Your mind, your creativity, and your skills no longer matter to these giants.
Billionaire Peter Thiel’s company, Palantir, intends to upend humanity and replace the US Constitution with a 1000-year republic. In this model, an echelon of techno-nationalists will hold reign over a caste-based system of human beings. The Heritage Foundation (authors of Project 2025 and more) aims to upend democracy and replace it with a far-right, authoritarian ideology that fuses white supremacy, extreme Christian fundamentalism, and radical nationalism.
These giants do not value creative practitioners like you and me. Neither do they desire cultural innovation and imagination.
Artificial intelligence is writing books, composing songs, creating visual art, and designing buildings. The far right is tearing down what it calls the “woke agenda” by cutting funds, silencing voices, shutting programs, and reshaping institutions.
The Quiet Plan to Replace Creators
Last weekend, Palantir released this 22-point summary summarizing its manifesto for the future of the entire Western Hemisphere.
Their planned “Technological Republic” contends that artificial intelligence will devalue humanities and place greater emphasis on traditional trades. Your mind and your creativity will no longer matter because there will be technology to replace that. This model of civilization will only need those who can do what computers cannot: manual work.
Where writers, graphic designers, composers, filmmakers, urban planners and other creators used to turn to technology as tools, technology will now view creative practitioners as tools.
Indeed.
— Dean Blundell
Palantir is more than a giant. It is a frightening behemoth.
Control Over Culture
The Heritage Foundation and its political arm, Heritage Action, represent an aggressive move toward authoritarianism.
The Foundation presents itself as a mainstream conservative think tank focused on “ordered liberty” and traditional values. However, its release of Project 2025, recent leadership shift, and questionable funding sources signal a more ominous scheme.
The Heritage Foundation advocates for an “imperial president” who can exert broad, unaccountable power by weakening Congress and insulating executive actions from other oversight.
The group wants a president who can easily remove or replace career government officials and allow more positions to be filled by sycophants. Their plan also increases direct presidential authority over government agencies.
The Heritage Foundation’s priorities move us toward a world where art is curated for compliance, not insight. This will lead to works that are neither diverse nor innovative.
The Foundation’s objectives would also devalue public investment in culture and boost public discourse about the legitimacy of art, culture, and independent thought.
How can a blinkered agenda benefit those of us who are defenders and practitioners of a diverse, intelligent, and exploratory culture?
Easy. It won’t.
The Heritage Foundation is more than a giant. It is a cyclops.
Creativity as its Own Republic
In the Old Testament’s Book of Numbers, Moses sends twelve spies into Canaan. When they return, they report that the land is rich but also inhabited by powerful people, sometimes described as giants.
One of the spies says, “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”
Only two spies argued that they should trust and move forward. The rest spread fear, the people panicked, and they refused to enter the land.
The consequence is that they wander in the wilderness for 40 years. In other words, they were defeated not by giants, but by their own perception of themselves as inferior.
It is clear from Palantir, the Heritage Foundation, and whatever you want you call this US presidential administration, “there are big, tall, terrible giants in the sky.”
What we as individual artists can do is decide whether we are insignificant grasshoppers or capable of neutralizing these intimidating and wealthy behemoths as members of our own creative republic.
Together we are enormous.
Editor’s Note (2026): This essay was written during the earliest days of Res Creativa, when the project was first being imagined. It remains here as part of the organization’s founding story.
A version of this post was originally published on Substack, Apr 23, 2026
Banner image: Promotional photo of Boris Karloff from The Bride of Frankenstein as Frankenstein’s monster (1935), Universal Studios, NBCUniversal, Wikimedia Commons, This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1931 and 1977, inclusive, without a copyright notice. Colorized by Res Creativa.
