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Emergency Lawsuit Filed to Stop Trump Admin Meeting That Could Drive a Whale Species to Extinction
“Burgum’s Extinction Committee is immoral, illegal, and unnecessary,” said the head of the Center for Biological Diversity, which warns it could put the final nail in the coffin of the extremely endangered Rice's whale.
Mar 18, 2026
An environmental organization is suing to stop the Trump administration from illegally convening a meeting that could allow oil and gas companies to drive an extremely endangered whale species to extinction.
On Wednesday, the Center for Biological Diversity filed an emergency lawsuit against Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a federal district court in Washington, DC, seeking to block him from convening the Endangered Species Committee, more commonly known as the “Extinction Committee,” on March 31.
This committee is sometimes referred to as the "God Squad" because its members have the power to grant exemptions to the Endangered Species Act that can result in the extinction of imperiled species.
Led by the interior secretary, it has seven total members who can vote to override regulations. Five of them are senior executive officials: the secretaries of agriculture and the Army, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Each affected state also receives a delegate to the committee, but they collectively receive just one vote. Five votes of seven are needed to grant an exemption.
In the federal register, Burgum announced earlier this week that the committee would meet at the end of the month “regarding an Endangered Species Act exemption for Gulf of America oil and gas activities," referring to the Gulf of Mexico by the name preferred by President Donald Trump.
The Center for Biological Diversity said Burgum was seeking to override a requirement for oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico to drive boats at safe speeds in order to protect the nearly extinct Rice’s whale from strikes.
These whales, named after the cetologist Dale Rice, who first recognized them as distinct from other whales in 1965, were not formally recognized as a new species until 2021.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, only about 51 Rice's whales remain after BP's catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, which devastated their population.
Last May, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service issued a biological opinion concluding that their continued existence—as well as that of other whale and sea turtle species—was under threat from boat strikes, since Rice's whales spend most of their time in the top 15 meters of water, which often puts them on a collision course with oil vessels.
The agency issued guidance requiring oil industry ships to travel at slower speeds in the eastern Gulf, saying that if they were followed, lethal collisions would be “extremely unlikely to occur” and that the species would be protected.
The Extinction Committee could override this rule, but it has only been convened three times in its history, and not since 1991, when then-President George H.W. Bush used it to open up timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest that endangered the habitats of spotted owls, which were considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The Extinction Committee is invoked so rarely because the circumstances for its use, as outlined in law, are extremely narrow: It can only be convened within 90 days of a biological opinion by the US Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service concluding that a federal action is likely to jeopardize a species. They must also determine that there is no “reasonable and prudent alternative” to the action the government plans to take.
In its lawsuit, the Center for Biological Diversity says that neither of these criteria has been reached, since the Fisheries Service issued its opinion 10 months ago and already established a reasonable alternative: slowing down the boats.
"Slowing boat speeds is not just reasonable, it’s easy, and it’s the absolute minimum the oil and gas industry can do to save Rice’s whales from extinction,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The group said Burgum is also flouting other requirements of the law, including that the meeting be presided over by an administrative judge and have a formal hearing with public comment. No judge has been appointed by Burgum, and the meeting is only scheduled to be livestreamed on YouTube, with no forum for public input.
“Burgum’s Extinction Committee is immoral, illegal, and unnecessary,” Suckling said. “There’s no emergency, no legal basis to convene the committee, and no legal way to approve the extinction of Rice’s whales. This sham is nothing more than Burgum posturing for Trump and saving the fossil fuel industry a few dollars by allowing its boats to drive faster and more recklessly.”
If Rice's whales were to go extinct, they could be the first ever large whale species to be driven out of existence by human activity in recorded history. Earthjustice says that the rollback of boat speed restrictions and other activities by the Trump administration—including the approval of the first BP oil field in the Gulf since the 2010 spill—are putting other species at risk too.
The scheduled March 31 meeting, said the group, "could kick off a months-long process to decide whether to give special treatment to the oil industry by allowing offshore drilling to go forward even if it would lead to the extinction of Gulf species."
“The marine species in the Gulf are our natural heritage. There’s no imaginable justification to sacrifice them,” said Steve Mashuda, Earthjustice's managing attorney for oceans. "It’s beyond reckless even to consider greenlighting the extinction of sea turtles, fish, whales, rays, and corals to further pad the oil industry’s pockets at the public’s expense. Giving carte blanche to industry also takes us further away from renewable energy that is cleaner, cheaper, more reliable, and more efficient than ever before.”
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Palantir Is Leading a New Age of Empire
Palantir has merged American empire, Zionist military infrastructure, surveillance capitalism, and technofascist ideology into a single architecture of control.
Mar 18, 2026
A former Palantir executive recently confirmed what many have long suspected. In a public statement, the whistleblower said it plainly: Palantir intended to take over the US government, and many of his former colleagues are now installed inside the federal apparatus. He called it an occupied nation. He is not alone. Thirteen former Palantir employees—engineers, managers, and a member of the company's own privacy team—signed a letter shared with NPR warning that guardrails meant to prevent discrimination, disinformation, and abuse of power have been violated and are being rapidly dismantled.
What Palantir represents is something unprecedented: the convergence of American imperialism, Zionism, technofascism, and surveillance capitalism into a single instrument of control. Understanding how we got here requires looking at the machine Palantir has built, who built it, and what they believe.
Palantir was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Its first major investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, which seeded the company with millions and opened the door to every major intelligence and defense agency. The logic was deliberate: The American ruling class recognized decades ago that the state's coercive power—surveillance, targeting, data harvesting—could be run more effectively and more profitably through private contractors. When a government agency surveils its own citizens, there are hearings, FOIA requests, oversight committees. When a private company does it, it is a trade secret.
That strategy has paid off enormously. Palantir now holds contracts worth over $10 billion with the US Army alone. The Trump regime tapped Palantir to build a master database on American citizens. The Pentagon expanded its Maven Smart System contract by $795 million to deploy AI-powered battlefield intelligence across the empire. In June, the military swore in four tech executives as Army Reserve lieutenant colonels—including Palantir's CTO—in a program that embeds Silicon Valley directly into military planning. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a $30 million contract for Palantir's ImmigrationOS platform, which provides near real-time tracking of people targeted for deportation. Thousands of American police departments use Palantir's Gotham platform for domestic surveillance.
When academics define technofascism—what happens when tech executives encode their political beliefs into the architecture of technology and infrastructure to suppress dissent—they are describing Palantir with precision.
Abroad, the consequences are even more devastating. Palantir's AI platforms have been deployed by Israel's military to systematically prosecute the assault on Gaza. AI targeting systems built on Palantir's architecture—known by names like Lavender, The Gospel, and Where's Daddy—have enabled the kind of automated killing that produces mass civilian casualties at scale. Palantir's own executives have been recorded discussing how bombing densely populated areas generates the movement data their algorithms need to train on. When people flee, make phone calls, search for loved ones, rush to hospitals that no longer exist—that movement becomes fuel for the machine. Palantir’s platforms were deployed in the illegal capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Israel’s terrorist pager attack against Lebanon, and the US carpet bombing of Iran at the behest of Israel—the same campaign that destroyed a girls' elementary school in Minab.
The genocide in Gaza was also a business windfall. Palantir's valuation surged hundreds of billions of dollars, making it o best-performing stock of 2024 and among the top in 2025. That financial momentum funded the next phase: political capture. Former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), the congressman who introduced the bill forcing TikTok's sale, resigned from Congress and joined Palantir as head of defense. He later acknowledged that the legislation gained momentum not because of any Chinese national security threat, but because of pro-Palestinian content on the platform. Palantir's senior adviser Jacob Helberg was instrumental in pushing the sale through Congress. The app was handed to Oracle's Larry Ellison—one of Israel's most prominent private benefactors. Silence the platform most critical of your technology enabling mass death, and the profits keep flowing.
Then there is the Jeffrey Epstein connection. Department of Justice-released emails reveal hundreds of messages between Epstein and Thiel spanning years. Epstein invested approximately $40 million into Thiel's Valar Ventures. He brokered introductions between Palantir and Israeli officials, including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in meetings where surveillance technology, AI warfare, and Israeli national security policy were all on the table.
All of this is dangerous enough on its own. It becomes existential when you understand the ideology driving it. Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. He is a devoted patron of Curtis Yarvin, the political theorist who argues democracy should be replaced by corporate monarchy—a CEO-king with absolute authority. Yarvin is not a fringe blogger anymore. He was a guest of honor at Trump's inauguration ball. Vice President JD Vance—bankrolled and politically launched by Thiel—has cited Yarvin by name. Project 2025 follows Yarvin’s technofascist vision almost to the letter.
When academics define technofascism—what happens when tech executives encode their political beliefs into the architecture of technology and infrastructure to suppress dissent—they are describing Palantir with precision. This is a project whose founders believe democracy was a mistake, whose software hunts human beings across borders, and whose executives now hold military rank and sit inside the federal government while enriching themselves. They are no longer serving the empire who created them. They have become the empire.
This is the new age of empire—American imperialism, Zionism, technofascism, and surveillance capitalism fused into one architecture, operated by one class of people, accountable to no one.
And that is the part that should terrify you more than anything else—because this isn't a warning about some future to come. This already happened. The merger is complete. The executives are installed. The kill chains are running. The surveillance is live. The dissenters are being tracked. The media that exposed it has been silenced or sold.
There is no cavalry coming for us.
So the question is not whether Palantir is dangerous. The whistleblowers have answered that. The dead children in Gaza have answered that. The families ripped apart by ICE have answered that.
The question is what are we going to do about it—because every day we stay silent, every day we scroll past this, is another day they use to dig in deeper, build more kill chains, harvest more data, and make themselves harder to remove.
They are betting that you won't act. That you'll feel too small, too overwhelmed, too paralyzed—because that is the fear they designed this system to produce.
Prove them wrong.
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'We're Wiping Them Out': Netanyahu Shows Off Kill List 'Punch Card' to a Fawning Mike Huckabee
"I’m extremely creeped out," said one journalist in response to the staged video between the Israeli prime minister and the US ambassador. "Just going to go ahead and say it."
Mar 17, 2026
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday posted a video of himself showing off what he said was a list of kill targets to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
In the video, Netanyahu informs Huckabee that he recently "erased" two names off the punch card, while noting that there are "many more to go."
Huckabee then expresses relief to Netanyahu that his name is not on the punch card, to which Netanyahu replies that the former Republican Arkansas governor was on a "list of the good, good guys."
Netanyahu then says that he's "proud to stand shoulder to shoulder" with the US military in "getting rid of these lunatics" that the two countries started bombing more than two weeks ago in Iran.
"We're wiping them out," the Israeli prime minister boasts.
"I love it," Huckabee responds. "Thank you, mister prime minister."
Crossing names off the list is good - doing it shoulder to shoulder with our American friends is even better.
Good to see Ambassador @GovMikeHuckabee. Always a pleasure.
🇮🇱🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/FZrZN03IZI
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) March 17, 2026
Journalist Noga Tarnopolsky expressed disgust at the two men being so jovial about matters of life and death.
"PM Netanyahu and US Ambassador Huckabee amuse themselves with a kill list," she wrote. "Yes, really."
Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone expressed a similar sentiment.
"I’m extremely creeped out," Andreone wrote. "Just going to go ahead and say it."
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