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MAGA embraced the “tech right,” the network of right-wing, anti-woke Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists, in the 2024 election because they shared a common foe: the left. The tech right now has an outsized influence on the U.S. government and the second Trump administration. And, day by day, their power grows, to the detriment of not only the American people, but our very system of constitutional government. 

Conservatives seemed enthusiastic to welcome Silicon Valley elites into the fold, including Elon Musk, namely because they promised to use their cutthroat management skills and startup expertise to trim the fat of the federal bureaucracy and make the government more efficient and cost-effective. It was a compelling argument: the federal government was, and still is, despite the efforts of DOGE, woefully sclerotic, incompetent, and wasteful. 

I argue that this tradeoff might not be worth it in the long run; it might have actually been detrimental to the health of our republic and our constitutional rights. In the name of fighting wokeness and bloated government bureaucracy, MAGA opened up their arms to a vast, powerful network of elites. The short term deal was a reduction of waste; the long term outcome seems increasingly like mass surveillance, and government policy not by the people, but by ruthlessly efficient private contractors. 

One company, in particular, seems to capture the toxicness of this implicit deal: Palantir. 

Throughout 2025, the Trump administration has drastically expanded its work with Palantir, a tech behemoth co-founded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel in 2004. If you are unfamiliar with Palantir, a 2018 Bloomberg article breaks down the company and what they are capable of doing. Subscribe to MR. RIGHT, a free weekly newsletter about modern masculinity)

“The company’s engineers and products don’t do any spying themselves; they’re more like a spy’s brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from the hands, eyes, nose, and ears. The software combs through disparate data sources—financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for connections that human analysts might miss,” Bloomberg reported. 

Palantir’s software then takes all that data and creates easy-on-the-eye graphics that could be extremely useful for government or military officials, for example, to get a picture of criminals, fraudsters, or enemy combatants. Numerous law enforcement agencies have already relied on Palantir, including the FBI and DHS. It was even used in the Department of Health and Human Services to detect instances of Medicare fraud. 

An activist of the group Campact! dressed as US President Donald Trump stands next to a wooden horse symbolising a Trojan Horse with the lettering “Palantir” in front of the Chancellery in Berlin where is taking place the German cabinet’s weekly meeting on September 3, 2025. Activists protested against the German Interior Ministry’s intention to pave the way for the nationwide use of the data mining Palantir software, that was........

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