Hey and welcome back to Unlimited Hangout. I'm your host Whitney Webb. The past few weeks have been

very eventful for American politics to say the least, but today we're going to focus on Peter Thiel,

the man behind Donald Trump's recent vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, and has now outsized influence

on now very likely second Trump administration. As noted in a recent article published last week

on Unlimited Hangout,

Teal is responsible not only for Vance's relatively short political career, as well as once

rocky but now cozy relationship with Trump, but also for Vance's venture capital career that

preceded it. Teal, in my opinion, is one of the most misunderstood billionaire political donors

and kingmakers in the United States, and I would argue that's by design.

He spent a small fortune to frame himself and have others frame him as a libertarian and as anti-state, when his business decisions, particularly those that made him a billionaire, as well as many of his investments, point to him being of a very different political persuasion.

His biggest companies from PayPal to Palantir incubated close ties with intelligence agencies

from their inception, aiding and abetting financial and other forms of incredibly invasive

and warrantless surveillance against innocent Americans.

His investments include companies tied to foreign intelligence that are now taking

over U.S. 911 call centers to hoover up all of your data from your smartphone and give it to

law enforcement, as well as companies ushering in an era of AI-powered mass murder currently being

piloted by the Ukrainian military and now the IDF in Gaza.

What will Teal's influence, which was already significant during Trump's first term,

be in a likely second term, particularly with his protege, J.D. Vance, as co-pilot.

Joining me today to discuss this and more as Stavrula Papps.

Stavrula is an unlimited hangout contributor who also contributes to several other sites,

including propaganda in focus, reductrous, the gray zone in addition to her own substack, the link to which we will be putting in the show notes. She is based in Greece and is also a comedian and a media PhD student. Thanks so much for joining me today, Steph Rola. Great to have you back on Unlimited Hangout. Thanks so much for having me, looking forward to it. I am too, because not a lot of people in alternative media write about Peter Thiel, but you definitely have, and you've written some great ones for Unlimited Hangout, so happy to get into that later. But first off, I think, you know, for our listeners, it would be good to give a quickly establish the connection between J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel, which is the subject of a recent article that we put out last week on Unlimited Hangout, as I mentioned earlier, entitled,

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