The Perils of Palantir

$1.9 billion in military contracts, a one button citizen database and creating "the kill chain of tomorrow."

A depiction of Gandalf, a good sorcerer who first appeared in The Hobbit, which proceeded The Lord of the Rings. Is Peter Thiel a good sorcerer?

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, a palantír is a crystal ball used for communication and to see events in the world or its past, distort truth and present selective visions of reality. It is no coincidence that Peter Thiel’s AI company Palantir chose that name.

During the War of the Ring, a palantír falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive in his quest to rule the tale’s Middle-Earth. I would argue any corporation profiting from the murder of unarmed civilians — in the case of Gaza women, children and babies trapped — their backs just coincidentally against a vast sea of LNG and oil the victims of evil. Peter Thiel did not create the Gaza strip, a decades-old, open-air prison, but he did make killing far more efficient. Peter Thiel is Sauron, an evil sorcerer.

Drones enhanced with Palantir AI have been used to murder Gazans. Similarly, the Maven Smart System, developed by the company was used by the US Air Force according to The Military Times to identify targets in the current Iran war, including the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab, struck by a missile on February 28, resulting in the deaths of 156 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren. How smart is a system that murders children? This is advertised as the “kill chain of tomorrow.”

Loitering drones to make murder autonomous and efficient. Facial recognition and cell phone tracking are part of its arsenal, and stateside DHS and ICE are using this technology to collect your personal data in a mass surveillance system predicted by Orwell long ago. ICE specifically uses an app called ELITE, an acronym for "Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement" to target raids for arrests, incarceration and deportation.

One of Palantir's crystal balls in action, versions of which are being used by the military. Defense News link here.

Trump has chosen Palantir’s Foundry “ontology” software to create a master database on every American citizen. From emails to social media posts and medical records every detail of your life is available at the push of a button, no walls. Applying for Medicare? Oh, we see you attended a No Kings Rally as well. Putting in for your Social Security benefits, hmm, we see you have read banned books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Kite Runner. Filing your taxes? Yes, we see you there, too. Oh my, that negative article on Palantir you wrote? We know.

Palantir has secured $1.9 billion in military contracts. And so, we have a company that participates in genocide, provides AI software to the US military that indiscriminately targets girls schools and tracks whether you’re naughty or nice by the standards of billionaire Peter Thiel. What could go wrong?

Thiel is a libertarian who has published for the ultra-right Cato Institute. He states that freedom and democracy are incompatible. This is artifice, as his true belief is in authoritarian control. His moral compunction has been demonstrated in exchanging more than 2,000 messages with Jeffrey Epstein. Their relationship began in 2014, long after Epstein’s pedophilia was widely known, and they met on multiple occasions according to The Nation. Gay, Thiel did not share Epstein’s foul sexual proclivities, but Epstein would ultimately invest $40 million in venture capital funds managed by Valar Ventures, a firm co-founded by Thiel.

Peter, who is stalwart believer in planet destroying capitalism and that democracy stands in the way, (stands in his way to do whatever he wants), believes we can exercise the conquest of outer space even as fossil fuels rapidly approach their end of EROI. He also thinks seasteading our dying oceans is a good idea, and that women should not be allowed to vote.

From his thoughts published on the Cato Institute:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

These are the rantings of a typical billionaire, detached from the reality of a finite planet and conveniently clueless that billionaire wealth creates the poverty that necessitates welfare. Obviously, the poor and women have no right voting.

The Palantir Manifesto

Published in 2025, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, is a book co-authored by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to Karp. The book includes a 22-point manifesto among other wishes. The manifesto is easily viewed on Nazi platform X, and a review of the book is here from Stanford where Thiel and Karp met.

Alex Karp at work.

Here’s a leaked video clip of Kool-Aid dispenser Karp fervently sales pitching Palantir investors, my bolds for emphasis:

We’re doing it, and I am sure you’re enjoying this as much as I am. Let’s not talk to analysts about the burden of being right. Our burdens of investing in Onthology, our burdens of actually looking at the math, the burden of reading what the Rule of 40 is, the burden of being honest, the burden of explaining what an enterprise software company is. or the burden of explaining to your friends that you’re really happy — maybe we should just stop talking about it. I’m very happy to have you along for the journey, and you are partners for us. Every Palantirian, we are crushing it. Everyone else who’s listening, we are dedicating our company, we have dedicated our company to the service of the West and the United States of America, and we’re super-proud of the role we play especially in places we can’t talk about, and we love our success in the US and globally. Also, you know we are doing well in the United Kingdom and many other places. Palantir is here to disrupt and make our institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it’s necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. We hope you’re in favor of that.

This Palestinian child is clearly an enemy. Is she dead or alive since this photo?

The manifesto is a self-serving document written to advance Palantir’s wealth by creating a “post-nuclear” police state, where AI powered weapons systems continue US hegemony since clearly our time as an imperial nation is coming to an end. This is illustrated by the Iran War, the rise of BRICS countries, and abandonment of NATO, likely in Russia’s interest from Trump’s fealty to Putin.

Among the Palantir manifesto’s stated claims, beliefs and goals are:

Point 4: The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Rebuttal: Let’s forget moral “appeal.” Let’s forget human decision-making. Let’s put that in AI software (built on the foibles of human thinking) and emphasize hard power; in other words the brutality Thiel’s AI has brought on hundreds of thousands of unarmed Palestinians and the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school.

Point 5: The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

Rebuttal: This is an ancient and ignorant argument. We’ve been in an arms race since spear chucking days. Any chance of Homo sapiens surviving requires cooperation and recognition of the limits of the planet. This “vision” is merely an excuse to make billions of dollars at the cost of innocent lives.

Point 6: National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

Rebuttal: National duty is a good idea. What if that duty was to live in poor nations to deeply understand and repair the damage done by Western societies in violently taking their natural resources and consigning them to poverty? Why do you pose war as inevitable? It is a choice, and you are just the latest evil brick in the wall of the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned of long ago.

Point 8: Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

Rebuttal: Public servants are the workers who bring us the essential programs — the social contract of a just society. We paid for social security, unemployment benefits, Medicare and Medicaid. We pay for an EPA in agreement clean air and water are human rights. It is YOU that think you’re a high priest by the ignorance of your stolen, obscene wealth.

Point 9: We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

Rebuttal: Yes, more grace for Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Chuck Schumer and Rick Scott, please, any of the ciphers who allow you to grow your power and subvert democracy for feudal power.

Point 11: Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

Rebuttal: Seriously? Hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Gaza and a $1.9 billion military contract? We know who is gleeful here.

Point 12: The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

Rebuttal: I must have missed the part where we dismantled our nuclear arsenals. Clearly, a new generation of terrible weapons is a wise step in the interests of humanities’ future.

Point 13: No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

Rebuttal: Ah yes, the progressiveness of neoliberal destruction of the planet and culture taken to the next level, and the opportunity to stock grocery store shelves when you’re 90.

Point 14: American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Rebuttal: America is ALWAYS at war. WTF are you talking about? Your business model is built by and for war and oppression.

Point 15: The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection [sic] for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

Rebuttal: Oh yes, Germany and Japan were so unfairly scapegoated. The Bataan Death March was no big deal, and making lampshades out of human skin was clever. Let’s make Nazi vivisections great again.

Point 16: We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

Rebuttal: Yes, let’s rehabilitate the image of Apartheid South Africa immigrant Elon Musk who broke immigration laws at one point, criticizes immigrants, and celebrate his making Twitter a Nazi platform.

Point 17: Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

Rebuttal: Silicon Valley is violent crime, none better illustrated by the efficiency Palantir has added to murder.

Point 20: The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

Rebuttal: I shall only pray to a Christian fundamentalist Nazi approving god, and Jesus was white.

Point 21: Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

Rebuttal: “All cultures are now equal…but others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” Did anyone even proofread this manifesto?

Point 22: We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Rebuttal: Clearly we need billionaires to define what is acceptable and unacceptable pluralism. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, “The elderly are useless eaters.” I ask, do we need elderly people?

Then Henry lived to 100 and to his credit was far more damaging than useless.

Do we need brown people? Of course, how else will we keep those ICE agents employed?

Do we need billionaires? Of course! Wealth is clearly proof of wisdom.