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Monday, June 30, 2025
Today's Meditation
Today’s Meditation
"We will never be free of trials and temptations as long as our earthly life lasts. For Job has said: 'Is not the life of human beings on earth a drudgery?' (Job 7:1). Therefore, we should always be on our guard against temptations, always praying that our enemy, the devil, 'who never sleeps but constantly looks for someone to devour.' (1 Pet 5:8), will not catch us off guard. No one in this world is so perfect or holy as not to have temptations sometimes. We can never be entirely free from them. Sometimes these temptations can be very severe and troublesome, but if we resist them, they will be very useful to us; for by experiencing them we are humbled, cleansed, and instructed. All the Saints endured tribulations and temptations and profited by them, while those who did not resist and overcome them fell away and were lost. There is no place so holy or remote where you will not meet with temptation, nor is there anyone completely free from it in this life; for in our body we bear the wounds of sin—the weakness of our human nature in which we are born." —Thomas á Kempis, p. 31
An excerpt from Imitation of Christ
Why July is dedicated to the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ
Why July is dedicated to the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ
Below is the opening prayer of the votive Mass, as well as an additional prayer that can be used as our own personal meditation or prayer during July.
O God, who by the Precious Blood of your only Begotten son have redeemed the whole world,
preserve in us the work of your mercy,
so that, ever honoring the mystery of our salvation,
we may merit to obtain its fruits.
Through our lord Jesus Christ, your son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Sunday, June 29, 2025
[Salon] The war on sovereignty - Iran is now a front-line state. Guest Post by Patrick Lawrence
https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/the-war-on-sovereignty?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=112164&post_id=167134866&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=210kv&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
“The war on sovereignty.”
Iran is now a front-line state.
Patrick Lawrence 6/29/25
Made in America. Israeli jets en route to Iran, 13 June 2025. (I.D.F.)
29 JUNE—No, not yet by a long way. There is no calculating as of now the extravagant costs of the Israeli–American bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic—which is certain to resume at some point despite the rickety ceasefire now in place. We think of the fatalities of these wanton assaults, truth being ever war’s first casualty. Apart from the deaths of innocents, there are the risks of political chaos, the destruction of an economy, the damage to productive capacities, the social dislocations, the ruined dreams of countless Iranians who had been preparing to contribute one or another way to the human cause.
The list goes on and we may never be able to complete it—certainly not since the Air Force’s B–2 bombers have flown alongside Israeli jets, so making the United States directly a party to these daily acts of barbarity.
But we must not omit the principle of national sovereignty as we weigh the damage of what we now witness. An American-led war on sovereignty has blighted the community of nations for many decades. Many of us know this, and those who missed this elephant in the living room should now face it squarely. In my view the United States and Israel just opened a decisive front in this long-running combat. Let us not leave so extreme and momentous a breach off our list.
As the Zionist state extends its illegal aggressions further into West Asia—with some measure of American support at every stage—the fundamental implications of this its 21–month spree of criminality and terror are bitterly plain. The Israeli–American operation against Iran—and it seems to me by no means over—confirms an era of lawlessness and disorder such as humanity has not known for centuries. It is time, I mean to say, to consider in a world-historical context the conduct of the Zionist state and its American sponsor as they abuse the territorial integrity of another West Asian nation, possibly on the way to another “regime change”—this quite openly now.
It has been evident for some time—my date for this point of departure is 11 September 2001—that “the international rules-based order” is a preposterous misnomer for a long regime of chaos, violence, and at times near-anarchy. I think of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of that year, the invasion of Iraq two years later, the bombing of Libya eight years after that, the Central Intelligence Agency’s long, covert operation to topple the Assad regime in Syria, Israel’s incessant attacks against Iran, covert and overt, and now the genocide in Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon, the grinding, barely visible assaults on Venezuela and Nicaragua. If Iran is a front-line state in the war against sovereignty, so should we think of these latter.
Disorder, then, is nothing new. The extreme degree of disorder with which we live, to make this point another way, will have endured 24 years this autumn.
One could cast the U.S.–Israeli aerial invasion of Iran as another page in this book. As an exercise of raw power in the name of raw power it is comparable with many others that preceded it—another unrestrained, uninhibited contravention of international law and all norms associated with it. Its perpetrators make no apology for themselves, just as in the past. And there appears to be no prospect of an effective multilateral censure or intervention in the cause of global justice.
But this reading would be to miss the larger significance of what transpires in West Asia daily. Israel and the United States, have embarked—carelessly, thoughtlessly but also strategically—on an adventure that cannot end well for them and stands to harm many others aside from the Iranians. Straight off the top, the White House and the Pentagon continue to repeat President Trump’s rash, impulsive declaration immediately after the B–2s flew that Iran’s nuclear programs have been “completely and totally obliterated.” But, given this a quite obviously untrue, the risk of future attacks, and so the continued risk of nuclear contamination, remains.
Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned of this in a statement to the U.N. Security Council the very day the bombs fell. Attacking of Iran’s nuclear research and development sites, he said, would risk releasing catastrophic levels of radioactivity that would require mass evacuations on both sides of the Persian Gulf. Grossi singled out the Bushehr nuclear power plant on Iran’s gulf coast. The plant still stands, and it is hardly the only survivor of the Israeli–U.S. onslaught.
Iran is not the outcome of lines drawn on maps a century ago in the manner of Sykes and Picot. It is an old civilization with a singularly strong sense of national identity—a point apparently lost in Tel Aviv and Washington. It will not tip over or disintegrate as Iraq did after the 2003 invasion, or as Syria, crippled by years of covert Central Intelligence Agency operations, did late last year. Iran has made it clear severally since the bombs fell, and as anyone who knows the country and its people would have anticipated, that it will defend its sovereignty against any power that challenges it; its right to run nuclear programs has long stood as a totemic signifier of this determination.
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Friday, June 27, 2025
WIRN webinar - July 10, 8 pm EDT, with Mr. Fish! - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail
WIRN webinar - July 10, 8 pm EDT, with Mr. Fish! - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail
Massachusetts Peace Action
Warning! Graphic Content! (a WIRN Webinar)
Online Event
Thursday, July 10, 2025 8:00 PM - 9:30 PM ET
What is the future of political cartooning, protest art, and visual satire? How can pictures rendered in celebration of the precious vulnerability of the human experience make crystal clear the toxic barbarity of the military and retail industrial complexes, both built on the hideous notion that the commodification of people everywhere and the willful disenfranchisement of their natural inclination towards peace, love, and understanding is better for business – better business being predatory capitalism and capitulation to hierarchy? What can be done to assert the importance and indispensability of the artist’s unique role in a free society as both a witness and predictor and, in some circumstances, instigator of all the comedy and tragedy that motivates our politics, shapes our cultural identities, and informs, for better or worse, the internal voice that shames, praises, and confounds our tenuous relationship with truth, beauty, and treachery every moment of everyday?
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
An Ode to No-Fault Divorce - The Catholic Thing - Guest Post
An Ode to No-Fault Divorce - The Catholic Thing
In 1967, on the eve of the sexual revolution, Glenn Campbell released a song he took from a Nashville songwriter, John Hartford. “Gentle on My Mind” rose on the Billboard charts and helped Campbell crossover from country music to pop.
I call it Glenn Campbell’s Ode to No-Fault Divorce. Or at least the Sexual Revolution.
The timing was perfect. When Campbell re-released it in 1968, Humanae vitae was just months away, as was Woodstock. Hartford, the songwriter, said he was inspired to write it by the 1965 hit film Doctor Zhivago, the guy who made cheating on your child’s mother, Tonya, with lovely nurse Lara, international chic.
In many ways, the song prefigured our times. Marriage hasn’t quite collapsed for the upper classes in the same way it has for working class or hillbilly folk. The former may commit their discreet indiscretions, but they’re more the clean-cut Wichita Lineman than the young and muddy of Woodstock. Campbell was the better messenger for them.
He sings of a man who keeps “his sleeping bag rolled up” behind some woman’s couch. He does it because “your door is always open and your path is free to walk.” It’s clearly an “open” relationship. He doesn’t feel confined, “shackled by forgotten words and bonds/and the ink stains that are dried upon some line,” which contemporaries pejoratively called “a license for love.” Neither is he held back by tradition, by “the rocks and ivy planted on their columns now that bind me.” He can always leave wherever he wants, across “the wheatfields and the clothes lines and the highways and the junkyards that come” between him and his nominal love.
Sounds romantic. Just not realistic.
His “love” object is imaginary, a projection of himself rather than a genuine woman. She’s no burden because she’s no responsibility. She’s not like the “other woman’s cryin’ to her mother because she turned and I was gone.” Like a real woman, a wife and mother of your child. Like Tonya, who had to figure out how to go on living in exile with Yuri’s son, Sasha. Even like Lara in her futile search for her and Yuri’s illegitimate daughter, Katya.
Unlike Hartford’s muse, real women aren’t always “ever smilin’, ever gentle” on one’s mind. Christ’s yoke may be easy; a spouse’s isn’t always. That’s what goes with “for better, for worse.”
The heart of the song – and the subsequent problem – lies in two lines: “It’s just knowing that the world will not be cursing or forgiving/when I walk along some railroad track.”
That’s exactly what no-fault divorce produced.
Arnaud Bertrand on X: "Pretty funny to see some foreign policy "experts" praise Trump's approach to Iran when what he's actually done is prove that Kim Jong Un was right about everything. Essentially, here are the 4 lessons that countries serious about their survival have learned from what happened:" / X
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
[Salon] Ahab's Folly: America's Reckless Strike on Iran - Guest Post by ArabDigest.org
Ahab's Folly: America's Reckless Strike on Iran
Summary: the US attack on Iran was driven by Trump’s need to save face as well as a deep-seated desire for retribution stemming from the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Despite being a theatrical rather than strategic operation, the strike has potentially devastating regional consequences and uncertain global implications.
In the famous American epic novel Moby Dick, the obsessive and vengeful Captain Ahab, commander of the whaling ship Pequod, is obsessed with hunting and killing a giant white sperm whale which had previously bitten off his leg, leaving him with a deep-seated desire for retribution. Likewise ever since the Iranian Hostage Crisis (November 4, 1979 - January 20, 1981), during which 52 American diplomats and citizens were held captive for 444 days, inflicting intense humiliation on the USA, the United States has suffered a smouldering impulse to destroy the mullahs’ regime in an attempt to erase the deep scar left on the American national psyche. This impulse, which runs far beyond realpolitik calculations or the relentless pressure from the Israeli lobby, meant that when Israel came begging to be rescued from the consequences of its unprovoked, illegal war of aggression against Iran which began on 13 June, it was pushing at an open door. Trump’s narcissism meant flattery and manipulation framed as an opportunity to be remembered as a decisive saviour was easily enough to convince him to "finish the job".
The attack was hailed by the President as a “spectacular military success”, completely obliterating the Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities and demonstrating the power of the American Air Force. In fact it was more of a theatrical rather than a strategic operation. Two of the three sites had already been destroyed by Israel and were empty. The third, while damaged, remains largely intact. Knowing the strikes were imminent, the enriched uranium had already been removed.
President Donald J. Trump in The Situation Room, June 21, 2025 [photo credit: US Gov]
Besides serving the political imperatives of Netanyahu, Trump’s bombing, which disregarded his own intelligence services, ran contrary to what he had promised on the campaign trail, and put American personnel and assets at risk, was also about saving Trump’s own face after he had impetuously aligned himself with Israel’s tactically brilliant but strategically disastrous surprise attack on June 13th. After assassinating top military leaders, nuclear scientists, and politicians, striking nuclear and military facilities, and destroying Iran's air defences, Netanyahu, it turned out, had no capacity to finish what he had started. Iran quickly recovered and within hours was sending wave after wave of airstrikes into Tel Aviv and other metropolitan areas. In an unthinkable turnaround, many highly sensitive strategic targets have been hit, including Israel’s military intelligence headquarters, Tel Nof Airbase, Nevatim Airbase, Ovda Airbase and the Rafael Defence Facility, to name just a few. When Iran refused to yield to the President’s threats and demands for unconditional surrender he had no choice but to deliver on his threats.
Now the dogs of war have been unleashed, no one can predict what will happen next. There is no sign of a ceasefire or even peace talks. Iran and Israel both view the conflict fundamentally as an existential struggle. From Tehran's perspective, the Israeli campaign extends beyond the stated objective of neutralising its nuclear program to dismantling the regime itself and stopping the war would only invite being bombed on Israel’s whim, like Lebanon or Gaza. For Israel, Iran's retaliatory missile campaign is viewed as a direct threat to its own existence. Within hours of Donald Trump declaring Israel to be much safer thanks to his bombing the twentieth wave of Iranian missiles rained down on Tel Aviv and Haifa.
One glimmer of hope is that as no regional US military assets appear to have been used in the strike, Iranian retaliation against US personnel may be inhibited, preventing further escalation. Expanding the conflict to other fronts would mean Iran would risk provoking more US strikes and dilute its current military effectiveness in the next crucial stage in the war. At the same time, by bombing empty targets Trump has created a potential window of opportunity for the US to disengage.
Even if Iran and its allies take no direct action against the US in retaliation, despite public statements to the contrary, there are plenty of other ways they can respond. Iran is surrounded by high-value targets with the potential to inflict enormous economic, political, and security damage on the US. This is why all previous US presidents had avoided using force to destroy the Iranian nuclear program.
The US strikes were a grave violation of the United Nations Charter and all established principles of international law, as well as the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Constitutional provision that Congress alone has the power to declare war. The attack was initiated by two states possessing thousands of nuclear weapons of their own, without any verifiable evidence from international inspection bodies regarding a military nuclear program. The situation evokes the catastrophic war in Iraq, which was also predicated on deception and contradicted by reports from international inspection bodies confirming the absence of weapons of mass destruction. A similar war against Iran would undoubtedly unleash devastating consequences on the region and its populace. It will perpetuate the pattern, as observed in the Iraq war and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which regional states are relegated to the role of passive observers and it will consolidate the United States’ ignominious status as a despised pariah internationally and an autocratic nation at home. The lesson for any other would-be US adversary is clear: nuclear weapons are the only security guarantor so develop a bomb fast, just do it in secret like Pakistan and North Korea.
At the end of Moby-Dick Ahab and almost all of his crew perish due to his consuming obsession. The Pequod is destroyed, swallowed by the sea and Moby Dick survives, having successfully thwarted Ahab's vengeful quest.
Monday, June 23, 2025
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Saturday, June 21, 2025
[Salon] The Ishiba government says no - Guest Post by Tobias Harris Observing Japan
The Ishiba government says no
A Japan that can say no, more in sorrow than in anger
Tobias Harris
Jun 20
The Financial Times dropped a major story about the US-Japan relationship this afternoon, reporting that the Japanese government “scrapped” – the article’s word – a 2+2 meeting of foreign and defense ministers on 1 July after Elbridge Colby, under secretary of defense for policy, demanded that Japan raise its defense spending to 3.5% of GDP.
Demetri Sevastopulo and Leo Lewis write:
US secretary of state Marco Rubio and defence secretary Pete Hegseth were due to meet Japan’s defence minister Gen Nakatani and foreign minister Takeshi Iwaya in Washington on July 1 for annual security talks known as the “2+2”.
But Tokyo scrapped the meeting after the US asked Japan to boost defence spending to 3.5 per cent, higher than its earlier request of 3 per cent, according to three people familiar with the matter, including two officials in Tokyo.
I have previously written at length about Colby’s views of Japanese defense spending, and there is not much more to say on the matter, other than that if 3% was unrealistic, 3.5% is deeply unrealistic.
The constraints I wrote about last year – fiscal and administrative as well as political – are if anything even more salient, since subsequently the ruling coalition lost control of the House of Representatives, reducing Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru to the head of a minority government. Meanwhile, the fiscal constraints have become even more salient, as rising interest rates have reignited fears about the sustainability of the Japanese government’s debt.¹
Perhaps the most significant change since last year is that Japanese attitudes towards the United States – and the domestic politics of the US-Japan relationship – have changed since the start of the second Trump administration. Historically, ensuring that the bilateral relationship is on sound footing is one of the most important duties for Japan’s prime ministers. But since 2 April — if not since 20 January — the public’s mood has shifted. As remarks from lawmakers and journalists, Tokyo knows that it has entered a new era and it has to be willing to say no to the United States when it makes unreasonable demands.
The public is, if anything, even more eager for leaders to say no to the United States. Polls have repeatedly showed that the public overwhelmingly favors the government’s taking a harder line in trade talks with the United States, no doubt encouraging Ishiba to repeatedly emphasize that he is not rushing to complete a deal with Donald Trump if it means sacrificing Japan’s national interests.² Meanwhile, in the Asahi Shimbun’s large poll conducted by mail for Constitution Day, only 24% said in relations with the United States Japan should follow the US as much as possible, compared with 68% who said that Japan should be as independent as possible. The same poll found that only 15% think that the US were truly defend Japan, while 77% do not. The public is not eager to abandon or be abandoned by the United States — only 16% approve of replacing the centrality of the US for Japanese foreign policy with a focus on cooperation with China and other Asian countries, with 66% opposed — and 62% approve (31% strongly, 31% somewhat) of increasing Japan’s defense capabilities. Rather, there appears to be opposition to a heavy-handed approach from Washington that, for example, demands that Japan raise defense spending to politically impossible levels or tolerate arbitrarily high tariffs on Japan’s exports to the United States.
As these data points suggest, the Trump administration’s approach on both trade and defense cooperation is needlessly provocative. Japan wants the United States engaged in the region and has been willing to bear a lot to make it possible. Its leaders want to raise defense spending, with the public’s understanding. The Japanese government, despite its dissatisfaction with the Trump administration’s tariffs, has negotiated in good faith and avoided threatening retaliation, even as it has been frustrated with its negotiating partner’s approach. All Japan’s leaders — and the public — appear to be asking for is for Japan to be treated as an ally, an ally that has been making increasingly important contributions to regional security, to say nothing of Japanese companies’ contributions to the US economy, instead of being treated like a vassal. In rejecting a 2+2 meeting with the US, a forum Tokyo treats with considerable reverence, the Ishiba government appears to be drawing a line against the treatment.
In 1989, not long after Donald Trump ran an ad in leading newspapers attacking Japan for free-riding on US defense guarantees — “America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves” — novelist, politician, and provocateur Ishihara Shintarō and Sony founder Morita Akio made waves on both sides of the Pacific with their book, The Japan That Can Say No. That book was a nationalist polemic written at the peak of Japan’s rise as an economic superpower, and did not end up serving as a blueprint for Japan’s foreign policy. Instead, the Japan that is ever so quietly saying no today is not petulantly or aggressively saying no. Rather, its leaders are trying to square outsized US demands with the real political and economic constraints of an era of relative decline.
1
Meanwhile, the impact of US tariffs on Japan’s exports will do little to boost Japan’s ability to bear higher defense spending if it means lower exports, lower corporate profitability, and lower tax receipts.
2
See, for example, here.
Friday, June 20, 2025
[Salon] War Is The Worst Thing In The World - Guest Post by Caitlin Johnstone
War is the worst thing in the world. It is the single craziest behavior exhibited by humans. The most destructive. The most traumatizing. The least sustainable. The least conducive to human thriving.
All the things we fear most become the norm in a land ravaged by war. Death. Pain. Suffering. Rape. Chaos. Uncertainty. Losing loved ones. Losing homes. Losing limbs. Living in terror. Being attacked. Being brain damaged. Being faced with impossible choices. All the things we frighten ourselves with by watching horror movies become a reality from which there is no escape.
War creates a waking nightmare which any sensible person would want to avoid except in the direst necessity. And yet we are ruled by people who actively seek it out. Who will lie and manipulate to make wars happen. Who will smear and slander anyone who resists in the name of peace. Who will actively fight against every healthy impulse in everybody in their society to push their war agenda forward.
They always tell us the new war they want us to fight is about self-defense, or about liberating an oppressed population from a tyrannical dictatorship, or about preventing terrorism, or about spreading freedom and democracy. Usually they tell us it’s about all of these things.
But it never is. They are always lying. Always. They are pushing human beings into the worst circumstances they could possibly experience here on earth for no other reason than power and profit. To advance the hegemonic agendas of empire managers and to fill the coffers of war profiteers. That’s all it ever is. Always, always, always.
They say whatever they need to say and move whatever chess pieces they need to move to get their war, and then they send a bunch of poor suckers to go fight in it, lying to them that they are doing something noble and heroic.
They ship them off to a foreign land, and then they are trapped. They can’t flee into the wilderness because they don’t know how to survive and have no way of getting home. They can’t ask the locals for help because the locals are their victims. They have no choice but to either fight and kill people who have never wronged them, or lay down their arms and be caged like animals.
If they choose to fight, the best case scenario is that they spend the rest of their lives knowing that they killed other human beings who wanted to live just as much as themselves, and who had just as much right to. All because some people who already had far too much power wanted a little bit more.
It’s about the most insane and backwards thing you could possibly imagine. The most powerful individuals in our world are people who actively push for the absolute worst outcomes that could possibly happen. It’s the exact opposite of the way things should be.
Yet we are told it’s normal. We are trained to believe this is just the reality we live in which we should expect and accept, first by our parents and teachers, and then by our news media and by Hollywood. War is aggressively normalized by pundits, propagandists and politicians, and enthusiastically glorified in movies and documentaries.
Those who were forced or duped into fighting in these insane arrangements of mass-scale violence are framed as heroes, and anyone who disagrees with what they were sent to do is framed as disrespectful and ungrateful. Those who push for peace are framed as treasonous freaks who must surely have covert loyalties toward whatever government the empire is trying to target this time around. Those who suggest that there might be some solution apart from war are dismissed as infantile dreamers.
And once the war has started, it is almost impossible to stop. The entire political/media class treats the war as the new normal, and any suggestion that it’s time to wrap things up is regarded as outlandish and suspicious. It’s never time to end the war, because this or that objective has not yet been achieved, or because this or that faction might come into power if troops are pulled out, or because this or that disempowered group might suffer without our military there to protect them.
Ending a war is as difficult as beginning a war is easy. All the institutions which lined up perfectly to help get the ball rolling toward war suddenly transform into giant tar pits of inertia when it comes to ending the conflict. The warmakers say the war must continue for this or that reason, the politicians back the warmakers, the media back the politicians, and the person saying it’s time to end the madness is left standing there looking like they’re the crazy ones.
But they’re not the crazy ones. The ones pushing us toward war are crazy. This whole system is crazy. This whole civilization.
The ones resisting the push toward war are the ones fighting for sanity. They’re the ones who are trying to reverse the tide of madness and drag us into a healthy world.
If this is you, do not falter. Do not let the warmongers shout you down or shut you up. You are right, and they are wrong. Let your voice thunder with confidence. Let nothing cause you to waver.
Blessed are the peacemakers. Don’t let anyone trick you into doubting what you know to be true.
The Most Dangerous Corporation in America | The Smirking Chimp - Guest Post by Robert Reich
The Most Dangerous Corporation in America | The Smirking Chimp
Robert Reich
Jun 20, 2025
Friends,
Draw a circle around all the assets in America now devoted to Artificial Intelligence.
Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the U.S. military.
A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans.
And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the United States away from a democracy into a libertarian dictatorship led by tech bros.
Where do the four circles intersect?
At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel.
In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a “palantir” is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. During the War of the Ring, a palantir falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive.
Palantir Technologies bears a striking similarity. It sells an AI-based data platform that allows its users — among them, military and law enforcement agencies — to analyze personal data, including social media profiles, personal information, and physical characteristics. These are used to identify and surveil individuals.
In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. To get the job done, Trump chose Palantir Technologies.
Palantir is now busily combining personal data on every American gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, Defense Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, and Internal Revenue Service, including their bank account numbers and medical claims.
Will the Trump regime use this emerging super database to advance Trump’s political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics? Will it make it easier for Trump to spy on and target his ever-growing list of enemies and other Americans? We’ll soon find out.
Thirteen former Palantir employees signed a letter this month urging the corporation to stop its endeavors with Trump. Linda Xia, a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse,” she said.
Palantir’s work on such a project could be “dangerous,” Representative Warren Davidson, Republican of Ohio, told the Semafor news site. “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”
On Monday, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Palantir, asking for answers about huge government contracts the company got. The lawmakers are worried that Palantir is helping make a super database of American’s private information.
Behind their worry lie several people who are behind Palantir’s selection for the project, starting with Elon Musk.
Palantir’s selection was driven by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir, who still holds a major stake in it.
Thiel has worked closely with Musk, who devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump reelected and then, as head of DOGE, helped eviscerate swaths of the government without congressional authority.
Thiel also mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his venture funds. Thiel subsequently bankrolled Vance’s 2022 senatorial campaign. Thiel introduced Vance to Trump and later helped convinced Trump to name Vance his vice president.
Thiel also mentored billionaire David Sacks, who also worked with Thiel at PayPal. As a student at Stanford University, Sacks wrote for the Stanford Review, the right-wing student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate there in 1987. Sacks is now Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.”
The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who said on an earnings call earlier this year that the company wants “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”
Palantir recently disclosed that Karp received $6.8 billion in “compensation actually paid” in 2024 (you read that right) — making him the second-highest paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the United States (behind Musk).
A former generation of wealthy U.S. conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions.
But this group — Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Karp, and Vance, among others — doesn’t seem to want to conserve much of anything, at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.
As Thiel has written:
“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
Hello?
If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.
Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the U.S. had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.
When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.
If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel abuses of political power — as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp, and other oligarchs have put on full display — which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.
The danger inherent in Palantir’s AI-powered super database on all Americans is connected to the vast wealth and power of those associated with the corporation, and their apparent disdain for democratic institutions.
Last Saturday, had you walked to the end of Trump’s military-birthday parade and gazed above Trump’s reviewing stand, you’d have seen on a giant video board an advertisement for Palantir — one of the chief sponsors of the event.
Tolkien’s palantir fell under the control of Sauron. Thiel’s Palatir is falling under the control of Trump. How this story ends is up to all of us.
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