QAnon is dead, but the paranoia lives on in Palantir panic
QAnon — the right-wing conspiracy theory claiming that Donald Trump was secretly battling an evil elitist cabal that puppeteers the world — may be in history’s ash heap, but the kind of fanatical, evidence-light thinking that birthed it is still alive and well, says BlazeTV host John Doyle.
Now that cryptic Q messages are a relic of the past, those who hunger for hype and theatrics are sinking their teeth into another paranoia-driven fantasy, this time revolving around Peter Thiel and Palantir — a powerful data analytics and surveillance software company that helps governments and large corporations analyze massive datasets to detect patterns, predict threats, and make decisions.
“According to the people who tend to like this idea … Palantir is essentially part of a vast global conspiracy to deprive Americans, specifically American patriots, of their rights, and that is somehow supposed to benefit Israel,” says Doyle.
People who take this bait usually end up setting their crosshairs on Vice President JD Vance. Thiel hired Vance at his venture firm Mithril Capital after meeting him at Yale, financially backed Vance's own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, and donated $15 million to his successful 2022 Ohio Senate campaign.
Many well-meaning fringe believers, hardened by years of being hated by America’s “most powerful and prestigious institutions,” says Doyle, hear this and denounce Vance as a controlled political figure installed by Thiel to advance a shadowy agenda of surveillance, authoritarian tech dominance, and anti-democratic control through Palantir's government contracts.
“On paper, dude, I don't know. It strikes me as a very sort of typical, like, mentor-mentee kind of relationship,” Doyle counters.
But more importantly, “look at the fruits of this [relationship], though,” he adds. “JD Vance is a senator in Ohio. JD Vance now is the vice president of the United States. He's doing fantastic work. Things are going very well for us, due in large part to JD Vance.”
Doyle cautions against falling into the right’s anti-Palantir/Thiel conspiracism, as it is ultimately a tactic employed by “people who stumbled into right-wing politics but are themselves spiritually leftists” to sabotage JD Vance’s potential 2028 presidential run by painting him as tool tied to "Big Tech" overlords like Thiel.
Further, he rejects the superstition that Palantir — named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s "The Lord of the Rings" — amounts to Thiel confessing plans to wield his AI-powered company as a real-world Sauron.
“I am gonna have to disappoint you a little bit by telling you that [Palantir] does not actually give you telepathic powers. Instead what it actually offers is a little bit more mundane, a little bit less romantic. It's just, like, software platforms that allow clients to make sense of pre-existing data,” says Doyle.
That said, Palantir is indeed working with “intelligence agencies, militaries, some of the world's largest corporations.”
“It's pretty clear that Palantir, whatever it does, is operating at the highest levels of society. Much of the U.S. government is running on Palantir software. Maybe we should pay a little bit more attention to that. Fair enough,” Doyle acknowledges.
Even still, it’s unwise to join the anti-Palantir/Thiel crowd for the explicit reason that it was started by leftists who hate anyone and anything considered right-wing.
“Amusingly, it is the fact that several of Palantir’s founders are outspokenly right-wing that the anti-Palantir narratives were spread in the first place. This was not from some kind of principled opposition. … Literally just because Palantir is run by guys who are sympathetic and enthusiastic about right-wing ideas,” says Doyle.
“All [Palantir] does is give you the ability to make sense of your own data,” he declares. If it was doing anything more than that — say, “stealing its clients’ data” — then almost certainly we would know about it due to the sheer number of people on both the left and pseudo-right who are chomping at the bit to dismantle Palantir.
“If that's happening, there's no evidence for it,” Doyle asserts. “And by the way, if the federal government wanted to send your data to Mossad — which, for the record, I really don't think that's what's going on — it doesn't need Palantir to do that. It would just simply do that.”
To hear more of Doyle’s analysis, watch the full episode above.
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