In real time, we are watching the United States of America slide further into authoritarianism. As the administration’s response to protests in Los Angeles escalates, President Donald Trump’s handling of the issue must be understood in the context of his broader assault on democracy and the rule of law.
If deploying the National Guard and the marines to control citizens exercising their democratic right to protest was not a clear enough message, on Monday, Trump said that “it would be a great thing” if Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, was arrested over his opposition to the federal government’s intervention.
President Donald Trump said he would support the governor of California being arrested. Credit: AP
Another alarming example of encroachment on citizen’s rights is the recent news that the Trump administration is engaging the US-based tech company Palantir to merge government data to create one enormous mega-centre of personal information on citizens. Here, it joins China and Russia in the use of mass surveillance to monitor and control its people.
The notoriously secretive tech company already has deep connections to the US government, particularly to the Central Intelligence Agency and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement – the agency that provoked the protests in California as it carried out raids and mass arrests of illegal immigrants across Los Angeles late last week.
In its contract with ICE, Palantir is developing a surveillance platform that will allow the government to prioritise people for deportation, track deportations, and streamline “deportation logistics”.
And in yet another government contract revealed last month, Palantir will scrape, consolidate and analyse federal data on the health, finances and education of Americans for the Trump administration. This could give the government what the New York Times has described as “untold surveillance power”. Critics of the project argue that providing Trump with what amounts to detailed portraits of civilians could be used to silence or punish critics of the administration.
This mass surveillance program potentially encompasses all of American life. And unlike the phone and internet records secretly collected by the National Security Agency (as revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013), this technology is far more sophisticated, far more wide-ranging in scope, less understood, and less regulated.
In J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, the word “palantir” refers to powerful crystal balls. Made by ancient elves and used to see events of the past and future, the empire-building Sauron had one, which he could use to corrupt all others. In the real world, Palantir was co-founded by billionaire activist Peter Thiel, Elon Musk’s erstwhile mentor and a long-term supporter of Vice President J.D. Vance, as well as one of the many far-right tech bros currently propping up and profiting from the Trump administration.
Palantir is unapologetically ideological. The company’s leaders frame its work as a defence of “the West” in response to its decline – a decline driven, as they see it, by “woke” agendas and efforts to redistribute wealth and power. Like Trump, they see oppression and violence as necessary to winning the war against such forces.
