The screams of babies as buildings collapse in Gaza. Terrified parents carrying the remains of their children away in plastic carrier bags. These scenes – altogether too familiar today – come enabled by German-American tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his company, Palantir, whose software uses AI and big data to help the Israeli military surveil, target and slaughter hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It is also used by ICE, the FBI and U.S. law enforcement to destroy privacy, to attack whistleblowers, and to turn the Orwellian concept of “pre-crime” (identifying and tracking potential subversives before they commit any offense) into a reality.

The Silicon Valley oligarch has deep ties to the CIA and the military-industrial complex and is one of the Republican Party’s most powerful backers. Already one of the world’s most influential individuals, if Donald Trump wins in November, Thiel has set himself up to become a “shadow president,” wielding gigantic power over us all. This is his story.

Shadow President

Donald Trump is surging. A recent New York Times poll found the former president is ahead in several key battleground states, making the coming election too close to call. One man undoubtedly heartened by this news is Peter Thiel, the German-born tech entrepreneur and co-founder of such companies as PayPal and Palantir. Thiel, whose net worth stands at $10 billion, bankrolled Trump’s successful 2016 campaign when few others would. He served on his transition team and as an advisor, leading commentators to label him a “shadow president.”

This time, however, Thiel will enjoy even more influence in the White House, as Trump has selected Ohio Senator and Thiel protégé J.D. Vance as his vice president. Thiel – who has previously stated that freedom and democracy are incompatible- bemoaned the extension of the vote to women and denounced the public as an “unthinking demos” – took Vance under his wing when the latter was still at college. From there, Thiel secured Vance his first job in 2013. Two years later, Vance joined his venture capital firm, and in 2020, he provided the seed money for Vance to start his own investment group.

Vance is a political neophyte, first running for Senate only in 2021. He was able to do so thanks to an enormous $15 million donation from Thiel – the largest ever amount to a Senate candidate. That Thiel had plucked someone from his own firm and bankrolled his political career raised many eyebrows at the time, with many feeling the billionaire had essentially bought a senate seat and put a pawn in his place. However, the stakes have been raised considerably now that Trump has selected Vance as his running mate. “J.D. Vance owes both his political career and his previous venture capital career to Peter Thiel,” Whitney Webb, an investigative journalist who has closely tracked Thiel’s exploits, told MintPress News.

It has not always been plain sailing between Trump and Vance. The latter began his political career as a vocal “Never Trump” Republican, describing the 45th president as an “idiot” and “America’s Hitler.” It was Thiel himself who personally escorted Vance to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to smooth over the relationship. The tech mogul’s pitch was successful, and in July, Trump shocked many by picking the inexperienced senator as his VP – a decision that gave Thiel unprecedented power and influence over the country’s direction.

AI War Criminal

The United States government has unequivocally backed Israeli aggression in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. And central to that support has been the role that Thiel has played. Thiel’s company, Palantir, is using AI to surveil the Palestinian population and help generate massive kill lists for the Israeli military based on that data.

According to an investigation by an Israeli outlet, +972 Magazine, Israel is using a piece of software called Lavender, which develops profiles on every person in Gaza, assigning them a score of 1-100 based on individuals’ perceived connections to Hamas. A wide range of characteristics, including sharing similar work schedules to or being in a WhatsApp group with a known Hamas member, would raise one’s score. If an individual’s number reached a certain level, they would automatically be put on a kill list. In the first months of the war alone, Lavender identified over 37,000 Palestinians to be executed.

Although not mentioned explicitly by name in the +972 Magazine report, Palantir is widely assumed to be part of the Lavender project. The group has long provided the Israeli military with vast amounts of AI hardware and software. Moreover, at the height of the Gaza onslaught, it announced it had entered into a new “strategic partnership” with the Israeli Defense Ministry to “supply technology to help the country’s war effort.” “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions,” the company’s executive vice-president, Josh Harris, said, adding: “This strategic partnership aims to significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense in addressing the current situation in Israel.”

Lavender is known to be distinctly hit-or-miss. Many professions with similar communication patterns to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives, including police and firefighters, or even people with the same name as a resistance fighter, were flagged for execution. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) sources suggest a 10% false positive rate.

Nevertheless, IDF analysts were told to treat Lavender suggestions as orders, turning the program into an automated kill list. One individual said that they devoted only 20 seconds to each target, only to check if the individual Thiel’s software marked for execution was male. Other than that, humans were there only to “rubber stamp” Lavender’s decisions.

Today, Israel also uses AI-powered “Smart Shooter” guns at checkpoints, capable of mowing down dozens of Palestinians without any human input whatsoever.

“An AI smart shooter sits atop this checkpoint.”

Mnar Adley visits the Palestinian city of Al Khalil to witness Israel’s automated apartheid in full effect. pic.twitter.com/3s5spk6DkQ

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) May 9, 2024

The Israeli military systematically targeted Gazans at night while entire families were in their own homes, sleeping. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one intelligence officer said, adding: “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in [their] homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” Israelis called this system “Where’s Daddy?” presumably a reference to the cries of newly orphaned Gazan children.

For most of these assassinations, the Israeli military preferred to use cheaper, unguided missiles, commonly referred to as “dumb bombs.” Unlike guided missiles, these munitions lacked precision targeting, and so needed to be larger and pack more explosives, causing massive collateral damage. Israel would use these bombs to destroy entire apartment buildings if Lavender identified even a suspected junior Hamas member living there.

For the IDF, it was simply a question of resources. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of precision guided bombs],” explained one intelligence officer. The massive collateral damage barely factored into the equation. Palestinian lives were considered so unimportant that Israeli commanders accepted up to 100 civilian deaths per Hamas target.

It was this deliberate destruction of entire apartment complexes that led to the unprecedented wiping out of entire extended families. Palestinian families often lived together in the same building. And when those buildings were felled every night, bloodlines would be extinguished with one keystroke or mouse click. MintPress News recently spoke to Ahmed al-Naouq, a Gazan who lost 21 members of his family to Israeli bombing.

Perhaps most controversially, Lavender also gave children a score of 1-100 and recommended many for execution. Israel was delighted with Lavender’s performance, with one commander explaining that human targeting produced “bottlenecks” that limited the IDF’s capacity for violence. “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day,” they said. The IDF’s insatiable thirst for destruction could only be quenched through AI Lavender only became less useful after Israel had leveled the strip, displacing nearly the entire population and causing complete chaos. This made the system less able to track individuals’ movements.

Israel’s Biggest Supporters

The level of destruction in such a short period of time is nearly unprecedented in the modern era. Serious estimates suggest that up to 335,000 people have been killed in less than one year. “The situation today in Gaza cannot be analyzed or qualified otherwise than as a genocide. I have not seen a genocide where the intent was so ostentatious and vindicated over and over,” Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Palestinian Territories, said. “This is one of the most critical cases of genocide, a tragedy foretold, because of the intent to eliminate the Palestinians with all means available – be it transferring them or neutralizing them or segregating them,” she added.

Israel is currently being investigated for genocide by the International Court of Justice. And Thiel is one of its key enablers.

When asked a question about Lavender at the Cambridge University Union, Thiel was flustered, stating:

My bias is to defer to Israel. It’s not for us to second-guess everything. And I believe that, broadly, the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they’re broadly in the right and that’s the sort of the perspective I come back to. And if I fall into the trap of arguing you on every detailed point, I would actually be conceding the broader issue that the Middle East should be micromanaged from Cambridge. And I think that’s just simply absurd. And so I’m not going to concede that point.”

Thiel has done more than just defer to Israel, however. In January, he flew Palantir executives out to Tel Aviv to host a board meeting in “solidarity” with Israel. It was there that Palantir announced its new strategic partnership with the Israeli military. In October 2023, Palantir also took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, expressing its total commitment to the Israeli war effort. “Certain kinds of evil can only be fought with force. Palantir stands with Israel,” the company posted on Twitter. These actions precipitated an exodus of employees from the organization, as numerous staff members refused to be complicit in the violence.

Since October 7, Palantir has been the target of numerous protests, with groups condemning the company’s complicity in the slaughter. Palantir’s actions are so unethical that they have even caused significant cognitive dissonance for company executives. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’” Palantir CEO Alex Karp once admitted. Nevertheless, Karp has denounced the student protests against Israel as “antisemitic” and warned that they pose a threat to the military-industrial complex, saying: “If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West again.”

One group pushing for an end to the partnership between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military is Tech for Palestine, a community of tech workers who support Palestinian liberation. “I would like to see the tech industry fully divest from Israel. That would be a major step forward,” Paul Biggar, founder of Tech For Palestine, told MintPress, adding that Silicon Valley is directly contributing to Palestinian suffering:

The goals should be that Palestinian people are afforded full equality and freedom from the Apartheid and oppression of Israel. Any acts that are committed by tech companies that support the Israeli state are de facto apartheid actions. And any involvement in Israel’s war economy is supporting the violation of international humanitarian law and involvement in crimes against humanity.”

The Brains of Ukraine

Thanks to its use in Gaza, Palantir markets its products as battle-tested. But the company is deeply involved in the war in Ukraine as well, providing surveillance, intelligence and targeting solutions for the Ukrainian government. Palantir was one of the first Western corporations on the ground after the Russian invasion and has deeply embedded itself into the Zelensky administration. More than half a dozen ministries, including the Ministry of Defense, depend on its software. Palantir uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to assess battlefield situations and provide the military with digital kill lists, similar to what they do in Israel. The company is responsible for most of the Ukrainian military’s targeting capability. “It’s like a superpower,” one Ukrainian minister said of Palantir.

The organization presents its actions in Ukraine as a moral crusade for righteousness:

We believe that when we can make a difference in the service of a just cause, such as in the defense of Ukraine, we carry a moral responsibility to do so. And so, we are proud to provide our technical experience and technology to Ukrainian forces defending their homeland, national sovereignty, and personal freedoms.”

Yet, given its other actions around the world, it seems to act less as a champion for human rights and more as an extension of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. national security state.

“CIA Front”

Today, Palantir is a digital juggernaut valued at over $79 billion. But it was not always like that. In its early days in the 2000s, the business floundered and could find neither clients nor investors. A cash injection from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investments arm, rescued it from oblivion.

In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999 and seeks to nurture and sponsor new companies that can supply the intelligence community with cutting-edge technologies to keep them one step ahead of their competitors. The “Q” in its name is a reference to “Q” from the James Bond franchise – a creative inventor who supplies the spy with the latest in futuristic tech. Many top tech firms today, including Google and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, enjoyed intimate relationships with the CIA and owe their prominence to the agency.

Palantir is no different, growing up alongside the burgeoning post-9/11 national security state. Its first customers were primarily intelligence agencies. Indeed, until 2008, the CIA was its only client. The government remains its most important customer; it currently possesses more than $1.5 billion in government contracts, including with the CIA, FBI, NSA, U.S. Army, Navy, and Space Force. Many of these were secured during the Trump presidency when Thiel had unparalleled access to the presidency. In 2020, it moved its headquarters away from the Bay Area to Denver, cementing its attempt to position itself less as a tech group and more alongside military contractors such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton. Palantir is “arguably a CIA front company,” Webb told MintPress.

Real-Life Minority Report

The 2002 movie “Minority Report” is set in a dystopian future where corrupt police arrest citizens before they commit any crimes. But thanks to Palantir, the concept of “pre-crime” has become less science fiction and more a reality.

The group works with law enforcement across the country, using big data to track Americans’ movements, interactions with other people, social media posts and more. It builds up a complex web of information predicting which individuals are more likely to be gang members or perpetrators of violent crime.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also uses Palantir software to surveil, arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, causing fear, alarm, and panic in immigrant communities across the country. Palantir renewed its contract with ICE, even over objections from its own employees, many of whom resigned in protest.

“Tech companies such as Palantir provide the digital backbone that allows for ICE to carry out raids, arrests and mass deportations,” Jesse Franzblau, Senior Policy Analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center, told MintPress. “In the past, ICE has relied on Palantir to target the parents and caregivers of unaccompanied children and to coordinate workplace raids. The government should not be allowed to contract with companies that help ICE put a target on the back of immigrant communities.”

Thus, today, the same group that helps Israel carry out its onslaught against Palestinians also tears families apart inside the United States – an illustration of how America’s imperial projects abroad are fundamentally intertwined with the war on black and brown people at home.

Perhaps even more dystopian is that it also works with government agencies to build profiles on employees that identify which are most likely to become whistleblowers. These “subversives” can then be isolated, investigated or punished. Moreover, it has developed complex software to ensure leakers of classified information can always be caught.

This war on whistleblowers reached new levels in 2010 when Palantir published a plan to undermine, attack and destroy WikiLeaks and its supporters. The document, entitled “The WikiLeaks Threat,” recommended that the U.S. government carry out cyberattacks and spread “disinformation” about the organization by creating a “media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities.”

It suggested cutting off funding sources for WikiLeaks by spreading fear among its supporters that they would be arrested for donating and carrying out targeted attacks against prominent WikiLeaks supporters, such as journalist Glenn Greenwald.

The document was hacked and circulated online, causing a huge scandal for Palantir. Although the company offered a full apology to both WikiLeaks and Greenwald, Webb’s investigation noted that most of Palantir’s anti-WikiLeaks lines of attack were indeed carried out.

Palantir also likely has access to your most sensitive health data. The company works with health providers in the United States and Great Britain. This has triggered a reaction in the U.K., where the group No Palantir in Our NHS was formed. A statement on their website explains their objections:

Palantir is a U.S. tech and security corporation with a terrible track record. They help governments, intelligence agencies, and border forces to spy on innocent citizens and target minorities and the poor.

We don’t trust them with our health data, and we don’t trust them to respect the values of our National Health Service… Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.”

PayPal Mafioso

By the time he started Palantir in 2003, Thiel was already extremely wealthy. He had previously co-founded online payment service PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion the previous year. There, he made connections with another early PayPal investor, Elon Musk.

Early PayPal employees went on to develop an extraordinary amount of the modern tech economy, so much so that they are widely referred to as the “PayPal Mafia.” Members of this mafia went on to found the video platform YouTube, the review site Yelp, and the business social network LinkedIn. Others sit on the boards of Microsoft and Reddit.

Thiel is universally described as the “don” of the PayPal Mafia. The billionaire was Facebook’s first outside investor, buying over 10% of the company for a paltry $500,000. He also served on its board of directors from 2005 until 2022. This savvy investment netted him a gigantic return on his investment.

Thiel also had ulterior motives in founding PayPal, seeing the project as an attempt to use the power of money to overturn democracy as we know it and allow him to implement his deeply conservative agenda. “The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world,” he said. However, he knew his ideology could never stand up to public scrutiny and would never be accepted by society. As he noted:

We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilateral change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”

Vampire Capitalist

Like many individuals working in Silicon Valley, Thiel holds many controversial beliefs about society that should be better understood, given that he may become the shadow president in November.

While still a student, he founded The Stanford Review, a deeply conservative newspaper that attacked attempts to diversify the student body and anyone who challenged American exceptionalism or the superiority of Western culture.

In 1995, alongside fellow future PayPal mafioso David Sacks, he wrote and published the book, “The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus: Multiculturalism and the Political Intolerance on Campus.” The book warned against multiculturalism, argued that racism and sexism were greatly exaggerated and that U.S. universities displayed a profound anti-Americanism and intolerance of all things Western.

These arguments would later become standard conservative talking points. Thiel has also personally bemoaned the extension of the franchise to women and stated that freedom and democracy are incompatible because of the stupidity of the American population, whom he calls the “unthinking demos.”

And while Thiel claimed that racism was largely a thing of the past, in 2016, the U.S. Department of Labor sued Palantir for egregiously racist hiring practices. The government’s case noted that 85% of Palantir software engineer applicants were Asian, but despite this, Palantir still hired significantly more non-Asians than Asians. This meant that Asians were four times less likely to be hired. Palantir eventually agreed to pay nearly $1.7 million to settle the lawsuit.

Thiel often identifies a supposed woke agenda as one of America’s more pressing problems. In a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, he compared wokeism to Saudi Arabian Wahhabism. Unlike many Trump supporters, however, he blamed the Christian Church for its ubiquity, stating:

[Christianity] always takes the side of the victim and there’s something where it is like some kind of deformation or intensification… And maybe you should think of wokeness as ultra-Christianity or hyper-Christianity.”

If even the American Christian Church is too liberal for Thiel, then where does he see a future? In cyberspace, outer space, and in building floating towns in the ocean where people can finally be free from government interference and the woke agenda. The 56-year-old entrepreneur sees the Internet, human colonization of other planets, and building autonomous cities on the water as potential libertarian utopias.

These are far from Thiel’s only quixotic schemes. Like many Silicon Valley executives, he also has many alternative beliefs about health. His, however, go further than many others. On a quest to live indefinitely, he follows a strict anti-aging routine, including taking human growth hormone pills and reportedly harvesting the blood of poor but healthy teenagers and injecting it into his body to boost his immune system. “Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People’s Blood,” reads one headline from American Business magazine, Inc.

Thiel funds several biology and anti-aging start-ups, including those that use stem cells to treat medical ailments. He believes society has been hoodwinked by “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual” and has suggested immortality could be achievable, a notion that has deeply concerned academics and commentators alike. As a last resort, he plans to have his body cryogenically frozen if his endeavors do not succeed.

Free Speech Champion?

In addition to funding big online media like Facebook and Reddit, Thiel (alongside Vance) invested heavily in video platform Rumble. Launched in 2013, Rumble saw little success for years. But after Thiel and Vance sunk their money into it, it has become a conservative media stalwart, marketing itself as a “free speech app” that will not censor its users.

Yet Thiel’s commitment to the free flow of information has not always been consistent. Famously, he funded multiple lawsuits, to the tune of around $10 million, against Gawker, which eventually caused the news website to close its doors. In a 2009 interview, he argued that Gawker journalists “should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters” and claimed that they were Silicon Valley’s al-Qaeda. Considering how Palantir was aiding the U.S. government with its occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and how the U.S. was treating its enemies in its War on Terror, Thiel’s words could be seen as quite the threat.

The lawsuits were roundly condemned as having a “chilling effect” on the free press. For instance, the editor-in-chief of the politics magazine Mother Jones described it as part of a campaign of “press intimidation.” Gawker had drawn Thiel’s ire for previously outing him as gay. Thus, instead of promoting a new era of free speech online, Thiel’s Rumble venture appears more likely to be an attempt to construct a conservative media in his image, just as he is rebuilding the modern Republican Party.

Ultimately, Thiel is a walking contradiction: a libertarian who got rich from fat military contracts, an immigrant working with ICE and a free speech advocate who attacks media outlets. He presents himself as an outsider. Yet he is a mainstay at many of the world’s most elite institutions and conferences, including the Bilderberg Group, the Munich Security Conference, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In many ways, his persona is almost out of a comic book, a real-life Lex Luthor. From aiding an Israeli genocide in Gaza to using AI to surveil immigrants at home to spearheading a war against whistleblowers, Thiel’s story perfectly encapsulates how Silicon Valley has been folded into the national security state and works to maintain the American empire well into the 21st century.

Yet his latest venture into politics could arguably be his most consequential project. He has always had a close relationship with the U.S. government. However, a Trump/Vance White House could bring the billionaire a level of influence he previously could only have dreamed of. Thiel does not particularly seek out the limelight. However, with Trump surging in the polls, there is an increasing chance that he will soon have an even more profound influence over our lives, whether we like it or not. Therefore, it is crucial that we understand the man who could be calling the shots come November.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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