If there’s part of you that thinks Hulk Hogan, Peter Thiel, and Gawker should all be put on the same rocket and launched toward the sun, you’re not alone: It’s hard to generate much sympathy for the obnoxious professional wrestler, the PayPal-founding libertarian, and the news site known for outing people.

But on balance, the report – according to Forbes — that the billionaire Thiel has been funding Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker over a leaked sex tape is some of the most disturbing news of the year. It’s as troubling, say, as the rise of Donald Trump to likely Republican primary leader. In fact, in some ways, it’s the same bad news.

Thiel’s side has not commented yet, but here’s Forbes on the suit:

The involvement of Thiel, an eccentric figure in Silicon Valley who has advocated for teenagers to skip college and openly supported Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, adds another wrinkle to a case that has garnered widespread attention for its implications over celebrity privacy and a publication’s First Amendment rights. During court proceedings, which ended in late March with a $140 million victory for Hogan, there had been rumors that a wealthy individual had funded Hogan’s case though there was never any hard evidence that surfaced to prove that was true.

Thiel is a well-known unpleasant character who was outed by Gawker’s Valleywag site (“the Silicon Valley version of Al Qaeda,” he called it) at the end of 2007. His Silicon Valley peers are called the PayPal Mafia: They are wealthy and powerful disruptors, and lean toward the anti-regulatory and anti-government.

Thiel’s support for Trump could the scariest part, and not just because Trump is scary to begin with. It’s because Thiel – a rich man who is doing what he can to destroy a news outlet, and tried to do it secretly – is backing a candidate who is also a rich man who wouldn’t mind destroying news outlets himself.

Trump has been pretty upfront about this. At a rally in Texas in February, Trump said that he would “open up” libel laws to make it easier to sue publications who say things he doesn’t like. There are limits to what a president can do when it comes to muzzling the media. But, as the Washington Post notes, “it is technically possible, without Congress acting on a new law, to lower the libel standard for public figures to match the one applied to private citizens. That would accomplish Trump’s mission to make it easier for people like him to successfully sue media companies.”