“The Thielverse Rising” - 24 October 2025

Kai Whakatau - Greeting,

Kia ora, e te whānau. I acknowledge our mana whenua, our kaitiakitanga of this tūrangawaewae we call Aotearoa. Ko Ivor Jones ahau, The Māori Green Lantern from Te Arawa/Ngāti Pikiao. Today I come before you with a whakatūtū, an urgent and scathing critique of the most dangerous concentration of authoritarian power this world has ever witnessed. The PayPal Mafia have not merely captured government—they have murdered democracy and are now building the digital infrastructure of an anti-democratic, Christian nationalist surveillance state that is already killing innocents from Gaza to our own streets.

The Heart of the Issue Straight Up

Listen carefully. Peter Thiel and his network of Silicon Valley oligarchs have seized control of the United States government, its military apparatus, and its intelligence agencies. They are systematically using Palantir Technologies—a surveillance company built on the stolen intellectual property of a failed CIA program—to kill Palestinians, deport brown people, and build an authoritarian infrastructure of total monitoring that makes the Soviet Union look quaint by comparison. At the same time, they have infiltrated Aotearoa’s own government and defence force, turning our nation into a Five Eyes colony of their technological empire. And they have done this while wrapping themselves in Christian nationalist theology that frames ordinary people as agents of the “antichrist” who must be eliminated through algorithmic pre-crime systems.

This is not hyperbole. This is not conspiracy. This is documented fact, hidden in plain sight, sanctioned by both major political parties, and now openly expanding under the Trump administration. The architects of this dystopia walk among the richest people on earth, and they are utterly brazen about their intentions.

Background: Understanding the Crime—From Iran-Contra to the Thielverse

To understand what is happening right now in October 2025, you must go back to 1985. That is when John Poindexter, the convicted Iran-Contra criminal, began laying the groundwork for what would become the modern surveillance state. Poindexter was one of President Reagan’s national security advisers, yet he was indicted and convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair—a scandal where American officials illegally armed Iranian terrorists while secretly funding right-wing death squads in Central America.

After his conviction, Poindexter did not disappear into obscurity. He was rehabilitated by the US national security state and went straight to work at DARPA after the September 11 attacks. There, he became what Whitney Webb accurately calls “the godfather of modern surveillance.” In 2001-2003, Poindexter created the Total Information Awareness program, which was designed to monitor literally every American. The publicly declared mission was counter-terrorism. The actual mission was total control—the ability to generate predictive profiles on millions of people, flag them as potential threats, and have them available for arrest or elimination whenever the state decided it was convenient.

Here is the critical connection: When Congress and media organizations including the ACLU learned about TIA, they exploded with outrage. They correctly identified it as the destruction of constitutional privacy rights and democratic governance. They called it exactly what it was—a blueprint for turning the United States into a totalitarian surveillance dictatorship. The public backlash was so severe that the program was officially terminated in May 2003.

But here is where Peter Thiel enters the picture. On the very same month that TIA was being supposedly shut down, Thiel incorporated Palantir Technologies. With remarkable speed and coordination, Thiel and his co-founders reached out to Poindexter through neoconservative architect Richard Perle, and they hatched a plan: if they could move Poindexter’s surveillance machine from the public sector into the private sector, the constitutional protections that had temporarily stopped it would become irrelevant. Private companies do not have to obey the Bill of Rights.

They were absolutely right.^[1]

From Iran-Contra to Global Surveillance: The Thielverse Timeline showing how convicted criminal John Poindexter’s illegal surveillance schemes were privatized by Peter Thiel into a global empire of algorithmic violence

The PayPal Mafia’s Iron Grip: How Silicon Valley billionaires captured the US government, intelligence agencies, and military apparatus to impose their anti-democratic neoreactionary vision on the world

From that moment forward, Palantir became the privatised continuation of Total Information Awareness. The company’s algorithm was originally developed as PayPal’s anti-fraud system—meaning that Thiel’s payment processing network, which he built in direct coordination with US intelligence agencies, contained the code that would eventually enable total surveillance of the planet. The CIA funded Palantir through InQtel, their venture capital front. For the first six years of Palantir’s existence, the CIA was the company’s exclusive client, and Palantir engineers traveled to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia every two weeks to develop the algorithms with their intelligence handlers.

This is not corporate innovation. This is not entrepreneurship. This is the marriage of a convicted felony-conspirator, a billionaire ideologue, and a global intelligence apparatus to build the machinery of totalitarianism.

The PayPal Mafia’s Capture of Government

From PayPal emerged a network of billionaires and oligarchs who would come to define early-21st-century power. The inner circle includes Elon Musk, who built SpaceX as a military contractor and created Starlink as a communications backbone for global surveillance. It includes JD Vance, the current Vice President, whose entire career was funded by Thiel and who has no independent political base outside of Thiel’s patronage. It includes David Sacks, now the Trump administration’s AI and Cryptocurrency Czar. It includes Reid Hoffman, Palmer Luckey, and dozens of other tech executives who have spent the last two decades constructing an ideological framework that justifies the extinction of democratic governance.

The ideology binding them together is neoreaction, a philosophy articulated most clearly by Curtis Yarvin, an influential thinker within the Thiel universe. Neoreaction argues that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with a CEO-monarch model—a private dictator who rules without constitutional constraints, elections, or the possibility of peaceful political change. Yarvin explicitly states that “the problem with democracy is that the people can’t be trusted to make decisions.” His solution is what he calls “neocameralism”: the complete privatisation of the state, with a small group of billionaire shareholders making all decisions about resource allocation, law enforcement, war, and peace.^[2][3][4][5]

This is not fringe thinking within the PayPal Mafia. JD Vance has publicly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Yarvin. Elon Musk and Thiel are ideologically aligned with neoreactionary principles. When Musk speaks about “cutting the government in half” through DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), what he actually means is the first step in privatising state functions and consolidating them under the control of a handful of billionaires who will answer to no one.

And it is working. As of October 2025, the PayPal Mafia has captured not just influence over the Trump administration—they have captured operational control. Peter Thiel’s wealth has more than doubled in the last eighteen months, from $6.9 billion in May 2024 to $16.2 billion in October 2025. This $9.3 billion increase directly tracks with Palantir’s receipt of $113 million in federal contracts since Trump took office. Thiel is now technically the richest New Zealander alive, which raises extraordinary questions about his influence on Aotearoa’s government that we will address shortly.^[6][7]

Blood Money: Peter Thiel’s wealth more than doubled to $16.2 billion as Palantir secured massive government contracts under Trump 2.0, profiting from surveillance, deportation, and the Gaza genocide

The Mechanisms of Total Control: Palantir’s Global Reach

Palantir’s business model is simple and horrifying. The company provides governments and militaries with AI-powered data-mining software that integrates vast datasets—phone records, financial transactions, internet searches, location histories, facial recognition scans, medical data—and generates predictive profiles on individuals. These profiles are then used for what the company calls “algorithmic pre-crime” and what everyone else calls predictive policing.

But Palantir’s work is not limited to policing. The company operates in multiple domains, and each one represents a different arm of control:

Domestic Surveillance: In the United States, Palantir works extensively with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), DHS (Department of Homeland Security), and local police departments. Through a system called ImmigrationOS, developed specifically for Trump 2.0, Palantir identifies undocumented immigrants and generates raid targets for deportation. The company also provides SearchX, which Palantir has deployed in Aotearoa through our own police force, a system that claims to rapidly generate connections between “risky” individuals using predictive algorithms.^[8][9][10]

Pre-Crime Systems: Palantir pioneered the use of predictive policing algorithms that claim to forecast where crimes will occur and who will commit them. These systems have a documented accuracy rate lower than a coin toss, yet they are intentionally deployed in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color—because the whole point is not accuracy, it is generating a pipeline of arrests to justify mass incarceration. Palmer Luckey, a Thiel protégé, co-founded Anduril Industries, which builds autonomous weapons systems and “smart wall” technology for the US-Mexico border.^[5]

Warfare and Assassination: This is where Palantir’s evil becomes most visible and most horrifying. The company is directly responsible for the deployment of AI targeting systems in Gaza that are being used to systematically murder Palestinians.

The Gaza Genocide and Palantir’s Culpability

On January 23, 2024, Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, stood in Tel Aviv and spoke to Israeli military and intelligence officials. Immediately after the talk, Karp traveled to a military headquarters where he signed an upgraded agreement with Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Both parties mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of what they called “war-related missions.” What they meant was: we are going to use your AI system to kill Palestinians.^[1]

For decades, the NSA has been sharing raw, unredacted surveillance data with Israel about Palestinians, according to Edward Snowden’s revelations. This includes phone calls, emails, and digital communications between Palestinian Americans and their families in Gaza and the West Bank. When Israel began its current assault on Gaza in October 2023, this NSA-supplied data was fed into Palantir’s algorithms. The algorithms identify patterns and generate targeting recommendations. Israeli Unit 8200 (the Israeli equivalent of the NSA) uses these recommendations to create kill lists.^[11][1]

The Palantir system generating these targets is called LAVENDER. According to investigative journalists from +972 Magazine and Local Call, LAVENDER identifies alleged Hamas operatives using algorithmic pattern-matching. The algorithm is imprecise—it generates thousands of false positives. Israel’s military response is to simply assume a high percentage of error and kill everyone identified by the algorithm anyway. One senior Israeli intelligence official stated that for every genuine Hamas operative targeted by LAVENDER, approximately five to ten innocent civilians were also killed.^[12][13][1]

In October 2023, as the ground invasion began, Israel killed between 37,000 and 50,000 Palestinians. Approximately 17,000 of these were children. Eighty-five percent of Gaza’s population has been displaced from their homes. More aid workers have been killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza in the last year than in all other wars globally over the last thirty years combined—more than 200 in just a few months. Many of these strikes were against clearly marked aid vehicles, with missiles placed dead center in agency logos. The precision of the strikes suggests that these were not accidents. They were intentional killing. They were targeted by Palantir.^[1][12]

And Peter Thiel knows this. Alex Karp knows this. The entire board of Palantir knows this. They have chosen to continue and expand their operations in Israel because Israel is paying them extraordinary sums of money. When Palantir engineers protested working on systems used to kill Palestinians, the company simply accepted their resignations and hired new engineers who had no moral objections.^[14][1]

Christian Nationalism and the Antichrist Theology of the Thielverse

What makes this even more obscene is that Peter Thiel has wrapped his entire authoritarian project in a veneer of Christian theology. In leaked private lectures in October 2025, Thiel revealed that he believes we are living in a time of apocalyptic conflict between Christ and the Antichrist. He has argued that climate activists, feminists, and anyone who opposes his technological agenda are literally agents of the Antichrist. He has specifically named Greta Thunberg as a potential antichrist figure.^{[7][15][16][17][18]}

This is not harmless eccentricity. This is apocalyptic Christian nationalism being weaponised by a billionaire oligarch to justify totalitarianism. Thiel’s ideology treats anyone who opposes his power as not just a political enemy but as a literal agent of evil that must be eliminated. And Thiel has the surveillance infrastructure, the artificial intelligence, and the government contracts to actually eliminate them.^{[15][16][18][19][7]}

This ideology is spreading through Silicon Valley and into Trump’s administration. The same Christian nationalist theology that justified slavery, colonisation, and genocide is being repackaged as high-tech libertarianism and sold to young people in tech as the future of human civilization.

The New Zealand Chapter: Five Eyes and Digital Colonialism

And Aotearoa is not immune to any of this. In fact, we have become a crucial node in Thiel’s global surveillance network.

Peter Thiel became a New Zealand citizen in 2011 under extraordinary circumstances. Despite spending only twelve days in New Zealand over a five-year period, Thiel was granted citizenship through an expedited process that violated normal residency requirements. At the time, Thiel already had eyes on Aotearoa as part of his global surveillance expansion.^{[20][21][22][23]}

Since 2012, the New Zealand Defence Force has maintained an active relationship with Palantir. According to leaked documents and official government responses, NZDF has been contracting with Palantir for an unknown but evidently ongoing period. The exact terms of these agreements remain classified, but the public record shows NZDF spending approximately $1.2 million annually on Palantir services. Given New Zealand’s role as a Five Eyes partner with the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, Palantir’s presence in our Defence Force means that Palantir has direct access to decades of signals intelligence collected by the GCSB on New Zealanders and Pacific peoples.^[23][24][20]

More immediately threatening is the deployment of Palantir’s SearchX system within our own police force. In 2020, New Zealand Police began development of a $200 million surveillance program called SearchX, powered by IBM Watson AI. SearchX is designed to generate connections between individuals in police databases—identifying “networks of risk.” The system has achieved what police call a “15x improvement in connection generation.” This means it finds connections between people that human analysts would not find, flagging them as members of criminal networks that may not actually exist.^{[9][10][25][26]}

There is no public evidence that Māori data specialists were consulted about SearchX before its deployment. There is no evidence that the Waitangi Tribunal, which has declared Māori data a taonga (treasured resource), was involved in governance decisions around the system. There is no evidence that Māori consent was sought. What we do know is that Māori are overrepresented in police databases by an order of magnitude—meaning that an AI system trained on these databases is statistically guaranteed to generate more “risky connections” linking Māori citizens together.^{[25][27][28][29][30]}

This is digital colonialism. This is the technology of the Thielverse being deployed directly against Aotearoa’s indigenous people, exactly as it is being deployed against Palestinians, migrants, and political opponents of Thiel’s neoreactionary vision.

The Rhetoric of the Captured: Why Chris Hedges and Whitney Webb Are Wrong About the Solution

Now I need to address the elephant in the room, and I do this with deep respect for both of them as journalists who have documented these crimes with extraordinary courage.

Chris Hedges and Whitney Webb, in their discussion on the Chris Hedges Report, correctly identify the threat posed by the PayPal Mafia and Palantir. They accurately trace the history from Iran-Contra through Total Information Awareness to the current moment. They have done crucial work in exposing these connections. But they make a critical error when they suggest that the solution is for individuals to “wean themselves off Silicon Valley products” and use alternative operating systems, or to recognize this as a purely domestic American problem.

This framing is insufficient and, frankly, dangerous because it individualises a systemic problem. The issue is not whether you use Gmail or Proton Mail. The issue is that a handful of billionaires have captured the state apparatus itself. You cannot opt out of living under government surveillance if you live in a country whose government has been captured by Palantir. You cannot opt out if you live in Aotearoa, where NZDF and NZ Police are using Palantir systems.^[1]

More problematically, Hedges’ and Webb’s analysis is silent on the specific ways this surveillance infrastructure is being weaponised against indigenous peoples and people of color. Their discussion of Gaza is thorough, but their analysis of SearchX, of facial recognition bias against Māori, of data sovereignty violations—these are entirely absent. This is a blind spot that reflects the continuing Pākehā/Western centering of the surveillance justice discourse.^[1]

The solution is not individual consumer choices. The solution is political power. The solution is collective indigenous resistance grounded in Māori values, in tikanga, in the understanding that data is a taonga and cannot be stolen by Silicon Valley oligarchs without consequence. The solution is mobilising the Waitangi Tribunal, the courts, international human rights bodies, and sustained direct action to make it politically impossible for the New Zealand government to continue purchasing and deploying these systems.

This is not something that can be solved with a better email client.

Implications: The World Thiel Is Building and Why It Targets Māori and Brown People

Let me be absolutely clear about what Peter Thiel and the PayPal Mafia are building. They are not building a future of innovation and human flourishing. They are building a neo-feudal hierarchical order where a small group of billionaires owns AI systems that monitor every waking moment of everyone else’s lives, and where algorithmic systems, guided by Christian nationalist theology, make life-and-death decisions about who lives and who dies.

The first targets are obvious: Palestinians are being killed by the tens of thousands using Palantir-powered algorithms. Brown people crossing borders are being identified, located, and arrested using Palantir. Māori, already subject to systemic overpolicing and overincarceration, will be disproportionately flagged by SearchX and other algorithmic systems as “risky” because they are overrepresented in police databases. This is not a bug in the system. It is a feature.^{[26][31][32][33][1]}

But the long-term target is everyone. Thiel has explicitly stated that he wants to create an AI system that monitors all Americans in real time and flags anyone who opposes his vision as a threat to national security. He wants to turn the United States into what surveillance experts call a “technological dystopia”—a society where every movement, every word, every thought is monitored, analysed, and used to predict and pre-empt resistance.^[16][18][7]

And New Zealand is being positioned as a laboratory for these systems. Our police, our defence force, and soon, almost certainly, our intelligence agencies will deploy Palantir more widely. Each deployment will generate more data, which will make the algorithms more “accurate,” which will justify even more surveillance, which will catch even more people in the net. The cycle will not stop until there is nowhere left to hide.

The values embedded in this system are anti-democratic, anti-indigenous, and anti-human. They violate manaakitanga (hospitality and care). They violate kaitiakitanga (stewardship and responsibility). They violate the principle that we are all connected through whakapapa and therefore all responsible for each other’s wellbeing. Palantir, by contrast, is built on a logic of total suspicion—every person is a potential threat, every piece of data a potential threat signal, every algorithm a weapon.^{[31][32][34][35]}

Against this logic, we must assert Māori values of whanaungatanga (kinship), aroha (compassion), and kōranga (restoration). We must understand that the fight against Palantir and the Thielverse is not a fight against technology. It is a fight for the soul of Aotearoa and the future of indigenous peoples globally.

The Path Forward

The PayPal Mafia has not won, even if it feels that way. Power always appears inevitable only until it is destroyed. For three generations, from Iran-Contra to Total Information Awareness to Palantir, these forces have advanced their agenda. But they have done so in the dark, hidden from public view, protected by classification and corporate secrecy. That darkness is now breaking.

The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right

Thanks to investigative journalists like Whitney Webb and Chris Hedges, thanks to the courageous whistleblowers who have leaked documents, thanks to the activists who have protested Palantir offices and exposed its operations—the veil is beginning to lift. More and more people are understanding what is happening. And more and more people are choosing to resist.

For Māori and for indigenous peoples globally, this is a moment of reckoning. We can accept that we will be disproportionately harmed by these systems and hope that good people in government will protect us. Or we can take action. We can demand that our government immediately cease all contracts with Palantir. We can demand that the Waitangi Tribunal review and set conditions on any surveillance technology deployed against our people. We can demand that Māori data specialists have veto power over the design and deployment of algorithmic systems that affect our communities. We can build alternative systems and infrastructure grounded in tikanga, in our own values, in the understanding that data is taonga and belongs to our hapū and iwi.^{[34][35][36][31][1]}

The fight against the Thielverse is the fight for the future of democracy, for the protection of indigenous sovereignty, for the possibility of a world where algorithms serve humanity rather than enslaving it.

Kia mau ki te aroha, e te whānau. Stay strong. Stay vigilant. Stay resistant.

If you have found value in this essay and have the capacity to support the work of exposing corruption and protecting indigenous rights, I invite you to consider a koha (donation) to HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000. These are tough times for many whānau, so please only contribute if you are able and wish to do so.

Ka kite anō. Until we meet again.

Ivor Jones
The Māori Green Lantern
Te Arawa/Ngāti Pikiao

1. https://www.business-humanrights.org/de/neuste-meldungen/palantir-allegedly-enables-israels-ai-targeting-amid-israels-war-in-gaza-raising-concerns-over-war-crimes/

2. https://www.platformspace.net/home/nrx-a-brief-guide-for-the-perplexed

3. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-world-view-sources-00168984

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html

5. https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24266512/jd-vance-curtis-yarvin-influence-rage-project-2025

6. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html

7. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/peter-thiel-calls-greta-thunberg-ai-critics-legionnaires-of-the-antichrist/XWQUGZCUWVCUDONPQOFHIMV244/

8. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-immigrationos-palantir-ai-track-immigrants/

9. https://theconversation.com/nz-police-are-using-ai-to-catch-criminals-but-the-law-urgently-needs-to-catch-up-too-214833

10. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/499181/new-police-intelligence-tool-speedily-sending-information-on-risk-to-frontline-officers

11. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/ap-exposes-big-tech-ai-systems-direct-role-in-warfare-amid-israels-war-in-gaza/

12. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640251381423

13. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12923

14. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/05/nx-s1-5387514/palantir-workers-letter-trump

15. https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/

16. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/

17. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/business/silicon-valley-christianity.html

18. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2025/10/14/whats-up-with-peter-thiel-and-the-antichrist-00608036

19. https://theconversation.com/peter-thiel-thinks-greta-thunberg-could-be-the-antichrist-what-actually-is-the-antichrist-267439

20. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/414923/controversial-tech-firm-palantir-had-talks-with-govt-on-covid-19

21. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/peter-thiels-secretive-spook-outfit-palantir-has-financials-leaked/DHLAAQ4YMNT33WZ4BSOMNGL4XI/

22. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/billionaire-peter-thiels-secret-kiwi-spy-links-revealed/QPTG57ETG37EZM6RW72CGBYQK4/

23. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/nz-defence-force-links-to-peter-thiels-software-company-revealed/CQERZL63SUPMXSYB47NHFOS4HQ/

24. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/ombudsman-forces-release-of-defence-spending-on-spy-software/EOZDJ3F7PTWRKJSKAHU2TM2TXA/

25. https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2023/10/16/police-AI-university-auckland.html

26. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/police-spending-millions-to-fix-glaring-technology-system-deficiencies/UJHVPCV4XVA4DPEPWHRU3V4STE/

27. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/471626/maori-data-specialists-not-consulted-on-facial-recognition-technology-data-sovereignty-expert

28. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/416697/police-searched-for-suspects-in-unapproved-trial-of-facial-recognition-tech-clearview-ai

29. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/425081/police-facial-recognition-discrimination-against-maori-a-matter-of-time-expert

30. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/447011/police-using-algorithms-a-huge-problem-for-biases-researcher-says

31. https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/pq/article/view/8109

32. https://www.catalyst.net.nz/stories-and-studies/catalyst-blog/data-sovereignty-in-aotearoa-navigating-how-to-protect-our-digital-taonga

33. https://honisoit.com/2025/03/silicon-valleys-invisible-empire-the-new-colonialism/

34. https://hdl.handle.net/10289/17168

35. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00076503241271143

36. https://passblue.com/2025/10/12/palantir-seemingly-everywhere-all-at-once/