Little Rock    Paul Thiel, the libertarian billionaire, co-founder of PayPal, board member of Facebook, and venture capitalist, Trump delegate, and Silicon Valley community leader, went public about the fact that he is the money bags behind the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that is trying to put the on-line scandal and news sheet, Gawker, out of business. He says the price tag is in the range of $10 million to the lawyers so far. He swears it is not just for revenge over a now defunct Silicon Valley blog that had outed him in 2007, but more about privacy and setting limits on scurrilous press abuse. He had referred to the Gawker blog previously as the Al Qaeda of journalism or words to that effect. He was not a fan. Observers knew there was an angel behind Hulk and his lawyers when they agreed to let the insurance company for Gawker off the hook. In wrestling, they would call this a “death match.”

With a billion dollar bank account he very accurately described himself as having the resources to defend himself and noted that that was not always the case for many others somewhat slandered in one way or another. He also says that he is financing other litigation as well but didn’t reveal it. He was educated as a lawyer himself, and supposedly asked a team of legal beagles to find some areas where he could make a difference at this interesting juncture of self-described philanthropy, vengeance, and politics.

Dude, where were you when we needed you a couple of years ago when ACORN was fighting for its life over the unconstitutional Congressional “bill of attainder” in 2009? Well, never mind there are always other issues, and I’d encourage brothers and sisters everywhere to make a list and send it over to Thiel so his team can saddle up and defend our liberties and lives as well.

You take the recent report for example by ACORN International and its partners about the lack of democracy and diversity in membership-based, rural electric cooperatives. I’ve talked to one lawyer after another who are convinced this ought to be against the law, and I’ve even tried to track down lawsuits that have recently been filed in Alabama on this issue, but it’s one of those Gordian knots where I can hear my friends on the other side of the phone kind of sighing because they know it’s wrong, they suspect it’s illegal, but who has the time or money to wage such a fight. A colleague send me a picture of the all-white, male, mostly elderly board of the Mississippi land bank supposedly soliciting interest from all the farmers out there who might want loans. A lot of them can look at the board makeup and not bother, but is that legal. I guess I’m sighing now!

Or how about the discrimination against the poor on getting their tax refunds at the same time as everyone else if they happen to qualify for an earned income credit? Going after the taxman, isn’t that a libertarian issue, too?

Or how about all of this voter mischief? A federal judge in Ohio allowed people to register and vote on the same day, declaring the effort to prevent such activity was discriminatory to black voters. There’s a lot of that and rollbacks on voting rights in one state after another. Voting is equal to individual liberty isn’t it? Sounds like someone financing more of these lawsuits would be a good libertarian philanthropy.

Hey, pile on! If this isn’t just a piece of Silicon Valley revenge, there’s a long list of injustices where some cash could help us get some of these issues before a judge and settle some scores for millions.