The Rise of the Thielverse and the Construction of the Surveillance State (w/ Whitney Webb) | The Chris Hedges Report

 Chris Hedges, October 23, 2025 

Whitney Webb traces the Thielverse’s rise and the bipartisan construction of the modern surveillance state that Trump and his benefactors are deploying against dissidents and immigrants today.

The descent into a new, mutated and technology-focused form of American fascism is already here. Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere.

Whitney Webb, investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to document the rise of this cabal into the most powerful positions of the American government.

“I think now it’s quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia’s moment. These particular figures have had an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government,” Webb explains.

It’s clear that the architects of mass surveillance and the military industrial complex are beginning to coalesce in unprecedented ways within the Trump administration and Webb emphasizes that now is the time to pay attention and push back against these new forces.

If they have their way, all commercial technology will be completely folded into the national security state — acting blatantly as the new infrastructure for techno-authoritarian rule. The underlying idea behind this new system is “pre-crime,” or the use of mass surveillance to designate people criminals before they’ve committed any crime. Webb warns that the Trump administration and its benefactors will demonize segments of the population to turn civilians against each other, all in pursuit of building out this elaborate system of control right under our noses.

Transcript:

Chris Hedges

There were many, including some liberals, who mistakenly believed the Trump administration would dismantle the deep state. In fact, as the investigative reporter Whitney Webb has documented, Trump is closely allied with the most authoritarian figures in Silicon Valley, such as Peter Thiel, who envision a world where our habits, proclivities, opinions and movements are minutely recorded and tracked.

These Trump allies do not intend to free us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations or mass surveillance. They will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. Nor will they slash the bloated and unaccountable spending — some $1 trillion dollars — by the Pentagon.

They are rapidly purging the civil service, as well as law enforcement and the military, not to eradicate the deep state, but to ensure that those in charge of state machinery are exclusively loyal to the whims and dictates of the Trump White House. What is being targeted is not the deep state, but the laws, regulations, protocols and rules, and the government civil servants who enforce them, which hinder absolute dictatorial control.

Compromise, limited power, checks and balances and accountability are slated to be abolished. Those who believe that the government is designed to serve the common good, rather than the dictates of a tiny cabal of billionaires, will be forced out. The deep state will be reconstituted to serve the leadership cult.

Laws and the rights enshrined in the Constitution will become irrelevant. It is a coup d’état by inches, one that will be enforced in crude and brutal fashion by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the streets of our cities and empowered by Thiel’s Palantir and the sophisticated forms of monitoring made possible by artificial intelligence and digital surveillance pioneered by Silicon Valley.

Joining me to discuss our emergent Orwellian state is the investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail Whitney Webb. You can find her on her website, Unlimited Hangout.

Whitney, let’s go back to the beginning, [John] Poindexter, Iran-Contra, which I covered actually when I was in Nicaragua, because that’s really the origin of where we are today.

Whitney Webb……………………..right after the Reagan administration, Poindexter was sort of in various roles throughout these tech companies that were sort of a prototype to what Palantir and Total Information Awareness (TIA) would later do…………………………………………………………………………….

 Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir and as Palantir was developing as a company they, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the Palantir co-founders, reached out to Poindexter directly through Richard Perle, who’s a well-known neoconservative figure and was also one of the architects of the Iraq War at the Bush-era Pentagon.

Basically they hatched this plan to privatize this program, rightly calculating that if they turned it into an entirely private sector enterprise, the outrage would essentially dissipate, which it remarkably did because originally it was a public-private partnership housed within DARPA……………………………………………………………………………..

the CIA was Palantir’s exclusive client for, I believe, the first six years of its existence as a company and its engineers went to Langley, the CIA headquarters in Virginia, every two weeks for several years as well where the CIA was developing their algorithm with them, in a very direct partnership and Alex Karp has even said that the CIA was always the intended client of Palantir………………………………………………………….

Palantir, you know, also works extensively now in the private sector as well. They’re a major AI engine for Wall Street banks, for example, and they have different programs that are sold to different entities, but ultimately, they are a massive contractor to essentially every US intelligence agency, and that includes DHS and ICE

………………………………………………….. predictive policing is the term that they use but a lot of other companies have attempted to also get in on this.

One of the most notorious being PredPol that was a partnership I believe with UCLA and LAPD or something to that effect and they’re notoriously inaccurate…………………

another Peter Thiel-backed entity called Carbyne also has a predictive policing component……………………………..

But this is a company that wasn’t just funded by Peter Thiel, it was funded by Jeffrey Epstein and was led for a significant amount of time by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, as well and has sort of expanded outwards. 

…………………………… The Trump administration was explicitly using Palantir to make databases on every American. But that has been done in a way that has been more covert through something called the Main Core database. 

…………………………..William Barr, then Attorney General, created this program at the DOJ called DEEP that basically created the legal infrastructure for pre-crime. And you had Trump come out and say that the way to combat these shootings was to have social media develop algorithms that flag posts to predict shooters before they can act, target some of these anonymous online message boards.

…………………………………………..It is rather unsettling but, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of this profiling of Americans has been going on for a long time under the guise of what was developed by the Iran-Contra crowd covertly. The continuity of government protocols in this effort by parts of the “deep state” or the national security state to basically profile people they deemed unfriendly for whatever reason, people that could be, you know, potentially incarcerated in a time of political upheaval, they said.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………And so since then you have a whole network of people that have either been protege’s of these figures or worked at one point for PayPal. For example the current AI and crypto czar at the White House David Sacks, a former top executive at PayPal with Thiel and all of these other people.

And of course JD Vance, the current vice president, is intimately connected to Peter Thiel……………………………………………………

So Thiel’s influence is incredibly significant. It was also arguably significant during the first Trump administration, but I think now it’s quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia’s moment. These particular figures have an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government.

…………………………………………………….what I find particularly troubling about this is that a lot of these PayPal Mafia figures Thiel, Musk and Vance, among others, are extremely close to or acolytes really of the philosophy advocated by a fellow named Curtis Yarvin, whose political philosophy is essentially that the way to solve the problems of our current system and current bureaucracy is to basically completely privatize the state and install a CEO in place of the president, who would rule essentially as a dictator, which is completely bonkers and it’s amazing that people have allowed people like Peter Thiel or even Yarvin himself to masquerade as so-called libertarians when they’re very in favor of the authoritarian abilities of the state.

………………………………………………… And you can also see how a lot of these people are also war profiteers, Palantir, of course, not only is this tool of mass surveillance, it’s a tool of mass murder used by the US Army and also by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to decide who lives and who dies in Gaza.

And a lot of these other people that have been Thiel protégés, for example, like Palmer Luckey and Anduril, which Luckey co-founded with Trae Stephens, who’s also affiliated with the aforementioned Epstein-funded Carbyne 911.

Anduril is ushering in this era of autonomous warfare, and bankrolled, of course, by Peter Thiel. And they’re also developing the so-called smart wall on the US-Mexico border. And really, you know, these people are developing very Orwellian disturbing systems with not just domestic implications but also very significant implications to how the US military and other militaries operate abroad……………………………………………………………………….

So under the guise of “we’re making the government more efficient”, what aspects of the government are these people in the PayPal Mafia actually making more efficient? Well, one of them is mass murder.

…………………………………………………………………………………… basically the goal of the smart wall, it’s not a physical wall, it’s meant to be basically an invisible wall that uses a combination of surveillance and drone technology to basically intercept anyone crossing the border in a non-authorized way.

………………. I’m not sure exactly what you’d like to talk about as it relates to SpaceX, but it is worth pointing out that they’re a massive military contractor specifically for Space Force created under the first Trump administration. They really are the main contractor for Space Force.

And also, you know, they are directly affiliated with Starlink, the satellite internet company that also arguably has some kind of covert uses with Elon Musk, for example, saying he is going to help sneak Starlinks into Iran, for example

………………………………………………….. through the Department of Government Deficiency, a government efficiency DOGE, a lot was made to facilitate that by laying off a lot of government workers in their place putting, basically replacing them with, AI algorithms.

And those algorithms are, of course, patented and controlled by Silicon Valley companies. And the vast majority of major Silicon Valley companies double as either intelligence or military contractors or both, or have for a very long time. 

One that’s often overlooked a lot is Oracle, Larry Ellison’s Oracle. And Larry Ellison, before creating Oracle, worked on Project Oracle at the CIA, and then created Oracle, the company, which then took on the CIA as one of its earliest main clients, similar in a way to what happened with Palantir, as I noted a moment ago.

And now, Larry Ellison is becoming, basically taking over a large swath of American media now. So you’re seeing a lot of these Silicon billionaires that contract for the military are also becoming major owners of mass media. So you see that with Ellison, for example, and it’s also true with Elon Musk after his purchase of Twitter…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Chris Hedges

I want you to speculate what this world is going to look like, it is the fusion of corporate and governmental power. In some ways, of course, these corporations will have even more power than government institutions. We just had the presidential memo that came out a couple days ago, which essentially criminalizes… It’s quite an amazing memo that criminalizes people who criticize capitalism, support gender equality.

Whitney Webb

Or really anyone who is antifascist in any capacity…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

we lost all of our freedoms, but now al-Qaeda is just let’s shake hands and let them come to the UN while we don’t let anyone from Palestine come. I mean, it’s totally insane. ……………………………………………….

 I think Americans have been naive that a lot of the evil that that national security state has done abroad would never be used against them. And I think that we need to be very aware of what is going on here and that the deep state, whatever you want to call it, is expanding and it’s expanding in the hands of private oligarchs that have a very dangerous political vision that is rarely talked about.

……………………………………………………………………..So I think there’s a potentially dark future but there’s still time for awareness about these agendas and for people to develop parallel systems to escape this. And I think it’s very important too that people start really seriously considering how to wean themselves off of these Silicon Valley giants that are building these systems and contracting with these military and intelligence agencies. You know, getting off of Microsoft or Google products………………………………………………………….. https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-thielverse-and-the

October 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

The Great Narco Pretext: Trump Readies for Regime Change in Venezuela.

20 October 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/the-great-narco-pretext-trump-readies-for-regime-change-in-venezuela/

Since the start of September, the Trump administration has busied itself with striking boats in international waters stemming from Venezuelan and possibly Colombian waters. Their mortal offence: allegedly carrying narcotics cargo destined for consumers in the United States. A few days following the first strike on September 2, President Donald Trump stated in a War Powers Resolution notification to Congress that the action was one of “self-defense” motivated by “the inability or unwillingness of some states in the region to address the continuing threat to United States persons and interests emanating from their territories.”

In early October, a presidential notice was issued deeming those killed in such strikes on suspicion of drug smuggling “unlawful combatants.” The notice to Congress advanced an anaemic excuse to justify murder instead of arrest, an echo of previous, elastic rationales used by administrations to justify an enlargement of executive war powers: “based on the cumulative effects of these hostile acts against the citizens and interests of the United States and friendly foreign nations, the president determined that the United States is in a non–international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations.” The US had “reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations.”

The document amounted to an arrogation of extraordinary wartime powers to combat drug cartels, treating the trafficking of illicit narcotics to an armed assault on US citizens. Geoffrey S. Corn, a former judge advocate general lawyer, thought it a most adventurous move, given that drug cartels were not engaged in “hostilities”. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he told The New York Times. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”  

In the kingdom of alternative legal realities, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly articulated the position in an email: “the president acted in line with the law of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring deadly poison to our shores, and he is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans.”

The number of possible international law violations are far from negligible. Michael Schmitt lists a few in Just Security. Most obvious is the physical violation of a State’s sovereignty, which can take place through interfering with its “inherently governmental functions” comprising such matters as law enforcement. To also authorise kinetic operations in another State’s territory can amount to wrongful intervention in its international affairs. Last, though not least, is that using force in this context may be unlawful, violating Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and customary law.

Nothing in this cooked up scheme adds up. If the intention is to curb overdoses on US soil from drug use, flow of fentanyl would be the object of the exercise. But fentanyl hails from Mexico, not South America. The broader agenda is a more traditional one: the assertion of the imperium’s control over countries in the Americas, eliminating regimes deemed unfriendly to Washington’s interests. Narcotics has become the throbbing pretext, with Trump accusing Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro of being the leader of the drug trafficking organisation Cartel of the Suns. He is also accused of using the dark offices of the Tren de Aragua prison gang to conduct “irregular warfare” against the United States, despite countering claims by the intelligence community that the gang is not under Maduro’s control. (The reaffirmation of the initial intelligence assessment by the National Intelligence Council led to the sacking of its acting director, Michael Collins.)  

In 2020, the first Trump administration offered a reward of up to US$15 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Maduro. Two more increases to the bounty followed, the latest on August 7 being US$50 million following the sanctioning of the Cartel of the Suns by the Department of Treasury as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. “As leader of Cartel of the Suns,” declares the State Department in its notice of reward, “Maduro is the first target in the history of the Narcotics Rewards Program with a reward offer exceeding $25 million.”

Trump, in one of his moments of sharp frankness, concedes that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been authorised to conduct covert lethal operations on Venezuelan soil and more broadly through the Caribbean in a presidential finding. “We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea well under control,” he told reporters hours after the secret authorisation was revealed.  

In explaining his shoddy reasons, Trump cited Venezuela’s emptying of its “prisons into the United States of America” and the issue of drugs. “We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea, so you get to see that, but we’re going to stop them by land also.”

To the finding can be added a bulking military presence in the region: eight surface warships and a submarine in the Caribbean, 10,000 US troops, largely garrisoned at bases in Puerto Rico, with a contingent of Marines equipped with amphibious assault boats. In the meantime, the recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado, salivates at the prospect of regime change with muscular intervention from Washington. The pieces are being moved into place, and the self-proclaimed peace maker in the White House is readying for war.

October 22, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment