By Jeremy Kuzmarov
Palantir is a data analytics company founded with CIA seed money, which employed former Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and former CIA Director George Tenet as consultants.
Its AI software, which journalist James Bamford characterized as “the digital equivalent of weapons of mass destruction,” is used by the Israeli Air Force to strike targets in Gaza and by the Ukrainian military to track Russian troop movements and carry out drone and missile attacks.
Since Donald Trump has taken office, Palantir’s stock price has almost doubled from $70.90 a share to $133.17 (on June 3). This figure is in part the result of a $30 million contract from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time. [1]
Wired and CNN have reported that Palantir is being tapped by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to create a master immigration database to speed up deportations.[2]
Overall, Palantir has received close to a billion dollars since Trump’s inauguration, according to The New York Times. The new business has led Palantir’s stock market valuation to climb from $50 billion a year ago to approaching $300 billion today.[3]
A company that few outside tech and national security circles recognized a few years ago is now worth more than Verizon or Disney and nearly as much as Bank of America.
NPR described Palantir CEO Alex Karp as a “tousle-haired 57-year-old billionaire, holding a doctorate in neoclassical social theory, who could be found in his off-hours Nordic skiing or practicing tai chi.”[4]
The son of hippies who spent a lot of time as a kid at political protests,[5] Karp is a longtime Democratic Party donor who gave $360,000 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign before backing Kamala Harris for president in the 2024 election.[6]
Karp’s true neo-conservatism was apparent in a speech that he gave on a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum after October 7, 2023, when he criticized corporate America for its “abysmal failure at standing up to people who are anti-American, who are breathing the vapors of a thin new religion at elite schools.”[7]
Karp additionally praised Israel’s achievements in “building a nation from a desert,” which erases the history of Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba.[8]
NPR contrasted Karp’s support for the Democratic Party with Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s embrace of the MAGA right.
Thiel is a billionaire who is one of President Trump’s long-time backers and a sugar daddy of J.D. Vance whom he met while Vance was a student at Yale Law School.[9]
Thiel’s connection to the CIA is apparent in the fact that he was an early investor in Facebook, the “CIA’s wet dream,” since Facebook users voluntarily put information about themselves online.[10]
According to NPR, where Karp and Thiel merge is around a shared devotion for “developing data-analyzing intelligence tools to,” as Karp has put it, “power the West to its obvious, innate superiority.”
These comments reflect on how one of the top Democratic Party influencers subscribes to a world view reminiscent of the era of social Darwinism, formal colonialism and eugenics.
Karp told a Time magazine reporter that he saw the opportunity to fulfill Palantir’s mission to “defend the West” and to “scare the f-ck out of our enemies.”
The Democratic Party—like the Republican Party—is now being financed and shaped by the CEO of a company that is a leading war profiteer and proponent of Western exceptionalism who is helping to create a surveillance state within the U.S. that would make George Orwell sick to his stomach.
A small number of former Palantir employees who rue the company’s close ties with the Trump administration are now speaking out.
They have publicized the fact that Karp has boasted about the company’s tools being used to kill enemies and that he once jokingly said that Wall Street analysts who tried to screw the company should be “sprayed with light fentanyl-laced urine,” according to NPR.
Prominent Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham accused Palantir of “building the infrastructure of the police state,” asking a Palantir executive on X to commit to not building products that could be used to help the U.S. government violate citizens’ constitutional rights.
In August 2024, Palantir hired noted China hawk Mike Gallagher, former Republican representative from Wisconsin who chaired McCarthy-style hearings that promoted alarmism and an aggressive military buildup directed against China.[11]
Gallagher, who has an intelligence background in the Marine Corps, stated that “in Palantir, you have a rare, leading technology company that is unapologetic in its defense of the West and its belief that America is a force for good in this world and worth defending against our enemies.”
Gallagher told Defense One that his priorities at Palantir would include building on the company’s recent string of contract awards—including the Army’s TITAN (Tactical Intelligence Target Access Node) contract designed to help connect Army units to high-altitude and space sensors—and growing Palantir’s space portfolio.[12]
In May 2023, CovertAction Magazine ran an exposé detailing Palantir’s close ties to the CIA[13] and how it had recently extended its intrusive surveillance practices into Lithuania, a country on the front lines of the war in Ukraine with a right-wing government prone to arresting critical journalists and bloggers.
The article went into Palantir’s history of providing battlefield intelligence for the Pentagon and CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq and how Alex Karp had bragged that Palantir was responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine, where it had developed a system for managing aerial photographs from a huge network of satellites.[14]
In September 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-IL) wrote a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging an investigation of Palantir before it went public.
One of the many concerns that they raised was incomplete information about investments from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital arm that partially funded Palantir when it was founded.
A 2008 filing showed that In-Q-Tel owned at least 10% of Palantir, though more information was not available.
The CEO of Palantir Canada, David MacNaughton, who has influence in liberal party circles, worked with Hadron Inc. in the 1980s, a CIA linked firm tied with one of Rupert Murdoch’s company’s, Computer Power Group, which was involved in the theft of specialized software developed by National Security Agency (NSA) employee Bill Hamilton that was used by the CIA to enhance its surveillance and money laundering operations.
Palantir’s skyrocketing wealth and growing political influence in the Trump era makes clear the urgent necessity of an investigation.
What is especially disturbing about the company is its specialization in AI and surveillance systems of such terrifying capabilities.
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Author: stuartbramhall
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