Hulk Hogan Quotes

He was not a tall man, but he was wide. His face was the color and texture of old leather boots, and he was completely bald except for a gray walrus mustache that would have made Hulk Hogan jealous. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, even though it was chilly and wet. His arms were densely tattooed in style I didn’t recognize.

Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional character.

hulkamanias runnin wild brother

She had short, thick forearms, fingers like cocktail sausages, and a broad fleshy nose with flared nostrils. Deep folds of skin connected her nose to either side of her chin, and separated that section of her face from the rest of it, like a snout. Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a Biology lab an unshriveled and thickened with age. She kept damp cash in her bodice, which she tied tightly around her chest to flatten her unchristian breasts, Her kunukku earrings were thick and gold. Her earlobes had been distended into weighted loops that swung around her neck, her earrings sitting in them like gleeful children in a merry-go-(not all the way)-round. Her right lobe had split open once and was sewn together by Dr. Verghese Verghese. Kochu Maria couldn't stop wearing her kunukku because if she did, how would people know that despite her lowly cook's job (seventy-five rupees a month) she was a Syrian Christian, Mar Thomite? Not a Pelaya, or a Pulaya, or a Paravan. But a Touchable, upper-caste Christian (into whom Christianity had seeped like tea from a teabag). Split lobes stitched back were a better option by far. Kochu Maria hadn't yet made her acquaintance with the television addict waiting inside her. The Hulk Hogan addict. She hadn't yet seen a television set...

Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer,” writes Machiavelli, “becomes a very dangerous man to the prince.

You rush in to stamp out the sparks and end up fanning them into flames. This is the risk.

It’s the logic of two campers and the bear—you don’t need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other camper.

Believer Telephone lines all across the world People fight all across the world Angels sing all across the world Baby, you and me all across the world Jackie Chan flashing all across the world Hulk Hogan flashing all across the world Baby, let's go fly all across the world Baby, let's go fly all across the world! They call me the believer And I'm not coming back They call me the believer And I'm not coming back

It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency person.” How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it.

It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency person.” How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it. This choice defines us. Puts us at a crossroads with ourselves and what we think about the kind of person we are. “Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer,” writes Machiavelli, “becomes a very dangerous man to the prince.” And Peter Thiel was driven into a desperate position, of and not of his own making, that had started with a matter of his identity and become about a deeper identity. Now he had not only decided to act against Gawker, but he would conspire to destroy them.

There is a moment in The Great Gatsby when Jay Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway to Meyer Wolfsheim, mentioning offhandedly that he is the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. The idea staggers Gatsby’s idealistic young friend. Of course, Carraway knew the series had been thrown. But “if I had thought of it at all,” he says, “I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain.” It was unbelievable to him then, as it is to us now, that a single person could have been responsible for changing the outcome of an event watched by some fifty million people. In real life, the 1919 World Series was fixed not by Wolfsheim, but with great skill and audacity by Arnold Rothstein, a Jewish gangster. A young lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army named Dwight Eisenhower eagerly followed the game as the scores came in via telegram, and like everyone else, never suspected a thing. He would remark years later that the revelation of the conspiracy that had thrown the series produced a profound change in his perspective about the world; it taught him never to trust in first appearances.

When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community,” future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.” Brandeis’s words reflected some of the darkness of Kierkegaard’s worries from fifty years earlier and foretold some of that sullying paranoia that was still to come fifty years in the future. Thiel had read this article at Stanford. Many law students do. Most regard it as another piece of the puzzle that makes up American constitutional legal theory. But Peter believed it. He venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. Because he believed that’s where progress came from. Imagine for a second that you’re the kind of deranged individual who starts companies. You’ve created cryptocurrencies designed to replace the U.S. monetary system that somehow turned into a business that helps people sell Beanie Babies and laser pointers over the internet and ends up being worth billions of dollars. Where others saw science fiction, you’ve always seen opportunities—for real, legitimate business. You’re the kind of person who is a libertarian before that word had any kind of social respectability. You’re a conservative at Stanford. You’re the person who likes Ayn Rand and thinks she’s something more than an author teenage boys like to read. You were driven to entrepreneurship because it was a safe space from consensus, and from convention. How do you respond to social shaming? You hate it. How do you respond to petulant blogs implying there is something wrong with you for being a gay person who isn’t public about his sexuality? Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?

the imprints of the killer’s hands on his neck was like two catcher’s mitts squeezing a softball. He was not only strangled, but his trachea was crushed and his spinal cord severed in two places. Whoever did this, must have looked like “The Rock” or Hulk Hogan. Your hundred and seventy-five pound frame doesn’t fit the profile.

I walked away from this combination with the pale porcelain skin of an Irish woman, a mental state that self-medicated with food, and the thighs of Hulk Hogan. I was fat because it was really easy for me to be fat. Being

Machiavelli said that a proper conspiracy moves through three distinct phases: the planning, the doing, and the aftermath. Each of these phases requires different skills—from organization to strategic thinking to recruiting, funding, aiming, secrecy, managing public relations, leadership, foresight, and ultimately, knowing when to stop. Most important, a conspiracy requires patience and fortitude, so much patience, as much as it relies on boldness or courage.

The professional son understands what every father wants—a progeny worth his time, someone to invest in, someone who can further his legacy. The professional father wants to see his greatness given a second body—a younger one, with more energy, with

I came to believe that the nastiness of the internet was not a function of a technology or various things that have gone wrong, but the function of one particularly nasty media company led by a particularly sociopathic individual and that if I defeated Gawker, it would actually change the media landscape,” Thiel would say.

At Shiloh, Ulysses S. Grant had been caught by surprise. Flush off two victories, convinced he had superior resources and tactics, he was confident he would win. Yet he had thrown everything he had at the Confederates and been thrown back. It had begun to pour rain on the troops as they attempted to settle in for the night. Grant had seriously injured his leg in a fall a few weeks before. He is desperately short of reinforcements. Sherman finds him and begins to politely discuss plans for retreat. He says to him, "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" Grant, backlit by the camp lantern, squints as he clamps down on the stub of his cigar, "Yes. Yes. Lick 'em tomorrow, though."p206

Hillary Clinton spent her whole life trying to become president. She began her final campaign nearly two years before the election, cutting off at the pass anyone within her party who might seriously challenge her. She raised more money than you could ever possibly need. Donald Trump was under prepared, erratic, constantly in his own way. But it cannot be said that he did not want to win very badly. He wanted to win even more than Hillary. The last few weeks of the election made that fact look indisputable. She had already won in her mind, she felt she deserved it. Trump, on the other hand, was willing to do anything, go anywhere, bear any shame, tell any lie, ally with any group if it meant he could take it from her. And he did. p207

What Genghis Khan supposedly called the greatest of life's pleasures: to overcome your enemies, to drive them before you, to see their friends and allies bathed in tears, to take their possessions as your own. The question of justice is beside the point; every conqueror believes their cause just and righteous- a thought that makes the fruits taste sweeter. p9

A start-up is, in Peter’s definition, “a small group of people that you’ve convinced of a truth that nobody else believes in.

To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing.

Gawker was an unstoppable force that had yet to meet its immovable object.

It always takes longer than expected, per Hofstadter’s Law, even when—and this is the critical part—one takes Hofstadter’s Law into account.

There is something popular with ambitious people called the “briefcase technique.” You don’t show up to a meeting with a few vague ideas, you have a full-fledged plan that you take out of your briefcase and hand to the person you are pitching. Even if nothing comes of this plan, the person on the other side is knocked over by your effort, so impressed by the unexpected certainty that they cannot help but see your usefulness to them.

This compartmentalization is key to a conspiracy. Not everyone can be in charge.

How do you negotiate with a sociopath? That was the question at the back of my mind,” he recalls. It is a question to which he actually had an answer. “You have to box them in, and make sure they have no leverage, because they will look for a way to wriggle out and double-cross you in one way or another.

I was recognized as being an artist and a storyteller. If Hulk Hogan was the Elvis of wrestling, I was the Robert De Niro.

A pro wrestling fan who became a World Wrestling Entertainment supporter and personality (inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame), Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional character.

Napoleon, too, describes warfare in that simple way: Two armies are hurled at each other and both are thrown into confusion and disarray by the force of the collision. Victory is simple. It goes to whoever reassembles and redoubles firs

the people who claim the moral high ground, who claim to be about freedom of choice, but who bully everyone who doesn’t choose their way of freedom.

Anyone who has a guilty conscience can easily be led to believe that people are talking about him,” Machiavelli warns

Machiavelli said that conspiracies were weapons of the people. Only princes could afford to send an army against another army, he observed, but a conspiracy is available to every man.

Girard’s theory of mimetic desire holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so they are drawn to what other people want.

Confusum est, quidquid usque in pulverem sectum est—cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.

We take a secret pleasure in the misfortune of our friends, said another wise man.

Scipio Africanus, the general who defeated Hannibal, would say that an army should not only leave a road for their enemy to retreat by, they should pave it.

Jeff Bezos had also felt the need to opine about Peter’s politics: “Peter Thiel is a contrarian, first and foremost. You just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.” It certainly looked that way, until November 10, and then I would get an email from Peter: “Contrarians may be mostly wrong, but when they get it right, they really get it right.

I wait until I catch an ingrate with his fly open, then I take a picture of it.

It became very clear that the kind of jurors we wanted were overweight women. Most people can’t empathize with a sex tape, but overweight women are sensitive about their bodies and feel like they have been bullied on the internet. Men don’t have that problem. Attractive women don’t have that problem. They haven’t been body shamed,

If you think of what you’re doing too probabilistically where you have all these different steps, and there’s a chance that all these steps fail, then the conspiracy is very complicated, like a Rube Goldberg contraption, where something is just going to break down for one reason or another,” Peter explains. “What Mr. A convinced me of in 2011 was that this is not a statistical concatenation of probabilities—it was that if we simply executed on a few of these things correctly you would win.

As long as those few big things were still aligned correctly, all was not yet lost.

We thought we might get a spanking, not a mortal blow,” Denton says of his mindset prior to the verdict being read. “Something proportionate to any harm done.

Once the delivery was over and we were led to our hospital room for the night, Jordyn was famished, so I went down to the cafeteria to find her something to eat. I scoured for something that she might actually be able to stomach but retreated back to our room empty-handed, opting to perhaps order from the Jerry’s Deli across the street. I walked across the hall to the nurse station, where there was one nurse on duty, a large woman with Hulk Hogan’s build who barked at me in a thick eastern European accent, “CAN I HELP YOU?” “Yes . . . um, can you tell me if Jerry’s Deli delivers here?” She stared at me with her ice-cold eyes and growled, “I AM NOT AT LIBERTY TO DISCLOSE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT WHO IS DELIVERED HERE.” I smiled, realizing that she’d misunderstood my question, and said, “Hahaha . . . no . . . does JERRY’S DELI deliver here?” Looking like she was about to leap over her computer and strangle me with her giant, professional-wrestling hands, she raised her volume and repeated, “I TOLD YOU! I AM NOT AT LIBERTY TO DISCLOSE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT WHO IS DELIVERED HERE!!!” I scurried away in fear, walked across the street, and ordered a sandwich for Jordyn while standing next to Jennifer Lopez. Another night in Los Angeles. My mother was right, being a father to a daughter was indeed the most special relationship of my life. I was soon well versed in the art of a smudgeless pedicure, how to tie the perfect ponytail, and how to identify every Disney princess just by the color of her dress. This was easy, I thought.

The things that I think I’m right about,” Thiel said, “other people are in some sense not even wrong about, because they’re not thinking about them.

In his definitive book on the subject of strategy, Lawrence Freedman writes that “combining with others often constitutes the most strategic move.

Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.” Brandeis’s words reflected some of the darkness of Kierkegaard’s worries from fifty years earlier and foretold some of that sullying paranoia that was still to come fifty years in the future.

Girard’s theory of mimetic desire holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so they are drawn to what other people want. They want what other people have.

I told the truth - but I wasn't being honest.

That laceration to my sack isn’t a simple scratch. It’s fucking ripped open like Hulk Hogan’s shirt.

And the Gawker team, on a very literal level, had no idea that in the shadows, scheming against them, was the quixotic, contrarian, billionaire genius they’d so thoughtlessly outed five years earlier and then casually taunted ever since.

I ask Denton repeatedly if he feels like he misjudged Hulk Hogan, but even now I think he cannot admit that he did. Thiel was the one behind the conspiracy, so he gets all the credit and the blame. Yet Hogan deserves some, too. He was the one who charged ahead, who could have accepted any of the settlement offers that would be forthcoming, who didn’t need to and probably shouldn’t have filed the lawsuit in the first place.

never say never

Mr. Stallone had picked up a recent issue and was looking for a wrestler with a specific look - well built and blond - for a role in an upcoming movie. It would be the third in the 'Rocky' series, aptly titled 'Rocky III'... Two wrestlers who fit that profile immediately came to ...-'Superstar' Billy Graham and Hulk Hogan... It would be the biggest break of his (the Hulk's) life.

I didn't want Vince McMahon to be upset if the shots looked too good and take it out on Hogan! Hulk thanked me for "thinking in the right direction"... I took about 35 photos, and then Linda took one of Hulk and me together that I have never used in any magazine.

When Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant met in what is still considered the biggest wrestling match of all time, exaggeration was in the air. According to various contemporary reports, there were 95,000 people on hand at WrestleMania III to see the 7-foot-5, 525-pound Andre square off against Hulk Hogan, who stood 6-foot-8 and weighed 320 pounds and whose biceps measured twenty-four inches around. Probably the only number in that last sentence that’s unimpeachable is the III.

He forgot what Kierkegaard had said about the public and how the gossip press was like a mean dog that could be watched with amusement from afar. The papers could be set upon some superior, and everyone got to watch and never feel bad. If someone ever got hurt and the police came, the public could say: I wasn’t the one who bit you. That’s not my dog, I am merely a subscriber. Nobody would ever have to admit that they had enjoyed the story in 2007 when Gawker had outed Thiel, or that they were one of the seven million plus people who had watched the Hulk Hogan video.

someone,

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a longdesired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped towards new ends.

The job of a journalist would be unbearable if one was always to put oneself in the shoes of a subject.

The line attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker is that culture eats strategy. It’s a truism that applies as much to conspiracies as it does to businesses. It doesn’t matter how great your plan is, it doesn’t matter who your people are, if what binds them all together is weak or toxic, so, too, will be the outcome—if you even get that far. But if the ties that bind you together are strong, if you have a sense of purpose and mission, you can withstand great trials.

Peter Thiel secretly funded a legal battle between Hulk Hogan, a man he didn’t even know, and the gossip website Gawker, one of the mainstays of sneering media progressivism. The result was the personal bankruptcy of Gawker’s owner and editor and the destruction of the site, a major New Right victory.

but it was the evil nature of our enemy that was somehow super galvanizing.

Thiel, what ties them together really is Gawker and what they’d come to feel about it. Gawker had not only incited a conspiracy, but in the course of the trial, its actions, its tone, its arrogance had fused its unknown, unnamed opponents together

Mr. A had said the more they studied Gawker, the more they interacted with this organization, the harder it was to see any redeeming qualities: because of what Gawker’s writers would say, how its lawyers acted, and everyone’s inability to show even a slight understanding of what Terry Bollea was so upset about.

His path was in some ways traditional—Stanford to Stanford Law to judicial clerkship to high-powered law firm—but it was also marked by bouts of rebellion. At Stanford he created and published a radical conservative journal called The Stanford Review, then he wrote a book that railed against multiculturalism and “militant homosexuals” on campus, despite being both gay and foreign born. His friends thought he might become a political pundit. Instead he became a lawyer. Then one day, surprising even himself, he walked out of one of the most prestigious securities law firms in the world, Sullivan & Cromwell, after seven months and three days on the job. Within a few short years, Thiel formed and then sold PayPal, an online payments company, to eBay for $ 1.5 billion in July 2002, the month that Nick Denton registered the domain for his first site, Gizmodo. With proceeds of some $ 55 million, Thiel assembled an empire. He retooled a hedge fund called Clarium into a vehicle to make large, counterintuitive bets on global macro trends, seeding it with $ 10 million of his own money. In 2003, Thiel registered a company called Palantir with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2004, he would found it in earnest. The company would take antifraud technology from PayPal and apply it to intelligence gathering—fighting terrorism, predicting crime, providing military insights. It would take money from the venture capital arm of the CIA and soon take on almost every other arm of the government as clients.

First, a slight of some kind, which grows into a larger dissatisfaction with the status quo. A sense that things should be different, and will be different, except for the worse, if something doesn’t change. But then comes a second step, a weighing of the stakes. What if I do something about this? What might happen? What might happen if I do nothing? Which is riskier: to act or to ignore? History is uncertain on this question, as were the people in Peter’s life, the ones trying to tell him that there wasn’t much that could be done. Peter would, at one point, pass me a copy of The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy, the book he had read as he’d mulled his options over. The epigraph to the chapter on the Battle of Valmy quotes Shakespeare: A little fire is quickly trodden out, Which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Thucydides would say that the three strongest motives for men were “fear, honor, and self-interest.” Fear. Honor. Self-interest. All covered. Which is the truest of them for Thiel? Does it matter? Someone had begun to think seriously that something needed to be done and believed that he might be the person to do it.

This is a book for a world that has come to think like Nick Carraway, riding in disbelief through life on the wake of conspiracies we won’t believe until we see, unable to comprehend why they happen and who makes them happen. This ignorance of how things really work is depressing to me. Because it opens us up to manipulation. It closes us off from opportunities to produce fruitful change and advance our own goals. It is time to grow up.

It is just one word: Conspiracies. What follows is Machiavelli’s guide for rising up against a powerful enemy, for ending the reign of a supposed tyrant, for protecting yourself against those who wish to do you harm. It is appropriate that such a book sits just within arm’s reach of one of Thiel’s wingback armchairs and not far from the chess set which occupies considerable amounts of his time. Something in these pages planted itself deep into Thiel’s mind when he first read it long ago, and something in Thiel allowed him to see past Machiavelli’s deceptive warnings against conspiracies and hear the wily strategist’s true message: that some situations present only one option. It’s the option available to many but pursued by few: intrigue. To strategize, coordinate, and sustain a concerted effort to remove someone from power, to secretly move against an enemy, to do what Machiavelli would say was one of the hardest things to do in the world: to overthrow an existing order and do something new. To engage in a conspiracy to change the world.

Every conspiracy is a story of people. The protagonists of this one are two of the most distinctly unique personalities of their time, Nick Denton and Peter Thiel. Two characters who, not unlike the cowboys in your cliché western, found that the town—whether it was Silicon Valley or New York City or the world’s stage—was not big enough for them to coexist. The gravitational pull of the two figures would bring dozens of other people into their orbit over their ten-year cold war along with the FBI, the First and Fourth Amendments, and soon enough, the president of the United States. It somehow dragged me in, too. In 2016, I would find myself the recipient of unsolicited emails from both Peter Thiel and Nick Denton. Both wanted to talk, both were intrigued to hear I had spoken to the other. Both gave me questions to ask the other. And so for more than a year, I spent hundreds of hours researching, writing about, and speaking to nearly everyone involved. I would read more than twenty thousand pages of legal documents and pore through the history of media, of feuds, of warfare, and of strategy not only to make sense of what happened here, but to make something more than just some work of contemporary long-form journalism or some chronological retelling of events by a disinterested observer (which I am not). The result is a different kind of book from my other work, but given this extraordinary story, I had little choice. What follows then are both the facts and the lessons from this conflict—an extended meditation on what it means to successfully conspire, on the one hand, and how to be caught defenseless against a conspiracy and be its victim, on the other. So that we can see what power and conviction look like in real terms, as well as the costs of hubris, and recklessness. And because winning is typically preferable to losing, this book is about how one man came to experience what Genghis Khan supposedly called the greatest of life’s pleasures: to overcome your enemies, to drive them before you, to see their friends and allies bathed in tears, to take their possessions as your own. The question of justice is beside the point; every conqueror believes their cause just and righteous—a thought that makes the fruits taste sweeter.

Machiavelli said that a proper conspiracy moves through three distinct phases: the planning, the doing, and the aftermath. Each of these phases requires different skills—from organization to strategic thinking to recruiting, funding, aiming, secrecy, managing public relations, leadership, foresight, and ultimately, knowing when to stop. Most important, a conspiracy requires patience and fortitude, so much patience, as much as it relies on boldness or courage. The question that remains: What would a world without these skills look like? And would a world with more of them be a nightmare or something better? That’s for you to decide. In the meantime and for the record, I simply present what happened.

Machiavelli writes that a conspiracy without any coconspirators is not a conspiracy. It’s just a crime. This is also basic legal principle. If you kill someone by yourself, in the heat of the moment, it’s murder. If you meticulously plan it with someone else beforehand, that’s conspiracy. Lee Harvey Oswald almost certainly assassinated John F. Kennedy by himself. What he hoped would happen as a result is unclear. John Wilkes Booth conspired not only to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, but working with Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt also aimed to assassinate Andrew Johnson and William Seward. It was a coordinated attempt by Confederate sympathizers to usurp the United States government. It’s not simply a single crime, but a crazed, desperate effort to turn back the tide of a lost war. In his definitive book on the subject of strategy, Lawrence Freedman writes that “combining with others often constitutes the most strategic move.” By definition, the first move in the act of a conspiracy is the assemblage of allies and operators: your coconspirators. Someone to do your bidding, to work with you, someone you can trust, who agrees with you that there’s a problem, or is willing to be paid to agree with the sentiment that it’s about time someone, somebody did something about this. Each hand doesn’t need to know what the other is doing, but there needs to be more than one set. Thus, Thiel’s vague idea to do something about Gawker is concretized into conspiracy on April 6, 2011. It began unremarkably, when Thiel traveled to Germany to speak at a conference and had dinner with a student he’d met on a tour of a university a few years before. Peter arrives, driven in a black S-class Mercedes, the same model he has idling outside with a driver, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, wherever he is in the world.

There is a scene in the movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. At the beginning, in the woods, Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck, illustrates this phenomenon. He thinks the outlaw Jesse James is a great man. He thinks that he, himself, is a great man, too. He wants someone to recognize that in him. He wants someone to give him an opportunity—a project through which he can prove his worth. It just happens that Frank James would size the delusional, awkward boy up in the woods outside Blue Cut, Missouri: “You don’t have the ingredients, son.” In contrast, Mr. A is ambitious, but it’s paired with self-confidence, social adeptness, and a clear sense of what Thiel wanted. Even so, the prospect of meeting with Thiel is intimidating: his stomach churning, every nerve and synapse alive and flowing. He’s twenty-six years old. He’s sitting down for a one-on-one evening with a man worth, by 2011, some $ 1.5 billion and who owns a significant chunk of the biggest social network in the world, on whose board of directors he also sits. Even if Thiel were just an ordinary investor, dinner with him would make anyone nervous. One quickly finds that he is a man notoriously averse to small talk, or what a friend once deemed “casual bar talk.” Even the most perfunctory comment to Thiel can elicit long, deep pauses of consideration in response—so long you wonder if you’ve said something monumentally stupid. The tiny assumptions that grease the wheels of conversation find no quarter with Thiel. There is no chatting with Peter about the weather or about politics in general. It’s got to be, “I’ve been studying opening moves in chess, and I think king’s pawn might be the best one.” Or, “What do you think of the bubble in higher education?” And then you have to be prepared to talk about it at the expert level for hours on end. You can’t talk about television or music or pop culture because the person you’re sitting across from doesn’t care about these things and he couldn’t pretend to be familiar with them if he wanted to.

But that’s the nice thing about lawyers: as long as you’re paying them, they’re usually good with whatever terms go along with it. Compartmentalization is their job. It’s how they represent people who are guilty, how they file long motions they know are unlikely to be successful, how they can patiently keep secrets that they’d otherwise love to be able to share. Harder was nearly twenty years into his legal career when he was first approached. Though he often worked on celebrity cases they tended to be for routine matters, not exciting criminal proceedings or blockbuster cases, and when you’re retained to enforce rights of privacy and publicity on behalf of your clients, it tends to follow that they don’t want you grandstanding in the media on their behalf, building a profile as you work for them. His last appearance in the New York Times had been in 2001, about a case for a client who had been let go from an ad firm almost immediately after she left her new job to join it. Harder won two months’ back pay. It’s not exactly the kind of victory that marked the career of lawyers like Marty Singer, whom Harder had once worked for, and whom the Times had called the “Guard Dog to the Stars.” A lawyer who had publicly fought cases over celebrity sex tapes, who tangled with Gawker once on behalf of Rebecca Gayheart and the actor Eric Dane when their tape had run on Gawker and managed to eke out a small settlement, without an admission of guilt. So why not hire Singer? Because Peter Thiel and Mr. A didn’t want someone who was content to settle, or another lawyer who knew the standard Hollywood saber-rattling routine. They wanted someone who would win. Now, in mid-2012, they appear to have that man.

With patience and resources,” Mr. A would come to say often on his weekly calls with Peter, “we can do almost anything.” Tolstoy had a motto for Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov in War and Peace—“ Patience and Time.” “There is nothing stronger than those two,” he said, “. . . they will do it all.” In 1812 and in real life, Kutuzov gave Napoleon an abject lesson in the truth of that during a long Russian winter. The target, Nick Denton, is not a patient man. Most entrepreneurs aren’t. Most powerful people are not. One of his editors would say of Denton’s approach to stories, “Nick is very much of the mind that you do it now. And the emphasis is to get it out there and be correct as you can, but don’t let that stand in the way of getting the story out there.” Editorially, Nick Denton wanted to be first—which is a form of power in itself. But this isn’t how Thiel thinks. He would say his favorite chess player was José Raúl Capablanca, and remind himself of the man’s famous dictum: To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing. History is littered with examples of those who acted rashly in pursuit of their goals, who plunged ahead without much in the way of a plan, and suffered as a result. One could argue that the bigger of Nixon’s two blunders wasn’t his attacks on the Democratic Party but the decision to go after Katharine Graham and the media, and yet both decisions were the product of a fundamental lack of patience and discipline. Or consider the late head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, who responded to a series of Gawker articles and attacks by allegedly hiring private detectives to follow the reporters around. Not only did he find nothing of practical value, but these heavy-handed tactics came back to embarrass and discredit him at his most vulnerable moment. In fact, two weeks after the news of this disturbing conspiracy broke, he would be dead. How ought one do it then?

The gating resource here was not capital,” Thiel said. “The gating resource was the ideas and the people and executing it well. It’s not like lawsuits haven’t been brought in the past. It’s something that’s been done, so we were required to think very creatively about this space, what kind of lawsuit to bring.” Most of the ideas do not stand up to scrutiny, or to Thiel’s ambitions. A slap on the wrist from the FCC about affiliate commissions will accomplish little. Exploiting the financial misdeeds of the company would likely require an inside man, and this would be nasty, deceitful business. It wasn’t just a question of which strategy might actually win, it was also figuring out which one could actually do real damage. “It was important for us to win cases,” Thiel said. “We had to win. We had to get a large judgment. We did not want to bring meritless cases. We wanted to bring cases that were very strong. It was a very narrow set of context in which you could do that. You did not want to involve political speech, you did not want to involve anything that had anything remotely connected to the public interest. Ideally, our cases would not even involve the First Amendment at all.” The First Amendment was unappealing not because Thiel is a libertarian, though he is, but because as a strategist he understood that it was Gawker’s strongest and most entrenched position: we’re allowed to say anything we want. It challenges the legal system and conventional wisdom where they are the most clearly established. Forget the blocking and tackling of proof and precedent. At an almost philosophical level, the right to free speech is virtually absolute. But as Denton would himself admit to me later, free speech is sort of a Maginot Line. “It looks formidable,” he said, “it gives false confidence to defenders, but there are plenty of ways around if you’re nimble and ruthless enough.” That’s what Thiel was doing now, that’s what he was paying Charles Harder to find. Someone from Gawker would observe with some satisfaction to me, many years away from this period of preliminary strategizing from Thiel, that if Thiel had tried to go after Gawker in court for what it had written about him, litigating damages and distress from being outed, for example, he certainly would have lost. This was said as a sort of condemnation of the direction that Thiel ultimately did attack Gawker from. Which is strange because that was the point. The great strategist B. H. Liddell Hart would say that all great victories come along “the line of least resistance and the line of least expectation.” John Boyd, a fighter pilot before he was a strategist, would say that a good pilot never goes through the front door. He wins by coming through the back. And first, that door has to be located.

The Count of Monte Cristo would put it better: “What a fool I was not to tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to avenge myself!” Ah, but what dangerous business this is. This artificial hardening is a dangerous crossroads, a bargain with our primal forces that not everyone escapes or can emerge from with clean hands. William James knew that every man is “ready to be savage in some cause.” The distinction, he said, between good people and bad people is “the choice of the cause.

This is the nature of the American legal system, and of conspiracy as well. It’s slow, adversarial. Moral quandaries and personal issues are reduced to brief moments and decided on small points of law. Even a winning case will likely see as many setbacks as it does victories, and it falls upon the constitution of the players to weather the former to get to the latter. And this isn’t even the real legal battle—these are just arguments over the attempts to obtain what is called “prior restraint” of speech. The conspirators were trying to get the tape taken down before—until—they’d won their case. Harder’s thinking was that a sex tape recorded without consent was so egregious that a judge would be sympathetic. Gawker’s lawyers enjoy disabusing their opponent of this notion. So does the judge.

The essayist and investor Paul Graham, a peer and rival of Peter Thiel’s, has charted the trajectory of a start-up, with all its ups and downs. After the initial bump of media attention, the rush of excitement from the unexpected success, Graham says that the founders enter a phase where the novelty begins to wear off, and they quickly descend from their early euphoria into what he calls the “trough of sorrow.” A start-up launches with its investments, gets a few press hits, and then smacks right into reality. Many companies never make it out of this ditch. “The problem with the Silicon Valley,” as Jim Barksdale, the former CEO and president of Netscape, once put it, “is that we tend to confuse a clear view with a short distance.” Here, too, like the founders of a start-up, the conspirators have smacked into reality. The reality of the legal system. The defensive bulwark of the First Amendment. The reality of the odds. They have discovered the difference between a good plan and how far they’ll need to travel to fulfill it. They have trouble even serving Denton with papers. Harder has to request a 120-day extension just to wrap his head around Gawker’s financial and corporate structure. This is going to be harder than they thought. It always is. To say that in 2013 all the rush and excitement present on those courthouse steps several months earlier had dissipated would be a preposterous understatement. If a conspiracy, by its inherent desperation and disadvantaged position, is that long struggle in a dark hallway, here is the point where one considers simply sitting down and sobbing in despair, not even sure what direction to go. Is this even possible? Are we wrong? Machiavelli wrote that fortune—misfortune in fact—aims herself where “dikes and dams have not been made to contain her.” Clausewitz said that battle plans were great but ultimately subject to “friction”—delays, confusion, mistakes, and complications. What is friction? Friction is when you’re Pericles and you lay out a brilliant plan to defend Athens against Sparta and then your city is hit by the plague.

The line from the Obamas was “When they go low, we go high.” It’s a dignified and impressive mantra, if only because for the most part, whether you liked them or not, it’s hard to deny that they followed it. But the now cliché remark should not be taken conclusively, for it makes one dangerous omission. It forgets that from time to time in life, we might have to take someone out behind the woodshed. How we have lost this. How squeamish we have become. We now blindly demonize what is often one of the most effective forms of action. How vulnerable this ignorance has made us to the few real conspiracies, successful or not, that exist in the world. In this rare occasion, though, we got a glimpse, a peek behind the curtain, as the title of Gawker’s last post put it, of how things work. Now we know. Peter showed us. And yet our instinct is to turn away, to put our fingers in our ears. It’s why not once in nearly a decade of concentrated effort and scheming directed at a single enemy—at an entity who was obsessively covered and followed by the media—by an opponent who publicly stated his undying hatred of that enemy, did a single spectator, victim, or even many of the participants suspect any of what you read in the pages of this book. There is no question that what Thiel did over those years was brilliant, cunning, and ruthless. It is equally true that Gawker mostly beat itself. Denton and company allowed this to happen. Even the most cynical and aggressive media site on the planet had missed what was happening right in front of them; they did nothing to save themselves. “The idea of a conspiracy,” Thiel would say to me, “is linked with intentionality, with planning, working towards longer-term goals. In a world where you don’t have conspiracies maybe also those things disappear.

The Russians call this maskirovka—the art of deception and confusion. It is as old as strategy itself. Undermine your enemy, Sun Tzu advised 2,500 years ago. “Subvert him, attack his morale, strike at his economy, corrupt him. Sow internal discord among his leaders; destroy him without fighting him.” Call down the fog of war, he was telling conspirators and generals and swordsmen, let it descend on your opponent until they cannot see what is right before them. Because “all warfare,” Sun Tzu reminds us, “is based on deception.” Not just keeping secrets—that’s the first part, the passive part, a refusal to reveal your true intentions—but active, outwardly focused deceit intended to disorient and weaken the enemy. The long-term strategic drive to a decisive legal action—the hope of taking a case against Gawker to a real jury of normal people outside the Manhattan media bubble—had been set by Peter Thiel early on. By 2012, not only was the ideal case found with which to execute this strategy, but a lawsuit was filed within days of discovery. As the case wound its way through the legal system in 2013, it had seen many setbacks, some expected and others not, but these setbacks were not without their upside. They had, in the end, created a scenario in which the case’s final home in Florida district court might spell a bankruptcy-level event for Gawker Media.

The historian E. P. Thompson said that history never happens as the actors suspect, that history is instead the “record of unintended consequences.” The assassination of Julius Caesar does not restore the Roman Republic, it leads to a brutal civil war and, at the end, another emperor. The Allied powers destroy Hitler and Germany but empower Russia and Stalin and create a new Cold War to follow the conclusion of the hot one. There is always something you didn’t expect, always some second-or third-order consequence. Peter Thiel’s conspiracy had achieved its intended outcome. A negotiated peace had been found. Gawker.com would cease to publish. A new leader was in charge of the rest of the sites, some of the offending articles would be removed. But what would the consequences, intended and otherwise, of it all be? What had this brilliant, independent mind neglected to see? What, if anything, would come as a surprise? His own power and strength for one.

In the years he conspired against Gawker, Thiel would come to see the U.S. legal system differently. He later said that, before the case against Gawker, he had believed that the problem in America was too many lawsuits and too many lawyers. Like many media outlets, Gawker’s legal strategy had been to lean into that understanding—to be the black hole of time and money whose event horizon no one could afford to confront. With his immense resources, Thiel believed he had simply changed the equation. The fact that Hulk Hogan, a “single-digit millionaire” as Thiel put it, would not otherwise have had the funds to pursue a case like this means that there might be many other legitimate legal precedents or cases that have otherwise gone unpursued out of intimidation or lack of funds (it cannot be said with a straight face that A.J. and Nick did not have “legal protection”). Having actually gone through the system, Thiel would come to believe that maybe there weren’t enough lawsuits. That people should try more. And so he puts more money behind the idea, funding in 2016 a start-up called Legalist, conceived by a Thiel fellow, dedicated to bankrolling lawsuits with a high probability of winning and possibly setting new precedents.

Peter thought he’d be greeted as a liberator, that Gawker was a scourge that once eliminated would allow for open, collaborative discussion. If anything, the opposite has happened. The candidate he helped put in office embodies many of the bullying traits that Thiel claimed to abhor. Trump would also come to actively stymie expression, threatening to “open up” the libel laws in this country and pressuring NFL owners to fire the players who kneeled during the national anthem. This must hit Thiel sometimes, perhaps in the quiet cabin of his Gulfstream, that the man in the White House is essentially the opposite of everything he had spent his life believing in, that Trump threatened the very libertarian freedoms and open civil discourse that Thiel had spent his money protecting. To know he is associated with that, in certain ways responsible for it, might be the most unintended consequence of all.

Once one forges oneself into a hammer of justice and feels the power of crushing one’s enemies, driving them before one and taking their possessions as one’s own, does one become addicted to it? It can become a cycle without end. It can change you, ruin you. One of the worst things that can ever happen to a leader is to unconsciously associate resistance and criticism with opportunity. When everyone tells you you’re wrong and you turn out to be right, you learn a dangerous lesson: Never listen to warnings. And so the reason that few conspiracies are followed by additional successful conspiracies is because of this process and the changes that power produces.

Lyndon Johnson would famously conspire to steal a Senate election from Coke Stevenson in 1948, which put him on the path to the presidency. But given how it went, and the fact that Coke died an old man, surrounded by people who loved and admired him, who is to say that LBJ really won? Perhaps the most interesting unintended consequences, however, were the obvious ones. The ones that no one seriously thought could happen. First, the sex tape actually disappeared. Try to find it—I dare you. You can’t. The Streisand Effect now has at least one exception. Trying doesn’t always backfire.

When someone categorizes something evil, as Sherman did, as Peter and Mr. A repeatedly did, he implicitly gives himself permission to do what needs to be done to destroy it.

Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca”—Thiel’s favorite chess player—“put it well: to succeed ‘you must study the endgame before everything else.

For all the claims that what Peter had done was personal and unethical and wrong, that he had made the world a worse place and horribly wronged a group of journalists, something surprising happened: Media actually did change. Because they knew they needed to

Peter and a team of conspirators and a judge and a jury in Florida had spoken. They said: We don’t want to live in a world where the media can publish someone having sex—even if it’s just the “highlights”—simply because that person has talked about his sex life in public

We live in a world where only people like Peter Thiel can pull something so intentional and long-term off—and it’s not because, as Gawker has tried to make it seem, he’s rich. It’s because he’s one of the few who believes it can be done

I didn't tell her my imaginary friend as a kid was Hulk Hogan. There's cute and then there's weird.

giant’s