In a new report, Democracy Labs followed the money to connect the dots between J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Project 2025, and the push to monitor women’s menstrual cycles.
DEEPAK PURI; dpuri7@gmail.com
Puri is the co-founder of Democracy Labs, a nonprofit that applies technology and storytelling to social justice and voting rights issues.
Puri told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “I used to work at Netscape for over five years and I know how you can make money selling data. We know that J.D. Vance got his [Senate] campaign bankrolled by Peter Thiel. [Thiel’s company] Palantir, is a big data analytics company. They were monitoring for ICE; they were involved with Cambridge Analytica. There’s no big secret here; it’s all in the public domain. J.D. Vance has said that we need to start monitoring women’s menstrual cycles. Why would Peter Thiel give Vance $25 million for a Senate campaign? What is the possible payback for Thiel?
“Say that the government mandates that in order to get your health care or Social Security benefits, you need a sensor device, claiming that it will keep track of your health. In reality, the device is being analyzed to see that Jane Doe is moving between states and her menstrual cycle has changed. That takes a lot of processing power. An example of this is the way that Johnson & Johnson acquired a company called BabyCenter, which provided pregnant mothers with information on vitamins they should take and the exercises they should do. This was all a free service. But after the baby was born, BabyCenter could advertise to sell you diapers and so forth. That’s one way of monetizing similar data.
“If Peter Thiel gets a federal contract to do that processing work––just as Palantir got one from ICE––that’s a great way to sit on a gold mine. It doesn’t even need to be a federal contract; it could just be a state one. Alabama, Texas, and Tennessee have all said that they do not want pregnant women leaving their states. Other states have said they want to track menstrual data. If Alabama says you can get food stamps and health care benefits but need to wear this bracelet, but it’s a monitoring device that is analyzing data and catching people as they move out of state, that’s not a trivial exercise. That takes a lot of processing power, and that’s what Palantir is good at.
“We need to ask why Peter Thiel is funding Vance. What’s in it for him? This is not just a right-wing conservative [issue]. We need to think about the business payback of investing so much. The companies who have invested in Palantir have a vested interest in this. There is a payback for these federal contracts, and the people who are going to suffer are women and families. It gives the state the capability of monitoring women. The technology is there––it just hasn’t been used in this way before.”