Trump’s VP pick’s sugar daddy has deep ties to CIA

Vance’s main financial backer, Peter Thiel, co-founded the data analytics firm Palantir, which counts the CIA as a client, and was an early investor in Facebook, the CIA’s “wet dream.”

By Jeremy Kuzmarov
July 16, 2024

After surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump rose in the polls and increased his chances of becoming the next president by nominating JD Vance as his vice president.

Vance is a senator from Ohio whose bestselling memoir Elegy of the Hillbilly positioned him as a politician who could empathize with the people living in poverty in the Rust Belt.

Elegy of the Hillbilly described Vance’s upbringing in a poor family and simultaneously served as a kind of sociological study of the white American working class.

What is less well known about Vance are his close ties to billionaire Peter Thiel, who made Vance’s political career possible.

According to The San Francisco StandardIt was Thiel who hired Vance in 2017 to join his Silicon Valley firm Mithril Capital and later invested heavily in Vance’s company, Narya Capital.

Thiel subsequently donated more than $15 million to Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign and accompanied Vance to Mar-a-Lago to whitewash his past “Never Trump” stance.

Thiel also introduced Vance to David Sacks, PayPal’s Chief Operating Officer, who donated $1 million to Vance’s Super PAC and hosted a fundraiser for him.

Thiel’s connection to the CIA is evident from the fact that he was an early investor in Facebook, the CIA’s “wet dream” where Facebook users voluntarily posted information about themselves online.

Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, was recruited by the CIA at age 16 after he was caught by the FBI hacking into corporate and military databases.

Through Parker, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 worth of Facebook stock in September 2004 and was added to the board of directors.

In 2003, Thiel co-founded Palantir, a data analytics company whose software is billed as the “ultimate surveillance tool.”

Named after the omniscient crystal balls in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Palantir’s success was made possible by a $2 million investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm.

According to a former intelligence official directly involved in In-Q-Tel’s investment, the agency hoped that by tapping into Silicon Valley’s technological expertise, it could integrate widely disparate data sources.

For the first five years of Palantir’s existence, the CIA was its primary customer.

Journalist Mark Bowden credited Palantir with perfecting the data collection and analysis that Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter initiated with Total Information Awareness (TIA), a Pentagon surveillance system he helped develop after 9/11 that the ACLU warned would “kill privacy in America” by “cataloging every aspect of our lives.”

Palantir worked for the Pentagon and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq, where American spies and special forces used Palantir software to synthesize battlefield intelligence, evade roadside bombs, target insurgents for assassination, and track down Osama bin Laden.

Before Avril Haines, the former deputy director of the CIA, was appointed director of national intelligence in January 2021, she was paid $180,000 by Palantir as an adviser.

Palantir was deeply involved in the war in Ukraine, providing Ukraine with software systems that allowed the country to attack Russian tanks and track Russian troop movements.

After meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Palantir CEO Alex Karp told David Ignatius The Washington Post that “Palantir AI ‘won’ the war for Ukraine.”

Vance’s ties to Thiel and Palantir make it likely that he would help enhance the surveillance state and the military-industrial-intelligence complex.

Vance may want to de-escalate the conflict with Russia in Ukraine, but he is a staunch China hawk who wants to move the U.S. military to Southeast Asia to confront the Chinese, creating more opportunities for Palantir there.

Vance, who has received large-scale funding from the Republican Jewish Committee, 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.

In the bigger picture, Vance resembles Barack Obama, a sort of Manchurian candidate.

His book, Elegy of the Hillbillywhich was successfully made into a film, helped give him a public persona that was deeply misleading, much like Obama’s book My Father’s Dreams: A Story of Race and Legacy (New York: Times Books, 1995).

Obama’s book helped sell him to American voters as a symbol of multiculturalism, even though he (or his ghostwriter) lied about his family history, covered up his family’s ties to the CIA and the 1965-67 Indonesian genocide, and ridiculed the Black Power Movement and the new left movement of the 1960s.

In Vance’s case, his carefully crafted image as a working-class “hillbilly” from a dysfunctional family masks his ties to elite universities (he is a Yale Law graduate) and Silicon Valley, and his close ties to the billionaire class and warfare and surveillance states.

1. Vance appears to have first encountered Thiel at a lecture Thiel gave at Yale Law School on technological stagnation and the decline of American elites. In the lecture, Thiel argued that if technological innovation were truly driving prosperity, American elites would not increasingly compete with each other over a diminishing number of prestigious outcomes. Vance called Thiel’s lecture “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale. ↑
2. New York magazine reported that Palantir was set up to process the mountains of data collected by soldiers, spies and police – fingerprints, signals intelligence, bank records, tips from confidential informants – and enable users to discover hidden relationships, expose criminal and terrorist networks and even predict future attacks. ↑
3. Poindexter met Thiel, who asked Poindexter for ideas for Palantir’s development. ↑
4. Vance has also called for using the power of the U.S. military to take on Mexican drug cartels, a view popular on the right. ↑
5. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Endless Wars: Leading the Foreign Policy of the Permanent War State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019). ↑

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