Questions: Society & Politics

The US Army just swore in four tech executives as Lieutenant Colonels: Shayam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir (Peter Thiel’s company), Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta (Mark Zuckerberg’s company) and OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil and former chief research officer Bob McGrew, (the company belonging to Sam Altman.)

These four men are all now one rank away from a General. Second-in-command for field-grade officers. There are 16 ranks lower than a Lieutenant Colonel and these four untrained civilians just leapfrogged over soldiers who have dedicated their entire career and lives to the US military.

Apparently, these men are going to work on “targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems.” A sentence that means absolutely nothing because clearly this is just a way of giving these companies access to top-secret information without them having to go through any pesky background checks. If that doesn’t scare you, it really should, because we already know that Palantir is building a massive centralized database using much of the information they acquired from DOGE, Elon Musk’s foray into the American government.

These billionaire tech-bros are compiling lists of our most sensitive information. Our tax records, medical data, bank accounts, Social Security information, immigration status, etc. This administration is allowing them to build the infrastructure for techno-feudalism. Authoritarianism in the form of data and surveillance.

The people who are using the government against you are now taking over military authority. The corruption is calculated and staggering. And I can only hope that our veterans and active-duty military are paying incredibly close attention. And now that you know you should be talking about it.

-Leigh McGowan (“Politics Girl Podcast”)