The Man Behind Trump’s VP Pick: It’s Worse Than You Think

By Whitney Webb

After the recent revelation that Donald Trump had selected J.D. Vance as his Vice President, public attention not only turned toward Vance, but also to the billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance has been one of several prominent Thiel protégés whose profile has risen in recent years, with other protégés of the PayPal co-founder including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey.

Recent reports have also noted that Thiel first recruited Vance into his circle while Vance was still a student at Yale Law School. Shortly thereafter, Vance joined Thiel’s investment firm Mithril Capital, where he worked for two years before joining Revolution Ventures. Vance played a major role in Revolution’s “Rise of the Rest” seed fund whose major investors included Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and the Walton family of WalMart, who boast long-standing deep ties to the Clinton family. Vance later launched his own venture capital firm Narya Capital in 2020, which was heavily funded by Thiel as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

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Thiel has donated heavily to Vance’s political career, giving $15 million to Vance’s successful Senate bid in the 2022 election cycle in what was then the largest donation ever given to one Senate candidate. Thiel also joined Vance, a former “Never Trumper,” on a visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago where Vance successfully won the former president’s blessing. Thiel also connected Vance to other members of the so-called PayPal mafia, like David Sacks who donated $1 million to Vance and hosted a fundraiser for him. Sacks, along with PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, were allegedly a key factor in Trump’s selection of Vance as Vice President as they ran “a secret lobbying campaign” for Vance that also included media presenter Tucker Carlson.

Thiel had been a major donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and served on Trump’s transition team, with other Thiel-linked figures like Trae Stephens dramatically influencing Trump’s Pentagon appointments.

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Anduril’s unmanned drones have also come to play a major role in Ukrainian military operations during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as have other controversial Thiel-funded companies like Palantir (a CIA contractor) and ClearView AI, which used mainly photos posted on Facebook (another Thiel-backed company) to develop its Orwellian facial recognition database. These companies’ close ties to the Ukrainian military may impact a second Trump administration’s policies as it relates to American support for Ukraine, particularly if Thiel is slated to hold significant influence. Beyond Ukraine, this network of Thiel-funded defense companies are remaking the face of warfare and slowly but surely replacing human decision-making with AI.

While these ties should be unsettling on their own, the potential influence of Thiel on the upcoming Trump administration should concern every American, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, due to Thiel’s efforts to rehabilitate and remake some of the intelligence communities’ most Orwellian and unconstitutional efforts to target domestic dissent.

Thiel Information Awareness

While Peter Thiel has long marketed himself as a libertarian, his track record from PayPal on has revealed him to instead be an architect of the modern surveillance state and a successor to the neoconservative cabal that had once tried (but failed) to do the same.

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Unlimited Hangout has reported extensively on Thiel and Palantir for several years. As noted in past reports, the company was created to be the privatized version of a post-9/11 surveillance program that had been dreamt up by the Iran-Contra criminals responsible for the unconstitutional Main Core database. During the Reagan administration, the individuals at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal developed a database called Main Core, which firmly placed the US national-security state on its current, tech-fuelled path for crushing dissent. A senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in five presidential administrations told Radar in 2008 that Main Core was “a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”

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The Social Media Panopticon

Not long after Thiel helped resurrect TIA as Palantir, another post-9/11 DARPA program was also seeking a private sector makeover. Developed by Douglas Gage, a close friend of Poindexter’s and a DARPA program manager, LifeLog sought to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included an individual’s relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured data and organize it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots while also “mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences.”

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Critics in mainstream media outlets and elsewhere were quick to point out that the program would inevitably be used to build profiles on dissidents as well as suspected terrorists. Combined with TIA’s surveillance of individuals at multiple levels, LifeLog went farther by “adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.” One critic, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned at the time that the programs that DARPA was pursuing, including LifeLog, “have obvious, easy paths to Homeland Security deployments.”

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Facebook’s growing role in the ever-expanding surveillance and “pre-crime” apparatus of the national security state demands new scrutiny of the company’s origins and its products as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was essentially analogous to what is currently the world’s largest social network.

A few months into Facebook’s launch, in June 2004, Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz brought Sean Parker onto Facebook’s executive team. Parker, previously known for co-founding Napster, later connected Facebook with its first outside investor, Peter Thiel. As discussed, Thiel, at that time, in coordination with the CIA, was actively trying to resurrect at least one controversial DARPA program that had been dismantled the previous year. Notably, Sean Parker, who became Facebook’s first president, also had a history with the CIA, which sought to recruit him at the age of sixteen soon after he had been busted by the FBI for hacking corporate and military databases. Thanks to Parker, in September 2004, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 worth of Facebook shares and was added its board. Parker maintained close ties to Facebook as well as to Thiel, with Parker being hired as a managing partner of Thiel’s Founders Fund in 2006. Thiel left the Facebook board, which he had joined in 2005, in 2022 to focus on supporting “Trump-aligned candidates,” including J.D. Vance.

Thiel and Facebook co-founder Mosokvitz became involved outside of the social network long after Facebook’s rise to prominence, with Thiel’s Founder Fund becoming a significant investor in Moskovitz’s company Asana in 2012. Thiel’s longstanding symbiotic relationship with Facebook co-founders extends to his company Palantir, as the data that Facebook users make public invariably winds up in Palantir’s databases and helps drive the surveillance engine Palantir runs for US police departments, the military, and the intelligence community. Facebook data also feeds another Thiel-backed company, Clearview AI.

Notably, even LifeLog’s architect, Douglas Gage, has publicly commented on Facebook’s similarities to the program he had once hoped to lead. In 2015, He told VICE that “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point.” He tellingly added, “We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked,” precisely because it is now a private company and not a project housed at the Pentagon’s DARPA.

Palantir and the Surveillance Agenda under Trump

During the Trump administration, Palantir enjoyed an even more privileged status than it had held under previous administrations, with Palantir gaining many new lucrative contracts, mainly with the military and intelligence, during Trump’s first term. This was likely influenced by Thiel’s presence on Trump’s transition teams and the role of close Thiel associates in choosing key Pentagon appointees.

Donald Trump and Peter Thiel in 2017, Source

Not only that, but the broader agenda behind Palantir – the decades-long effort to create a pre-crime, AI-powered surveillance system in the United States – also got significant boosts during Trump’s first term. For instance, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr quietly legalized pre-crime in the United States under the guise of detecting potential mass shooters before they commit any crime. The program, called DEEP, enables the DOJ and FBI to work with “private sector partners” to surveil people of interest that have committed no crime, but are “mobilizing towards violence.” At roughly the same time the program was announced, Barr was also pushing heavily for a government backdoor into consumer apps and devices, particularly those that utilize encryption. He also signed a data access agreement with then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel that allowed both countries to “demand electronic data on consumers from tech companies based in the other country without legal restrictions.”

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The Trump administration, during this same period, also mulled the creation of a new health-focused agency modeled after DARPA. The proposed “HARPA”, which was promoted extensively to Trump by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka as well as Trump’s close friend and former NBCUniversal president Bob Wright. HARPA’s proposed flagship program – “SAFE HOME” (Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes) – would use “breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence,” specifically “advanced analytical tools based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.” The program would have cost an estimated $60 million over four years and would use data from Americans’ social media accounts as well as “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home” and other consumer electronic devices. The program would also collect information provided by health-care providers to identify who may be a “threat.”

Though HARPA was not created under the Trump administration, Trump reportedly reacted “very positively” to the proposal and was “sold on the concept.” In addition, before the proposal was known publicly, Trump had called on Big Tech, and specifically social media to collaborate with the DOJ to create software that stops mass murders before they happen by detecting potential mass shooters before they can act. However, Trump ultimately passed on creating HARPA, which was ultimately created during the Biden administration as ARPA-H, underscoring the bipartisan nature of this agenda.

Are Peter Thiel-Backed Intelligence Contractors “MAGA”?

Despite many Thiel-backed or Thiel-founded companies describing themselves as “America First” and as defenders of “Western values,” a closer examination of those companies suggests this is not the case. One lesser known example of this is Palantir’s early role in developing a way for the US government to target Julian Assange, leaks-based journalism in the public interest, and what it called “The WikiLeaks Threat.” In looking at other Thiel-linked firms, it’s quite clear that at least some are more than willing to target Americans on either side of the political divide on behalf of their biggest client, the so-called “Deep State” that Trump supporters revile. Take, for example, the Thiel-backed Clearview AI – which claims to now be able to identify every person in the world using its advanced facial recognition system.

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As its own CEO stated, Clearview AI was used extensively on January 6th and later boasted of its “potential for identifying rioters at the January 6 attack on the Capitol.”

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Via https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/07/investigative-reports/the-man-behind-trumps-vp-pick-its-worse-than-you-think/