Leaked memos just revealed how the Supreme Court has been secretly ruling on major policy without written opinions, without public reasoning, and without accountability.

It's called the "shadow docket." And now we know how it started.

The New York Times published internal Supreme Court memos showing that Chief Justice John Roberts personally fast-tracked an emergency request from West Virginia to block Obama's Clean Power Plan in 2016.

He did it while other justices were on winter recess. No oral arguments. No full briefing. No written opinion explaining why. Just an unsigned order that killed the most significant climate regulation in American history.

That ruling was supposed to be an exception. It became the playbook.

In the decade since, the shadow docket has been transformed from an emergency tool used almost exclusively for death row cases into a weapon for reshaping American policy. The court now routinely issues major rulings through this process: unsigned, unexplained, and unchallengeable. No public reasoning.

No dissent published. No accountability.

And it has been devastating under Trump's second term. Through the shadow docket, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to fire federal workers while lawsuits were still pending in lower courts.

It has kept the ban on transgender military service in effect while the case moved through the system. It has handed Trump win after win without ever having to explain its reasoning to the American public.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sounded the alarm this week in a speech at Yale Law School. She said that when she clerked at the Supreme Court in 1999, the emergency docket was used "almost exclusively for death row inmates." Now it decides the fate of millions of people with no transparency.

"Today, the court routinely opts to enter the fray," Jackson said, "and it fails to acknowledge the harms that follow when the Supreme Court of the United States consistently and casually divests the lower courts of their equitable authority."

The conservative majority isn't just ruling in Trump's favor. They're doing it through a process specifically designed to avoid public scrutiny.

No written opinions means no record. No record means no accountability. No accountability means they can do whatever they want.

 

34 Members of Congress Say

Palantir Is Being Used to Build a Mass Surveillance Ecosystem

Thom Hartman

Thirty-four members of Congress sent a letter Thursday to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE director Todd Lyons demanding answers about how the administration is using surveillance technology to power its immigration crackdown, including tools built by Palantir, Clearview AI, PenLink, L3Harris, and Paragon Solutions.

The letter states that this suite of tools could be used to “compile, aggregate, and analyze large volumes of personal data and information” about Americans. It demands a response by April 24.

The lawmakers asked specifically about a Palantir-built app called ELITE, short for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, requesting a full accounting of its purpose, its data categories, and how many DHS officials have access to it. Palantir also built ICE’s core law enforcement case management system and the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, which agents use to select deportation cases and track who has been removed.

Congressman Dan Goldman, a lead author of the letter, said the administration has “weaponized” Palantir technology to power its “inhumane mass deportation agenda” and to “surveil American citizens.” The lawmakers also asked whether DHS collects data on people who are “peacefully observing, documenting or protesting immigration enforcement operations,” citing cases in which facial recognition was used to identify U.S. citizens who encountered ICE agents.

Every generation of Americans has had to decide whether to let the government watch everyone all the time. The Church Committee warned us back in the seventies what happens when surveillance tools built to chase foreign threats get turned on citizens at home. Now Peter Thiel’s company is building that same infrastructure on a scale J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t have dreamed of, and they’re renting it to an administration that has openly threatened its political enemies and declared protesters enemies of the state. The Fourth Amendment wasn’t written for comfortable times. It was written for exactly this moment.

Palantir’s government revenue nearly doubled in fiscal year 2025, hitting approximately $1 billion. Its business has exploded since Trump’s second term began. The company’s founder has been closely allied with the administration. And the congressional letter demanding transparency has, so far, received no substantive public response.

 

Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.

Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:

“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”

The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.

“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”

“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdami ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.

“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)

“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.

We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts.

But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.

In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security, and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.

That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.

I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how that the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.

Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent or country in the image of Trump’s mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary.

The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.

That goes all the way back to trying to overturn the 1943 Schneiderman Supreme Court ruling, which held the government must prove “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot. But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether.

Roy told Breitbart his target is what he calls a “Red-Green Alliance” of socialists and Islamists, and a summary from his office goes further, claiming current immigration policies — echoing clearance Thomas's recent speech that I wrote about yesterday — have produced “dangerous levels of opposition to classical American political doctrines, like free-market capitalism.”

That’s an extraordinary admission, because Roy isn’t proposing to deport people who commit crimes, or who support terrorism, or even who lied on their citizenship applications. He wants, instead, to strip of citizenship and then deport people who don’t sufficiently believe in the unregulated, low-tax version of the so-called free market capitalism advocated by the right-wing billionaires who now own the GOP.

This is a loyalty test for an ideology rather than a country, and, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it’s the kind of legislation the robber barons of the 1920s and the John Birchers and McCarthy movement of the 1950s dreamed of but could never ram through Congress and neither Taft nor Eisenhower would ever have signed.

We’ve actually run a smaller, more local version of this experiment before, and it ended in disgrace. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw roughly 10,000 immigrants rounded up without warrants and 556 of them deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, all for the crime of holding the wrong politics.

The Communist Control Act of 1954 put into law by Republicans at the height of McCarthyism, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1973 and most of its provisions repealed. Each time we’ve tried this sort of neofascist thing the country looked back in shame, having relearned that the First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class.

History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.

There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens and 12.8 million green-card holders living in the United States today, and every single one of them would, under Roy’s bill, be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on some right-winger complaining about them to a federal bureaucrat or police agency or the discovery of a book in their house.

It would threaten millions of legal permanent residents and visa holders working in our hospitals, building our houses, teaching our children, designing our electronics, and even farming our food. The fear alone is the point: if you’re a naturalized citizen or green-card or visa holder, and you want to attend a Free Palestine rally, a labor union meeting, or a tenants’ rights organizing session, you’d now have to ask yourself whether some aide in Stephen Miller’s office might decide that constitutes “advocacy for socialism.”

And it’s one of dozens of similar laws that have been proposed by Republicans in recent years.

Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the billionaire Peter Thiel who funded JD Vance’s rise to the Senate and vice presidency meant when he famously said, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” That’s the billionaire whose company now compiles information on Americans on behalf of the Trump regime.

Call your member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you oppose the MAMDANI Act and any legislation that creates thought, publishing, and speech crimes, then use the ACLU’s action tool to make sure your senators hear from you, too.

Support the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been on the front lines fighting Roy’s earlier “Sharia-Free America Act,” and back the American Immigration Council as it readies the inevitable legal challenges. Get involved with Indivisible and your local Democratic Party to make sure the 2026 midterms send Roy and every co-sponsor of this bill back home permanently.

The Constitution doesn’t defend itself and neither does' freedom; that work belongs to us, and the time to engage with it is right now.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Chip Roy makes McCarthy Blush”

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piece of bread each day.

After days, they took me for interrogation, which was based on beatings and torture.

They put cigarettes out in my mouth and on my body.

They put clamps on my testicles that were attached to something heavy. It went on like that for a whole day.

My testicles swelled up and my left ear bled.

They used the worst kind of torture; I was wishing for death in a crazy way.

I was asked about Hamas leaders and people I didn’t know and hadn’t met. They asked me where I was on October 7, and I said I was at home and had only gone out to get food for my wife.

They beat me. Then they put me back in the freezing room with the loud disco music, and again left me there, naked, for days, and gave me only very little bread and water.

Then they took me into interrogation again. They opened WhatsApp on my phone and asked me about neighbors from my building and where they worked. I told them that some of them worked at UNRWA or the International Committee of the Red Cross and some I didn’t know.

From there, they took me to a different pen, where they left me naked for about or days.

I got very little food and drink there too, and they made me wear a diaper.

After that, I was taken into interrogation again. I was asked about my work and about car dealers I have business connections with. During the interrogation, they showed me a video and told me they were Islamic Jihad people. I told them I didn’t know them.

During the interrogation, I was given electric shocks and beaten so badly that I passed out.

My foot got swollen from the electric shocks. When I came to, I asked them to bandage it and they did.

The interrogation continued, and then they took me back to the room with the disco and left me there for days. When I asked the soldier guarding me to go to the bathroom, he brought me a container and told me to pee into it.

I developed wounds, bleeding, and pain in my body, especially the left leg, which had bruises and wounds full of pus that hurt badly. My leg turned blue and nearly reached a state of necrosis.

I was kept in the pen for days, and then I had surgery, without anesthesia, on my swollen left leg.

I asked for anesthetics and they said I wasn't in a position to ask for anything and ordered me to keep quiet.

When I screamed in pain, they hit me in the abdomen with a plastic stick until I shut up.

They drained the pus from my leg.

Then they moved me back to the pen, where I was forced to kneel every day for weeks, handcuffed and blindfolded.

The bandage on my leg was changed only once. We showered once a week and got clean underwear only once during that time.

I was offered to work with the army and refused. One of the officers or soldiers conveyed condolences for the death of my father and mother, my family, and my wife. That’s when I had a nervous breakdown and I passed out.

After days of detention, I was put on a bus with other detainees, and we drove for a long time.

We arrived at the Karam Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing, where the soldiers told us we weren’t allowed to talk to the media about the torture we’d been through.

They gave us a bag with our personal effects, but I didn’t find the money, the gold jewelry, or my phone in mine. I only found the phone charger, my UNRWA refugee card, and my ID card.

I told the soldier I wanted my things, and he said I had nothing and that if I spoke about it, I would go back to prison.

We went to the Palestinian side of the crossing and UNRWA staff were waiting for us there. I called my family in northern Gaza, and they were shocked when they heard my voice. They were sure I’d been killed.

My father and mother were so excited that they put themselves at risk and came to Rafah to be with me. They got to the checkpoint in a cart and walked from there.

They told me my wife had given birth to our daughter while I was in prison, that she was malnourished because of the hunger in the northern Gaza Strip, and that our daughter was born weighing kg.

My parents and I lived in a tent in Rafah until the army raided the area, and now we are in a makeshift tent in Deir al-Balah.

Conditions here are terrible.

I keep in touch with my wife over the phone. She keeps moving with the baby from place to place because of the bombings.

Much of the torture that the other men and I endured was being hit in the genitals and sensitive areas, and having cigarettes put out on our mouths, our bodies, and our genitals.

My toe almost had to be amputated as a result of the electricity torture.

At one point, they took a man next to me, and they let him lie on the ground. They took off his underwear. They released a dog on him, and the dog raped the guy.

They were enjoying themselves in the ways of torture.

Some guys were tortured with an electric baton that they inserted into prisoners’ rectums.

One man died as a result of this torture.

If international law and human rights are not safeguarded during war, they are unnecessary in times of peace."

If you want to understand exactly what the Silicon Valley billionaire class actually thinks of the working class, you do not need to read between the lines; you just have to read their own terrifying manifestos. Palantir, the massive data analytics and defense contracting firm heavily embedded in the United States military and intelligence apparatus, recently published a deeply disturbing ideological blueprint they call "The Technological Republic." It is not a business plan; it is a blatant, authoritarian demand to merge unaccountable corporate tech power with the lethal force of the federal government. Any private corporation operating under this specific, radicalized belief system should be immediately and permanently banned from holding a single government contract.

You do not even have to read their terrifying twenty-two-point manifesto to understand exactly how deeply sinister this corporation actually is; you simply have to look at the sheer, unhinged arrogance of what they chose to name themselves. "Palantir" is a direct, deliberate reference to the fictional universe of J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Lord of the Rings*. In the mythology, a Palantir is an ancient "seeing stone" used to spy across vast distances. But the crucial, horrifying context is that these stones were ultimately hijacked by the supreme dark lord of the series to surveil the world, corrupt the minds of political leaders, and orchestrate endless, devastating warfare.

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The fact that a massive data-mining monopoly (one explicitly building domestic surveillance grids and military targeting algorithms for the federal government) deliberately named themselves after a fictional artifact of pure, corrupting evil is not some cute, nerdy inside joke. It is a terrifying, blatant admission of their actual intentions. They are openly telling the working class that they view themselves as the all-seeing eye of a dystopian empire, and they are literally bragging about their own villainy right to our faces.

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The entire foundation of Palantir’s manifesto is the aggressive privatization of the military-industrial complex. In their points regarding "hard power" and AI weapons, they explicitly state that the engineering elite must actively participate in national defense, arguing that whoever builds AI weapons will control the century. They do not want to be just a software vendor; they want to be the architects of the American war machine. Handing the keys to our national security over to a private, profit-driven tech monopoly that views global conflict as an inevitable software engineering challenge is a recipe for endless, mechanized warfare.

Comment

But the absolute most offensive, enraging point in their entire twenty-two-point doctrine is their stance on the working class bleeding for their wars. Palantir explicitly calls for a return to the mandatory military draft, stating that "national service should be a universal duty." Let that sink in. The billionaire executives sitting in air-conditioned boardrooms, building the AI targeting systems that will ignite the next global conflict, are actively lobbying the government to force your working-class children onto the front lines to fight it. They want to socialize the physical risk in blood while they entirely privatize the financial profits.

When they are not demanding the working class fight abroad, they are demanding the right to surveil us at home. The manifesto insists that Silicon Valley must "play a role in addressing violent crime" in our local neighborhoods. For a company like Palantir, whose bread and butter is massive, unregulated data harvesting and predictive analytics, this is a terrifying threat. It is a direct pitch to turn our local police departments into heavily militarized, algorithm-driven surveillance states, treating everyday American citizens like enemy combatants in their own communities just to test out their new tech.

While they demand total surveillance of the public, they aggressively demand total secrecy for themselves. Two separate points in their manifesto explicitly complain about the "ruthless exposure" of public figures and demand we show "far more grace" to the politicians and elites running the country. They view holding the ruling class accountable for their corruption as a "petty assault." It is a blatant, hypocritical demand for absolute immunity: mass surveillance and zero privacy for the working class, but total, unquestioned protection for the political and corporate elite.

The ideological arrogance expands well beyond government mechanics; it bleeds into highly dangerous cultural supremacy. Palantir explicitly declares that certain cultures are "dysfunctional and regressive" while openly attacking the concepts of pluralism and inclusivity in the West. It is deeply terrifying when an unaccountable defense contractor—a company that actively decides who goes on watchlists, who gets surveilled, and who gets targeted by military algorithms—openly holds supremacist views about which subcultures are "valid" and which ones are "regressive."

This manifesto also actively demands that society stop holding the billionaire class in contempt. They literally complain that the public "snickers" at billionaires like Elon Musk and insist we should be applauding them instead. This reveals the true allegiance of Palantir: they do not serve the American Republic; they serve the oligarchy. They are actively trying to construct a society where the ultra-wealthy tech elite are treated as untouchable philosopher-kings, completely immune from the criticism of the everyday people whose lives they are aggressively trying to engineer.

They are even arrogant enough to lobby for the destabilization of global security frameworks to drum up more business. The manifesto demands the "undoing" of post-WWII pacifism in Germany and Japan, arguing that these nations need to be remilitarized. A private software company should not be dictating international geopolitical alliances. They are actively advocating for a massive, global arms race simply because a remilitarized Europe and Asia means billions of dollars in brand new government contracts for their AI defense platforms.

When a private corporation explicitly holds a political ideology this authoritarian, handing them state power effectively bypasses the democratic process entirely. We do not get to vote on Palantir’s board of directors, yet they are actively managing the data that runs our intelligence agencies, our military, and our domestic law enforcement. By continuing to award them massive federal contracts, the government is officially endorsing a worldview that views the working class as draftable cannon fodder and the elite as untouchable rulers.

The American public must draw an absolute, uncompromising line in the sand. We cannot allow an unelected, technocratic oligarchy to dictate the future of human freedom under the guise of national security. Palantir's "Technological Republic" is a dystopian nightmare, and any politician who takes their money or awards them a contract is actively selling out the working class. If this independent journalism brings you value, your voluntary contribution gives me the absolute freedom to keep tearing down these corporate monopolies. Links are in the first comment. Subscribe to the Substack for the full archive.

#AVoiceOfReason #Palantir #WorkingClass #Accountability #SurveillanceState #TechOligarchy #MilitaryIndustrialComplex #News #April2026

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Trump's buddies

"Palantir’s new manifesto is a straight up blueprint for techno-fascism

Alex Karp’s mass surveillance and autonomous weapons software empire has just released a blueprint for an American techno-fascist, techno-feudalist state powered by advanced AI.

The 22-point document combines the enthusiasm of the 1930s American Technocracy movement with elements eerily reminiscent of 20th century fascist ideologists, and calls for:

Making the Silicon Valley “engineering elite” the new aristocracy, obliged “to participate in the defense of the nation,” and being given more of a say in advancing the overarching “grand narrative”

The rejection of “vacant and hollow pluralism” and “decadent” consumer iPhone culture

Recognition of the “limits” of “soft power,” and celebrating “hard power,” which “in this century will be built on software”

Framing the race for AI weapons debate as an ‘if we don’t build it, our enemies will’, using technological inevitability as a moral cover

Dubbing national service “a universal duty,” and calling for the end of all-volunteer armies

Calling for the rearmament of Germany and Japan

Contemptuously framing the Weimar Republic’s US’s current crop of leaders a “roster of ineffectual, empty vessels,” and suggesting that the “ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service” (keep those Epstein files closed, right Alex?)

Heaping jingoistic praise for America’s “progressive values” and supposed indispensability to “an extraordinarily long peace” post-WWII, and touting the superiority of Western culture, which has “produced wonders” while “others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful”

A critique of decadent, hollow pluralism, the need for a new elite promising “the solution,” demands for national sacrifice, rejection of liberal constraints, technological determinism, ranked cultures and a rewriting of the post-WWII order. We’ve seen this movie before…

@geopolitics_prime"

#pureblood #massawakening

 

Great Palantir - have your cookie, you deserve it in this case! Your software helped find the bad guy - after his evil deed - without having to mass surveil a nation preemptively. See how that worked like a charm -- let us remember that - mkay?!:

"Founded in 2003, Palantir provides software which specialises collating and analysing data to governments and private companies alike.

The company’s two main offerings are Palantir Gotham, designed for defence and intelligence purposes, and Palantir Foundry, used for civil government and commercial uses, but they often create custom software for clients for more specific use cases, especially the US government.

The company has long been controversial for its services and clients, with critics especially concerned about surveillance, data collection, data sovereignty, and where that all that information they handle ends up going.

Hiding in plain sight

Social media and the usage of it by Christchurch attacker Brenton Tarrant prior to the shooting has been a key issue in subsequent investigations into the massacre, and the Police’s use of Palantir to analyse social media content could have been an attempt at course correcting after prior law enforcement and intelligence failures.

The final report of New Zealand’s royal commission (a type of government inquiry in Commonwealth monarchies) into the massacre wrote that the survivors and victims’ relatives felt that “if Public sector agencies had monitored social media, this may have alerted them to the potential threat” and that they “did not understand why [Tarrant]’s social media was not monitored.”

Prior to the massacre, Tarrant was in numerous Facebook groups affiliated with Australia’s far-right movement, and was Facebook friends with several influential Australian far-right figures.

An employee of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) – New Zealand’s domestic security agency – claimed to have seen Facebook posts made by Tarrant in an internal report that was made prior to the massacre, but did not believe they warranted escalating the matter, according to the Arotake review – the SIS’ own investigation into its actions.

The royal commission’s report identified the employee as having belonged to the SIS’ Combined Threat Assessment Group branch – which is responsible for assessing threats and preparing reports for decision makers – and said the employee claimed to have seen the posts in 2018.

The inquiry accused the SIS employee’s memory of being “awry” and claimed to have been satisfied that “the employee could not have seen these posts before 15 March 2019”, the date of the massacre, because the SIS claimed to have not found any report which included Tarrant’s Facebook posts.

In the 48 hours prior to the shooting, Tarrant posted a flood of anti-immigration and fascist content to his social media pages. He also posted photos of firearms, magazines and tactical gear that had Nazi imagery, references, and slogans drawn on them, alongside the names of people Tarrant would later claim he wanted to avenge.

The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) – New Zealand’s largest intelligence agency – told the inquiry that social media accounts “posting weaponry” were not tracked as “[p]osting weaponry … is not an illegal activity”.

The inquiry did not address the fact that Tarrant’s weaponry had fascist references on it, or that he posted it alongside a plethora of violent right-wing content.

A 2025 University of Auckland study found that Tarrant had likely publicly posted on the notoriously far-right Politically Incorrect (/pol/) section of 4chan since at least 2015 about his support for and intent to carry out far-right attacks, a community known to have hosted previous mass shooters.

In March 2018, a year before the massacre, a user very likely to be Tarrant joined a thread about the South Pacific.

When discussion conversation turned to Muslims in New Zealand, the user joined in on expressing hatred, identifying himself as a Dunedin resident at the same time Tarrant was living there. His country, New Zealand, was visible through a flag next to the post ID. After someone egged him on to do something about it, the user posted “[D]on’t worry lad, I have a plan to stop it. Just hold on.”

In another August 2018 thread, a user likely to be Tarrant joined discussions about the locations of mosques in New Zealand.

“Tarrant wrote angrily about mosques and refugees in the South Island, including ‘here in Dunedin.’ He wrote: ‘F***** dunedin and christchurch both have mosques, christchurch has two of them for fucks sake.’ And again: ‘Want to hear some crazy shit? Ashburton now has a mosque, they converted a church.’ Four of the posters, including Tarrant, called for violence against the mosques. One commented that a particular mosque would be easy to firebomb. When another posted an image of a matchbox, Tarrant replied with only “Soon.” Seven months later, Tarrant attacked two mosques in Christchurch”.

The findings raise “serious questions, not only about why this posting was not detected, but also why it has not been discovered in the five years since the attacks”, the study’s authors wrote in a 2025 article for The Conversation.

A sleepwalking inquiry

Tarrant publicly stating his intention to attack significantly contradicts the royal commission’s remark that it would be “unlikely that the individual [Brenton Tarrant] would have wished to do anything that might attract the attention of international intelligence and security agencies.”

The royal commission’s belief that Tarrant desired to act covertly was used to justify not investigating whether Brenton Tarrant met with Martin Sellner – a far-right Austrian activist known for his advocacy for remigration (a euphemism for mass deportations) – after Tarrant donated approximately $2,300 Australian dollars to him in January 2018 and they subsequently discussed the possibility of meeting up in Austria over email.

Shortly after the massacre in March 2019, Austrian police raided Sellner’s residence over his ties to Tarrant. Sellner destroyed copies of his communications with Tarrant 40 minutes prior to the raid, suggesting that he had foreknowledge of an investigation into him. The only correspondence Austria’s authorities were able to recover came from screenshots that Sellner himself intentionally chose to preserve.

In late 2018 – just months before the massacre, Tarrant spent 9 days in Austria.

According to the Lone Actor podcast, an Austrian intelligence report has it that a rental car Tarrant used during his trip travelled about 2,000km during the trip.

The royal commission’s final report dismissed all this evidence, and made no mention of Tarrant’s extraordinary usage of a rental car during his Austrian excursion. Instead, the inquiry took him at his word.

Tarrant told the royal commission “that he did not meet Martin Sellner” and “had not tried to do so” during the late 2018 visit, according to the report.

“We [the inquiry’s commissioners] are inclined to accept this denial. There is no evidence to suggest they [Tarrant and Sellner] did meet”, the inquiry said, seeming all too eager dismiss the claims, which risked undermining the inquiry’s finding that Tarrant was a “lone actor”.

Since the massacre, Sellner has gained prominence and influence among Europe’s right-wing, and has popularised remigration.

In November 2023, he hosted a secret countryside conference with top brass of Germany’s right-wing CDU and AfD parties – some of whom were sitting members of parliament at the time – to plan how mass deportations could be implemented in Germany. Following the conference, AfD’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, publicly committed to implementing remigration.

Hardly the first time

The Police’s brief flirtations with Palantir does not mark the first time that New Zealand’s public sector has jumped into bed with the firm.

In fact, the government’s relationship with Palantir began when the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) started a pilot programme in 2012, including acquiring licenses for Palantir technology and the training of 100 NZDF personnel, around the same time Palantir opened a dedicated Wellington office.

The programme soon expanded to an “ongoing contractual relationship”, including the “acquisition of additional hardware and annual Palantir licences”, the NZDF said in response to an OIA request from Exit From Affco. The NZDF also released the manual for Palantir’s Gotham software to Exit From Affco.

By 2018, the NZDF was spending over $1.8 million NZD a year on its contracts with Palantir, and had spent $7.2 million NZD between 2012 and 2018, according to a report in the New Zealand Herald.

The SIS and GCSB are also known to use Palantir software, in a relationship which the New Zealand Herald says also dates back to 2012.

In March 2020, Palantir approached and met with the Ministry of Health and Privacy Commissioner, offering to “rapidly set up COVID-19 data-crunching capabilities” as it had done in Italy and the UK at free or little cost. The Ministry of Health then sat on the offer for a month, before announcing it had no plans to retain Palantir’s services.

Private sector health firms in New Zealand have also begun to make use of Palantir’s offerings, a source has claimed to Exit From Affco.

An OIA request from academic Marco de Jong revealed that then-defence and intelligence minister Judith Collins met with the head of Palantir’s international operations during her February 2026 visit to the Munich Security Conference.

The briefing was mostly redacted, but it saw her “acknowledge the importance of an ongoing effective partnership” and ask whether there were any “opportunities of interest for New Zealand in new technologies and emerging capabilities in this sector”.

Chris Penk, who replaced Collins in her ministerial roles, told RNZ that “the NZDF has no existing plans to use Palantir in the emerging technologies space”, “the NZDF uses Palantir as an analytics platform to aid with planning”, and that “the Government’s ongoing partnership with Palantir is led by the GCSB.”

However, the NZDF over recent years has been helping test and develop the US military’s new Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) system, a network to link together all sensors and data from the US military and its allies to enable more battlefield data collection, analysis, and interoperability. Palantir helped develop the Maven Smart System platform alongside the US military as their interface for this command and control network.

In May 2024, as revealed by documents found in a Salvation Army op-shop and given to Nicky Hager, NZDF staff attended a secret “Five Eyes community Combined Digital Leaders Forum” in the United Kingdom to discuss the new “Five Eyes C5 Campaign Plan” and how the five member countries would integrate their military command and control systems. This would include sending data, intelligence and information to other partners and be analysed in a “federated [Five Eyes] data fabric”, which Hager describes as “a worldwide system where all intelligence and information from the five partners is shared and woven together to support the dominant partner”.

New Zealand naval officers had meetings with other Five Eyes partners in September last year ahead of RIMPAC 2026, the US Navy’s biennial naval exercise in Hawai’i (and the largest worldwide). These meetings were to discuss Project Overmatch, the US Navy’s initiative for integrating the CJADC2 system, and testing it during exercises at this year’s RIMPAC. The NZDF announced earlier this month it would be sending 50 personnel to the Project Convergence Capstone 6 event later this year in Arizona, where the US Army doing their annual testing of their implementation of CJADC2 by putting soldiers alongside aerial and ground drones.

Strange bedfellows

New Zealand’s relationship with Palantir started shortly after one of its co-founders, Peter Thiel, was naturalised in 2011, while meeting none of the statutory requirements, and having only spent 12 days in the country, through an unusual and informal understanding with the John Key government: that Thiel would invest heavily in New Zealand’s technology sector.

Thiel didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. Valar Ventures, the venture capital firm Thiel set up in 2010 specifically for his New Zealand ambitions, ceased making investments in New Zealand shortly after Thiel had received his citizenship. By 2017, Valar had almost completely divested from New Zealand.

Thiel was able to keep his citizenship secret for almost five and a half years, until the New Zealand Herald revealed it in January 2017.

Valar Ventures was recently revealed to have received $40 million in investment from late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2015.

Sir Rod Drury, founder of fintech firm Xero, became one of Thiel’s surrogates in New Zealand after the billionaire made an investment into both Xero and Pacific Fibre – a failed venture Sir Drury co-founded to build an undersea fibre optic cable between the United States, New Zealand, and Australia.

Pacific Fibre had no less than $5.5 million in investment from Valar, and documents on Thiel’s citizenship released by New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) show that his VC firm’s holding in the company had significant weight on the decision to grant him citizenship.

Sir Drury, who was described by the New Zealand Herald as “the biggest winner of Thiel’s brush with New Zealand”, was one of Thiel’s character references, and wrote to New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs in support of Thiel’s citizenship application.

Sam Morgan, co-founder of Pacific Fibre and then a director of Xero, also wrote to the DIA in 2011 in support of Thiel’s citizenship application.

In 2013, whilst Thiel’s citizenship was still a secret, then-Green Party co-leader Russel Norman issued a press release questioning whether the Key government was working with Palantir to spy on New Zealanders after it was revealed Key had met with Thiel multiple times, the company had opened a Wellington office, and had posted a job listing for an analyst to be embedded inside the New Zealand government.

After Norman posted a tweet writing “When crony govt meets surveillance state - John Key appoints Peter Thiel’s Palantir to spy on NZers”, Drury quoted the post and wrote “Don’t be wankers”. Sir Drury and Norman then got into a heated Twitter dispute, with Sir Drury writing that the Greens were “ruining relationships and/by insinuating cronyism is vandalism”.

(...)

In September 2022, top officials from all Five Eyes partners flew into Queenstown for a secret meeting, with attendees suspected to have been hosted at the Millbrook Resort near Arrowtown, just a 10-minute drive from Drury’s property.

Drury’s alleged relationship with the Five Eyes, and with Thiel – who is closely tied to the alliance himself – may warrant taking another look at their failed effort to build an undersea fibre optic cable connected to New Zealand.

Pacific Fibre’s cable was being planned around the same time the GCSB – in partnership with America’s National Security Agency (NSA) – was starting up the Speargun mass surveillance program. Revealed by leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the program saw covert surveillance of New Zealand’s internet traffic and metadata, collected by bugging the Southern Cross Cable Network in the North Island, which at the time was the only undersea fibre optic cable connecting New Zealand to North America, as well as handling the vast majority of traffic routed through Australia, thus seeing most of the country’s international internet traffic.

On Wednesday – just a month after he received the New Zealander of the Year Award – Sir Drury was publicly accused of inappropriate behaviour during his time as CEO of Xero by a former employee, which resulted in an internal misconduct investigation being launched in December 2017.

Drury abruptly stepped down as from his CEO role four months later.

On Wednesday, Xero said that it began an internal review of its handling of the allegations.

The very American solution

The Central Intelligence Agency’s investment firm, In-Q-Tel, bootstrapped Palantir’s founding in 2003 with a $2 million investment, and the US government has subsequently become their biggest customer. Palantir has contracts with the US intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, law enforcement agencies, and police departments across the United States.

The Maven Smart System platform for the US military’s CJADC2 system, co-developed by Palantir and the Pentagon, is currently being used for data analysis and target selection in the US-Israeli war on Iran according to an early February report in the Washington Post. Some US lawmakers believe Maven may have chosen to target a girl’s primary school in the country’s invasion of Iran at the beginning of February, which killed at least 175 civilians, most of whom were young schoolgirls.

Palantir’s contracts with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have long been controversial since they began in 2014, but their collaboration increased heavily under the first and second Trump administration. To assist with Trump’s mass deportation program, Palantir was contracted in 2025 to develop ImmigrationOS, a platform which uses data collection and AI analysis to find, track and help ICE deport suspected noncitizens.

Palantir software has been used extensively by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in the Gaza genocide and their wars throughout the region, with CEO Alex Karp saying in February 2024 he was “exceedingly proud that after Oct. 7, within weeks, we are on the ground and we are involved in operationally crucial operations in Israel.” Palantir has been repeatedly accused of complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity due to the IDF’s actions in Gaza. When confronted with these accusations at a Cambridge Union event, Peter Thiel responded that his “bias is to defer to Israel”.

Palantir is eager to onboard governments and institutions to their services, often offering free or discounted rates and being proactive in approaching potential clients.

Palantir has often been criticised for enabling aggressive data collection and surveillance by providing these services to clients and allowing them to connect vast sources of data much more easily. There have also been concerns raised about data sovereignty, where data is processed or stored, and whether any data is shared elsewhere by Palantir. In 2024, the Swiss government decided to abandon their plans to work with Palantir after officials couldn’t guarantee there was data sovereignty, writing in a report that “there is a possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services.”

Palantir has also recently begun rapidly expanding its relationship with the United Kingdom. Palantir’s London based European branch, chaired by Louis Mosley – the grandson of Nazi collaborator and British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley, has signed numerous contracts over the past decade with England’s National Health Service (NHS), the Britain’s Ministry of Defence, and the Met Police.

Tarrant himself was a fan of Sir Mosley, having posted links to his works prior to the massacre, and even gifted one of Sir Mosley’s books – Fascism: 100 Questions Asked – to his sister’s mixed race partner.

Ironically, the Police sought solutions made in part by Sir Mosley’s grandchild in the wake of the massacre."

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Smith K. Stead and William Evans, Exit From Affco