Was it some friend of a gay prostitute having a little fun with Glenn on Twitter? Or was it something else? Was it Israel? Glenn still talks about Israel. Was it Palantir? What did Glenn say about J.D. Vance 10 days before this happened? Is there a lesson to be gleaned from this story either way? Maybe he shouldn't have helped privatize the surveillance state.
from RT
Tech mogul and billionaire Peter Thiel exerts considerable influence over US President Donald Trump’s administration, a Bloomberg article has claimed. Unlike Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, however, he prefers to keep a low profile.
More than a dozen individuals connected to Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, have been integrated into the Trump administration, Bloomberg wrote on Friday. This group includes “current and former employees of his companies, as well as people who have helped manage his fortune or benefitted from his investments and charitable giving.”
The outlet listed 15 individuals within the government who are seen as having ties to the entrepreneur, five of whom serve in the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Among the officials are Vice President J.D. Vance and AI and crypto czar David Sacks. According to Bloomberg, the former had worked at Thiel’s Mithril Capital, while Thiel reportedly acted as Vance’s “mentor” and sponsor. The tech tycoon is also said to have helped Vance make inroads with Trump in 2021 after the then-Ohio senator publicly criticized the Republican firebrand. Sacks, a longtime associate of Thiel, is also a PayPal co-founder...
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Trump answered the door and invited Vlad the Impaler into his trust. This could be a very bad career decision for the former/future president. Now all of a sudden, the whole of silicon valley In-Q-Tel power is seemingly backing Trump's election. I wonder what Vlad's mentor has in mind next.
from 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.
Schmidt, a major Democrat donor, has been the guiding hand behind the Biden administration’s science and technology policy and has dominated the development of the AI policies of the US military and intelligence communities, largely through his leadership of the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI). As Unlimited Hangout previously reported, the Schmidt-led NSCAI promoted policies like the end of private car ownership and in-person shopping in the United States to advance Americans’ adoption of AI as supposed national security imperative in the lead-up to the Covid-era lockdowns.Both Schmidt and Thiel are key members of the steering committee of the controversial, closed-door and overtly globalist Bilderberg conference. Newsweek once called Schmidt and Thiel the two most influential figures at Bilderberg...
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by Scott Creighton
'The twenty first century started with a bang September 11 2001. In those shocking hours the entire political and military framework of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and indeed of the modern age, with its emphasis on deterrent armies rational nation states public debates and international diplomacy was called into question. For how could mere talking or even great force deter a handful of crazy, determined and suicidal persons who seemingly operated outside of all the norms of the liberal west?...
The awareness of the West's vulnerability called for a new compromise and this new compromise inexorably demanded more security at the expense of less freedom...
America's antiquated military was not suited to fight such an enemy for the enemy needed to be pursued not only in America or in a handful of terrorist camps in Afghanistan, but to the very ends of the earth...
On the broader level of international cooperation and development Sept 11 called for wholly different arrangements. The issue of unilateralism and of the institutions designed to provide cover for unilateralism could be raised publicly by serious people for the first time since 1945' Peter Thiel The Straussian Moment (Leo Strauss, father of neoconservatism)
Thiel is a neocon and globalist who detests our system of government and like the other neocons from PNAC, wanted to use 9/11 to bring about a transition to something a bit more in line with what Carl Schmitt designed way back in the Nazi days.
from Salon (in red added by me)
... He has backed or bankrolled a number of far-right Republican candidates, including newly-elected Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio (to the record tune of $15 million) and losing Senate candidate Blake Masters in Arizona. He supported Donald Trump conspicuously in 2016, and then much more quietly, and perhaps hesitantly, in 2020 (and after patching things up with Trump, he brought JD Vance to his home for a meet-up and make-up session)
... Then there was the $500,000 "angel investment" he gave Mark Zuckerberg in 2005. That 10.2% stake in Facebook (also funded by CIA investment firm In-Q-Tel) turned into more than $1 billion in 2012.
After a few successful bets in 2004 on tech-industry bubbles — and a few critical failures — Thiel launched Palatir, a massive data-analytics firm whose first backer was none other than the CIA.
A boon to the burgeoning surveillance state, Palantir helped the Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection track and surveil immigrants using a combination of biometric and non-public databases (no wonder he wrote we have to give up freedoms for security after 9/11 just like all the neocons wanted), wielding an analytical superstructure whose power matched Google's. Palantir's exploits are too numerous to detail here, but went far beyond policing, and included plans for corporate cyberattacks and private espionage offensives, as well as helping another notorious firm, Cambridge Analytica, parse Facebook user data as it drew up the blueprint for Donald Trump's 2016 election victory.
By 2015, Palantir was already worth $20 billion.
Thiel's taste for data-tracking continued. In 2017, he became one of the first outside investors in Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition software (spying on your protests just like they accuse China of doing) often used by law enforcement agencies to monitor protests...read more here
from Forbes
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