Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘It’s not that Elon Musk has “stepped down” from DOGE. Take that with a pinch of salt. The idea that Musk “failed” in his “mission” to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse” is staggering beside the point.

It’s nothing so much as a repeat of all the many dumb articles about how Musk “failed” in his takeover of Twitter because he’d lost a ton of advertisers and hadn’t turned a profit. As if that was the point. You don’t buy a global propaganda weapon to turn a profit. You buy a global propaganda weapon to spread propaganda at a global scale.

The idea that Musk teamed up with Trump because of his deeply held belief in streamlining federal spending is naive at best and journalistic malpractice at worst.

His people are still in position across multiple departments in the US government. DOGE is going nowhere. And the real point of DOGE is not to save American taxpayers money. It’s a fundamental re-writing of the social contract, the relationship of US citizens to the state, and the state to private enterprise.

Musk’s operatives have been systematically gaining access to databases across the US government and are now merging them. This is a gift link to an important New York Times article that consolidates previous reporting and sheds new light on how these datasets are now being merged into a giant surveillance machine. A giant surveillance machine presided over by the dark lord of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel.

There’s one key rule to remember when considering all things Thiel: never underestimate him. He’s a master chess player who thinks strategically and long term. One of his most famous acts – destroying the media site, Gawker, was planned over years. JD Vance, the vice president, is a wholly owned Peter Thiel project that has been 15 years in the making. He first met Thiel when a student and he owes his entire career, first in finance and then politics, to him.

But Peter Thiel’s most consequential enterprise may be Palantir, the data analytics company and military contractor, which the Times reported is now being used to process and combine these datasets.

“Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.”

The New York Times drawing on reporting from Wired and CNN previously added up 314 categories of data that Musk’s DOGE was seeking to merge and consolidate.

Musk’s White House performances may be over, for now, most accurately viewed as a stunningly successful piece of political theatre but the “mission” is not. The foundations of a technoauthoritarian surveillance state have been laid and Palantir’s Foundry software – that also, unbelievably, is used at the heart of Britain’s NHS service – is the next stage in consolidation and control.

To understand how this database could be used, look no further than how it is already being used to monitor and track immigrants.

“Palantir also recently began helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations team, according to two Palantir employees and two current and former D.H.S. officials. The work is part of a $30 million contract that ICE signed with Palantir in April to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.”‘ (from How To Survive The Broligarchy)

This is one of the Substacks I am now reading, in addition to the mainstream media; the words were written before last week’s “break-up.”