From Ayn Rand Devotee and Never Trumper Drives Parler’s Reboot (Bloomberg):
A few years ago, a lawyer with a PhD in philosophy named Amy Peikoff appeared on Fox News and defended Amazon.com Inc.’s pay practices. The show’s host, Tucker Carlson, expressed disgust that some Amazon employees were collecting taxpayer-funded food stamps at a time when the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, was the world’s richest man.
But Peikoff said the problem wasn’t Amazon or Bezos, but the commonly accepted idea that the federal government should provide food assistance to people struggling to make ends meet. “If it’s wrong for taxpayers to pay his labor costs, then what we need we need to do is eliminate the program,” she said.
In July, Peikoff became chief policy officer at Parler, and these days she finds herself working to salvage the controversial social media platform, which in January was driven off the internet in part by the very company she once defended on Fox.
[…]Parler, which came back online a few weeks later, continues to promote a hands-off approach to content moderation that is largely being driven by Peikoff, who wrote the rules that dictate what’s allowed on the site, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
Bloomberg’s journalist clearly doesn’t know how to pin the principled Peikoff, who supports Parler, yet opposes Trump:
She has publicly opposed Trump since the earliest days of his candidacy in 2016. “I’ve always been #nevertrump,” Peikoff tweeted in 2019. “But I’m also anti-leftist. I’m pro-rights. And Trump doesn’t believe in rights as a principle.”
[…]
Peikoff has hailed whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency, as a hero who should be pardoned, and she sided with Apple Inc. in its battles with U.S. authorities over encryption.
