All Episodes
Previous Next
June 11, 2025 - Jim Fetzer
14:06
Palantir-Sponsored War Tech Summit Ejects Max Blumenthal
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This June 3rd, I attended the annual AI Expo of the Special Competitive Studies Project at the Convention Center in downtown Washington, D.C. The project was launched by Google co-founder and Pentagon advisor Eric Schmidt to advance ties between private artificial intelligence, cyber and military firms, and the U.S. government.
The AI Expo served as a showcase for the future of the American national security state.
Sponsored by a who's who of big tech firms like Google and Meta, as well as private spying and cyber warfare outfits, the conference featured heads of major U.S. intelligence agencies, the Secretary of the Navy, Chairman of the Pentagon Joint Chiefs, members of Congress, Drone manufacturers, and universities recruiting for the CIA and other intel branches.
At the AI + Expo, we've seen a lot of different people come by the booth as well as other booths and panels that we've gotten to see, people to interact with.
There is a ton of different stakeholders here, people from corporations, government, academia.
Ukrainian, Israeli, and Taiwanese officials were also on the scene to represent the frontline proxies of American empire sustaining the arms industry through their constant demand for massive military aid.
Members of all four branches of the armed forces were present as well, participating throughout the event in a friendly drone competition.
A booth by the International Committee of the Red Cross seemed slightly out of place inside this conference.
It turned out the Red Cross's comms team was inside distributing pamphlets advising other AI Expo participants on how to kill fewer civilians and pleading with them to follow international law.
"The energy, can you imagine the energy, right?
Center stage in the AI Expo's exhibition hall, just a few booths away from Boston Dynamics' robotic bomb dog, were two companies raking in massive contracts with the federal government.
One was Rhombus Power, a relatively new firm marketing generative AI technology, which it claims to have used to predict Russia's invasion of Ukraine with 80% certainty.
As well as everything from North Korean missile launches to supposed Chinese fentanyl trafficking.
Jack Paulson, a former Google research scholar turned dissident Silicon Valley reporter, said the coming conflict with China was the main focus of the AI Expo.
Yeah, I mean, the opening talk was with the vice president of Taiwan.
And her interviewer, Ili Bajraktari, from the non-profit run by Eric Schmidt, which is hosting this, immediately said, you know, Taiwan is the geopolitical topic of our times.
Now, there was a little bit of dissent from that, I would say.
Earlier today, right before protesters came in and disrupted Eric Schmidt, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph Dunford, Argued that what was more important right now is potential war with Iran in the next 30 to 60 to 90 days, to quote him.
So he actually argued we should maybe not be as focused on Taiwan, which is a more medium to far term, and we should pay attention to short term.
The other company taking the spotlight at the AI Expo was Palantir.
A private spying firm founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp in 2004, thanks to a grant from the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.
During a shareholder meeting earlier this year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp bragged about the blood his high-tech killing products had shed around the world.
Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.
Palantir has also invested heavily in Israel's genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, where its programs have assisted Israel's AI targeting.
In the face of public protest, Karp has proudly acknowledged his company's role in the Gaza bloodbath.
I dare you, your AI and your technology from Palakir kill Palestinians!
Mostly terrorists, that's true.
No, it's not, if you say mostly, so it's okay to kill others.
Okay, do you, do you, do you...
By the time the AI Expo began, Palantir's stock was surging to record heights thanks to a disturbing New York Times report revealing that the Trump administration had granted the company a massive contract.
To integrate the private data of American citizens across a wide array of federal government departments, from the IRS to the Departments of Health and Human Services to Homeland Security to the Social Security Administration through a program called Gotham.
Last May, the Pentagon awarded Palantir a massive $795 million contract, which will likely expand its use of the global targeting and killing system known as MAVEN.
At the AI Expo, Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth of the U.S. National Geospatial Agency touted the expansion of Palantir's Maven within America's global war machine.
He was joined on stage by Sasha Ingber, a former NPR reporter and State Department operative, who's now a de facto publicist for the U.S. military intelligence apparatus.
us.
On that last piece, I have no idea.
That's something I have to ask the Ukrainians.
On every one of those other contingencies, we typically don't.
Confirm whether Maven was involved in those particular contingencies, but I will answer this way.
And I think that this demonstrates just how important and popular this particular program is right now, now a program of record.
Every combatant command, every service is using NGA Maven and by extension Maven Smart System.
And the user base, just in one year, has quadrupled.
It's approaching now 25,000.
That's what I look at to determine whether we're on the right path.
Earlier in the day, the anti-war group Code Pink interrupted a discussion between the Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, and Palantir's chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill, former Congressman Mike Gallagher.
Palantir's Gallagher went straight from the AI Expo to Fox News to call for the US government to designate Code Pink.
And other anti-war groups as domestic terrorists.
So these people are both incredibly uninformed, they're brainwashed, but now they've become something much more, which is a dangerous movement, a domestic terrorist movement.
We must use all legal mechanisms at our disposal to prevent people from being harmed.
And I think politicians on the left, on the right, everywhere in between can come together around that basic, very fundamental American fact.
Back at the conference, the team at Palantir's booth was clearly on edge.
Almost every time a reporter asked them about the new spying contracts they'd raked in under Trump, Palantir's staff would instantaneously call conference security and D.C. Metro Police, as you can see here, when they were questioned by Jessica Lamersurier of France 24. I didn't ask about your CEO saying that he kills tons of people in Gaza.
I didn't ask them any questions.
Palantir even called the cops on me, simply for filming their attempts to get other reporters ejected.
Meanwhile, back in the AI Expo, U.S. government sponsored counter-revolutionary activists from Iran, Nicaragua, and Syria.
Urge the audience to support toppling the governments of their former countries.
General Assembly in Berlin, city of Berlin, we're going to bring the wall of dictatorship down together.
Don't be allergic of regime change.
Be allergic of dictators.
And join World Liberty Congress.
For sure, we're going to be together, we're going to be stronger and win the battle together.
Masay Alinejad, a U.S. government-funded anti-Iranian activist.
Went on to call for social media companies to ban political figures who the U.S. government doesn't like, especially the leaders in Tehran.
Elon Musk saying that we should know what's going on in the mind of dictators.
That's why we give them freedom of speech.
I'm telling you, we know.
In their mind, they want to destroy democracy.
They want to destroy freedom of speech all over the world.
So the time has come for the U.S. government to work with the tech companies to protect freedom of speech.
Though Palantir demanded my ouster from the AI Expo, I was allowed to re-enter for just long enough to attend a panel that amounted to 30 minutes of relentless pro-Israel pablum.
It featured the Vice President of the Right Wing Heritage Foundation.
Victoria Coates, who directs an initiative called Project Esther, which calls for criminalizing Palestine solidarity activism across the United States by designating pro-Palestine student groups as terrorist organizations.
The key thing is to enforce his red line of not allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon because, yes, it is a threat to Israel.
But you're the little thing.
We're the big thing.
We're both Satan in that world view.
And when people are pursuing Satan, even if they get the little one, they don't go home and make cookies.
Coates was joined on the panel by Amos Yadlin, the former director of military intelligence for Israel, who's credited with loosening his country's rules on targeting the residents of Gaza and Lebanon by designating them as, quote-unquote, the terrorist's non-dangerous neighbor.
I attempted to question Yadlin about his role in setting the stage for Israel's ongoing bloodbath in Gaza, where a majority of the almost 60,000 dead are women, children, and the elderly.
Mr. Yadlin, can I ask a question?
I'm Max Blumenthal from The Grey Zone.
You were the subject of a New York Review of Books article about how you and Asa Kasher helped loosen the principles of distinction on killing civilians.
And I wanted to ask you how you see your role in the current genocide where thousands of children are being killed.
Did you help inspire the genocide?
What's a genocide?
What's the definition of a genocide?
The deliberate attempt to exterminate a people.
What Israel's doing.
I just want to know the definition.
It's also a Holocaust.
A Holocaust.
My grandparents are Holocaust survivors.
And you're supporting the new Holocaust.
You're supporting the new Holocaust.
Hey, get her away from me.
I just asked the speaker a question.
I'm having a conversation with you.
Get this Holocaust supporter away from me.
I'm a Holocaust survivor.
And supporter.
And you're continuing the Holocaust.
You're continuing the Holocaust.
You're continuing the Holocaust.
Tens of thousands of slaughtered children.
Yeah, it's ethnic cleansing.
It's what's happening in Gaza.
I have my tripod.
Can I get my tripod?
I have no interest in engaging with her.
Come on, come on, come on.
You were doing good.
Okay.
She came up to me.
I asked her a question at the speaker.
I came up to him to shake his hand.
And you were accusing him.
Let's go.
No, I wasn't.
I asked him a question.
I asked, okay, can I get my tripod?
I'll get it.
He's going to get it.
No more questions.
Why are you crying?
Why are you supporting the Holocaust?
Let's go.
And you're supporting the Holocaust.
Come on, let's go.
You're supporting the mass slaughter of children.
Let's go.
You're a settler.
We'll meet him outside.
He's going to bring it to me outside.
He's coming right now.
The woman came up to me after I asked the speaker a question.
Remember, we talked about this earlier.
We talked about this earlier.
What's interesting here is how few reporters are actually at this place when you have the heads of intelligence, the AI warlords that are getting the biggest government contracts.
You have Palantir, which is stock is surging, and it just got a massive contract.
It has a massive contract from the Trump administration.
Take American's data and you have the former head of Israeli military intelligence, you have the Israeli embassy, the Ukrainian embassy, Taiwanese officials, and there's hardly any reporters here.
And one of the few reporters, the few reporters who are inside who are asking questions of any of these AI warlords, foreign governments that are committing genocide like Israel are being escorted out by police and having their badges taken away.
▲
Export Selection