The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Manufacturing Consent: The Border Fiasco and the “Smart Wall” The political response to the crisis at the southern border continues to advance the bipartisan “smart wall,” having been backed by Trump and Biden alike. This bipartisan consensus reaches far beyond the US, as much of the world is similarly speeding along in implementing “digital borders.” BY WHITNEY WEBB The disastrous situation at the US-Mexico border is, and has been, intentionally produced. Throughout the last several administrations, regardless of campaign and other public rhetoric, the porous nature of the border has remained unresolved. On several occasions, the situation as it has developed has been blamed largely on incompetence and government inefficiency. Though some administrations have been tougher than others in regards to terrestrial migration (under some metrics), the US-Mexico border has not been sealed off so to force entrants to cross through officially recognized and managed ports of entry. Under the c

How Palantir Conquered the World The Corbett Report by James Corbett Imagine a company that knows everything about everyone. A company that is equally at ease helping banks identify fraud as it is helping intelligence agencies track down enemies of the state. A company that can combine pictures of you with your cell phone location data, emails you've written, your health records and credit card purchases and thousands of other pieces of electronic data to paint an intimate portrait of your life—a portrait that any would-be investigator can pull up with a few keystrokes. A company that can target you anywhere in the world at any time. Now stop imagining that company, because it already exists. It's called Palantir Technologies. Founded by billionaire PayPal co-founder and Facebook early investor  Peter Thiel , this plucky little Silicon Valley startup has long been the darling of the US military and the intelligence community, and it's increasingly the darling of the corpora