How you can stop Peter Thiel’s Palantir

Join the action this Saturday to Defund Palantir

Friends,

Sorry to intrude on your Friday for a second time, but I wanted to alert you to an important action taking place tomorrow, Saturday, August 23.

It’s a protest against one of the worst corporations in America, called Palantir — a private corporation that’s using billions of our tax dollars for surveillance and deportation software.

Tomorrow, we’re going to demand that Palantir be defunded. Information about your local action can be found here.

As I have written, Palantir is at the nexus of several worrisome realities: artificial intelligence, Trump’s use of the U.S. military on American civilians, his attack on immigrants, his collection of personal information on millions of Americans, and the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the U.S. from a democracy into a dictatorship led by tech bros.

Palantir sells an AI-based platform that allows its users — among them, military and law enforcement agencies — to analyze personal data, including social media profiles, personal information, and physical characteristics. These are used to identify and surveil individuals.

In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. To get the job done, Trump chose Palantir Technologies.

According to New York Times reporting, Palantir’s software may now be used to combine data gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. Meanwhile, the administration wants access to citizens’ and others’ bank account numbers and medical claims.

The danger inherent in Palantir’s AI-powered super-database on all Americans is connected to the vast wealth and power of those associated with the corporation, and their apparent disdain for democratic institutions.

Elon Musk was behind Palantir’s selection for the project. At least three DOGE members had worked at Palantir, the Times reported, while others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir, who still holds a major stake in it.

Thiel has worked closely with Musk and mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his venture funds. Thiel introduced Vance to Trump and later helped Vance become his vice-presidential pick.

The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who said on an earnings call earlier this year that the company wants “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”

Palantir recently disclosed that Karp received $6.8 billion in “compensation actually paid” in 2024 (you read that right) — making him the highest-paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the United States.

A former generation of wealthy American conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions.

But this group — including Thiel, Musk, Karp, and Vance — doesn’t seem to want to conserve much of anything, at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.

As Thiel has written:

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.

Hello?

If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.

Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the U.S. had to go deep into debt to maintain both their standard of living and overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.

When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.

If we learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel abuses of political power — as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp, and other oligarchs have put on full display — that in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a “palantír” is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. During the War of the Ring, a palantír falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive.

Thiel’s Palantir is falling under the control of Trump.

How this story ends is up to all of us.

Hope you can take a stand against all of this tomorrow.

***

By the way, my new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.