It's just the beginning of the week, and already a major presidential candidate and his staunchest ally in Silicon Valley have shown they have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the First Amendment works.

Yesterday, Donald Trump responded to a critical New York Times piece depicting the self-sabotage of his campaign:

Today, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel said in an op-ed in the Times that he was proud of the court battle he funded against Gawker, a privacy lawsuit that pushed the site into bankruptcy. Gawker, he said, published "thinly sourced, nasty articles that attacked and mocked people" to make money.

What seems to be beyond both Trump's and Thiel's grasp is that the First Amendment does not protect someone from protest or criticism. Of course, the whole point of protecting a free press is to ensure the right to protest and criticize publicly.

In the op-ed, Thiel said he had suffered at the hands of Gawker when a 2007 post on the site's Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag "made choices for him" on how and when he came out to the public as a gay man. Thiel said journalists shouldn't fear his campaign against Gawker, which included funding the Hulk Hogan sex tape privacy lawsuit that led to the site's bankruptcy and several others. "It's not for me to draw the line," Thiel writes, "but journalists should condemn those who willfully cross it." Yet drawing the line is exactly what Thiel has done, and he's going to spend his fortune to make sure others don't cross it, even if that means he financially destroys journalists and publications.

Ironically, even as Thiel sought to frame his issues with Gawker as concern over the broader question of privacy on the Internet, much of his fortune comes from investing in companies whose own practices raise serious privacy questions themselves. Thiel says Gawker was "willing to exploit the Internet without moral limits," but gossip and tabloid journalism are hardly a new invention of online publishing. There's nothing uniquely "Internet-like" about people's desire to click on a headline to satisfy their curiosity.