PETER THIEL, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, is much more than a slick entrepreneur, he is a conservative libertarian, with bizarre, millenarian views on Western democracy. He has been described as the “intellectual architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos.”

He, together with Elon Musk, David O Sacks, JD Vance and Alex Karp are the chief architects of a radical shift in US politics.

In the past it was, presidents who very much determined radical policy shifts or, as in 1930s Europe, traditional fascist parties, but that is no longer the case.  

These men (and they are all men) constitute a tiny but extremely powerful shadowy force based in California’s Silicon Valley. Their aim is an all-encompassing stranglehold on government data processing and the establishment of algorhithmic efficiency.

Thiel has been their mentor, and today they form the backbone of emerging US fascism. They are the super-wealthy and ideologically driven men behind the Trump phenomenon.

What they all have in common, is an elitist libertarian outlook, technological hubris and a strong authoritarian streak. They are determined to push through a complete technological, economic and political restructuring of society.

They believe implicitly in the superiority of their ideas, seeing themselves as a sort of “International” of the wealthy and radical. Their instruments are not parties and parliaments, but platforms and data banks. They finance political processes, buy candidates, control the digital infrastructure and are writing the narrative of tomorrow.

They want to build a United States that will resemble a huge business enterprise: efficient, disciplined and hierarchical. Those who have other ideas are simply being marginalised or eradicated.

Thiel was born in Germany into an extreme right-wing family. When the 1968 democracy movement took hold in Germany, his family emigrated to the former German colony of South-West Africa (today Namibia) later leaving for California when the Namibian liberation movement threatened German dominance.

While Thiel is a classic entrepreneur who gained much of his wealth from PayPal, his originally idea being to create a form currency exchange outside government control.

However, he is also a man with strong views about power and control. He sees Western democracy as inimical to capitalism and has visions of a centralised, authoritarian form of global governance, brought about by technology and capital.

He has stated that the idea for the company was based on the realisation that “the approaches that PayPal used to fight fraud could be extended into other contexts, like fighting terrorism.” He also stated that, after the September 11 attacks, the debate in the United States was “will we have more security with less privacy or less security with more privacy?”

He envisioned Palantir as providing the government the technology to root out terrorism without operating illegally.

Thiel, like Trump, pontificates wildly on a variety of subjects. One moment talking of the “anti-christ,” then wandering off to talk about tax or the dangers of a left-led world government.

Thiel has two main theories. The first is that we live in a world of stagnation and, second, that democracy and capitalism are incompatible.

In today’s world, they who control the data, control behaviour and those who control behaviour control the people. Thiel is well aware of that, and in the meantime, Palantir algorithms are helping in the surveillance of protest movements on university campuses and with “profiling” of potential “terrorists,” as well as the management of digital social credit systems and more. It is not merely a company that works for the government. It is a government that is using Silicon Valley for an assault on democracy per se.

Today, Palantir has hundreds of government contracts and is interconnected with all those government bodies responsible for security matters. It has become a central tool of the Trump administration in its aim of establishing a surveillance state. We are seeing the emergence of a model for digital authoritarianism, divorced from all traditional political categories.

In May 2003, Thiel incorporated Palantir Technologies, as a huge data analysis company named after the all-seeing monolith in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Palantir is a super-modern apparatus for surveillance and deception, and it reflects his own quasi-visionary views. Today, Palantir does indeed see everything in the US.

In March 2025 Trump issued a decree ordering all US government agencies to integrate their data — social security numbers, tax files, bank connections etc, and appointed Palantir to oversee this.

Palantir has sold its AI-supported platforms to police authorities, secret services, government agencies and the Pentagon. It makes possible an unimaginable and detailed analysis of huge amounts of data: social media profiles, biometric characteristics, personal networks and movements, and is increasingly doing this globally.

Today Trump’s stormtroopers — his anti-immigration thugs or Ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) — are using Palantir to carry out their work. It allows them to locate immigrants, to map support networks and establish movement profiles. It enables Ice to localise and deport those targeted.

In this way Palantir is not merely a neutral supplier of software but is actively engaged in political strategy. Professor Vasilis Galis, professor in science and technology studies at the University of Copenhagen, notes that the software is not a mere tool but shapes policing culture with new policing norms.

This creeping takeover of state functions by this small group of technological oligarchs represents a new chapter in the evolutiuon (or is it the destruction of?) Western democracy.

We can see clearly how a bourgeois democratic state is being hollowed out from the centre. And these shadowy figures are not merely Trump supporters; they have chosen Trump to fulfil their dreams.

The Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was set up by Trump and headed by Musk to push through this agenda.

Thiel himself doesn’t believe in majorities but in ruling elites, despising democratic norms. He believes in the rule of, in his view, the most capable, wealthiest and visionary.

In his book The Diversity Myth, he argues, among other things, against Californian style multiculturalism and feminist studies. He writes of the “tyranny of diversity.” Thiel and his fellow visionaries, though, are not content to dominate US politics but want world domination.

As the Morning Star editorial of July 3 pointed out, Palantir is already penetrating the British state.

The Metropolitan Police want to use it to help them better “fight crime,” even though London’s mayor has ordered them to drop the contract with Palantir. It has already penetrated the NHS.

Unlike Britain, France and Spain have taken action to prevent this happening in their countries. The Spanish government told state-backed firms to avoid signing new contracts with Thiel’s company. It comes amid fears that sensitive national security information could be leaked, according to the Spanish publication El Confidencial.

And France’s domestic intelligence service is to ditch AI data tools from Palantir in favour of a domestic provider in an effort to avoid “strategic dependency,” Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said.

We need to increase the pressure on the new Prime Minister to ensure that Palantir and any other US invasive systems are kept out of our country.