Vance’s top funder, Peter Thiel, co-founded the data-analytics company Palantir, which has the CIA as a client, and was an early investor in Facebook, the CIA’s “wet dream.”
Surging in the polls after surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump boosted his prospects of becoming the next president by nominating J. D. Vance as his vice president.
Vance is an Ohio Senator whose best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy positioned him 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.
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]
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.
In September 2004, thanks to Parker, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 worth of Facebook shares and was added to its board.
In 2003, Thiel co-founded Palantir, a data-analytics company whose software is said to represent the “ultimate tool of surveillance.”[2]
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.
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 to 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.”[3]
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.
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.
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.”
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 de-escalate 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.[4]
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.
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 (New York: Times Books, 1995).
The Obama book helped sell him to the American electorate as a symbol of multi-culturalism though he (or his ghost-writer) lied about his family story, whitewashed his family’s connection to the CIA and the 1965-1967 Indonesian genocide, and ridiculed the Black Power Movement and 1960s New Left.[5]
In Vance’s case, his carefully crafted persona as a “hillbilly” from a dysfunctional family who can relate to the working class masks his affiliations 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.
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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 would not 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. ↑
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New York Magazine reported that Palantir was set up to ingest the mountains of data collected by soldiers and spies and police—fingerprints, signals intelligence, bank records, tips from confidential informants—and enable users to spot hidden relationships, uncover criminal and terrorist networks, and even anticipate future attacks. ↑
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Poindexter met with Thiel, who picked Poindexter’s brain for ideas in the development of Palantir. ↑
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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. ↑
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See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019). ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
