Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate

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A Michel Lind hit piece at Salon against libertarian investor Peter Thiel suggests, among other very bad things, that he’s anti-gay. Lind writes:

Peter Thiel wouldn’t be on any publication’s list of leading “public intellectuals” if he were a failed investor who worked in obscurity at a law firm or investment bank and, in his spare time, wrote defenses of anti-gay slurs and denunciations of female suffrage and endorsements of seasteading for the libertarian intellectual ghetto.

The evidence for the anti-gay charge? Lind quotes from a Fortune article:

In 1995 he and Sacks published a book called The Diversity Myth, in which they argued that in the campus context, “those persons complaining about oppression are generally not the ones to have experienced it firsthand.” In one disturbing passage they come to the defense of a law student friend who in 1992 had shouted an antigay slur outside the cottage of a gay resident fellow as a protest against campus speech codes. The authors argue that the law student’s near-universal execration afterward, official and unofficial, was disproportionate to his offense.

What Lind somehow fails to mention is that Thiel has long been openly gay, a rarity in the top echelons of Silicon Valley. In fact, this very morning on CNBC he was asked, as an openly gay man, about the lack of openly gay CEOs in America (he said times were changing and we’d be seeing more). But that wouldn’t fit into Lind’s, or Salon’s, anti-business, anti-libertarian, anti-anti-left narrative.

6 Comments for “Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    that wouldn’t fit into Lind’s, or Salon’s, anti-business, anti-libertarian, anti-anti-left narrative.

    Salon is a small-circulation, self-described “progressive” magazine, with a stated point of view. Salon does not pretend to be “Fair and Balanced” Fox News.

    It may have come to the wrong conclusion about Thiel’s position on “equal means equal”(*), but as your headline says, “Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate“, hit piece or not. Thiel espouses a number of very strange ideas, ideas which would not gain much currency absent his business celebrity status.

    (*) I note, for the sake of accuracy, that the article itself does not discuss Theil’s attitudes toward gays and lesbians at all. The article discusses Thiel’s “defenses of anti-gay slurs” as part of a comment about Thiel’s “contributions to debates about higher education”:

    What are Peter Thiel’s contributions to debates about higher education in the U.S.? Here is the one, according to Fortune:

    In 1995 he and Sacks published a book called The Diversity Myth, in which they argued that in the campus context, “those persons complaining about oppression are generally not the ones to have experienced it firsthand.” In one disturbing passage they come to the defense of a law student friend who in 1992 had shouted an antigay slur outside the cottage of a gay resident fellow as a protest against campus speech codes. The authors argue that the law student’s near-universal execration afterward, official and unofficial, was disproportionate to his offense.

    In your eagerness to defend Thiel and the Cato Institute, I think that you are perhaps rushing to defend a position that was not attacked, Stephen.

  2. posted by Houndentenor on

    One of the more bizarre ideas from the right these days is the one that people not directly affected by something cannot and should not speak out against it. It’s why you’ll find people in the religious right dumbfounded that people who aren’t gay would be in favor of gay rights. Most of us are aware that we live in a society and are not completely self-sufficient. If they can discriminate against others at some point they can and likely will do it to me too. Those not blinded by their own prejudices understand that.

  3. posted by Tom Jefferson III on

    1. I hear that it was quite trendy (in the 1980s/1990s) among conservatives and right-libertarians to attack ‘speech codes’ and ‘political correctness’. I would be — somewhat — curious to know what actually was said by the law student ‘friend’ (got to wonder how many friends of gay people use such language…).

    Where is the laws student friend now and where is the student he said those things to, now?

    It is easy to say ‘anything goes’ on a college campus. Yet, Their are practical, real world issues to address; i.e. the difference between a student having a viewpoint or belief and expressing that viewpoint or belief in manner that does not make other students worried about, you.

  4. posted by Jorge on

    What Lind somehow fails to mention is that Thiel has long been openly gay, a rarity in the top echelons of Silicon Valley.

    Being openly gay is not enough. What of his record?

    Peter Thiel was the host of GOProud’s inaugural event, in which it invited Ann Coulter to talk about gay marriage and she gave, for the last time I’m aware of, her irrelevant diatribe about anal fisting. Strange ideas is right, but he did try.

  5. posted by tom Jefferson 3rd on

    WOW….Annie….That woman has “issues”.

    • posted by Jorge on

      I think the person who heckled her took it in good humor.

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