How to Purge Palantir

On April 18, government surveillance giant Palantir Technologies published a fascist manifesto on X. In response, I pointed out the screed's flagrant fascism.

Among other things, it called for Silicon Valley elites to become a militant arm of the state and suggested imposing a system of compulsory military service.

Two days later, on April 20, I received notice that my X account has been permanently suspended. It was the most fascist response possible to a criticism of fascism—and on Hitler's birthday, no less. Soon, I will have more to say about Palantir's fascist manifesto, which summarized the main points of The Technological Republic, a recent book by Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

Coincidentally, today's episode of the Nerd Reich podcast focuses on Purge Palantir, a campaign to raise awareness of the need to get Palantir out of our government and our lives. Purge Palantir is working with organizers across the country to put a spotlight on the company and its abuses—and anyone can join.

I interview Jacinta Gonzalez and João Paulo Connolly, two organizers at the forefront of the struggle. They explain the reason for their campaign, how Palantir is aiding the authoritarian regime—and how you can get involved.

Please click below to watch the episode (it helps other discover the show!).

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Full transcript below:

Purge Palantir: Taking on Silicon Valley's All-Seeing Eye

Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.

GIL: Palantir, one of the most well-known tech companies in the world—and one of the most hated. It's a surveillance giant named after an all-seeing stone wielded by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. The company even called its Palo Alto office the Shire.

Its co-founder, Peter Thiel, was recently in Rome, obsessed with a different mythology, lecturing Catholics about the machinery of the Antichrist, as he called it — tools that will create a global authoritarian government.

In response, an advisor to the Pope himself publicly accused Thiel of building the very machinery he claims to warn against.

It's really weird, and also really scary. Because here's the truth: Palantir is now embedded in the Army, the NSA, the FBI, ICE, Border Patrol, the Pentagon, and Britain's National Health Service. Members of Congress and Trump officials are buying Palantir stock while handing it billions in contracts.

Just like the fabled all-seeing eye, it's working with the White House to merge every federal database to see everything about you — your health records, your financial transactions, your location data, everything — into one system.

In this episode of the Nerd Reich Podcast, I speak with two organizers from the Purge Palantir campaign. It's a drive to raise public awareness and put pressure on politicians to stop taking Palantir money. My guests are Jacinta Gonzalez, head of programs at Media Justice, and João Paulo Connolly, organizing director at Working Partnerships USA. These are two activists on the front lines fighting Palantir's power grab. It's a struggle with major consequences for the future of every human being on the planet.

In the books, the palantír stones corrupted those who stared into them. The real-world Palantir might do the same to our democracy, which makes our opposition to it all the more important.

I'm Gil Durán, and this is the Nerd Reich Podcast.

Jacinta and João Paulo, welcome to the Nerd Reich Podcast.

JOÃO PAULO: Good to be here.

JACINTA: Thank you so much for having us.

GIL: So Palantir is quickly becoming one of the most reviled companies in the nation, if not the world, due to its enthusiastic complicity with the Trump agenda. It was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and others. These are names that have become increasingly familiar during this Trump fascist regime that we are witnessing here in the States. And this is a company that literally takes its name from The Lord of the Rings. A palantír is an all-seeing magic stone wielded by an evil wizard who's trying to take over the world in The Lord of the Rings. And Palantir's offices are named things like the Shire and Rivendell. And this is not just whimsy. This is a worldview performed out loud. It's weird because they're trying to reverse it. They act like they're the hobbits, but they've got the palantír. What they're really doing, in a subtle, twisted way, is identifying as the villains of the story.

More and more people are seeing exactly what that means in 2026. And as Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. From the very day they were named, Palantir's goals were obvious. Before we get deeper into the company, I want to start by grounding people in the reality of how Palantir is affecting our lives. So I'd like to ask each of you to describe one specific person or community or moment where we can see Palantir's reach in the real lives of people today.

JACINTA: I come out of organizing in the immigrant rights sector. I've been organizing against deportations for almost two decades now. And so the way that I got to know Palantir was actually by following what was happening on the ground with immigration enforcement. During the first Trump administration, we would get calls from people across the country being like, "I don't know how they know where my house is. I don't know how they know who my family is. How do they know where I work? What car I drive?"

As we were looking at it, we're like, they can't be getting this information from local police, right? So we had to do the research to find out how Palantir was connected to all of this.

When I think of people affected by Palantir, I think of Maria, a worker who was part of the Mississippi poultry plant raid during the first Trump administration. She was detained, criminally prosecuted for working without documents, separated from her baby while she was breastfeeding, and deported and separated from her kids. And this was because of this raid. One of the things that they used to be able to conduct that raid was a Palantir tip line. So for us, being able to trace back how Palantir is impacting what we're seeing on the ground right now with what ICE is doing, with what the Department of Homeland Security is doing, is really key in terms of understanding the story of how they started, but also how they've continued to evolve and intensify their attack.

GIL: João Paulo, how are we seeing the impact on lives from Palantir today?

JOÃO PAULO: Since Jacinta already lifted up the immigrant experience, which is so critical in the communities that we work with as well — and the ICE persecution of our folks in our streets and in our communities and neighborhoods — I also want to lift up workers. It's interesting because the fight against Palantir, as you noted, is a fight that connects so many of us because they touch so many different sectors in different ways. So maybe you think, "Well, I'm not an immigrant. ICE is not a concern for me."

But now we're hearing from nurses who work in hospitals for these large hospital corporations. Palantir is developing software and technology — uses AI tools — to automatically do scheduling for workers. So it's part of not only this gigification, but the disempowerment of workers. It really profoundly harms worker schedules, and nurses are really feeling the pain caused by this Palantir app, Timpani.

So here, on the one hand, we have immigrants in our communities — ICE coming into our neighborhoods. On the other hand, we have nurses in hospitals also talking about the impacts of Palantir. I myself am concerned about the impacts of Palantir. I'm an American citizen. The news, this information that they're working with the federal government to assemble all of our data into some kind of large centralized database — data sets that were once separate and protected for privacy reasons, like data from Health and Human Services — data sets can now be integrated in one large database. I think that is scary to every single American. And so it means that none of us are safe.

GIL: In a lot of ways, the Trump administration seems like a huge data raid that's being conducted in conjunction with all of these tech companies who are trying to get their money funnels and their data funnels into the U.S. government. There's competition between OpenAI and — Musk tried to do it with xAI, Anthropic, this whole drama we've seen. There's like a gold rush for releasing these systems on our data, on our government.

I know it's been explained a few times, but what exactly is it that Palantir does? Obviously it's helping to gather data and surveillance and sort it and arrange it, make it more easy for governments to use. It has different platforms like Gotham and Foundry for different applications. One critic described it as an attempt to create an operating system for the entire government. Of course, it's not just used in governments, it's used in hospitals and other places as well. So if you had to describe to somebody who's not familiar with what Palantir does — Jacinta, what would you say?

JACINTA: This is definitely a tricky question to answer in some ways, because they also make it so hard to understand. One thing that is important to note is that data is being created constantly on all of us. There's information about us that we are creating ourselves on our phones and what our behaviors are. There's files that different government agencies have. Palantir is not creating that data. It's figuring out how to process that data, to put it into one single place.

When you think about it that way — when you also think about this metaphor they had of the palantír, "we can see everything, we can track everything, we can know where things are going" — that's really the system they're creating. Their software isn't that great in terms of what the product is. It's not that it's that complex.

What stands out about Palantir has been who's behind them, right? What the interest is, what the political connections are, what the vision is of what they want to use this technology for. And the fact that, because of that, they will go in and do the dirty work that other companies might not want to do. When ICE is saying, "I want custom-made software for my raids. I want to take all of this data so that when I go out, I can be as efficiently cruel as possible" — the people that raise their hand and say, "I'll go in there and try to clean up your data set and work with you in the field" — that's Palantir. So it isn't actually that their technology is that unique, to be very honest. It is actually the way that they use their technology, the way they position themselves, and the fact that they're able to be in these spaces to create that worldview, to be able to create these programs.

GIL: And they don't just send in their software, they send in engineers, right? They send people to be on the ground and wield it. That's an important part of their model. João Paulo, do you have anything to add?

JOÃO PAULO: Well, I think Jacinta did a great job describing it. I think this piece around their fundamental lack of regard for some of the basic principles and boundaries that others have typically abided by — or pretended to abide by — there's just such a long track record with this company. Their involvement with predictive policing in Los Angeles, which literally targeted communities of color with this idea that you could draw profiles of people who are more likely to be suspects and you could just spy on those people all the time. And then their involvement with HBGary Federal, where they were literally plotting to help cook up dirt. Instance after instance of these situations where Palantir just happens to be in the middle — some of the scandals that Edward Snowden helped expose. Why does Palantir happen to be a contractor in all of these situations? And do they not have boundaries?

I think what makes it more nefarious is they also use this kind of fascinating doublespeak, and they're very willing to deploy this kind of doublespeak. Stuff that is directly invasive of our privacy gets repackaged and billed to people very loudly by Alex Karp as somehow being protective of the Fourth Amendment, when it's the exact opposite of that. I think that also makes it even more nefarious.

GIL: They seem to enjoy being nefarious in a very twisted way, where they claim that their being nefarious is actually them being good. The way they try to twist The Lord of the Rings, for instance, into somehow being a justification for their actions — which are obviously the actions of the villains in that narrative. I find that they're actually the villains in every narrative. They're the villains in sci-fi. They're the villains in The Lord of the Rings. They're the villains in the Bible, largely. And they try to twist all of these narratives into somehow them being the hero. They're very much into reversals, almost to a satanic degree — everything being backwards and upside down with a lot of these guys. And we did a whole deep dive on Peter Thiel's obsession with the Antichrist, which I'll bring up a little later in the show, because it is very relevant to Palantir, apparently.

One of the interesting things about Palantir's origin story is that it really started with an investment from the CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel. From the very beginning, Palantir was designed to serve the national security state. This is in the aftermath of 9/11, when surveillance and security were all the rage.

Speaking of weird twists and reversals — Peter Thiel for a long time claimed to be a libertarian. Well, libertarians are against big government intrusion. Libertarians are against invasions of privacy. And so here's a guy who claims to be a libertarian, one of the most prominent libertarians in Silicon Valley, who goes full-on into government authoritarian power, surveillance, and control. In fact, it was former Department of Defense official John Poindexter who helped build their first network of government advocates. So what they really saw was a chance to do big business. Their supposed political beliefs didn't really matter. But now the world has come to reflect their political beliefs, which are not libertarian — which are quite clearly authoritarian.

Let's talk a little bit about the degree to which Palantir is now integrated into our government. They've got contracts with the Army, with the NSA, with the FBI, with ICE, with Border Patrol, the Pentagon. Over in the UK, they have contracts with the NHS, the National Health Service. Billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer money going to Palantir. Every time you turn around, it seems like there's a new deal or a new contract that they've scored. What does it say that we have so many of these private companies now taking a role that might have once belonged to government? Part of the story here seems to be the privatization of public duties and public responsibilities.

JOÃO PAULO: Yeah, well, when you privatize, there's less direct oversight, and it's harder to obtain real information about what's happening inside these companies. As broken as they often can be, there are oversight systems in the federal government, there are more checks and balances. When you outsource this stuff to these companies, you really enter this gray area where you can get away with a lot more.

The other side of it is — what you're pointing out is that Palantir's whole business model really relies so heavily on this cronyism. This cronyism that any libertarian should be condemning. They rely on this heavy revolving-door model. You have people who work inside these government agencies, and then they exit and get jobs at Palantir, and then they help Palantir win contracts inside those same agencies. An unprecedented new level of cronyism that we're beginning to explore here, blurring the boundaries between the public and private sector in really new ways.

JACINTA: What is really interesting about Palantir — because I agree completely with you, João Paulo, the revolving door, the relationships. JD Vance, our vice president: his campaign for Senate was basically financed by Peter Thiel. Thiel has led him in his political career. So the lines between where the loyalties lie, what are the politics of what's happening, are completely blurred.

When we first started to do research around this and launched the No Tech for ICE campaign in 2018, we were like, "No, this is profiteering." We'd been talking about private detention centers profiteering over the detention and deportation pipeline. But actually, it's tech companies. It's deeper than that and more nefarious than that, in the sense that they are both naming the policies and then benefiting from them in a way that is also controlling the infrastructure itself. So we're not in a position where it's only that they're benefiting economically. They actually control the system.

Is it a private government? Is it a corporation taking control of a government? There's a lot of nuance there that we can unpack. But you start to see it, for example, with the Big Beautiful Bill — the budget that was passed, all of these billions of dollars in the name of defending the homeland, defending security, immigration enforcement. Really, what they're doing is using it as a blank check to build up the surveillance system that they want to have, to have political control.

I think it's really important to also be pushing back. They have all of these ideas of defending liberty. What we're really debating is the role of government. On one hand, they're saying, "We need billions of dollars of our taxpayer money to go to war, genocide, a war on immigrants here at home." Anything related to healthcare, anything related to education, anything related to the environment is completely gutted. So it's not that they believe in small government. They actually want to have a very large government that is just focused on anything that has to do with militarization. That is their model in terms of business, and that is also their model in terms of political control.

GIL: They always want small government when it comes to things that are good for people. They have no problem with wasting billions of dollars killing children in Iran. There's always money for more bombs, never money for children, for families, etc. And this is a long-running problem in the country between the Republicans and the Democrats especially. The Democrats often buy into this idea that we should shrink the social safety net in order to get toward some mythical center that doesn't really exist. That search for the center has led us into this far-right trap where the Democratic Party is essentially silent or invisible as these guys openly, corruptly push the government into authoritarian territory.

What's also interesting is the degree to which the corruption is so open. You've had all these members of Congress and members of the Trump administration buying Palantir stock, which then surges far beyond what many experts think the company is worth. So there's a scam and a corruption on multiple levels being played, where not only do you get campaign contributions, but you can personally enrich yourself by buying in to the project. I think the degree of open corruption we're seeing that Palantir is right at the center of — and the people around it are at the center of — is unprecedented. There will have to be some serious consequences for that. We've basically got this corrupt Silicon Valley capitalist privatized shadow government, and it's hard to distinguish which is which, because now the Trump family has become crypto billionaires and who knows what else they're up to.

That's why I want to bring the conversation now to your campaign, Purge Palantir, which is very focused on this company, bringing attention to its abuses, making the public aware. But it didn't come out of nowhere. You've had a previous campaign to keep the pressure on these companies. Tell us a bit about the theory behind the campaign, what you hope to accomplish, and what you've accomplished so far.

JACINTA: I think maybe I can tell a little bit of the history, and then João Paulo can bring us into the current state. As I was telling you before, during the first Trump administration, a lot of us were starting to see changes in the way that ICE was behaving and understanding what's going on. So we put out a report called Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations. It uncovered that actually it was not only Palantir, but it was companies like Amazon that were providing cloud storage, or companies like Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis offering data. And so we were able to map out and track — and that was a very big part of the No Tech for ICE campaign, where we were organizing to stop these tech companies from having these contracts with ICE.

It's one of those things where you start to research a little bit and you pull the string, you pull the string, and all of a sudden you realize just how big it is. I think we're at a point where we realize that the work that they started to do with the Department of Homeland Security, with the CIA, with the Department of War — all of these contracts were just the beginning. The aspiration that they have and where they're going encompasses all of them.

So that is where there was a desire of: how do we actually create an effort that's not just about the genocide that is happening, that's not just about the new wars that are occurring, that's not just about immigration enforcement, that's not only about worker rights, that's not only about surveillance — but where we can all come together and have a multiplicity of tactics, a multiplicity of strategies in terms of how we go in and how we organize around this. I always tell people, there's not going to be one way that we win. These companies, in their influence and the ideology that they represent, are very deep. And so whether it's going after investors, whether it's workers taking over, whether it's people coming out and protesting, whether it's politicians refusing to take their money — all of us have a role to play. All of us can do something. That's the spirit behind the efforts around Purge Palantir.

JOÃO PAULO: To get into a little bit of where the campaign is at right now — really, going back to a point that you made at the beginning, Gil, where they lean into this supervillain character. One of the reasons they lean into the supervillain character is they want to make themselves come across as all-powerful and scary and really intimidating to us. And while a lot of what they do and profit off of is inherently creepy and evil — bringing ICE into our communities, the violence that we've been seeing in our neighborhoods — they're not an all-powerful company. Really, we start from the understanding that we have a lot of power over them, and we have the power to take them on. We, the people, can take down Palantir. Yes, their tentacles reach deep into the government, but their vulnerabilities are many. As I mentioned earlier, their software is not this irreplaceable magical tool. There are many other folks that could provide similar tools — and that do — and a lot of what they deploy in the government are these consultants. We have the ability to say, "This kind of business model that profits directly off of harm and predation — we're not going to get behind that."

So where do we have power over them? Well, we have power over them, first of all, as voters. We have power to say, "We don't want our elected champions on the Palantir payroll." If you go to purgepalantir.com and you go to the Palantir Payroll tab, you can actually see all the politicians in the United States, Democrats and Republicans, who are on the Palantir payroll — who have taken Palantir money. You can say, "Am I down for mass surveillance? If I'm not — Democrat or Republican, or wherever on the spectrum I am — I don't want my elected champion on the Palantir payroll." You can join the campaign to get your member of Congress off the Palantir payroll. And some champions have done that. Ro Khanna here in the Bay Area was very courageous in coming forward — we want to commend him — saying, "I am paying forward, donating forward, all the contributions that I have received from Palantir executives in the past, and I'm now signing this pledge to not take Palantir money moving forward." There are other electeds around the country who are signing on to that same petition.

As consumers, we have power because although Palantir has its tentacles in the government, they also provide their software services to many consumer-facing businesses. Take high-profile brands — some of them luxury consumer goods, luxury products. You have Ferrari, for instance. Palantir is very proud of how much time they put into their partnership with Ferrari. There's a lot of public marketing material tying Palantir and Ferrari's image together. Well, there's this question now: sure, I don't drive a Ferrari, but there's a long list of celebrities out there who do. And I wonder how many of those folks proudly driving their Ferraris are on board with the mass surveillance of all Americans, with the kidnapping of children in our streets and all of that. How about Dave & Buster's? How about John Deere? How about a number of these different major corporations that we do interact with and that are happily right now doing business with Palantir? Can we raise the cost as consumers?

And then we have power over them as workers. Nurses, anyone in a workplace where Palantir software is trying to be deployed — if you're a union member, you can fight to get it in your next contract to say, "We do not want this invasive, nefarious, immoral company doing business where we work." You can fight to get Palantir out of your workplace as a worker.

And last but not least, as engaged community members, we all have access to our city councils. We have access to our boards of supervisors and our counties. We have the ability to show up to meetings and say, "We don't want our local government doing business with Palantir either." There are so many fronts in which we do have the power to take on Palantir and to say, "This kind of business model is not acceptable with what we want for the future of our democracy."

GIL: What have you been able to do so far in terms of organizing people to purge Palantir? And what success do you think is possible? What do you see in the next five to ten years if your campaign is successful?

JOÃO PAULO: Some of the success we've seen really is with the elected officials who have publicly come forward and said, "Moving forward, we're not going to take this money." So you have elected officials distancing themselves from Palantir, noting that Palantir's model really relies so heavily on their ability to tip the scales in their favor politically. And then you have communities, coalitions being formed all around the country — in New York, in Nevada, in Los Angeles, here in the Bay Area. All around the country, you have communities of people coming together to say, "Let's look at our county governments and let's see where our counties have contracts. Let's see where our cities have contracts with Palantir or with Flock Safety, which is another Peter Thiel company. Let's take those contracts on. We do not want this in our local government either." So there's a lot of momentum growing there.

When I think of success, I think of a world where we have removed the tentacles of Palantir from the federal government, where Palantir is no longer able to continue with this crony business model, and where there are other alternatives, other solutions. Where the government needs genuine data integration services, the government is no longer looking to corporations like Palantir to do this work moving forward. And then it's worth noting: we do not want ICE terrorizing our communities anymore. We don't want them in our streets. We don't want them in our neighborhoods. A national movement really calling to abolish ICE, to rethink the way we do immigration enforcement, to find other solutions and not to move forward with ICE, is also a call to rip out one of Palantir's big sources of money.

JACINTA: I agree 100%. I'm on board with João Paulo's vision of where we're going. The thing I would add is: sometimes when companies particularly — the politicians too — when you get a good villain like this, they are doing things that are really horrible for humanity, but they are also a sign, a symptom of what is really going on underneath. Part of the test that we have at hand is: Palantir is awful, but they're also awful because of what they represent. If you take out Palantir and replace them with another company, it's going to be a very similar issue, because really this is all part of the broader fight against authoritarianism. What we just have to grapple with is, it's not only that we're facing authoritarian figures like Trump — we're also confronting authoritarian figures like Thiel.

One of the things that gives me a lot of hope is watching how they've had to shift to be relevant in the moment. When we first launched the No Tech for ICE campaign, Palantir would actually say, "We do not work with the Enforcement and Removal Operations. We only work with Homeland Security Investigations." These are two arms of ICE. Folks who have been in the movement know, for a long time they've always both done horrible things and deportations, but this felt like a line in the sand that they could say, "We're not doing that, but we're doing this."

Now they're very openly saying, "No, any immigrant, anyone — we're going to defend whatever the vision is of the white supremacists in the White House. That's going to be the political line that we're going to take." You start to realize, they are vulnerable. For a long time, Palantir has actually wanted to have this business model where Thiel will take folks on the right and Karp would take folks right in the Democratic center. Now that is broken in some ways. So they've revealed themselves. For me, it's an opportunity to actually show what's at stake, why this is so dangerous, why we all have to be really vigilant around how corporations — whether it's Palantir or other big tech companies — are controlling our political system, our economic system, the way we think about safety and who belongs.

All of these things to me are brought together. So to me, it's both: what can we do against Palantir, but also what kind of movement can we build that actually sees the threat of a company like Palantir and understands that to have a democracy, to have human rights, we actually have to take them head on and make sure that they're not a defining force of where we're going.

GIL: It seems like there has been a great unmasking during these Trump times, where they feel more comfortable — or at least they've been forced into defining their position. You have Alex Karp, it seems like every other day, saying completely insane things in public, barely able to control his physical movements as he says these things. Bragging that Palantir helps kill people. That AI is going to disempower educated Democratic voters and empower white vocational workers — which nobody really believes, but obviously he's trying to hedge against the growing working-class fear and hatred of AI. Actually, it's spreading through all classes of American society.

You've got Joe Lonsdale, one of the co-founders of Palantir, who said that Palantir was designed to kill communists — which most of these right-wingers define as people who vote for Democrats. He also recently called for a return to public executions, which some of his critics felt was a great idea, but that we should execute billionaires.

Then you've got Peter Thiel roaming the planet talking about the Antichrist. I have had the misfortune of reading through his entire Antichrist lecture series and tracing his fascination with the Antichrist back for decades. To get down to the point Thiel seems to be making: the Antichrist would be a force or a person who rises to totalitarian power under the guise of peace and safety to establish this one-world rule. Sort of "one ring to rule them all," to use Lord of the Rings — or one surveillance data mastery program that is embedded through all aspects of our life, like Palantir. When Peter Thiel talks about the Antichrist, it is hard not to draw the assumption that he's not talking about his own business activities. He's in Rome right now lecturing to the Catholics on the steps of the Vatican about the Antichrist, and one of the responses from the Vatican priest was that he's the one creating this machinery — that this is a violent assault on the liberal world order and on human dignity. It is in a way a gift that we can see these men so publicly revealing their true purpose and true goals, and sort of falling apart while doing it.

My fear, if Democrats do manage to retake power, if we do have elections, is that they're going to continue to let Palantir operate with the status quo. They're not going to take it on. For instance, people like Gavin Newsom, who are very critical of Trump in all caps, they have very little to say on these more specific matters. I wonder the degree to which Palantir is active in California in different capacities. So I do think it's an uphill fight, but I'm glad you all are fighting it, because people do need to know the names of these companies and what they do. Someone has to be watching. Someone has to be pushing back.

So how can people get involved? Is there a role for the average person in Purge Palantir? What can they do? Because I think your movement is just growing, and I think it's going to get bigger, but I think it's going to include a lot more companies. Because, and this is what I'm writing my book about, we are in a war for the future of democracy against a very small, interconnected group of companies and billionaires who have a very pronounced vision of what that future is going to look like. And believe me, it's not going to include most of us. The good news is there's only 3,000 billionaires in the world. There's 8.2 billion people. So this is the easiest trolley problem ever, if one side or the other has to be disempowered or eliminated. How can the average person do something about Palantir?

JOÃO PAULO: That's what's really exciting about this campaign — there's so many opportunities, and we've only really begun to scratch the surface around what can be done. If you're a parent taking your kids to Dave & Buster's on the weekend, would you like to know that Dave & Buster's is using the same software tool, Foundry, that ICE is using to track people down in our neighborhoods? If you're a farmer, or maybe you're doing some yard work and you go to John Deere, do you want these companies to be doing business with Palantir and receiving your dollars?

If you go to the Purge Palantir website and you look at the Palantir Payroll page, you can see if there's anyone near you who's on the Palantir payroll, and you can join the campaign and start writing letters and start calling them out and inviting them to really purge Palantir.

The other thing you can do is you can go to the Quakers. They put up a great website, the American Friends Service Committee, where you can actually see a map of everywhere there's someone doing business with Palantir or someone receiving Palantir money. You can use that map to really understand and start to map out where Palantir is present around the country. There's a little form that makes it really easy — you can use that form to send a letter to the CEO of every single company in your state that does business with Palantir. So there's a lot of basic steps that you can take right now. There will be much more, but there's so much to do. I'm really excited to be working with everybody who loves democracy enough to stand up to Palantir and call their bluff.

GIL: Wow. So the Quakers have engaged in the battle against the Palantichrist. Yes, they have. That's good. See, it's like The Lord of the Rings, where all the different good tribes have to come together against all the evil ones here. Jacinta, what can the average person do to get involved? Those were some good tips from João Paulo. Can they join Purge Palantir? Can they become a member or participant?

JACINTA: I really do think that this is a time where we can be in space together and come together to grow our movements. So recently, for example, Palantir moved their headquarters to Miami. First, they were not welcome in San Jose. We hosted an unwelcome party for them in Colorado. They stayed for a few years, didn't like it, went to Miami. Unwelcome party ready for them right there. There are opportunities, as João Paulo was saying, that come up all the time.

But this is part of a broader movement of communities coming together to say, "We want democracy. We don't want this tech oligarchy to be running our lives." To me, that means: if you're locally fighting against Palantir, that's great. If you're trying to close down a data center or make sure one isn't built in your backyard, that's great. If you're fighting to make sure we have independent media because the tech companies are actually buying up all of the ways that we get information — that's great. This is actually a broader movement that is coming together to fight these things.

But what they represent in terms of being fundamentally anti-democratic, fundamentally violent, fundamentally believing in genocide — I think we really have to pay attention to what's happening around the world to understand these are warnings. They are not only human rights atrocities. They are not only things that we have to stand against, but they are warnings of how far they are willing to go.

For us, all of these fights are connected — whether you're fighting against ICE, whether you're fighting against the genocide, whether you're making sure that communities are able to vote and get out to the election, all of these things are connected. Wanting to make sure that folks see that, because you might be doing work in another area and it's connected to the fight against Palantir. We don't have to choose just one way of organizing. We can actually believe that all of these things are needed. So wanting to encourage people, yeah, let's purge Palantir, let's make sure these companies know — but let's also make sure that we are holding true the values that we want to see. If we don't continue to say human rights matter, democracy matters, we actually need to have government that listens to its people, and we need a planet to live on — full stop — if we don't continue to say those things out loud, they're going to win. So for me, it really is about building the power of the people, building, organizing, and folks just plugging in wherever makes sense to them.

GIL: And we'll be right back after this break.

Plugs

R.R. ROBBINS: Thank you, Gil. This is producer R.R. Robbins with this week's plugs. This week, it's Purge Palantir. Go to the website at purgepalantir.com. Find a way to take action, and then do it. Also, as João Paulo mentioned earlier, the Quakers — yeah, the Quakers — have a great site and a Palantir money map to see everywhere the Palantir money is going. Find out about it at the American Friends Service Committee site at afsc.org.

Finally, if you haven't done it yet, pre-order Gil's book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Releases this August and makes a great belated Independence Day gift. Because if any book says America right now, this one does. And now, back to the pod.

GIL: João Paulo, where are we going to end?

JOÃO PAULO: I just wanted to add that this is also very much a bipartisan fight. This is a fight that extends beyond political parties. This isn't Democrats versus Republicans, blue versus red. This is people who live in the United States, or anywhere in the world, who are deeply concerned about this particular business model — corporations acquiring this kind of tentacular power in government. Anyone who thinks that that's just a line that no one should be allowed to cross can join this fight. We don't always have to agree on everything, but we can agree that this is particularly dangerous and harmful, and that if we want to have, as Jacinta said, a government that responds to the people, a government that responds to us, then we can't have a government that's powered by corporations like Palantir.

I invite my friends, my colleagues, people who may be watching this who don't typically vote Democrat but who think that some of this business about building databases with all Americans' data — that sounds really scary. I invite them to stand up to Palantir as well. I look forward to joining them in the fight against Palantir, because we need all of us to come together on this one.

JACINTA: To share: your fear of Democrats being a little too timid on this, I share that fear 100%. I share it because, look around — we actually are seeing multiple examples of that. When I think about who's built up, for example, ICE's ability to do what they're doing now, Democrats and Republicans have been equally complicit in that creation of that paramilitary force that is creating that harm now. So as part of this, we know that hopefully we're going to continue to organize to ensure that we continue to have elections, and we will vote whatever way we have to be able to protect our communities in those elections. But that does not mean that we don't also have to push the Democratic Party in general around these issues of mass surveillance, detention and deportation, war and genocide. Those are all issues that they continue to be, in many instances, very weak on. So we have to continue to push so that we actually have a line of political resistance.

GIL: I really think it needs to be a litmus test in the next election. Democrats cannot support a presidential candidate who will not pledge to not only purge Palantir from our government, but to punish violations as well. If we don't have that, then — what I've been saying, and it's not an optimistic message, though I'm optimistic in many ways — is that if we do not address this cancer that's growing in our society, in our government — not just Palantir, but the entire venture capital apocalyptic fascist culture that has risen up and that is in power under Trump — we're just going to get to the same place on the slower path. These guys want to accelerate it and bring it all down quickly, but we're going to get there on a slower path.

I think Gavin Newsom, if you're listening — anyone who's not going to pledge to take on and break up Palantir should not be president of the United States. So there's another thing we can all do as voters: make sure we're not going to support somebody who is going to support the literal enemies of democracy and humanity.

Jacinta, João, thank you so much for joining me today on the Nerd Reich Podcast.

JOÃO PAULO: Thank you for having us. Was a pleasure.

JACINTA: Thank you so much.

R.R. ROBBINS: And that's a wrap on the pod. Today's show was produced, edited, and announced by yours truly, R.R. Robbins. It was written and hosted by journalist and author Gil Durán. The Nerd Reich book drops this August. Pre-order today. Special thanks to our guests, Jacinta and João Paulo. Check out their work at purgepalantir.com.

As a reminder, this podcast is available in audio and video. For you ear-only people — or those who think I'm just getting a little too crazy on the video editing — you can listen via Spotify or anywhere you get audio pods. For everyone else, this podcast and all our pods are available on youtube.com. Check out our old ones like the Antichrist Playbook — you'll understand today's subject, Peter Thiel, a lot more when you do. And subscribe for new episodes when they drop. We'll be doing a lot more with the pod as we build up to Gil's book this summer. Also subscribe to the newsletter at thenerdreich.com.

Today's final words from J.R.R. Tolkien, via Pippin after he peeped a palantír: "If all the seven stones were laid out before me now, I should shut my eyes and put my hands in my pockets." Smart Hobbit advice. See you next time.