Peter Thiel's "Palantir," The Company That Owns The Trump Regime, Just Published Their 22 Point Manifesto For America And It's Terrifying.

22 Points · A Tolkien-Themed Surveillance Empire · A Chairman Who Loved Epstein · A Philosopher-King Blogger On Speed-Dial · And The IBM-Nazi Template Nobody Wants To Name

BEFORE WE START: WHY THIS IS THE MOST DANGEROUS COMPANY IN THE WORLD

Forget ExxonMobil. Forget Lockheed. Forget Facebook, Raytheon, Pfizer, BlackRock, every villain you’ve been trained to point at for the last thirty years. Those companies are dangerous the way a loaded gun on a table is dangerous — inert until somebody picks it up, and usually somebody does, and usually people die, and we write books about it afterward.

Palantir is dangerous in a category those companies don’t occupy. Palantir is the first private corporation in history that has successfully fused four things that every civilization in recorded history has kept — deliberately, and at enormous cost — separate:

One — the surveillance apparatus of the state. Every American’s tax records. Every immigrant’s file. Every license plate read by every camera. Every health record flagged for fraud. Every name on a watch list. Palantir’s Foundry and Gotham platforms don’t just access this data — they are the layer through which the government now sees itself. The East Germans needed 91,000 Stasi officers and 189,000 informants to surveil 17 million people. Palantir does the same job for 330 million Americans with a server rack and a login.

Two — the targeting engine of the military. The IDF uses Palantir to pick targets in Gaza. The U.S. Army just handed them a $10 billion contract. The Pentagon’s drone footage runs through their AI. They are not a contractor in the old Cold War sense — a company that builds a plane and hands it over. They are the decision layer. When a missile hits a volleyball gym or a hospital or a 10-year-old, the software that shortlisted that building as a legitimate target was almost certainly theirs.

Three — the ideological project of a faction that openly wants democracy to end. The chairman wrote in 2009 that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible. The CEO just published a book arguing that postwar denazification was a mistake and that some cultures are “regressive.” They bankroll a blogger who defends slavery. They helped install the Vice President of the United States. This is not a company that happens to have bad politics. The bad politics are the product roadmap.

Four — the capital of Jeffrey Epstein. A serial child rapist invested $40 million in the chairman’s venture fund a decade after his first conviction. That money is still in the system. The chairman and the rapist corresponded for five years. The company’s single largest strategic patron treated a convicted sex trafficker as a trusted Rolodex. This is not a scandal the company has survived. This is a scandal the company has absorbed, metabolized, and moved past while nobody was looking.

No corporation in history has ever held all four of those cards simultaneously.

IBM held the filing-system piece in 1933 but not the military or the ideology — those belonged to the Reich. The East India Company held the sovereignty piece in 1770 but not the informational omniscience — the technology didn’t exist yet. Lockheed and Raytheon hold the weapons piece today but not the civilian surveillance layer and not a founder publicly funding a neo-monarchist movement. Google and Meta hold the data piece but not the targeting authority or the government-officer pipeline.

Palantir holds all four at once. And on Saturday, they published a 22-point manifesto telling you exactly what they intend to do with them. The press yawned. The market rallied. The stock went up.

This is what a regime looks like while it’s installing itself. Not tanks. Not brownshirts. A software license, a CIA-backed venture round, a Tolkien-themed office, a bestselling book, and a chairman who thinks the Constitution is a bug.

Let me show you the rest.

They put it in writing. They pinned it to the top of their feed. Then they went to bed like they hadn’t just faxed the 21st century a ransom note.

Over the weekend, a $400 billion software company that holds nearly a billion dollars in U.S. federal contracts, builds the brain of ICE’s deportation system, helps Israel pick targets in Gaza, and has its people installed inside the IRS — posted a 22-point manifesto.

Not a white paper. Not a sales deck. A manifesto. Titled, with the smug coyness of a man who thinks he’s smarter than you, “Because we get asked a lot.”

The company is Palantir. Twenty-one million views in 48 hours. A Belgian philosopher called it “technofascism.” Yanis Varoufakis said if Evil could tweet, this is what it would sound like. A Substack theorist called it “the organising motor of the death spiral of the Western Empire.”

And the American press, bless its heart, largely treated it like a book promo.

Let me translate.

1️⃣ WHAT PALANTIR ACTUALLY IS — AND WHY THE NAME IS THE WHOLE TELL

What it is: Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings. Its two products — Gotham and Foundry — are the connective tissue of the modern American surveillance state. ICE runs on it. The IRS now runs on it. The Pentagon runs on it. The NYPD and LAPD run on it. The Israel Defense Forces run on it while they flatten Gaza.

It’s named after the palantíri — the seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings that let their holders watch everything, everywhere, all at once.

Here’s the part Peter Thiel’s English degree apparently skipped: in the books, every palantír that survives the Second Age gets corrupted by Sauron. Every single one. The stones drive their users insane. Saruman looks into one and switches sides. Denethor looks into one and sets himself on fire.

They named the company after cursed objects, and then they acted surprised when the curse took.

Why it matters: The CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, was the only investor willing to put money in when Sand Hill Road laughed them out of the room. Federal contracts went from $4.4 million in 2009 to $541 million in 2024 to $970 million in 2025 under Trump II. The stock surged 200% in a year. Karp was the highest-paid CEO in America in 2024 with $6.8 billion in “compensation actually paid.”

This is not a tech company. This is a nervous system being grafted onto a government. You don’t rip one of these out once it’s in. Ask the Germans in 1945 how easy it was to untangle IBM’s Hollerith punch-card machines from the Reich Security Main Office. IBM’s German subsidiary leased the tabulators that indexed every Jew, every Roma, every “undesirable” for the trains. Edwin Black documented the whole thing in 2001. IBM didn’t build the camps. IBM built the filing system that made the camps efficient.

Palantir is the Hollerith machine of this century. And its CEO just posted the pitch deck.

2️⃣ PETER THIEL: THE MAN WHO SAID THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD IN 2009

What happened: In a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, Peter Thiel — Palantir’s chairman, largest shareholder, and ideological spine — wrote that he had stopped believing freedom and democracy were compatible. He has said going back to 2004 that the U.S. Constitution prevents “any single ambitious person from reconstructing the old Republic.”

Read that again. The man at the top of the company building America’s deportation software publicly wishes the Constitution were weaker so a sufficiently ambitious person could reconstruct the Republic.

He’s not hiding it. He’s bragging.

(Video credit Jim Stewartson)

Why it matters: Every authoritarian turn in modern history has the same fingerprint — a frustrated capital class deciding democracy is too slow, too messy, too stupid to get things done. Fritz Thyssen and Gustav Krupp decided that in 1932. The industrialists of the Ruhr wrote checks to a failing Austrian painter because they thought the Weimar parliament was an obstacle to production. I.G. Farben got Auschwitz IV-Monowitz as a company town, with Jewish slave labor. They told themselves they were modernizing. They told themselves the trains running on time was a KPI.

Thiel is JD Vance’s patron. He dropped roughly $15 million into Vance’s 2022 Senate primary. Vance is now the Vice President of the United States. The through-line from the 2009 Cato essay to the current occupant of the Naval Observatory is one investor, one philosophy, and a blank checkbook.

That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a Wikipedia page.

3️⃣ CURTIS YARVIN, PALANTIR’S HOUSE MONARCHIST, ON THIEL’S PAYROLL SINCE 2013

What happened: Curtis Yarvin — blogger, “neoreactionary” philosopher, defender of slavery, proponent of the idea that certain races are suited to servitude — is the intellectual engine of a movement called the Dark Enlightenment. His program, translated out of his flowery 10,000-word blog posts: abolish democracy, install a CEO-king, run America like a corporation, and let the “real people running the world” get on with it.

Peter Thiel invested in Yarvin’s company Tlon in 2013 through Founders Fund. Gave $100,000 to Yarvin’s co-founder personally. Yarvin later admitted in messages to Milo Yiannopoulos that he’d been “coaching Thiel” and that Thiel was “fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

Yarvin was a featured guest at Trump’s 2025 inauguration ball. JD Vance cites him as an influence. Steve Bannon cites him. Michael Anton cites him. Marc Andreessen calls him a friend.

Why it matters: If you are squeamish about Hitler comparisons, please look away for one paragraph.

Time magazine — not me, Time — drew the explicit historical parallel in March 2025. Yarvin’s role in this moment is the role Filippo Marinetti played for Mussolini. Marinetti was the Italian Futurist poet who wrote in 1909 that war is “the world’s only hygiene,” that museums should be burned, that democracy was a tired old woman. He supplied the aesthetic permission for Italian fascism. When Mussolini marched on Rome, Marinetti marched with him. The Futurists didn’t invent fascism. They made it fashionable for the cultured classes.

Yarvin is Marinetti in a hoodie. Vance is the ambitious politician. Thiel is the industrialist who funds both.

There is also — and I want to be careful here because this matters — Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist whose entire project was arguing that liberal democracy was weak, that real politics is the friend/enemy distinction, and that a sovereign is defined by who gets to declare the exception. If you read Yarvin and then read Schmitt you will feel physically ill. Yarvin is the Schmitt of the American tech right, and Schmitt wrote the legal justification for Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution being used to suspend civil liberties in 1933.

We have been here before. We know how this ends. The difference now is they have better software.

4️⃣ JEFFREY EPSTEIN GAVE PETER THIEL $40 MILLION AND NOBODY WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT

What happened: House Oversight released the Epstein files in November 2025. The DOJ followed in February 2026. The documents show Peter Thiel corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein from roughly 2014 through early 2019 — continuing for eleven years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction as a registered sex offender, and right up until months before Epstein’s 2019 arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges.

Epstein called Thiel his “great friend” in private messages to associates.

Epstein invited Thiel to the island. Thiel’s spokesperson insists he never went. Fine.

Epstein invested $40 million in two funds managed by Thiel’s Valar Ventures in 2015 and 2016. That investment has since grown to roughly $170 million. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has described Epstein and Thiel as co-owners of the Valar fund. (Thiel’s people dispute the word “co-owner” while confirming Epstein was a limited partner. Lawyer distinctions.)

Epstein, in recorded conversations with Barak, floated Palantir as a company Barak should try to land a role at through the Thiel connection.

Epstein also considered buying Palantir shares directly.

And in August 2015, Epstein attended a Palo Alto dinner with Zuckerberg, Musk, Reid Hoffman, and other Silicon Valley principals — which Epstein described in an email as “wild.”

Why it matters: This is not a media-hit cheap shot. This is the capital structure of the company building ICE’s deportation platform. The chairman of a $400 billion surveillance empire took life-changing money from a serial child rapist a decade after that rapist’s first conviction, and used that rapist as a Rolodex to broker deals with former heads of state.

Every time you read Point 18 of the manifesto — “The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service” — remember which private life Palantir’s chairman does not want ruthlessly exposed.

They put it in the manifesto. Point eighteen. In writing.

5️⃣ THE GOVERNMENT IS NOW RUN BY PALANTIR. THIS IS NOT HYPERBOLE.

What happened: Take a breath. This list is not editorialized.

• ICE — $30 million contract in April 2025 to build ImmigrationOS, an AI platform that tracks self-deportations and feeds Stephen Miller’s mass-deportation machine. Runs through September 2027. Palantir holds roughly $145 million in total ICE contract obligations in 2025. Stephen Miller — the architect of the deportation program — reportedly holds a personal financial stake in Palantir.

• The IRS — Palantir employees have reportedly been embedded inside the agency helping build what Senator Ron Wyden and AOC called, in a June 2025 letter, a “single, searchable database” of every American’s tax records. Wyden and AOC say this is flatly illegal. Several members of DOGE — the entity that chose Palantir for this job — are former Palantir employees.

• The White House — Trump hired Gregory Barbaccia, Palantir’s former head of intelligence and investigations, as federal Chief Information Officer. He is reportedly considering Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar for a top Pentagon role.

• The Pentagon — roughly $10 billion Army contract in August 2025. Palantir’s head of defense business is former Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher, who publicly courted Pete Hegseth the day Trump nominated him.

• The Navy — a nearly $1 billion software contract in November 2024.

• Lobbying — up from $2.4 million in 2020 to $6.1 million in 2025. They hired Miller Strategies, Trump’s house lobbying firm.

Why it matters: This is not regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is when an industry buys a referee. This is when the industry becomes the field, the ball, and the stadium.

The East India Company — this is the closest historical match for what Palantir is becoming and I want you to sit with the comparison. From the 1600s through 1858, a private corporation ran the Indian subcontinent. It raised its own armies. Collected taxes. Negotiated treaties. Fought wars. It answered, nominally, to the British Crown, but the Crown answered, practically, to its balance sheet. It ruled over 150 million people with 250,000 private soldiers. It caused the Bengal famine of 1770, which killed roughly ten million human beings, because its revenue model required it. Parliament finally had to nationalize the company after the 1857 uprising made it obvious that sovereignty had been quietly outsourced to shareholders.

The East India Company had Hollerith machines, it just didn’t know it yet.

Palantir has them now. And the shareholders are Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Vanguard, BlackRock, and whatever’s left of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate.

6️⃣ THE MANIFESTO, READ HONESTLY

What happened: Go back and read the 22 points with the record in front of you. Here are the ones that matter.

Point 5 — “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose.” Translation: please don’t regulate us, and please do not sign any international treaty on autonomous weapons. We already sell them to the IDF. The ship has sailed. Get in the water or drown.

Point 6 — “National service should be a universal duty.” Translation: bring back the draft. Working-class kids die in the trenches. Our kids run Palantir dashboards from Palo Alto. Same war. Different tax bracket.

Point 12 — “The atomic age is ending… a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.” Translation: nuclear weapons were controlled by treaties. AI weapons are controlled by us. Pay up.

Point 15 — “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone.”

Read that one twice.

Palantir — the New York Times bestseller, the Pentagon’s favorite vendor, the company with Tolkien-themed office names — is on record arguing that the denazification of Germany and the postwar demilitarization of Imperial Japan were historical mistakes. This is in a book. This was posted to a corporate Twitter account. Nobody got fired.

This is the sentence that makes the manifesto matter. Because “the neutering of Germany must be undone” is the precise phrase the actual children and grandchildren of actual Nazis have been circulating in European far-right salons for forty years. The AfD says this. Alternative für Deutschland. Björn Höcke says this, the man a German court legally ruled may be called a fascist. The Japanese revisionists who want to purge the Nanking Massacre from textbooks say this.

Palantir is now their lobbyist. An American company with nine-figure Pentagon contracts is selling the rehabilitation of fascist-era militarisms as a business opportunity. Jacob Bertrand, speaking to Al Jazeera, pointed out the obvious: a remilitarized Germany and Japan are massive new defense-software markets. The ideology is the sales funnel.

Point 17 — “Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime.” Translation: let us sell Gotham to more American cities. The LAPD already uses it for predictive policing. Philip K. Dick wrote about this in 1956 and called it Minority Report and we all agreed it was a dystopia. Palantir read the book as a business plan.

Point 18 — “The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.” See above. See Epstein. See the $40 million. See what Palantir’s chairman does not want you looking at.

Point 21 — “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”

This is the sentence that made the philosophers reach for the word fascism and they were not being dramatic. This is civilizational ranking. This is the 1935 Nuremberg Laws re-staged as a LinkedIn post. This is The Bell Curve with a Stanford pedigree and a government contract. This is what Curtis Yarvin has been arguing in public for fifteen years, now laundered through a bestselling book and a viral corporate thread.

When a private company with access to every American’s tax records, immigration status, license plate movements, medical data, and targeting inputs publishes the opinion that some cultures are dysfunctional and regressive — you should ask which cultures. And you should ask whose software will decide.

Point 22 — “We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism.” Translation: inclusion into what? This is Yarvin talking through Karp’s mouth. The entire neoreactionary critique of liberal democracy reduced to a rhetorical question.

THE BIG PICTURE

Here is what you are looking at.

A company funded by the CIA, chaired by a man who wrote that democracy and freedom are incompatible, who took $40 million from Jeffrey Epstein and bankrolled a neo-monarchist blogger, whose software now runs inside ICE, the IRS, the Pentagon, and the White House — just published a 22-point manifesto calling for the draft, the rollback of postwar denazification, the end of international arms treaties, civilizational ranking of human beings, and the fusion of Silicon Valley with American hard power.

And the American press framed it as a spicy CEO book tour.

We are seven years from the 100th anniversary of the 1933 Enabling Act — the law that Hitler used to grant himself emergency decree power because Weimar’s democratic machinery was “too slow” to deal with a crisis. Peter Thiel has been openly wishing for American versions of that shortcut since 2004. Curtis Yarvin has been openly advocating for it since 2007. JD Vance has been openly quoting Yarvin since 2021. Palantir has been openly building the information layer that would make it possible since 2003.

They are not hiding. They are publishing books. They are posting threads. They are giving speeches at the Hill and Valley Forum. They are taking government contracts in the light.

The manifesto is not a slip. The manifesto is a confession. Confessions are not given in shame. Confessions are given by people who believe they will not be punished.

The question is whether they are right.

Stay awake.

— Dean

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Sources: House Oversight Committee Epstein file releases (November 2025); DOJ Epstein file release (February 2026); the Tech Transparency Project’s investigation into Palantir’s influence operation; the June 2025 Wyden–Ocasio-Cortez letter to Alex Karp; Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (2001); reporting from Al Jazeera, NPR, TechCrunch, Fortune, The Hill, FedScoop and Byline Times on Palantir’s 2025–2026 federal contracting; the American Immigration Council on ImmigrationOS; Corey Pein’s reporting on Thiel–Yarvin in The Baffler*; the 2025* Time essay on the Dark Enlightenment and the Marinetti parallel; Yanis Varoufakis’ annotated reply to the 22 points; and Curtis Yarvin’s blog, which is sadly real.

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