Buying Politicians is Easy
Buying Politicians is Easy
The Strange Story of Peter Thiel – Part Two
by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
October 27, 2024
Last week, in "The Strange Story of Peter Thiel," I examined Thiel's history, from his upbringing in a globe-trotting family to his years at Stanford to the formation of the "Thielverse" to the creation of Palantir.
As you'll recall from that exploration, by the time disgraced Admiral John Poindexter introduced Thiel (and his creepy Big Brother / Big Data surveillance company, Palantir Technologies) to the US intelligence community, Thiel was a full-fledged deep state actor, amassing power and influence in line with his billions of dollars of wealth.
But as incredible as that meteoric rise to riches and power was, it's only the very beginning of a decades-long journey through citizenship shopping and shadow presidencies and war profiteering.
This is the continuation of The Strange Story of Peter Thiel.
Citizen Thiel
In the late 2000s, after achieving such extraordinary success with PayPal and Palantir, and after betting on Facebook and ending up with yet more billions of dollars, and after assembling the cadre of trusted lieutenants who would go on to populate the Thielverse and ensure his control over Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel was faced with a question. Namely, once you've set up multiple multi-billion-dollar corporations, invested in several other multi-billion-dollar corporations and joined forces with the deep state by crafting a surveillance and tracking tool that DARPA and its alphabet soup buddies have been lusting after, what do you actually do with your power and wealth?
Or, in other words: what does the man who already has everything actually buy?
One answer: he buys New Zealand citizenship (illegally, of course)!
That's right, in 2017 the New Zealand Herald broke a remarkable story: through a highly dubious process, the German-born Silicon Valley investor had been secretly granted citizenship in New Zealand despite not meeting the country's basic requirements for citizenship. The Herald investigation showed that Thiel had been granted an investor visa by the New Zealand government in 2006 and had then bought his way into citizenship by creating a venture capital fund, Valar Ventures, to invest in local companies. Shortly after making a high-profile $1 million donation to the Christchurch earthquake relief fund and agreeing to invest in a government-backed venture capital fund, Thiel was granted citizenship in 2011, a fact that remained concealed from the New Zealand public for six years.
Thiel's citizenship was technically illegal. New Zealand law requires that a citizenship applicant spend at least 1,350 days in the country over a five-year period before being eligible. So, how many days had Thiel spent in New Zealand over that time? Twelve. It later came out that Thiel's application had been granted under an "exceptional circumstances" loophole that has never been used before or since and that Thiel's exception had only been made after he personally met with the Prime Minister and high-ranking government officials.
New Zealanders were understandably upset that this billionaire had so blatantly broken the law by bribing their politicians. But they were even more upset by what Thiel did with his newfound naturalization: absolutely nothing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the man who spent a grand total of twelve days in the country before gaining citizen status has hardly set foot in it since. Valar Ventures made one investment in NZ after Thiel was granted his citizenship, and the billionaire also invoked a buyout clause to bow out of his investment in the kiwi government's separate VC fund.
So, given that Thiel has scarcely seen the country since buying his way in, why did he become a citizen in the first place?
According to Matt Nippert, the Herald reporter who broke the story of Thiel's New Zealand venture, "It was a hedge." During Obama's administration, Thiel had been worried that a change in US tax policy would strip him of his billions in tax-free investment riches and he had seen a potential safe harbour for his ill-gotten gains in New Zealand and a potential political ally in then-New Zealand Prime Minister John Key. But when Trump took the Oval Office in 2016 and Jacinda Ardern's Labour Party came to power in New Zealand in 2017, the hedge became unnecessary. Then, when the local government blocked the development of Thiel's $13.5 million "doomsday home" on his 477-acre mega-estate overlooking Lake Wānaka on New Zealand’s South Island, he had no incentive to return.
In effect, as the Herald put it, citizen Thiel "ghosted" the country.
Still, Thiel's New Zealand hedge wasn't a total write-off. He did manage to secure contracts for Palantir with the New Zealand Defence Force, the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications and Security Bureau before cutting ties with his new country of citizenship.
Buying Politicians is Easy
So, other than acquiring illegal citizenship in a foreign nation, what else does the man who has everything buy for himself?
Why, he buys politicians, of course!
Yes, after successfully cashing out from PayPal and hitting the Facebook investment jackpot and embedding his surveillance company in the heart of the US intelligence establishment, Thiel dove headfirst into American politics in an attempt to translate his paper wealth into real-world political capital. And he started, as any self-proclaimed "libertarian" would, by latching on to whatever libertarian firebrand was capturing the public imagination at the moment. In the late 2000s, that firebrand just happened to be Ron Paul.
Thiel dipped his toe into the waters of presidential politics with a $2,300 donation to Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign—his first contribution to any presidential candidate.
It was in the next (s)election cycle, however, that Thiel began to get serious about playing politics. In December 2011—as Paul started to poll competitively ahead of the all-important Iowa caucus—Thiel decided he would jump in front of the Ron Paul parade and pretend to start leading it. He donated $50,000 to the Paul-supporting Revolution PAC on December 12, 2011, and then threw another $85,000 into the purse four days later. Behind the scenes, his contributions were even more substantive. He had begun quietly funding Endorse Liberty, another Paul-boosting "Super PAC," to the tune of $2.6 million.
Thiel's patronage of Paul was unusual in every way. Although by US law independent expenditure-only political action committees (or "Super PACs") are required to avoid coordination with the campaign of the candidate they're supporting, in reality they are almost always led by people connected to the candidate. This ensures that the PAC and the campaign will be able to work toward the same vision without running afoul of any campaign laws. But there was no such wink-and-nod collusion between Endorse Liberty and the Ron Paul campaign. Rather, Paul campaign manager Jesse Benton was as mystified as everyone else about Thiel's support, noting that he had only learned about it through the press and insisting the campaign couldn't see "how any money they [Endorse Liberty] spent has done anything effective" for Paul.
Max Chafkin, Thiel biographer and author of the 2021 book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, concludes that Thiel's backing of Paul was never about Paul anyway.
Thiel didn't really care about helping Ron Paul get the Republican nomination. He'd found a relatively inexpensive way to try to syphon off Paul's movement, with the ultimate goal of incorporating it into his own. Speaking to young activists at the Students for Liberty conference in late February, Thiel didn't even mention Paul.
As Thiel later admitted to Slate journalists, his political support wasn't even about trying to get Paul elected. Instead, "[t]he campaign really is for 2016. I think we’re just trying to build a libertarian base for the next cycle."
After Paul's loss, Thiel turned his efforts to steering the Republican Party in his direction, donating $1 million to an action fund to help Ted Cruz get elected to the US Senate. With Thiel's help, Cruz—a "little-known former state solicitor general"—won the Texas Senate Republican primary in a 14-point landslide that The Washington Post called "The biggest upset of 2012."
In the 2016 presidential (s)election contest, Thiel pinned his hopes on Trump—a man who, just two years before, he had dismissed as "sort of symptomatic of everything that is wrong with New York City." Once again, Thiel's support of a presidential candidate mystified the Beltway pundits—when Thiel came out as a Trump supporter, Bloomberg's crack journalists waffled that the billionaire investor's politics are "weird" and he just "loves disruption."
Thiel would end up coming in clutch for Trump in 2016, delivering a much-discussed speech at the July Republican National Convention where Trump was nominated. In that speech, Thiel declared "I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I'm proud to be an American." ("You were terrific! We're friends for life," Trump gushed afterwards.)
And so, when the Trump campaign nearly derailed in October over the "grab her by the pussy" audio leak, there was Thiel to make an additional $1.25 million donation to his campaign. In a speech at the National Press Club shortly after news of his donation became public, Thiel conceded that Trump's remarks had been "clearly offensive and inappropriate" but that he and millions of other Americans were "voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed."
Unlike his 2012 bet on Ron Paul, Thiel's 2016 bet on Trump paid off handsomely. "Once Election Day came and went," a senior Trump staffer told Politico, "Peter Thiel was a major force in the transition." He moved into Trump Tower with a team of four to six aides to work on staffing agencies across the Trump White House, and his employees took to calling him the "shadow president."
Naturally, Thiel used this opportunity to embed his business interests even further into the bowels of the deep state. Michael Kratsios, Thiel's chief-of-staff at Thiel Capital, became Trump's deputy chief technology officer and, later, the "acting Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering." Thiel also helped install various "former" Palantir staffers and consultants in the Pentagon, including Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' chief-of-staff, Anthony DeMartino, and Mattis' senior advisor, Sally Donnelly.
Then, after Trump's ouster in the 2020 (s)election, Thiel sought to position himself for the rise of the next iteration of MAGA in 2024. For one thing, he backed Harriet Hageman, the Trump-endorsed Wyoming congressional candidate who unseated Liz Cheney in that state's 2022 Republican primary. For another, he contributed over $20 million to the campaigns of various candidates running against those he called "the traitorous 10"—ten prominent Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the January 6th riots. And, most important of all, he reached into the Thielverse to pluck out J. D. Vance, an obscure former worker at Mithril Capital (one of Thiel's venture capital firms) who was at the time best known for penning Hillbilly Elegy about his upbringing in the rural American Midwest.
When Vance left Mithril (another Thielversian reference to Lord of the Rings lore) to set up his own Ohio-based venture capital firm, Narya Capital (yet another reference to Lord of the Rings lore), there was Thiel to invest in the fledgling company. And in the spring of 2021, even before Vance had officially announced his intention to run for US Senate, there was Thiel to pump $10 million into Vance's "Protect Ohio Values PAC"—his largest-ever political donation. Needless to say, when Trump endorsed Vance weeks before the May 2022 primary, there was Thiel yet again with another $5 million to get his chosen candidate across the finish line.
After having successfully bought a US Senator, Thiel did not rest on his laurels. He got to work effecting a rapprochement between Vance—who had previously said he "never liked" Trump, couldn't stomach him and would never vote for him—and Trump himself. It was Thiel who arranged the first meeting between the two at Mar-A-Lago in 2021.
And now here we are in 2024, with Thiel set to win big on (s)election day—if the voting machines decide to opt for Trump. This time, Thiel's "shadow presidency" will be more than just an office in Trump Tower during the transition. It will be an office in the White House through his bought-and-paid minion, Vice President Vance. And that minion will be one heartbeat away from the Oval Office itself.
So, what will Thiel do with that bought-and-paid-for political power? . . .
War is a Racket
. . . Why, make more blood money, of course!
Yes, we do not have to go out on a limb to guess that—in the event Thiel's mini-me, J. D. Vance, worms his way into the next administration—he will do exactly what he did in 2016: place his minions in positions of power and influence in the Department of Defense so he can plunge Palantir's blood funnel directly into the veins of the military-industrial complex.
Looking back, we can see that Thiel's term as "shadow president" during the 2016 Trump presidential transition paid off handsomely for his business interests. After successfully suing the US Army over the bidding process for contracts related to the development of its $6 billion "Distributed Common Ground System"—a weapons system that collects, processes, exploits and disseminates data from drones and other electronic sources—Thiel managed (as noted above) to embed former Palantir staffers and consultants like Anthony DeMartino and Sally Donnelly in key positions in the Defense Secretary's office. Then, lo and behold, Palantir coincidentally won an $800 million contract—the largest single contract in company history—to provide "a comprehensive combat intelligence hardware and software suite for the US Army." Imagine that!
Of course, it doesn't actually matter if the Thielverse-funded deep state puppet known as "Donald Trump" wins in November or the Gates/Soros-funded deep state puppet known as "Kamala Harris" wins. Like any consummate investor, Thiel is hedged against any eventuality. One example of such a hedge: Biden's Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, is, it turns out, not only a drone-killer and torture-cover-upper but a former Palantir advisor—an affiliation that was scrubbed from her biography as soon as it became public knowledge.
But when it comes to cashing in on military shenanigans, there's nothing like actual warfare, and Palantir is no stranger to that, either. From the very inception of the Ukraine war in 2022, Palantir has been right there at the front line, bravely volunteering to help the Ukraine government wage its NATO-backed war . . . for a steep price, of course. Palantir CEO Alex Karp became the first Western corporate leader to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after Russia's invasion, crossing into the country on foot over the Polish border in June of 2022 to make a personal proposal to Zelensky: "to open an office in Kyiv and deploy Palantir’s data and artificial-intelligence software to support Ukraine’s defense."
The move paid off. Since that fateful meeting, the Ukrainian government has engaged with Palantir to:
provide targeting systems to Ukraine's military;
demine the country;
and assist Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation (yes, that's a real government ministry) in "supporting and coordinating a digitally-led reconstruction of Ukraine," including "consolidating the efforts in the field of digitalization, digital innovations and integration of Ukraine into the international market."
Amazingly, Palantir isn't even the only Thielverse company to be profiting from the carnage in Ukraine. As Stavroula Pabst has carefully documented in a detailed report at Unlimited Hangout, Clearview AI (the creepy facial recognition company whose first major financial backer was Peter Thiel and who likes to brag about how the US government used its tech to help identify January 6th protesters) and Anduril (founded by Thielverse minion Palmer Luckey and backed by Thiel's Founders Fund) also have their snoots in the Ukraine blood money trough.
But for sheer return on investment, the most lucrative battlefield at the moment is the killing fields in Gaza, where—it should be no surprise to learn—Thiel and his companies are hard at work supplying the Israeli government with high-tech ways to genocide the Palestinians.
First, in November of last year, Palantir issued a letter to shareholders that stressed the company's support for Israel's quest to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. "We are one of a few companies in the world to stand up and announce our support for Israel, which remains steadfast," CEO Alex Karp wrote in the letter. "Palantir stands with Israel."
Then in January of this year, Palantir announced that it had signed a "strategic partnership" with the Israeli Defense Ministry to supply technology to help murder women and children. It even held a board meeting in Tel Aviv to show its solidarity with Israel.
When cornered at the Cambridge Student Union in May on the question of Palantir's collaboration with the war criminals in the Israeli military, Thiel gave the type of bumbling, stumbling, evasive non-response that is characteristic of his anti-charismatic persona (emphasis added):
Look again . . . I'm not . . . I'm not . . . you know, you know . . . with . . . without, without going into all the . . . you know I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel. It's not for us to to second-guess every, everything. And I believe that broadly the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they're broadly in the right and that's, that's sort of the perspective I come back to. And if I, if I fall into the trap of arguing you on every detailed point, I'm actually going to, I would actually be conceding the broader issue that the Middle East should be micromanaged from Cambridge. And I think that's just simply absurd. And so I'm not, I'm not going to concede that point.
In other words: "war is (you know) good for business and business is (you know, you know) booming in Gaza, so don't ask me about it!"
Of course, such a position does have its drawbacks. Karp admitted that some of Palantir's staffers were quitting over the company's support for Israel, and one of Norway's largest investors, Storebrand Asset Management, announced earlier this month that it had "excluded Palantir Technologies Inc. from our investments due (to) its sales of products and services to Israel for use in occupied Palestinian territories."
Still, while such moves are a hopeful sign that Thiel and Palantir are receiving pushback for their genocide-supporting activities, it's not enough to actually derail the company or dissuade Thiel from "deferring to Israel" when it suits his business interests to do so. Palantir's stock price has tripled since the beginning of the year.
TO BE CONCLUDED . . .
So far in this examination of the Strange Story of Peter Thiel, I've documented:
Thiel's rise to prominence through his founding investments in multiple multi-billion-dollar companies of interest to the US intelligence complex;
his formation of a network of business contacts who collectively control much of Silicon Valley;
his illegal and secretive purchase of citizenship in New Zealand;
his attempt to use large donations to puppeteer politicians from behind the scenes (including a stint as Trump's "shadow president");
and his willingness to profit from war and bloodshed by forging alliances with US military powers around the world.
Where does this leave us in our exploration of Peter Thiel's ignoble career?
To the extent that we are interested in learning who Peter Thiel truly is—as opposed to what his self-sponsored PR and establishment media think pieces tell us he is—it doesn't get us that much closer at all.
In next week's conclusion to this series, I will drill down on the core of Peter Thiel and the power that he wields over our society.
I will explore his current role in the broader globalist deep state.
I will drill down on his ideology and what motivates his decisions.
And I will answer the age-old question: is Peter Thiel a vampire?
Stay tuned!
Like this type of essay? Then you’ll love The Corbett Report Subscriber newsletter, which contains my weekly editorial as well as recommended reading, viewing and listening. If you’re a Corbett Report member, you can sign in to corbettreport.com and read the newsletter today.
Not a member yet? Sign up today to access the newsletter and support this work.