Free Republic

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is reportedly considering launching a conservative news outlet backed by the powerful Mercer family, along with a “cast of Fox News celebrities,” according to Michael Wolff book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” and a report from BuzzFeed news. According to Wolff, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and Peter Thiel were set to discuss the idea of a conservative news outlet last May – however Ailes slipped and fell two days before the meeting, hitting his head and dying before the discussion could occur. Word of Thiel’s potential new venture with the Mercers is...

Less than a year after famed (or infamous) media gossip site Gawker was forced to close by a eight-figure settlement in favor of wrestler Hulk Hogan, the successor to the former Gawker Media empire finds itself in the legal crosshairs. It's for another lawsuit seeking major damages — and it’s the same lawyer taking aim. This time, attorney Charles Harder, who has also represented First Lady Melania Trump in her libel lawsuit against the Daily Mail, is handling the lawsuit on behalf of RJ Bell, real name Randall James Busack, the founder and CEO of Pregame.com, a sports handicapping Web...

RUSH: Yesterday — and this, ladies and gentlemen? The people that watch CNN or read the New York Times do not know about this. But they’re gonna hear it because we have the audio sound bites coming up. Yesterday President Trump met with the nation’s leading technological CEOs, such as the CEO of Microsoft, the chairman and CEO of Alphabet, Eric Schmidt. He’s not the CEO anymore, but he’s the chairman. He’s the head honcho in emeritus, in perpetuity. Tim Cook from Apple. There were a number of them there, and it was just like the cabinet meeting that Trump...

Billionaire tech entrepreneur and adviser to President Trump, Peter Thiel, declared globalization to be over on Tuesday, claiming it’s “so 2005, it feels so dated.” “I’m naturally inclined to think of it in those terms,” said Thiel on the topic of how Trump’s victory showed the American people’s dissatisfaction with globalization. “There’s something around globalization that’s not been working that well.”

<p>Sexy spook Anna Chapman, busted in the summer of 2010 as part of a sleeper cell of Russian agents, proposed to fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden on Twitter.</p> <p>Snowden, who revealed the secret NSA surveillance program PRISM, has been stuck in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport since June 23, after fleeing his Hong Kong hiding place. He has been caught in legal limbo after being stripped of his US passport and has sought asylum wth 21 countries.</p>

Peter Thiel has been at Donald Trump’s side since the Republican National Convention, guiding the then-candidate on technology policy and brokering a meeting between him and top tech executives. Now Thiel has secured a place for one of his top aides in Trump’s White House — Michael Kratsios, formerly chief of staff at Thiel Capital, will step into the role of deputy chief technology officer. The appointment, first reported by Politico Pro and confirmed by TechCrunch, seems like a natural progression of Kratsios’ work alongside Thiel on the transition team. Prior to his work at Thiel Capital, Kratsios was the...

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and outspoken Donald Trump supporter, is considering a 2018 bid for California governor, according to three Republicans familiar with his thinking. Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, has been discussing a prospective bid with a small circle of advisers, including Rob Morrow, who has emerged as his political consigliere. (please see link for full article)

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and outspoken Donald Trump supporter, is considering a 2018 bid for California governor, according to three Republicans familiar with his thinking. Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, has been discussing a prospective bid with a small circle of advisers, including Rob Morrow, who has emerged as his political consigliere. Morrow has worked at Clarium Capital, the San Francisco-based investment management firm and hedge fund that Thiel started. Those who have been in t

#CalExit just received a big boost from an unlikely source: Peter Thiel, billionaire tech buddy of President-elect Trump. In a “Confirm or Deny” interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, the 49 year-old Thiel confirmed that he believed California should secede. Maureen Dowd: California should secede. Peter Thiel: Confirm. I’d be fine with that. I think it would be good for California, good for the rest of the country. It would help Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. Apparently Thiel’s comment that “…it would help Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign” was made rather tongue-in-cheek. But it does raise an interesting question. With...

Steve KovachJanuary 12, 2017 Silicon Valley investor and Donald Trump transition-team member Peter Thiel says Apple is past its peak. Here's what he said in a Q&A with Maureen Dowd of The New York Times when he was asked to confirm or deny that "the age of Apple is over": "Confirm. We know what a smartphone looks like and does. It's not the fault of Tim Cook, but it's not an area where there will be any more innovation." Thiel is best known in Silicon Valley for his early investment in Facebook.(snip)

In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd on Wednesday, billionaire tech giant Peter Thiel defended his support of President-Elect Donald Trump and offered some characteristically esoteric opinions on everything from Meryl Streep to “Star Wars.” To a question noting that “President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness,” Thiel replied, “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

While policy wasn’t exactly the primary focus of Trump’s campaign, he did make several direct promises to the American people while he was running for president. One of the most common refrains was that he would overhaul the vetting process and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, but without providing any specifics, many of his critics understandably questioned his ability to accomplish this goal. Trump’s promises might have been empty ones, but newly released documents show that Palantir—the data-mining technology firm founded by Trump transition team member (and Gawker public enemy number one) Peter Thiel—has been secretly helping US Customs and...

National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney explains how the secretive agency runs its pervasive domestic spying apparatus in a new piece by Laura Poitras in The New York Times. Binney—one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history—worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." In a short video called "The Program," Binney explains how the agency took part of one of the programs he built and started using it to spy on virtually every U.S....

Silicon Valley investor and billionaire Peter Thiel has delivered a spirited defense of the Trump agenda for change, focusing in a wide-ranging speech on the failures of leadership and the future of the Republic. Mr. Thiel says he is "voting for Trump because other politicians are 'just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.'" Thiel contends that Trumpism is a bad dream for the political establishment: … To the people who are used to influencing our choice of leaders, to the wealthy people who give money and the commentators who give reasons why, it all seems like a bad dream[.]...

"What Trump Represents Is Not Crazy... And Is Not Going Away" - Peter Thiel Full Transcript by Tyler Durden Oct 31, 2016 6:55 PM 0 SHARES Silicon Valley billionaire (and now pariah) Peter Thiel defended his support for Donald Trump in a speech this morning. The excellent oration wondered from the ignorance of the elites and the bankruptcy of the nation, to the endless and pointless wars and America's slumping quality of life...  *  *  *Full Transcript: THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR HAVING ME HERE.EVERYONE KNOWS WE HAVE BEEN LIVING THROUGH A CRAZY ELECTION YEAR. REAL EVENTS SEEM LIKE THE...

This guy is great, I could see voting for him in 8 years. Is anyone else watching.

The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian. The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court. The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA's inability to separate purely domestic communications from...

... The news prompted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to address the “issue” of Thiel supporting Trump. In a leaked, internal post, Zuckerberg did the unexpected: he defended Thiel’s right to support Trump and stressed the importance of free speech and freedom of expression in our society.

Peter Thiel may be attracted to men, but a prominent LGBT magazine says he’s “not a gay man” because he supports Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. In a rambling article for The Advocate, Connecticut College history professor Jim Downs posits that there is more to being gay “than just having sex with someone of the same gender.” Mr. Downs argues the Silicon Valley billionaire reaffirmed his personal “sexual choices” by supporting Mr. Trump, but separated himself from the broader “gay identity” rooted in class struggle against oppression. “By the logic of gay liberation, Thiel is an example of a man...

In response to Peter Thiel's pledge to donate $1.25 million to Donald Trump's presidential bid (reported by the New York Times on Sunday), some in the Silicon Valley-centered tech community are going public with a call to reject any company willing to do business with the PayPal co-founder. In addition to co-founding PayPal and data analysis software firm Palantir, Thiel sits on the board at Facebook and is a part-time partner and investor in startup seed fund Y Combinator. Thiel substantial donation to Trump doesn't come as a surprise--he did have a prime-time speaking slot at this summer's Republican National...