Trump just gave Palantir the keys. Peter Thiel already had the map.

Donald Trump has given Palantir the green light to build out the infrastructure for America’s national AI database. This isn’t just a contract. It’s a transfer of power, the kind that doesn’t show up on a ballot, but changes how authority is exercised across nearly every part of government.

Palantir is Peter Thiel’s machine. Not metaphorically. It is the clearest expression of his ideology: distrust of democracy, disdain for public institutions, and a belief that smart, ruthless men should be the ones making decisions. Palantir doesn’t sell ads or connect friends. It ingests data from across government systems (criminal records, immigration files, social services, border crossings, financial behavior) and converts that information into decisions. Who is flagged. Who is watched. Who is denied. And now, it will be doing that work from the inside.

The man behind the model

Peter Thiel does not hide his beliefs. In 2009, in an essay titled The Education of a Libertarian, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He has repeated this claim in various forms over the years, rarely with shame or nuance. In his view, democracy slows things down. It gives people with no skin in the game too much power. The best world, he believes, is one ruled by an elite minority, founders, engineers, thinkers. People like him.

This philosophy wasn’t a phase. It became his strategy. Over the past fifteen years, Thiel has built a web of influence that crosses tech, finance, media, and politics. He has funded senate campaigns (J.D. Vance, Blake Masters), ideological publications (The American Mind), and a growing ecosystem of political thinkers aligned with his view that democracy has failed and needs to be replaced—not repaired, replaced.

And he has backed Curtis Yarvin.

The monarchist in the machine

Curtis Yarvin is not a household name, but he should be. He argues that America should be ruled like a corporation, with a single executive—essentially a CEO of the country—who cannot be voted out. Yarvin’s model discards checks and balances. It replaces public debate with private decision-making. His essays are long and often obscure, but the message is plain: rule by the competent few, not the chaotic many.

Thiel is not just a casual reader of Yarvin. He funds candidates and policies that reflect Yarvin’s ideals. And now, thanks to the Palantir contract, the machinery to enforce those ideals is being integrated directly into the operations of the American state.

This isn’t about theory anymore. It’s about tools. And Palantir is a tool designed for control.

From surveillance to central nervous system

Palantir began as a tool for intelligence agencies tracking insurgents, flagging patterns, connecting dots across opaque networks. Over time, it moved into domestic policing, then immigration enforcement, then public health, then fraud detection. It doesn’t enforce laws. It tells the people who do whom to target.

Palantir’s predictive policing systems have already been criticized for reinforcing racial bias. Its immigration platforms have contributed to deportation operations that function with little transparency. During COVID, its technology was used to monitor the movement of people under the language of public health. All of this happened before the federal AI deal.

Now imagine that capacity applied across every major federal agency like HUD, the IRS, the Department of Health and Human Services. Now imagine that access, insight, and influence sitting behind a black box of proprietary code.

What Palantir doesn’t sell

Palantir is often described as a data analytics company. That’s marketing. What it actually sells is judgment. Software that decides. Software that classifies. Software that allows agencies to act first and justify later.

This is where Peter Thiel’s worldview becomes not just influential, but operational. Thiel doesn’t want transparency. He doesn’t believe in democratic control. He believes in decisive, centralized power, and he now owns the tools that allow government to act that way, regardless of who wins an election.

His disdain for democracy extends beyond ballots. It reaches into every system of inclusion. Thiel has a long record of hostility toward egalitarian ideals, particularly feminism. In The Diversity Myth, a book he co-authored in 1996, he described feminism as a “disease” and argued that women’s political empowerment had diminished liberty. He has since walked back parts of that book, but the underlying worldview is visible in the networks he funds: almost exclusively male, overwhelmingly technocratic, openly skeptical of social equality.

He doesn’t just want to shape policy. He wants to decide who belongs in the room when policy is written—and who doesn’t.

Why this matters now

Palantir isn’t just building software. It’s building the operating system of the next federal government. One that may be run not by a president in the traditional sense, but by someone closer to a CEO—a position Thiel has already spent years auditioning Trump, Vance, and others for.

This is not about science fiction. It’s not about conspiracy. It’s about what happens when billionaires who reject democracy are given the power to automate its functions.

The conservative movement has stopped fighting big government. It now wants to own it. And Thiel is handing them the tools to run it like a private company—efficient, opaque, and brutal.

That future isn’t coming. It’s already been coded.

Sources & References

1. Peter Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian, Cato Unbound (2009): Link

2. Drew Harwell, Palantir’s Shadowy Role in Government, Washington Post: Link

3. Ryan Devereaux, Palantir Helped ICE Deport Thousands, The Guardian: Link

4. Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America, The New Yorker, June 2025: Link

5. The Diversity Myth, Peter Thiel & David Sacks (1996) – commentary via The Guardian: Link

6. Peter Thiel Isn’t Done Yet, The Atlantic (2023): Link