American history with more than a whiff of political violence about them. But I'm not sure any of these fit the current situation very well. Today we live in a deeply polarized culture of ambient fascism where deep wells of anger seek outlets for pent up violence. "Because something is happening here and you don't know what it is/Do you Mr. Jones?" Only now Mr. Jones has reached a breaking point. Everything is out of whack. 

And along with fears of civil war people are often puzzling over whether the causes of the current crisis are cultural or economic, cultural divisions or economic inequality. How about it goes like this: the pursuit of economic inequality, Billionaires, monopoly, and generally and relentlessly financializing the economy, otherwise known today as corporate rule or the neoliberal order, has exacerbated cultural divisions, poverty, homelessness, and the othering of victims of the onslaught to a breaking point? And voters just elected a Frankenstein of this historical onslaught to double down on the violent pressures in society. Forgive me if I don't think this is going to go well. 

And, again, Keynes, one of my current intellectual touchstones, was comically imperious and overly ambitious and maybe quite naive about colonialism and definitely an overly complicated theoretician (there really is no "general theory," for instance) but he did call all this out a hundred years ago: i.e., the violence and social conflict that results from the predatory impacts of unfettered capitalism without the necessary stabilizing agency of government. 

 

 

"Trump has sewn himself into a sack with Elon Musk, a few billion dollars, a cat and a snake, and had the sack tossed into the Tiber. That’s the story here. And it will go on for a while."

Josh Marshall @ TPM

A Bigger Story Than You Can Possibly Imagine

Josh Marshall @ TPM

Refers to recent revelations that the primary source guy behind the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, the Twitter Files, and the GOP's effort to impeach Biden, etc, is, basically, a Russian intelligence operative, spreading disinformation to sabotage American democracy. Surprise, surprise! 

Media organizations at first wouldn’t touch the story because they’d spent the previous four years kicking themselves for allowing themselves to become the promoters of a Russian election interference and disinformation campaign with the purloined DNC emails back in 2016. Since the Hunter Biden laptop stories had all the hallmarks of exactly the same thing somehow happening to pop up in the final days of the 2020, of course they were suspicious.

 

At worst, that initial resistance was very reasonable, given the record for 2016, even if it had been the case that the story was entirely legitimate. But it wasn’t. Even though the Smirnov revelations themselves don’t speak directly to the laptop story, they tell us very clearly that Russian intelligence operations have continued to drive stories at the center of the American political debate right up until today. 

To sum up, for me: we know Dump and MAGA and conservative media (Fox et al) are Putin assets (if not active agents) and with them they have played the MSM, TV News, and NY Times/WaPo for treasonous fools going on a decade now, amplifying hostile foreign influences at a scale not seen since the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, if ever in American history. This is the "Big" part of the story.