{"id":240396,"date":"2024-07-20T07:06:15","date_gmt":"2024-07-20T11:06:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=240396"},"modified":"2024-07-20T07:13:33","modified_gmt":"2024-07-20T11:13:33","slug":"j-d-vance-its-much-worse-than-youve-already-heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=240396","title":{"rendered":"

JD Vance<\/span>: It’s much worse than you’ve already heard<\/span><\/b><\/h1>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Man Behind Trump\u2019s VP Pick: It\u2019s Worse Than You Think<\/h1>\n

While J.D. Vance has his own controversies, his close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, who is poised to have unprecedented influence in a new Trump administration, should deeply unsettle every American who cares about freedom, privacy and reining in the surveillance state.<\/h3>\n

BY WHITNEY WEBB
\nUnlimited Hangout<\/p>\n

After the recent revelation that Donald Trump had selected J.D. Vance as his Vice President, public attention not only turned toward Vance, but also\u00a0to the billionaire Peter Thiel<\/a>. Vance has been one of several prominent Thiel prot\u00e9g\u00e9s whose profile has risen in recent years, with other prot\u00e9g\u00e9s of the PayPal co-founder including\u00a0OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Anduril\u2019s Palmer Luckey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Recent reports\u00a0have\u00a0<\/a>also noted<\/a>\u00a0that Thiel first recruited Vance into his circle while Vance was still a student at Yale Law School. Shortly thereafter, Vance joined Thiel\u2019s investment firm Mithril Capital, where he worked for two years before joining Revolution Ventures. Vance played\u00a0a major role<\/a>\u00a0in Revolution\u2019s \u201cRise of the Rest\u201d seed fund whose major investors included Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos and the Walton family of WalMart, who boast\u00a0long-standing deep ties<\/a>\u00a0to the Clinton family. Vance later launched his own venture capital firm\u00a0Narya Capital<\/a>\u00a0in 2020, which was heavily funded by Thiel as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.<\/p>\n

Schmidt, a major Democrat donor, has been\u00a0the guiding hand<\/a>\u00a0behind the Biden administration\u2019s\u00a0science and technology policy<\/a>\u00a0and has dominated the development of the AI policies of the US military and intelligence communities, largely through his leadership of the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI). As\u00a0Unlimited Hangout<\/em>\u00a0previously reported<\/a>, the Schmidt-led NSCAI promoted policies like the end of private car ownership and in-person shopping in the United States to advance Americans\u2019 adoption of AI as supposed national security imperative in the lead-up to the Covid-era lockdowns.Both Schmidt and Thiel are\u00a0key\u00a0<\/a>members<\/a>\u00a0of the steering committee of the controversial, closed-door and overtly globalist Bilderberg conference.\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>\u00a0once called<\/a>\u00a0Schmidt and Thiel the two most influential figures at Bilderberg.<\/p>\n

Thiel has\u00a0donated heavily<\/a>\u00a0to Vance\u2019s political career, giving $15 million to Vance\u2019s successful Senate bid in the 2022 election cycle in what was then the largest donation ever given to one Senate candidate. Thiel also joined Vance, a former \u201cNever Trumper,\u201d on a visit to Trump\u2019s Mar-a-Lago where Vance successfully won the former president\u2019s blessing. Thiel also connected Vance to other members of the so-called PayPal mafia, like David Sacks\u00a0who donated $1 million<\/a>\u00a0to Vance and hosted a fundraiser for him. Sacks, along with PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, were allegedly a key factor in Trump\u2019s selection of Vance as Vice President as they ran \u201ca secret lobbying campaign<\/a>\u201d for Vance that also included media presenter Tucker Carlson.<\/p>\n

Thiel had been a major donor to Trump\u2019s 2016 presidential campaign and served on Trump\u2019s transition team, with other Thiel-linked figures\u00a0like Trae Stephens<\/a>\u00a0dramatically influencing Trump\u2019s Pentagon appointments. Stephens\u2019 influence at the Trump Pentagon also helped develop the military\u2019s relationship with the Thiel-funded company Anduril, which was\u00a0co-founded by<\/a>\u00a0Stephens and Thiel fellow Palmer Luckey. Before Anduril, Luckey develop the Virual Reality system Oculus Rift, which was later sold to Facebook, where Thiel then served on the board. Anduril is now building a \u201cvirtual border wall<\/a>\u201d for the federal government and Trump, who long campaigned on building a physical barrier on the US-Mexico border, abandoned that promise during his first term and now supports the exact solution Anduril is selling.<\/p>\n

Anduril\u2019s unmanned drones have also come to play\u00a0a major role in Ukrainian military operations<\/a>\u00a0during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as have other controversial Thiel-funded companies like Palantir (a CIA contractor) and ClearView AI, which used mainly photos posted on Facebook (another Thiel-backed company) to develop its Orwellian facial recognition database. These companies\u2019 close ties to the Ukrainian military may impact a second Trump administration\u2019s policies as it relates to American support for Ukraine, particularly if Thiel is slated to hold significant influence. Beyond Ukraine, this\u00a0network<\/a>\u00a0of Thiel-funded defense companies are remaking the face of warfare and slowly but surely replacing human decision-making with AI.<\/p>\n

While these ties should be unsettling on their own, the potential influence of Thiel on the upcoming Trump administration should concern every American, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, due to Thiel\u2019s efforts to rehabilitate and remake some of the intelligence communities\u2019 most Orwellian and unconstitutional efforts to target domestic dissent.<\/p>\n

Thiel Information Awareness<\/strong><\/h2>\n

While Peter Thiel has long marketed himself as a libertarian, his track record from PayPal on has revealed him to instead be an architect of the modern surveillance state and a successor to the neoconservative cabal that had once tried (but failed) to do the same. During PayPal\u2019s earliest days, Thiel and his colleagues\u00a0went around<\/a>\u00a0to various government agencies, including intelligence agencies, to see how they could best tailor their product to win government support (and contracts) for their products and services. After leaving PayPal, Thiel would follow a similar path in creating another company, Palantir. Palantir is the engine on which the surveillance state runs and, soon after Vance was announced as Trump\u2019s Vice President, it was reported that Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale as well as Palantir itself\u00a0were backing\u00a0<\/a>a Trump-Vance super PAC called America PAC.<\/p>\n

Unlimited Hangout<\/em>\u00a0has reported<\/a>\u00a0extensively<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0Thiel<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Palantir<\/a>\u00a0for several years. As noted in past reports, the company was created to be\u00a0the privatized version<\/a>\u00a0of a post-9\/11 surveillance program that had been dreamt up by the Iran-Contra criminals responsible for the unconstitutional Main Core database. During the Reagan administration, the individuals at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal developed\u00a0a database called Main Core<\/u><\/a>, which firmly placed the US national-security state on its current, tech-fuelled path for crushing dissent. A senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in five presidential administrations\u00a0told\u00a0<\/u>Radar<\/u><\/em><\/a>\u00a0in 2008 that Main Core was \u201ca database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived \u2018enemies of the state\u2019 almost instantaneously.\u201d<\/p>\n

Main Core was expressly developed for use in \u201ccontinuity of government\u201d (COG) protocols by the key Iran-Contra figure Oliver North and his allies that operated an \u201coff the books\u201d intelligence apparatus with direct CIA involvement known as \u201cThe Enterprise.\u201d North and his associates used COG and Main Core to compile a list of US dissidents and \u201cpotential troublemakers\u201d to be dealt with if the continuity of government protocol was ever invoked. Troublingly, these protocols\u00a0could be invoked<\/a>\u00a0for a variety of reasons, including widespread public, non-violent opposition to a US military intervention abroad, widespread internal dissent, or a vaguely defined moment of \u201cnational crisis\u201d or \u201ctime of panic.\u201d North would later brush up against the Trump administration, joining former Blackwater founder Erik Prince in\u00a0an effort<\/a>\u00a0to lobby the administration to create an \u201coff the books,\u201d private CIA.<\/p>\n

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