Palantir co-founders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp neatly embody the zeitgeist of 2025 with Palantir’s use of AI for ICE and the IDF, their Trump affiliations, and their outspoken views on the Antichrist and “Western Civilization.”
Naked Capitalism has covered Palantir from several angles in recent months, let’s touch on the highlights of those pieces so interested readers can catch up on the conversation and quickly grasp the stakes.
The focus of this piece is Palantir 2025’s use of AI as part of a hype campaign, their crony capitalism in Israel, the U.S. and the U.K., and how Thiel’s seemingly weird obsession with the Antichrist plays into it.
- Thomas Neuburger on Palantir Revisited: Who’s Us in Us vs. Them?
“Alex Karp’s admonition — to make sure ‘our’ enemies ‘wake up scared and go to bed scared‘ — puts Americans, us in the more advanced West, inside facing out — secure and protected, not just from ‘our enemies,’ but from the evils we deliver to them. To put it in cruder terms, we’re also safe because we’re pissing, not pissed upon.“And this is how we’re supposed to regard the muscular state, the heavily armed, punishing state, as guardians of ‘us’, as outward-facing armies guarding the gates. The state can mistreat ‘them’ because ‘they’ are not ‘us’.
“But Karp is a billionaire, as is Trump, whom he serves, as are all of the wealthy class, the overly rich. Karp imagines he speaks for a larger ‘us’, for his class and also Americans generalized.”
- Nick Corbishley on Welcome to Peak Palantir
“The company that ‘knows everything about you’ is going from strength to strength as war rises and and the so-called ‘liberal’ West turns into a dystopian novel. …“Palantir’s star is rising rapidly under Trump 2.0 while its shares hit record highs on an almost daily basis. The firm’s co-founder and chair of the board, Peter Thiel, was one of relatively few Silicon Valley moguls to bankroll Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and now it looks like he’s cashing in. Thiel is also a former employer-cum-mentor of Vice President JD Vance, whose senate run in Ohio Thiel almost single handedly funded with a record breaking $15 million donation. In other words Thiel’s influence would probably be greater in a Vance administration.
“Palantir is involved in a new Pentagon initiative aimed at spurring innovation within the US army, titled Detachment 201. As Defense News reports, Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer, was one of four Silicon Valley tech execs invited to join the US Army Reserve as lieutenant colonel, to help inject their speed and expertise into the army’s military innovation. The other three Army Reserve lieutenant colonels were from Meta, Open AI and Thinking Machines Lab.”
- Curro Jimenez on Palantir’s AI Justified Israel’s Attack on Iran — Will Tech Take Us Back to Irrational Beliefs?
“’If you don’t have AI, there’s nothing going on.’ Those are Peter Thiel’s words in an interview with Ross Douthat for the podcast Interesting Times. To put it into context, Thiel is referring to something he calls the ‘stagnation hypothesis.’ …“The argument is that without a breakthrough to propel a new wave of economic growth, the social fabric as we know it—in the West—will begin to collapse. To avoid that, we need to seek progress through various means, including exploring new forms of government, ventures into radical biology—such as transhumanism—or missions to Mars.”
- Haig Hovaness on The Two Faces of Palantir
“Palantir’s technology is inherently Janus-faced. The same software that allows governments to defend against terrorism or respond to pandemics can also be deployed to monitor political opponents, quash dissent, and entrench authoritarian control. In this sense, Palantir represents a broader dilemma of the digital age: the dual-use character of advanced information infrastructure. Growing controversy surrounds Palantir, as the harmful potential of its work becomes increasingly evident. …“Palantir’s technology can act as a national security shield, defending against external threats and crises. But without legal safeguards, it can just as easily become a cage, controlling domestic political life through sophisticated means of surveillance. The question is not whether Palantir has built powerful tools. The question is whether the United States and other nations can ensure that such tools remain only tools of defense against foreign threats, and not become instruments of domestic repression.”
- Curro Jimenez on The Alliance Among Washington, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley
- Silicon Valley Ideologies as a Lens for Viewing Current Events
Emile P. Torres: “Thiel holds a particular interpretation of pro-extinctionism according to which we should become a new posthuman species, but this posthuman species shouldn’t be entirely digital. We should retain our biological substrates, albeit in a radically transformed state. As such, this contrasts with most other views discussed here. These other views are clear instances of digital eugenics, whereas Thiel advocates a version of pro-extinctionism that’s more traditionally eugenicist — in particular, it’s a pro-biology variant of transhumanism (a form of eugenics).”
“…the Military Industrial Complex, which Eisenhower warned about, has expanded to include the governments of the U.S. and Israel, as well as major Silicon Valley tech companies. If Eisenhower could draw a line between the MIC and the government, today that’s no longer possible.
“This new alliance, referred to as the ‘military-digital complex,’ is characterized by the blurred lines between the public and private sectors, with corporations playing a crucial and often unaccountable role in geopolitical affairs and military operations. Out of this, a new power system is emerging. …
“Thiel outlined ‘the foundations of the new global power architecture. He based this on the premise that ‘the brute facts of September 11 demand a re-examination of the foundations of modern politics,’ given that ‘Western political philosophy can no longer cope with our world of global violence’.
“(Thiel) states that this new global power architecture ‘called for a new compromise, and this new compromise inexorably demanded more security at the expense of less freedom’.”
Now that my colleagues have set the scene and explained the stakes, let’s get into Palantir’s use of AI in its marketing, their involvement with the worst excesses of the Israeli and American regimes, and what Thiel and Karp have been saying lately about the Antichrist and Western Civilization.
Palantir 2025, AI Hype & Influencers
This piece is a compliment to my on-going series on the various companies leading the headlong charge into large language models branded as AI.
Palantir, has enjoyed a dramatic share price run up in the AI era:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 24, 2025
The company is considered by some analysts to be a “top 15 AI company,” but it should be viewed as a middleman, re-selling AI tech to governments (and huge government contractors) rather than a tech pioneer per se.
Wired’s Caroline Haskins grappled with what it is exactly that Palantir 2025 does:
(Juan Sebastián Pinto, former Palantir Content Strategiest) believes that the company, which recently began using the tagline “software that dominates,” has cultivated its mysterious public image on purpose. Unlike consumer-facing startups that need to clearly explain their products to everyday users, Palantir’s main audience is sprawling government agencies and Fortune 500 companies.
What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems. To do that, Palantir often uses the language and aesthetics of warfare, painting itself as a powerful, quasi-military intelligence partner.
In another piece, Haskins called Palantir 2025 a “lifestyle brand”:
…what does it mean for Palantir—a company that, in the words of one former employee, essentially sells digital “filing cabinets” to customers like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US Department of Defense, Heineken beer, and General Mills—to be a lifestyle brand?
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Palantir bros are not hard to encounter online: There are several Palantir-focused subreddits, the largest of which has 109,000 members. Some people on X have been able to amass huge followings by posting exclusively about the company throughout the day.
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Palantir’s fan base gradually expanded during the years that contractors for immigration enforcement and the military were least popular in Silicon Valley. For fans, Palantir was a contrarian dark horse that stood by its principles, even though others detested them.…under the second Trump administration, the tech world is beginning to openly embrace aligning with the military—both transactionally, and symbolically. In June, the Army commissioned an elite group of tech executives to be “lieutenant colonels.” Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar was joined by Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil, and current Thinking Machines Lab adviser and former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew, who also worked at Palantir.
Palantir 2025 also cultivates influencers:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 24, 2025
And one of their co-founders, Joe Lonsdale, has a mid-sized YouTube channel where he platforms Palantir execs like CEO Alex Karp:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 24, 2025
Karp’s opening statement on the show is a tell as to what he wants Palantir 2025 investors to be focused on:
Joe Lonsdale: How much of AI right now is innovation in theater? What’s real and what’s hype?
Alex Karp: Well, the big thing that we have to avoid in our country, but is less of a problem for us than in other countries, is there’s an attempt to dampen AI and its utilization by people who don’t have a product. That is a big deal inside and outside of government. Now, luckily for us, in this country (U.S.), it’s a much smaller deal than say in Europe.
Wouldn’t want any decision makers in the Pentagon to find out that AI is mostly hype, now would we? There’s money to be made after all.
Karp also has his finger on the pulse of Gen Z, and like a good doctor he has some advice:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 24, 2025
The New York Times pitches in with a lifestyle profile of the charming Alex Karp:
In fact, Mr. Karp, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies, the mysterious and powerful data analytics firm, doesn’t trust himself to drive. Or ride a bike. Or ski downhill.
“I’m a dreamer,” he said. “I’ll start dreaming and then I fall over. I started doing tai chi to prevent that. It’s really, really helped with focusing on one thing at a time. If you had met me 15 years ago, two-thirds of the conversation, I’d just be dreaming.”
What would he dream about?
“Literally, it could be a walk I did five years ago,” he said. “It could be some conversation I had in grad school. Could be my family member annoyed me. Something a colleague said, like: ‘Why did they say this? What does it actually mean?’”
Mr. Karp is a lean, extremely fit billionaire with unruly salt-and-pepper curls. He is introvert-charming (something I aspire to myself). He has A.D.H.D. and can’t hide it if he is not interested in what someone is saying. After a hyper spurt of talking, he loses energy and has to recharge on the stationary bike or by reading. Even though he thinks of himself as different, he seems to like being different. He enjoys being a provocateur onstage and in interviews.
Truly sterling journalism from the Paper of Record’s legendary columnist Maureen Dowd.
I wonder if the same Palantir 2025 flacks that feed Dowd such sexy bits also handle outreach to this plucky grifter:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 24, 2025
The Palantir 2025 hype may provide some harmless fun for us, but its purpose is to set corporate behemoths and Western governments up for the kill.
Palantir as the Eyes and Ears of Murder, Inc.
This Marketwatch piece illustrates how Palantir’s branding and use of AI hype helps them land big contracts with the U.S. and U.K. governments:
Bank of America analysts see Palantir’s forward deployed engineers, or FDEs, as part of the company’s “secret sauce.” These are engineers who embed with customers to provide services and encourage the use of Palantir’s technology, the analysts noted. Now that Palantir is adding agentic artificial intelligence “to extend this idiosyncratic skillset to more use cases,” Bank of America expects the AI FDEs to accelerate the company’s commercial business.
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In its government business, Palantir’s new strategic partnership with the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense, which aims to invest up to £750 million, or more than $1 billion, into AI-enabled defense technology over the next five years, “builds on Palantir’s momentum as the global digital battle-management system,” the analysts said.
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Palantir’s deal with the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense, which marks its first outside of the U.S. worth $1 billion, not only builds on its growing exposure to the country, but also on international demand for its technology, the analysts said. They noted that adoption of Palantir’s Maven Smart System in the U.S. has grown eightfold since early 2024 and that it is now being used by NATO.“We expect other countries to increasingly consider Maven as their global digital battle-management system, as it provides both interoperability with the U.S. and allies as well as governance on their own data,” the Bank of America team said.
Interesting to note the difference between what the Palantir employees quoted in the Wired piece above think the company does with what Bank of America analysts call the company’s “secret sauce.”
Looks like a modified McKinsey model to me, planting engineers instead of consultants inside big orgs.
Here’s what they’re doing for ICE, per Business Insider:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has signed a $30 million deal with Palantir for software add-ons to track self-deportations and immigrants who have overstayed their visas, government records show.
A contract reviewed by Business Insider said the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System — or ImmigrationOS — will minimize “time and resource expenditure” for selecting and apprehending immigrants based on ICE enforcement priorities.
Along with “violent criminals” and “affiliates of known transnational criminal organizations,” the contract also cited visa overstays as a deportation priority.
ImmigrationOS will expand ICE’s case management system to include “near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation.” The contract said the new ImmigrationOS will streamline “end to end immigration lifecycle from identification to removal.”
The agency is awarding Palantir $29.8 million for a prototype to be delivered by September 25.
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The software collates information from a wide range of government databases and allows DHS agents to keep detailed records on potential immigration violators for future enforcement actions. It includes “data sharing with Customs and Border Protection for lookout and seizure tracking.”
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“Palantir has developed deep institutional knowledge of ICE operations over more than a decade of support,” ICE wrote in the documents. “Their systems have been tailored to meet strict DHS security and privacy standards.”
The organization Just Futures Law used a Freedom of Information Act request to find out more about Palantir’s work with ICE, via The Guardian:
The documents…largely cover Palantir’s contract with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of Ice that is responsible for stopping the “illegal movement of people, goods, money, contraband, weapons and sensitive technology”.
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The documents reveal how deeply embedded Palantir’s tools were in HSI’s day-to-day operations, helping its agents to investigate and arrest people using a searchable super-network of government and private databases.They show the HSI team used Palantir platforms and apps to track air travel, analyze information like driver’s license scans and track people’s locations using cell phone records.
In an example that highlights the vastness of the data Ice has access to: one March 2020 training document detailed how Palantir software allowed Ice agents to search across data from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (Sevis), which at the time contained 4.9 million records “of non-immigrant students, exchange visitors and their dependents” dating back to 2016. Another told Ice agents they could enhance their investigations by using phone numbers or names extracted from phones the agents unlocked using technology from Cellebrite, an Israeli forensic software company that has had a contract with Ice since 2019.
The exact nature of Palantir’s work for Israel is slightly harder to parse.
The Nation’s James Bamford took a look at Palantir’s role in the Gaza genocide last year:
the enormous amount of advanced targeting AI hardware and software provided to the Israeli miliary and spy agencies—some of it by one American company in particular: Palantir Technologies.
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As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, with ties to the CIA, Palantir’s “work” was supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities—the precise capabilities that allowed Israel to place three drone-fired missiles into three clearly marked aid vehicles.“I am pretty encouraged about talent here and that we are getting the best people,” Alex Karp, cofounder and CEO of the company, told a group soon after arriving in Tel Aviv last January.
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Immediately after the talk, Karp traveled to a military headquarters where he signed an upgraded agreement with Israel’s Ministry of Defense. …
The project involved selling the ministry an Artificial Intelligence Platform that uses reams of classified intelligence reports to make life-or-death determinations about which targets to attack. In an understatement several years ago, Karp admitted, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” the morality of which even he himself occasionally questions. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’” …
Palantir’s AI machines need data for fuel—data in the form of intelligence reports on Palestinians in the occupied territories. And for decades a key and highly secret source of that data for Israel has been the US National Security Agency, according to documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Bloomberg looked at Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform in 2023 which reveals more about the company’s pivot to AI-focused marketing than the tech itself:
AIP stands for Artificial Intelligence Platform. According to the company’s site, the tool can be used by militaries to tap the kinds of AI models that power ChatGPT to aid in battlefield intelligence and decision-making. A demo video shows how the platform can display and analyze intel on enemy targets, identify potentially hostile situations, propose battle plans and send those plans to commanding officers for execution.
The video emphasizes that the platform is safe and secure, allowing a client to decide what data the models can see and what they “can and can’t do on behalf of humans.”“If you wheel these technologies correctly, safely, and securely,” Palantir Chief Executive Officer Alex Karp said during Monday’s call, “you have a weapon that will allow you to win, that will scare your competitors and adversaries.”
Karp described the boom in large language models as a revolution “that will raise ships and sink ships.” Demand for AIP is like “nothing I’ve ever seen in 20 years of being involved in Palantir,” he said. “We are reorganizing our efforts aggressively to capitalize.”
Never fear, Palantir has plenty of sweet AI tech for the US Army too, per CNBC in March of this year:
Palantir is rolling out its first two artificial intelligence-enabled systems to the U.S. Army, the company said Friday.
The Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node systems, or TITAN, act as a mobile ground station that harness AI to collect data from space sensors to assist soldiers with warfare strategy and improve strike targeting and accuracy, according to Palantir.
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Palantir won the $178 million contract last March, beating out competitor and defense giant RTX Corporation
. It marked a key milestone for the company known for its data analysis and software services, as well as the first time a software company has worked as a primary contractor for a significant hardware program.
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The agreement includes a total of 10 TITAN systems. Each system includes an advanced system with two larger trucks and a basic system with two vehicles delivered over five delivery orders, Jain explained. The systems allow soldiers to make intelligence decisions without requiring the cloud, putting “all that power in the back of a truck,” he added.
Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein Acquaintance, and The Antichrist
Now that we’ve looked a little more at what Palantir is actually selling, to whom, and how, let’s tie them back into the 2025 zeitgeist.
For example, Thiel even has a bizarre business connection with the new head of the CDC, something about man-made islands beyond national borders.
Now on to the sex scandal and crazy religious stuff: Jeffrey Epstein and the Antichrist.
The former is not something Palantir wants to be associated with in 2025, but they wouldn’t be embodying the zeitgeist if they stayed out of that mess would they?
The Antichrist, on the other hand is something Thiel very much wants to be associated with.
I discussed his infamous interview on the topic with the NY Times’ Ross Douthat in a previous piece.
Let’s look at what and why.
Reason.com got the goods on the Epstein-Thiel-Israel link:
After his first arrest for sex crimes, Jeffrey Epstein tried to get into a new line of work: surveillance. In 2015, he partnered with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to invest in a security tech startup called Reporty Homeland Security, now known as Carbyne. Leaked emails show that Epstein was using Barak to seek out opportunities in the surveillance industry and build connections with powerful figures around the globe, including American businessman Peter Thiel, the former director of Israeli signals intelligence, and two people in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s circle.
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Epstein invited (former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Barak to come to a meeting with Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and the surveillance contractor Palantir, in May 2014. Although Barak couldn’t make that meeting, Epstein insisted that Barak “spend real time with peter thiel [sic]” and offered to set up a dinner the following month.Barak wrote to a different business associate a few days later, without mentioning Epstein’s role, that he and Thiel would have a “first date” and “probably spend it talking just geopolitics” with an unnamed third person. In that email, Barak added that he had met Thiel once before in Davos, Switzerland, but speculated that Thiel “probably doesn’t even recall it.”
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It’s not clear exactly what happened in that meeting. In February 2016, however, Epstein pitched Reporty to Valar Ventures, a fund co-founded by Thiel and two close partners. “We’d love to hear more about Reporty, are you in NYC in the near term or would a phone call make more sense? Thanks for thinking of us Jeffrey,” Valar Ventures general partner Andrew McCormack wrote back.
Looks like the Epstein, Israel, Thiel connection might be more smoke than fire, but the same could be said for Thiel’s antichrist obsession.
Mike Brock linked Thiel’s thinking on the Antichrist with his intellectual mentor at Stanford and explained Thiel’s purpose:
Thiel is publicly, explicitly a follower of René Girard—his Stanford professor and intellectual mentor whose insights about human social psychology Thiel has weaponized as political methodology.
Think of it this way: instead of society dissolving into everyone fighting everyone, people unite against a designated villain. That’s Girard’s scapegoat theory—and it’s the lever Thiel pulls. Think of conspiracy theories blaming George Soros, or anti-woke crusades targeting universities. In both cases, real frustrations get channeled toward a scapegoat that distracts from the oligarchic capture actually shaping outcomes.
As I explored in “Ideas Without Love,” Thiel approaches civilization itself as a thought experiment rather than lived reality—he loves ideas more than people. But he’s systematically applied Girard’s insights to redirect popular anger away from oligarchic capture toward the institutions that could provide democratic resistance.
Émile P. Torres dives a little deeper at Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter:
If you can convince people that the end is nigh, that one is fighting the Antichrist, and that Armageddon — an ultimate battle between Good and Evil — is at hand, you can persuade them to do just about anything. After all, what hangs in the balance is eternal life, perfect happiness, perpetual peace, and cosmic justice. With the stakes that high, what exactly is off the table? What act is morally impermissible?.
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My guess is that Peter Thiel understands this dynamic, at least to some extent, and that’s partly why he keeps talking about the Antichrist.
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As far as I can tell, the particular interpretation of biblical prophecy that Thiel is peddling goes like this: we face two foes — the Antichrist and Armageddon. The former is a world government with — I kid you not — high taxes, an idea that’s “curiously consistent with other apocalypticists who’ve claimed that the Antichrist will gain power through supranational organizations like the European Union or United Nations.”Thiel sees Greta Thunberg as an agent of the Antichrist precisely because she advocates for global regulations targeting carbon emissions. If implemented, this would take us one more misstep down the slippery slope of regulatory regimes that interfere with other areas of industry, some of which Thiel has a vested interest in.
Here’s the strategy of Antichristic agents, according to Thiel: they use the threat of Armageddon — a global-scale catastrophe, or an existential disaster — as a pretext for establishing a world government. If you want to avoid annihilation or collapse, they say, we must sacrifice the “freedom” of corporations to continue polluting, exploiting, extracting, and doing whatever they see as necessary to maximize their profits. Thiel responds that aligning with the Antichrist to avoid Armageddon is no solution at all. Rather, our eschatological task in these perilous times is to walk the narrow path between Armageddon and the Antichrist: to avoid an actual catastrophe while resisting the urge to accomplish this through global governance.
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If Thunberg is just an annoying climate activist, she can be safely ignored. But if she’s an agent of the Antichrist, then she must be stopped immediately and at all costs. If those advocating for AI regulation are engaged in the work of the Devil, then they, too, must be dealt with in a manner proportionate to the awesome stakes of the fight. This is an apocalyptic showdown to protect, preserve, and bring about paradise, which Thiel imagines happening through the unregulated development of advanced technologies.
It doesn’t get more 2025 than conflating Greta Thunberg with the Antichrist. I wonder if Palantir’s tech was used in the latest attack on the flotilla headed for Israel with Ms. Thunberg on board.
In short, does Peter Thiel want to be a cult leader? Come to think of it, Palantir sounds more like the name of a religion than a company.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, it’s dumber than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr
ive wondered for a while now, how come Tolkien’s Estate hasnt sued him(Palantir, Valar(really?), etc…and that Lucky Palmer guy(Anduril, the flame of the west).
this also reminds me of the myriad shell corps(e) that Enron used to engage in insane shenanigans(chewbacca, Luke Skywalker, et alia)
shoulda never stopped requiring Greek and Latin and the Classics at those aristocrat farms(harvard, yale, etc)
I don’t believe Tolkein’s estate trademarked those terms, esp for use in a tech business.
Never forget that the effing Beatles lost a multi-decade legal battle with Apple Computers after initially letting Steve Jobs use the name as long as he stayed out of music. If the Beatles couldn’t hold their rights, I don’t give the Tolkein estate much chance even if they were dead set on fighting.
At this point it’s 20 years too late on Palantir anyhow.
I suppose we’ll have to retire this one.
There is a lot of “_______ is satanic” talk in evangelical/Catholic media. At some point a loony is going to kill somebody
At some point? You mean at some point today because it’s been happening a lot.
Ah, but as long as only the “right” people get bumped off. (For some definition of “the right people.”) It’s almost like a subtler Neoliberal Rule #2.
I believe Charlie Kirk said one had to expect a few deaths to preserve the Second Amendment.
I don’t see how second amendment trumps the first.
How long have you been in America.
Sigh. One of the great benefits of a society with sharply curtailed wealth inequity is that people that are kind of nuts don’t get outsized influence and power over everyone else. Instead, we get wealthy amoral and immoral people running things and inflicting whatever demons they want upon the rest of us.
Peter Thiel:
“Highways create traffic jams,
welfare creates poverty,
schools make people dumb
and the NHS makes people sick.”
CONservatives think nothing of humanity
because they have a fantasy
of human annihilation
resulting in
Adam & Eve jerkoffs.
I’m inclined to hope he keeps talking about the Antichrist. It speaks to the narcissistic shallowness of his education that he parrots some Stanford prof who claims great insight into “human psychology” by giving himself credit for recycling a theory of scapegoat demagoguery, which you can find references to from Aristotle onward. For all his grasp of psychology Thiel misses the point that in babbling about the Antichrist he’s taking on the burden of religious conversion as part of his manipulation.
I disagree that he is “taking on the burden of religious conversion” — the audience he seems to be after is threefold.
First is tech billionaires like him who are educated and cynical and “get the joke.”
Second are chucklehead pundits like Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein, who reflexively defer to Christian talk because in Ross’ case he’s a Xian and in Ezra’s case because he knows that many Americans are Xians and he wants to defer to them while having no basis for understanding religious thought.
Third are the Southern Xians he assumes are Trump’s base and even though many of them have are lapsed Xians, they have a cultural affinity for the religious talk, especially if it’s othering some out group.
The eschatological theme is very prevalent in one half of my family and the entire area where I grew up. There are some minor differences here and there between the Southern Baptists, the Assemblies of God and other tongue-talking claques, and the near snake handlers – but the story is largely the same. It has led to me a life of deep contemplation about religion and a clinging to the religion on the other side of the family.
Nevertheless, there are a few things of which I can assure everyone. The vast majority if not essentially everyone in this entire movement in multiple regions of the country are simply not going to accept Antichrist advice from anyone who is gay, and worse stands accused of murdering his gay boyfriend. Did I hear that he had him thrown out the window of a high-rise condo? That is just not going to happen. Gay behavior and gay lifestyles ARE the purview of the Antichrist. Our culture’s celebration of the gay lifestyle is a sign of the times – a sign to get your eyes looking at the sky. The thought they would even consider this from someone like Thiel is absolutely absurd. Prima facie. Nothing will ever change their mind. Now, it is entirely possible that he will convince the Silicon Valley type people of this and then we will have a whole new cult – but the American Evangelical is just not going to even consider this.
There has been much talk of digital ID and digital central bank currency on here the past few days. You can rest assured, that too is never going to happen in this country. There are far too many people who unmovingly believe that sort of thing is The Mark of the Beast. They would rather die than get involved and they have been prepared for decades. If you think COVID vaccine cards and surveillance were bad – you have not seen anything yet. When I was a kid, this film series ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075945/) – A Distant Thunder – was THE thing regarding this thinking. This film is somewhat amusing to those who have never been exposed, but guillotines and all – they are READY FOR IT. Large swaths of people in the Hinterland live this life every day. In fact, they would welcome this development, it would be an indication that the end draweth nigh. And this is literally tens of millions of people in this country. Way more holdouts to the digital ID concept that would render it not a going concern.
We have the literal dumbest elites ever. They get involved with all this stuff and do not even do the most basic of research of where huge swaths of people are with it. It is really quite amusing.
Looking at Peter Thiel I cost help but think he would fit most of the criteria for evangelicals to consider him the antichrist.
..and me, a reluctant agnostic.
There were a number of stories about the many people who assume Thiel IS the Antichrist. I probably should have included some of them, especially the comedian Tim Dillon, appearing on Joe Rogan, who thoroughly roasted Thiel on that basis.
Thiel’s anything but a man of the people.
I don’t know. Many people thought the Southern Evangelicals would reject Trump because he’s a New York atheist with a history of womanizing but now he’s regarded as the Second Coming in some circles.
That is some kind of talking point from someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I get really upset by people talking about Southern Evangelicals like Sigourney Weaver talks about the apes in Gorillas in the Mist. I get tired of these pundits blasting away about all kinds of groups in this country. It is unbecoming and very much concentrated on the blue side. It immediately puts people off in the worst way. It is right up there with Latinx. I firmly believe before anyone can make sweeping statements about any group, they need to be very familiar with them.I really really wish they would knock it off. It is losing them lots of votes.
Whoever came up with this theory was projecting their own bias onto people they likely had never talked to before. Anyone who knows them knows the vast majority of them were on board the Trump train very early on……this includes many who are racial minorities in the movement. Especially Latinos.
But truly, political allegiance is nothing to these people’s religious belief. It is an absolute hill they will die on.
I’ll concede that the pundits who thought Southern evangelicals would reject Trump were ignorant know-nothings.
However, as a Texan who grew up in the Panhandle in a town of less than 20,000 people, I am deeply, painfully, personally familiar with the religious views of many evangelicals – Baptists, non-denominationals, 7th Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Assembly of God, etc etc.. I have seen all kinds of crazy from them (including much sincerely held and even practiced belief). I’ve seen an enormous fall off in the religiousity of the generations from Millennial on down. Lots of anti-religious PTSD kids who regard themselves as survivors, lots of Trumpers who haven’t gone to church in years but have channeled their faith into politics, novel new churches/denominations like “Cowboy Church” that I’ve only driven by and haven’t investigated etc etc.
What you call “these people” — my cousins, classmates, acquaintances — are anything but a monolith and they’ve been impacted by the massive social disruptions of this century as much as anyone else.
But what I’m quite confident of is that the Boomer revival era churches I knew in the 80s have long ago run out of steam just like the Moral Majority and Reaganism.
But now that I’m off my high horse long enough to think about your comment, yea Thiel’s loathsomeness is obvious and unavoidable for almost any ordinary person, religious homophobe or not. Nonetheless, when he puts his ideas into the heads of more charismatic vessels like Vance, it’s dangerous.
Always worth to recall that DJT readily vanquished a lengthy list of qualified R candidates in the 2016 primaries. His quip on “low energy Jeb(!)” is highly memorable. And some 10 years afterwards he, meaning Trump, is continually in the national discourse.
I’m gonna give this column a second read through, but I do enjoy these columns highlighting the various oligarchy evils ( Palantir is still such a youngish corporate entity, as are Meta and Alphabet among others )….
One element of the whole forward deployed engineer role in these cross-military engagements are the security clearances. If you have a product that is being used by two militaries or even just shared into another that requires a technical resource you need to ensure whoever is seeing the logs and writing the code has the correct clearance to phone home (and possibly spoken language skills other than English). This, combined with the coding/technical skills, is a primary reason the Palantir business model relies heavily on FDEs. It is very, very lucrative and very similar to the McKinsey model of external consultants. From a technical perspective it is probably nothing very special (skills wise), but the combination of security clearance, specific technical skills and spoken language skills translates to huge billable amounts.
why are the words “social reproduction of the billionaire looter class” popping up in my brain, Raspberry?
someone should prolly look into that process, try to understand how it works.
just in case.
In the case of Palantir it is not just that but how every ruling class ultimately requires a praetorian guard to maintain their position. there is a very specific venn overlap of skills for these FDE who are working on the military projects, a few minutes of thought will surface who is being hired into these roles.
I know a guy who was recruited by Palantir a few years back. Last I checked in with him two things had changed in his life: one, his online persona had been completely scrubbed off the internet like he didn’t exist. Two, he had a spectacularly nice new house. It’s not hard to guess how the replication is occurring.
I am curious how much online persona he had to begin with: I can’t imagine people who enjoy online life (or even general socialization, in meat space, so to speak) to sign on to a gig like that, however lucrative. It must be a certain set of personality traits that orgs like Palantir draw in and that has to affect how the technology gets implemented….
I think you’re probably giving Palantir too much credit. Tech work is inherently precarious, even (especially) for top-tier talent working in Big Tech or VC Tech. Once you get to where you’re making 400k+ you have to keep making that or more to maintain the mortgage that keeps the SALT deduction that keeps the taxes in check. And then if you have children there are those costs. Quite a lot of people that I know in the field have decided to leave it in the past 2 years because it is too difficult and competitive to stay in the race. But Palantir and a handful of other companies are giving out insane amounts of money for someone with that kind of resume. I got the impression from talking to this guy that it wasn’t ideal, of course, but it ensured his daughters could stay in ballet classes, even if he had to move the family to the East Coast.
Contrast this with another guy I know who spent over a decade in his dream open source maintainer principal engineer role who quit to move out to the Bay Area right as the bloodbath was starting, his only strict rule was ‘no AI work’. He’s been looking for a job for almost 3 years now. Miltech and AI are the only things hiring.
It sounds far-fetched, but some people regard Netanyahu as ‘The Messiah’ based on how he is expanding Israel.
In that case, Greta Thunberg makes the perfect ‘Antichrist’, doesn’t she?
So was Cyrus, the king of Persia–he was the first to be called Messiah, I think. In fact, there were a lot of Messiahs over time (anointing was a common practice in crowning a king, no?) before the New Testament era…and the religious Jews still live in the Old Testament era. (And if those are allegedly “Christians,” they can’t be real Christians as they obviously don’t believe in the New Testament.)
The invocation of religious, especially apocalyptic memes, by the likes of Thiel seems bizarre to me because that just wouldn’t carry any weight with the people who might think about religion seriously. To repeat IM Doc above, just wtf is Peter Thiel to the religious people? He isn’t one of them. He has no credibilty with them. Worse, he is an open embodiment, to the degree that any religious person knows anything about him, of everything antithetical to Christianity in practically any form. The only people who might be drawn to his memes are fans of postapocalyptic sci fi, maybe (per Ricardo2000) and that’s a very narrow audience–especially if we limit the sample to those who can tell reality and sci fi apart
I do not see any evidence he can even see any difference between sc-fi and fantasy.
He does,however,have a firm grasp on the reality of the MIC grotto pathologies.
I think Thiel is serious – he believes the antichrist stuff; it isn’t just a spiel.
I sometimes toy with a theory:
Thiel was raised in a very rigid, religious German household. He grew up gay, which must have caused some psychological stress. His extreme libertarianism is an attempt to be free of that rigid household. His obsession with the antichrist is because deep down he thinks he may be it.
The sociopathy element I believe is innate.
Re: IMDoc’s points above: Thiel knows he is repulsive to the rank and file religious types. That’s why he has proxies like Vance. Thiel will never be a front-and-center leader.
More good stuff, Nat. Thanks.
I listened to Douthat’s interview, and to parts of it more than once. Torres has it largely right about Thiel’s use of the antichrist stuff:
Thiel has many of the world’s national governments in his pocket already. He thinks it would take some kind of supranational entity, certainly not the sadly anemic U.N., to bring him under rein. To him, the Antichrist is someone who can collect enough power to control him. Maybe Greta is that person in the nightmares I hope he has.
The Antichrist of popular imagination is mostly an amalgam of biblical texts from just four sources: Daniel 7 in the Hebrew bible; Paul’s 2 Thessalonians 2; the first and second Johannine letters; and Revelation 13. Only in the Johannine letters is the term “antichrist” used. Paul calls this eschatological villain the “man of lawlessness,” and Revelation, following Daniel 7, calls him “the beast.”
There is no guarantee that any of these were related in the minds of the authors other than the clear reference in Revelation to Daniel. That’s especially true of John’s letters that clearly state that there are many antichrists, including ones that have already come and gone before the writing of the letter. It seems to be a generic term for a false Christian teacher.
Now Thiel didn’t refer to any of these passages in the Douthat interview. The only biblical reference he made was to Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians: 1 Thess. 5:2, where the broader context will show the sleight of hand:
1 Thess. 5:1-4 (NRSVUE)
Here’s the way Thiel quoted it (cued to spot).
Thiel is trying to make Paul say that “peace and safety” is the message on the Antichrist. In fact, Paul is referring to one of Jesus’s apocalyptic discourses as presented in Matthew:
Matthew 24:36-44 (NRSVUE)
Both the passage in 1 Thessalonians and the one in Matthew are preaching the need for watchfulness because the Day of the LORD will come unexpectedly, like a thief in the night. The “peace and safety” that Paul is talking about is not the slogan of some Antichrist. It’s the same lackadaisical attitude that the hearers of Noah’s preaching had as they went on eating and drinking right up until the flood waters were upon them.
So Thiel is twisting Paul’s words to mean the opposite of their meaning in context. Thiel is angry that we’re alarmed that the plans of people like him include no concern about our welfare whatsoever. Whether it’s Musk’s dangerous Starship or billionaires drastically increasing demand for electricity just when we need to reduce it, Thiel wants no interference on grounds that there are legitimate concerns about how these TechBros quests will make our lives harder or even impossible. No precautionary principle for Mr. Thiel, who is the one preaching “peace and safety” about his many projects, hoping that we’ll remain distracted by the demands and diversions of life so that we make no effort to intervene for the sake of our safety and the safety of our progeny.
One final note: a familiar trope in Christian preaching is that one who intentionally misrepresents biblical texts is himself Satan or the Antichrist. Indeed, this is how John uses “antichrist.” It would be interesting to see what Thiel is presenting in his “Antichrist Seminar” to see if he’s as careless with other parts of the biblical corpus as he was with 1 Thessalonians 5.
Daniel 7 in the Hebrew bible;
A rather silly term, as the chapter is in Aramaic.
True enough, though the very first and last parts of Daniel are in very poor Hebrew, plus the Septuagint (Greek) version of Daniel is significantly longer with the “priests of Bel” story and others included. All this makes it clear that Daniel was put together much later than its purported setting in the Babylonian exile. It probably comes from the Maccabean period. The next-to-the-last verse of the book, Daniel 12:12, is an example of the difficulty of prophesying end dates. When the projected end date comes and goes, the author(s) adds a gloss and another 45 days, but he still didn’t get it right.
Thanks for the kind words, and much thanks for the Bible lesson, very informative.
Thanks for that. From your interview link, he does appear to have a pop-history approach, and is surprisingly inarticulate in his delivery.
Has Thiel actually written on the theme of antichrist and katechon, on his understanding of Girard? The only links I can find are to interviews and reports of interviews. His wikipedia biog (486 footnotes!) refers to some private lectures he gave, but no link to the source material.
Thiel hasn’t written on antichrist (as far as I know). The only real available thing is the interview linked above. There may be video of the lectures but I think at that time he was a closeted eschatolgist. For years he’d say he “was religious but didn’t talk about it”.
Re: inarticulate – he has a speech disorder
https://firstthings.com/voyages-to-the-end-of-the-world/
A little late, but he has now published this, which articulates his eschatological views more thoroughly
The talks were closed to the public, I had a whole section on that which I had to cut. Someone leaked his notes from the first night of Thiel’s talks and he was banned from the rest and forced to delete what he’d posted.
I had the full thing loaded but then hit refresh or something and lost it so I didn’t get into that whole thing.
“Palantir” is an anagram of air plant. What is an air plant? It is a plant with no need of soil. For support it requires only a platform. It sucks nutrients out of the air. It offers a congenial setting for The Reptile.
Thanks again Nat! As I commented the other day. I’m letting the algo take me wherever … throwing this over the fence – Thiel and his ilk as the hyena’s in service of Scar.
Thanks, that was an interesting video and ought to reach many Americans where they live.
Does the AI for ICE include an algorithm to calculate the norrect number of bogus kidnap targets acceptable for agent safety/success and “deport them all” publicity without turning public opinion so far against ICE tactics that elected reps get nervous?
Minor question –
Wheel or wield? I can imagine someone slick realizing mid-thought that weird implies weapons and switching to wheel. But maybe a misquote or a simple mistake.
I would hope Karp with his philosophy degree would get the idiom correct, but the Bloomberg reporter just misheard him and didn’t know the word “wield” but who is to say. We are in a world of plummeting language usage.
A tech guy “wheeling” an event is just newspeak for wielding.