Bette In the News: 'Rejecting Palantir' on Hartmann
Plus, a few more words on moral clarity
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I had a few minutes to get ready for my appearance on The Thom Hartmann Program to discuss my report on the many European countries that are now blacklisting the data analytics company Palantir due to US threats to national security and sovereignty.
It’s an important subject, as the concept of digital sovereignty is increasingly front and center in the fight for human rights.
Here is my conversation with Thom:
Multiple European countries are attempting to cauterize the wound to prevent further damage.
As I reminded Thom’s audience, Palantir’s founder Peter Thiel also sat on the board of Facebook, when Cambridge Analytica was stealing and weaponizing our data to then help steal the 2016 election for Trump, with Palantir’s assistance.
Europe can’t afford to leave that door open for exploit, and EU and UK leaders are increasingly aware that Palantir’s founder is pro-autocratic and it’s not safe to work with his company. Thiel and Palantir’s weirdo CEO Alex Karp are not safe to work with. As I also noted, Palantir has multi-million dollar contracts with ICE because it’s a notorious surveillance company, those contracts, in addition to its contracts with Israel.
The bottom line: if Palantir is continued to allow to operate within European Union borders, you can expect the EU to collapse.
That is why it’s so important, and why I’m grateful that Europe is finally fighting on the battlefield that it should have been fighting on all along — the tech battlefield.
As I noted in our interview, I had just driven in from Cornwall, where I took a few days off to enjoy the beautiful seaside towns of the south coast of England. I was on a mission to tour Port Isaac, the fishing village where the British TV series, Doc Martin, was filmed. (If you know, you know.)
It was there I met a woman from the east end of London, who understood my worries for America. Of Trump, she said repeatedly: “Someone needs to sort him out.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Sharing a table with a stranger over Cornish pasties in Truro — communal tables are very common in Europe and a wonderful way to meet people — I learned that Cornwall is filled with “Irish people who never learned to swim.” Probably why I felt an immediate kinship with the locals.
His family was originally from Co Limerick, and he had a profound understanding of America’s troubles.
He said even in his local pub, where people’s heads are filled up with a bunch of junk politics and disinformation, there is now an understanding that “it’s not about left and right, it’s about up and down. The billionaires are sucking all the money to the top, and leaving nothing for the bottom.”
He said, “That’s the thing about people here in the UK, we can smell a rat. And the smell is getting stronger.”
I told Thom a bit about that interchange and how for the first time in 18 months, I am starting to be hopeful about the UK’s prospects of thwarting the pro-Russian authoritarian political factions masquerading as populists for the people, while engaging in immigrant bashing. Maybe it’s the new PM, who I met last year at Byline Festival. Andy Burnham is such a decent chap. And decency matters.
It also matters that Palantir is being rejecting both nationally and locally — that matters.
A final word about moral clarity.
I encourage each of you to watch the “50 Ships” episode of a British series titled Foyle’s War, starring two brilliant actors Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks.
The series is set during World War II, and Kitchen plays a cop whose job it is to keep law and order in an increasingly evil world. He never loses his moral clarity — not for a second. While war profiteering is occurring and locals are looting houses bombed by the “Jerries” — and murders are covered up for geopolitical gains — Foyle remains perfectly clear-eyed about right and wrong.
I am drawing great inspiration from him.
And from the people I am meeting in shared spaces.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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Always lovely to see you here in Blighty!! My mother, "we didn't have teenagers, we had the war", prised out of her, her worst memory was, being heavily bombed in Swansea, seeing her neighbours looting her home when it had taken a direct hit xx my father lost his left arm when on ARP duty, his older friend and co-warden threw himself over my dad to save him and was vaporised xx both my father and mother worked for the rest of their lives to improve wherever they were xxx decency is more fun than degeneracy imho xxx but then i was traumatised seeing Pinocchio as an adult xx load love and gratitude to you and yours xx lizzie