Renegade Editor’s Note: Guess what tribe owns and runs Palantir.
(Common Dreams) A former Palantir executive recently confirmed what many have long suspected. In a public statement, the whistleblower said it plainly: Palantir intended to take over the US government, and many of his former colleagues are now installed inside the federal apparatus. He called it an occupied nation. He is not alone. Thirteen former Palantir employees – engineers, managers, and a member of the company’s own privacy team – signed a letter shared with NPR warning that guardrails meant to prevent discrimination, disinformation, and abuse of power have been violated and are being rapidly dismantled.
Peter Thiel greets Netanyahu during a 2017 meeting in Israel. Photo | Israel PM
What Palantir represents is something unprecedented: the convergence of American imperialism, Zionism, and surveillance capitalism into a single instrument of control. Understanding how we got here requires looking at the machine Palantir has built, who built it, and what they believe.
Palantir was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Its first major investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, which seeded the company with millions and opened the door to every major intelligence and defense agency. The logic was deliberate: The American ruling class recognized decades ago that the state’s coercive power – surveillance, targeting, data harvesting – could be run more effectively and more profitably through private contractors. When a government agency surveils its own citizens, there are hearings, FOIA requests, oversight committees. When a private company does it, it is a trade secret.
That strategy has paid off enormously. Palantir now holds contracts worth over $10 billion with the US Army alone. The Trump regime tapped Palantir to build a master database on American citizens. The Pentagon expanded its Maven Smart System contract by $795 million to deploy AI-powered battlefield intelligence across the empire. In June, the military swore in four tech executives as Army Reserve lieutenant colonels – including Palantir’s CTO – in a program that embeds Silicon Valley directly into military planning. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a $30 million contract for Palantir’s ImmigrationOS platform, which provides near real-time tracking of people targeted for deportation. Thousands of American police departments use Palantir’s Gotham platform for domestic surveillance.
Abroad, the consequences are even more devastating. Palantir’s AI platforms have been deployed by Israel’s military to systematically prosecute the assault on Gaza. AI targeting systems built on Palantir’s architecture – known by names like Lavender, The Gospel, and Where’s Daddy – have enabled the kind of automated killing that produces mass civilian casualties at scale. Palantir’s own executives have been recorded discussing how bombing densely populated areas generates the movement data their algorithms need to train on. When people flee, make phone calls, search for loved ones, rush to hospitals that no longer exist – that movement becomes fuel for the machine. Palantir’s platforms were deployed in the illegal capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Israel’s terrorist pager attack against Lebanon, and the US carpet bombing of Iran at the behest of Israel – the same campaign that destroyed a girls’ elementary school in Minab.
The genocide in Gaza was also a business windfall. Palantir’s valuation surged hundreds of billions of dollars, making it o best-performing stock of 2024 and among the top in 2025. That financial momentum funded the next phase: political capture. Former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), the congressman who introduced the bill forcing TikTok’s sale, resigned from Congress and joined Palantir as head of defense. He later acknowledged that the legislation gained momentum not because of any Chinese national security threat, but because of pro-Palestinian content on the platform. Palantir’s senior adviser Jacob Helberg was instrumental in pushing the sale through Congress. The app was handed to Oracle’s Larry Ellison – one of Israel’s most prominent private benefactors. Silence the platform most critical of your technology enabling mass death, and the profits keep flowing.
Then there is the Jeffrey Epstein connection. Department of Justice-released emails reveal hundreds of messages between Epstein and Thiel spanning years. Epstein invested approximately $40 million into Thiel’s Valar Ventures. He brokered introductions between Palantir and Israeli officials, including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in meetings where surveillance technology, AI warfare, and Israeli national security policy were all on the table.
All of this is dangerous enough on its own. It becomes existential when you understand the ideology driving it. Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. He is a devoted patron of Curtis Yarvin, the political theorist who argues democracy should be replaced by corporate monarchy – a CEO-king with absolute authority. Yarvin is not a fringe blogger anymore. He was a guest of honor at Trump’s inauguration ball. Vice President JD Vance – bankrolled and politically launched by Thiel – has cited Yarvin by name. Project 2025 follows Yarvin’s technofascist vision almost to the letter.
When academics define technofascism – what happens when tech executives encode their political beliefs into the architecture of technology and infrastructure to suppress dissent – they are describing Palantir with precision. This is a project whose founders believe democracy was a mistake, whose software hunts human beings across borders, and whose executives now hold military rank and sit inside the federal government while enriching themselves. They are no longer serving the empire who created them. They have become the empire.
This is the new age of empire – American imperialism, Zionism, technofascism, and surveillance capitalism fused into one architecture, operated by one class of people, accountable to no one.
And that is the part that should terrify you more than anything else – because this isn’t a warning about some future to come. This already happened. The merger is complete. The executives are installed. The kill chains are running. The surveillance is live. The dissenters are being tracked. The media that exposed it has been silenced or sold.
There is no cavalry coming for us.
So the question is not whether Palantir is dangerous. The whistleblowers have answered that. The dead children in Gaza have answered that. The families ripped apart by ICE have answered that.
The question is what are we going to do about it – because every day we stay silent, every day we scroll past this, is another day they use to dig in deeper, build more kill chains, harvest more data, and make themselves harder to remove.
They are betting that you won’t act. That you’ll feel too small, too overwhelmed, too paralyzed – because that is the fear they designed this system to produce.
Prove them wrong.
