One Eye To See Them All
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A Very Contemporary Sci-Fi Thriller
Like many of the darkest tales out of the second Trump era, this is a story that sounds like it was ripped directly from the pages of a comic book. A billionaire white supremacist reality TV show star uses an apartheid-loving South African oligarch’s money to buy the American presidency, and once he’s in office hires another apartheid-loving South African billionaire weapons contractor to build him the most comprehensive and terrifying fascist mass surveillance panopticon the world has ever seen. Unfortunately for those of us who prefer our science fiction thrillers to remain fictional, it also appears to be true; at least according to widely-circulated reporting by the New York Times, MSNBC, and other media outlets.
You may remember that back in March, Downmarket Mussolini signed an ominous executive order that allows the US government to broadly share data internally, and DHS then immediately used that information to hunt down brown people as part of Trump’s fascist mass deportation scheme. Now we know that the Pork Reich also gave Peter Thiel-aligned malevolent weapons contractor and data technology company Palantir over a hundred million dollars (and counting) to help a regime already calling protestors “terrorists”, and criticism a “threat to American national security”, compile comprehensive data reports on everyone in America using information collected by agencies across the entire US government.
For more details, let’s check out this detailed and surprisingly frank May 30th, 2025 article by Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik, writing for the New York Times.
Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
“The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.”
This is a story that sits at a terrifying nexus of multiple topics I’ve been writing about throughout the second Trump era, including billionaire neofeudalist influence on the Trump agenda, the power of so-called “AI” technology to supercharge fascist oppression, the expansion of a pre-existing police surveillance panopticon to conduct Trump’s fascist mass deportation program, and the clear signs that the regime intends to use that same police state to target, suppress, and potentially purge Trump’s political opposition across broad swathes of society. The Pork Reich has made no secret about its intentions to transform America into a fascist dictatorship under a perpetual state of something that sure does look like martial law. With an already-functioning militarized police state at his disposal, the biggest obstacle facing Downmarket Mussolini is the pure logistics involved in tracking and targeting all the folks who have no place in the “new America” he’s trying to build. Now, just like IBM punch card computers allowed Hitler to conduct the Holocaust, noted supervillain Thiel, his shadowy contracting company, and the power of “AI” are offering a way for Trump to unlock that panopticon and use it to empower a police state that would make East Germany at the height of the Cold War jealous.
My friends, do you have any idea just how much data the US government keeps on American citizens? The answer is a lot, and certainly more than enough to construct highly-detailed profiles of dissidents, activist, and political enemies of the Kelpto Kaiser the regime may want to target; this is extremely bad news for folks who aren’t pining for the days of the Nazi police state in interwar Germany. In the years since the attacks on 9/11 kicked off America’s disastrous War on Terror, political observers, privacy advocates, and police state abolitionists have warned about the dangers of building a state-controlled digital panopticon under the guise of keeping us safe; both because of the abuses it would allow by a US government that has never given one wet shit about privacy rights, and because such a system could potentially empower an authoritarian dictatorship if it fell into the wrong hands. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of anyone who more fully embodies the concept of “the wrong hands” than Donald Trump, or for that matter Palantir, a company we last saw helping the IOF assassinate officials at home with their families in Gaza and hunting down brown people through the magic of “AI” as part of the Pork Reich’s fascist mass deportation program here in the United States.
In a post-Snowden leaks world, it is the height of naivety to presume the Trump regime doesn’t have enough data on virtually everyone in America to facilitate targeted repression against its perceived political enemies, which apparently include folks protesting Elon Musk’s companies, opponents of Trump’s mass deportation schemes, sitting American judges, and members of the opposition Democratic Party. Keep in mind that this is a government that has already created a fake invasion to justify trafficking hundreds of innocent migrants to a torture gulag in El Salvador, declared anti-genocide protest a threat to American national security to justify kidnapping and attempting to deport foreign student protestors exercising their free speech rights, and openly defies court orders on a regular basis. They’re calling protestors terrorists, implying that speaking out against fascist mass deportations and a US-backed genocide is material support for terrorism, and plotting to use FARA and RICO laws to target a broadly-defined “radical left” in America. Now, the Pork Reich and one of the most amoral tech companies on Earth are teaming up to automate sorting and compiling the data Trump needs to conduct widespread repression, detainment, and ideological purges. Unless you’ve been living in a cave since Trump first strolled down that escalator to announce his presidential ambitions in late 2015, it should be pretty obvious to you that this is about more than mass deportations and fighting “terrorists.”
The seeds of an authoritarian surveillance state sewn during our long, multi-administration “war on terror” have grown to find expression in an AI-infused, fascist Trump regime that defines “us” and “them” along both racial and ideological lines, and will seemingly stop at nothing to crush dissent against Downmarket Mussolini’s tyrannical rule. Armed with a “counterterrorism” panopticon, a militarized police state, and a host of private sector allies working to make Trump’s fascist dreams a digital reality, the government is gearing up for a very literal war to control the future of our society long after the Kelpto Kaiser is dead and buried. I’d be lying if I told you I know how that story is going to end, but at least we know that regardless of the outcome, the eye will always be watching.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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