The Billionaire Technocrat Behind Trump’s VP Pick: It’s Worse Than You Think

by Whitney Webb | Unlimited Hangout

After the recent revelation that Donald Trump had selected J.D. Vance as his Vice President, public attention not only turned toward Vance, but also to the billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance has been one of several prominent Thiel protégés whose profile has risen in recent years, with other protégés of the PayPal co-founder including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey.

Recent reports have also noted that Thiel first recruited Vance into his circle while Vance was still a student at Yale Law School. Shortly thereafter, Vance joined Thiel’s investment firm Mithril Capital, where he worked for two years before joining Revolution Ventures. Vance played a major role in Revolution’s “Rise of the Rest” seed fund whose major investors included Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and the Walton family of WalMart, who boast long-standing deep ties to the Clinton family. Vance later launched his own venture capital firm Narya Capital in 2020, which was heavily funded by Thiel as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt, a major Democrat donor, has been the guiding hand behind the Biden administration’s science and technology policy and has dominated the development of the AI policies of the US military and intelligence communities, largely through his leadership of the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI). As Unlimited Hangoutpreviously reported, the Schmidt-led NSCAI promoted policies like the end of private car ownership and in-person shopping in the United States to advance Americans’ adoption of AI as supposed national security imperative in the lead-up to the Covid-era lockdowns.Both Schmidt and Thiel are key members of the steering committee of the controversial, closed-door and overtly globalist Bilderberg conference. Newsweek once called Schmidt and Thiel the two most influential figures at Bilderberg.

Thiel has donated heavily to Vance’s political career, giving $15 million to Vance’s successful Senate bid in the 2022 election cycle in what was then the largest donation ever given to one Senate candidate. Thiel also joined Vance, a former “Never Trumper,” on a visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago where Vance successfully won the former president’s blessing. Thiel also connected Vance to other members of the so-called PayPal mafia, like David Sacks who donated $1 million to Vance and hosted a fundraiser for him. Sacks, along with PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, were allegedly a key factor in Trump’s selection of Vance as Vice President as they ran “a secret lobbying campaign” for Vance that also included media presenter Tucker Carlson.

Thiel had been a major donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and served on Trump’s transition team, with other Thiel-linked figures like Trae Stephens dramatically influencing Trump’s Pentagon appointments. Stephens’ influence at the Trump Pentagon also helped develop the military’s relationship with the Thiel-funded company Anduril, which was co-founded by Stephens and Thiel fellow Palmer Luckey. Before Anduril, Luckey develop the Virual Reality system Oculus Rift, which was later sold to Facebook, where Thiel then served on the board. Anduril is now building a “virtual border wall” for the federal government and Trump, who long campaigned on building a physical barrier on the US-Mexico border, abandoned that promise during his first term and now supports the exact solution Anduril is selling.

Anduril’s unmanned drones have also come to play a major role in Ukrainian military operations during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as have other controversial Thiel-funded companies like Palantir (a CIA contractor) and ClearView AI, which used mainly photos posted on Facebook (another Thiel-backed company) to develop its Orwellian facial recognition database. These companies’ close ties to the Ukrainian military may impact a second Trump administration’s policies as it relates to American support for Ukraine, particularly if Thiel is slated to hold significant influence. Beyond Ukraine, this network of Thiel-funded defense companies are remaking the face of warfare and slowly but surely replacing human decision-making with AI.

While these ties should be unsettling on their own, the potential influence of Thiel on the upcoming Trump administration should concern every American, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, due to Thiel’s efforts to rehabilitate and remake some of the intelligence communities’ most Orwellian and unconstitutional efforts to target domestic dissent.

Thiel Information Awareness

While Peter Thiel has long marketed himself as a libertarian, his track record from PayPal on has revealed him to instead be an architect of the modern surveillance state and a successor to the neoconservative cabal that had once tried (but failed) to do the same. During PayPal’s earliest days, Thiel and his colleagues went around to various government agencies, including intelligence agencies, to see how they could best tailor their product to win government support (and contracts) for their products and services. After leaving PayPal, Thiel would follow a similar path in creating another company, Palantir. Palantir is the engine on which the surveillance state runs and, soon after Vance was announced as Trump’s Vice President, it was reported that Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale as well as Palantir itself were backing a Trump-Vance super PAC called America PAC. Read Full Article >