Until recently, exhibits at University museums and family narratives represented the Stanfords as an ideal nuclear unit destroyed by the tragic death of Leland, Jr., at age 15 from typhoid fever. Jane Stanford devoted the rest of her life to honoring her son by creating a great university. As Stevens sees it, the late Weimar Republic and the US today have plenty in common. As was the case 90 years ago, democracy could be made expendable, particularly if the donor class goes along for the ride. There is no doubt that the internet is an important part of the story. Human rights groups blamed anti-Rohingya propaganda on Facebook for inciting a genocide in Myanmar. But the author resists any attempt to shift moral responsibility to social media. It exacerbates some of our latent tendencies, he argues, but those tendencies are there no matter what.

It does succeed in being reflective though — causing you to think: is it ever right to seek revenge when you've been hurt? Is it right to destroy an individual or institution that you think is incredibly damaging or hurtful to a wide range of people? The word 'conspiracy' tends to be viewed as automatically 'bad', but Ryan forces his reader to question that. Ultimately, I remain unconvinced with Ryan's hypothesis that we need more conspiracies in the world than we currently have. You see that with 9/11 conspiracy theories and you see it with the JFK assassination. The idea that the head of state was assassinated and yet, for a large part of the population, the only explanation was that the government itself in some form or another was responsible for this is representative of that sea change.” Many people have opinions about the case based entirely on what they think of the principals. When Bollea aka "Hulk Hogan" first won his lawsuit against Gawker, public opinion was generally in his favor. The trial had shown amply that Gawker didn't care in the slightest about truth or journalistic ethics. They would publish anything without regard for the impact on its subjects. The rich and famous were favorite targets, and everyone enjoyed the schadenfreude of seeing yet another celebrity being humiliated. Worse, they operated on the principal that they were essentially untouchable. "Never start a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel" - they relied on strong First Amendment protections coupled with the fact that even for a rich celebrity, taking on a multimillion-dollar media empire was doomed to be a losing fight. That said, I came away quite unconvinced by Holiday's thesis about conspiracies and nowhere near as sympathetic towards Thiel as he is. As one online reviewer astutely pointed out, the tenuous connection to Gamergate is extremely troubling, and Holiday missed (or deliberately ignored) the chance to probe deeper into this. My enemy's enemy is my friend, Holiday alludes elsewhere in the book, yet when it comes to Gamergate he steers clear of any investigation as to whether Thiel or the mysterious Mr. A. supported or colluded in any way with this terrible movement. If true, it would be extremely troubling - and have now disturbing implications as well for Thiel's subsequent support of Trump. Disclosure: Gawker has tried to get more than one of my friends fired, so I didn’t shed any tears when justice was served. High-fives may have been exchanged.From MMR to Covid-19, vaccines have been a prime example of how initially reasonable concerns over possible side-effects can career into an insidious irrationality. Enter GamerGate and the culture wars and then the 2016 election, and the judgment against Gawker became fraught with implications that went well beyond the politics of outing and whether or not it's okay to publish someone's sex video without their consent. The problem with this book is at the very end, he suddenly turns it into an opinion piece on his belief that the Trump presidency is a disaster and proves more and more a disaster every day that passes...

Bernays gives an insight into how the elites actually subjugate the masses through the media, and this will resonate with those theorists who contend that humans are highly programmable through radio and television. It does seem to be a battle of brainwashing to an extent, with various government controlled media outlets each sending out propaganda to its citizens. Thus American, Russian and Chinese citizens are all given different propaganda and different versions of events. Bernays states in the book that: For some reason the author frequently writes in the present tense. For example (not a real quote, just to illustrate), "In 2012, Thiel goes to the store. He sees his rival, and debates what to say." Perhaps it's my historian bias, but this tense just seemed wrong and distracting.A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful actors, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable. The term has a pejorative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence. Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it, are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, and the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than proof. I doubt I'd have bothered with this book if it didn't have "Ryan Holiday" on the cover. I mean, can the story of Hulk Hogan suing Gawker really be that interesting? Who is the target audience - the intersection of "people who are fans of Hulk Hogan" and "people who know how to read"? But Holiday said it was his favourite thing he'd ever written, so I gave it a chance... and the response is a resounding "meh". Who Really Killed Kennedy? (2013), by Dr Jerome R Corsi, also finds the mafia guilty, although with a little help from Richard Nixon and the French. Another work published to mark the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, by Roger Stone, a Trump associate, implicates President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in close association with mobsters and US intelligence. A friend of mine compares the free speech debate to the gun control debate: when they wrote the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers could never have imagined that a high-powered Assault Press like Gawker could end up in the hands of a civilian.