Left to right, J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. [Source: foxbusiness.com]
Published at CovertAction Magazine
Surging in the polls after surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump boosted his prospects of becoming the next president by nominating as his vice-president, J.D. Vance.
Vance is an Ohio Senator whose best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy positioned Vance as a politician who could empathize with people living in poverty in the Rust Belt.
Hillbilly Elegy recounted Vance’s upbringing in a poor family that also served as a sort of sociological examination of white working-class Americans.
[Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Less well known about Vance is his intricate ties to billionaire Peter Thiel, who has enabled Vance’s political career.
According to The San Francisco Standard, it was Thiel who in 2017 hired Vance to work at his Silicon Valley Mithril Capital firm and later invested heavily in Vance’s firm, Narya Capital.
Thiel then donated more than $15 million to Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and escorted Vance to Mar-a-Lago to patch over his former “Never Trump” stance.
Thiel also introduced Vance to David Sacks, the Chief Operating Officer of PayPal who donated $1 million to Vance’s Super PAC and hosted a fundraiser for him. 1
Peter Thiel [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
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.
Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, was recruited by the CIA at sixteen 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 to its board.
Sean Parker [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
In 2003, Thiel co-founded Palantir, a data-analytics company whose software is said to represent the “ultimate tool of surveillance.”
Named after the omniscient crystal balls in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Palantir’s success was enabled by a $2 million investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm.
According to a former intelligence official who was directly involved with In-Q-Tel’s investment, the agency hoped that tapping the tech expertise of Silicon Valley would enable it to integrate widely disparate sources of data.
During the first five years of its existence, Palantir’s chief client was the CIA.
[Source: archyde.com]
Journalist Mark Bowden credited Palantir with perfecting the data collection and analysis that Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter had initiated with Total Information Awareness (TIA), a Pentagon surveillance system he helped develop in the aftermath of 9/11 that the ACLU warned would “kill privacy in America” because “every aspect of our lives would be catalogued.”
John Poindexter [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Palantir worked for the Pentagon and CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq, where U.S. spies and Special Forces deployed its software to synthesize the blizzard of battlefield intelligence, and to avoid roadside bombs, track insurgents for assassination, and hunt down Osama bin Laden.
An unwelcome party for Palantir after it moved to new headquarters in Denver from Silicon Valley. [Source: 5280.com]
Before her appointment as Director of National Intelligence in January 2021, Avril Haines, the former CIA Deputy Director, was paid $180,000 by Palantir as a consultant.
Avril Haines [Source: counterinformationblog.blogspot.com]
Palantir has been heavily involved in the Ukraine War by supplying Ukraine with software systems to help it target Russian tanks and track Russian troop movements.
After meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Palantir CEO Alex Karp told David Ignatius of The Washington Post that “Palantir AI was ‘winning’ the war for Ukraine.”
Zelensky in the presidential palace with Palantir CEO Alex Karp. [Source: rubryka.com]
Vance’s ties to Thiel and Palantir make it likely that he would help advance the surveillance state and military-industrial-intelligence complex.
Vance may want to deescalate the conflict with Russia in Ukraine, however, he is a staunch China hawk who wants to pivot the U.S. military to Southeast Asia to confront the Chinese and would create more opportunities for Palantir there. 2
Recipient of large-scale funding from the Republican Jewish Committee, Vance has also echoed Trump’s call for Israel to finish the job against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In 2024, not coincidentally, Palantir held its first board meeting in Tel Aviv and signed a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
Palantir's Peter Thiel and Alex Karp pose with Israeli Ministry of Defense officials. [Source: calcalistech.com]
Looking at the big picture, Vance appears like Barack Obama to be a kind of Manchurian Candidate.
His book, Hillbilly Elegy, which was made into a successful film, helped to give him a public persona that was deeply misleading, much like Obama’s book Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Times Books, 1995).
The latter book help sell Obama to the American electorate as a symbol of multi-culturalism though Obama (or his ghost-writer) lied about his family story, whitewashed his family’s connection to the CIA and 1965-1967 Indonesian genocide, and ridiculed the Black power movement and 1960s New Left. 3
A work of fraud. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
In Vance’s, case, his carefully crafted personae as a “hillbilly” from a dysfunctional family who can relate to the working class masks his affiliation with elite universities (he is a graduate of Yale law school) and Silicon Valley and close ties to the billionaire class and warfare and surveillance states.
Vance appears to have first met Thiel at a talk Thiel gave at Yale law school about technological stagnation and the decline of American elites. In the talk, Thiel stressed that if technological innovation were actually driving prosperity, American elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes. Vance called Thiel’s talk “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale.
Vance has also called for using the power of the U.S. military to go after Mexican drug cartels, a view popular on the right.
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).
Couldn't we say the same for Kamala?