https://www.thenation.com/article/society/alex-karp-palantir-techbro-fascism/
Society
Palantir’s Manifesto Promises a Dystopian Future
The tech company’s CEO Alex Karp delivers a self-serving broadside that’s steeped in oligarchic hubris and authoritarian nihilism
by Elizabeth Spiers
April 23, 2026
The Nation
Alex Karp seated before an image of his model of a visionary tech thinker during last year’s Hill & Valley Forum at the US Capitol’s Visitor Center. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)
Once upon a time, we lived in a society where the innermost thoughts of the one percent were largely confined to their own brains and the inner circles of their social and professional relationships. Then came the Internet, which gave anyone with a wireless connection or a smartphone the ability to broadcast their good and bad ideas to millions of people at once. Among the most aggressive adopters: Silicon Valley billionaires. When Marc Andressen wrote a 5,000-plus-word post titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in 2023, it went viral, and became something of a template for kindred grandiose edicts from various CEOs and founders in the tech industry. At the time, I wrote that Andreessen’s manifesto had the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacked its ideological coherence. Now another sort of manifesto has been produced by Palantir CEO Alex Karp in the form of a summary on X of his book, The Technological Republic. It shares the same intellectual lapses endemic to the genre Andreessen helped launch, but it’s bleaker, more antidemocratic, and nihilistic in its worldview.
As a longtime social-media user, I’m sympathetic to the inclination to post one’s every opinion to the Internet, no matter how idiotic. But this isn’t just a matter of the wealthiest people in the world floating iffy ideas about innovation or posting cat memes. Their posts serve as a kind of evangelicalism for a new order in which technocrats are in charge, equality is a naïve aspiration promoted by woke mediocrities, and technology customized to attain power is an unalloyed good.
That this roster of tech-bro shibboleths is remarkably tone deaf in the current environment of economic and political uncertainty bothers Valley propagandists not a whit. Someone recently threw a Molotov cocktail at Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s house, Elon Musk’s unfavorability is at an all-time high in recent polls, and a majority of Americans think AI will do more harm than good. But instead of treating this information as valuable feedback, the oligarchs have doubled down on exactly the things that give people pause about their metastasizing infiltration of all aspects of public and private life.
Karp’s manifesto-via-tweet asserts primarily that we can achieve peace through war, and that billionaires brandishing “grand narratives” in the manner of Elon Musk should be in the country’s driver’s seat, sending ordinary citizens to the battlefield whether they like it or not. (Among the recommendations in Karp’s unhinged rantings is a proposal to revive the military draft—a singularly boneheaded idea at a moment when the country is waging an unprovoked, illegal, and massively unpopular war.)
This is a convenient philosophy for a billionaire who runs a company engorged on defense contracts and likes to construct grand narratives himself. But we are at an inflection point where a big chunk of our economy is affected by AI and the incestuous circle of spending and investing that Karp, Musk, and their peers are perpetuating—to say nothing of the cataclysmic implications for labor markets as jobs get replaced or changed. The billionaire tech-bros’ insistence on telling us exactly what they aim to do, on saying the bad quiet parts out loud, is designed to indoctrinate you. But if it doesn’t, they don’t care. They’re going to proceed anyway, and if recent history is any indication, no one with regulatory power is going to stop them.
By way of analytic context: Palantir is a data analytics company and defense contractor that sells surveillance technology to the US government and allied countries, as well as to the private sector. It’s won $1.9 billion in US contracts since 2008, and Karp received $6.8 billion in compensation in 2024, making him the highest-paid public company CEO that year. Under the Trump administration, Palantir has won contracts to consolidate data on individual Americans and track migrants, raising concerns about data privacy and the government’s ability to surveil its own citizens and potentially, to punish political dissenters. Palantir’s technology has also been used to target Iranians and Palestinians in Gaza for bombing, to devastating effect.
By way of analytic context: Palantir is a data analytics company and defense contractor that sells surveillance technology to the US government and allied countries, as well as to the private sector. It’s won $1.9 billion in US contracts since 2008, and Karp received $6.8 billion in compensation in 2024, making him the highest-paid public company CEO that year. Under the Trump administration, Palantir has won contracts to consolidate data on individual Americans and track migrants, raising concerns about data privacy and the government’s ability to surveil its own citizens and potentially, to punish political dissenters. Palantir’s technology has also been used to target Iranians and Palestinians in Gaza for bombing, to devastating effect.
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It comes as no surprise then that Karp’s vision for America encourages maximal usage of Palantir’s technology to exert power, against both US citizens and foreign powers who may or may not be current adversaries. This strategy would, among other things, increase profits for Palantir. More war and less diplomacy is hardly a winning message with the public, so Karp has to lend his self-interested agenda a certain civilizational gravitas, in the Musk vein. He positions himself as a heroic defender of an idea of America defined by a nebulous “national” culture that reflects the values of “the West.” If this sounds like the sort of back-of-the-cereal-box ethnonationalism now coursing through the MAGA/groyper world, that’s because it is; non-Western cultures are very much not included.
But beyond such affinities with the Trumpian right, Karp’s self-serving manifesto also reflects the insular worldview of the Silicon Valley elite. The billionaire cohort of tech oligarchs simply isn’t obliged to move in any space that treats the open endorsement of quasi-eugenicist racial chauvinism as dangerous or offensive. They’ve also repeatedly seen that there are no consequences for evangelizing a warmongering authoritarianism. If you’re a billionaire, you indeed rarely face any consequences for anything, because every problem can be solved with money. As far as Karp is concerned, the current problem to be solved is the “hollow pluralism,” as he calls it, that insists our democracy include all citizens regardless of their cultural background or net worth.
The key corollary, of course, is that Karp wants more scrutiny for American citizens and anyone who doesn’t belong to whatever he considers “Western civilization” at the moment. Meanwhile, there’s one group Karp thinks should have more privacy: “The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from public service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.” This is a jaw-dropping claim to make in a country whose president who is in the Epstein files, has been the subject of multiple accusations of sexual assault, has been found guilty of financial fraud—and has suffered no real consequences for any of it. If anything, the exposure of Donald Trump’s private behavior has underscored how little accountability actually matters if our lawmakers aren’t willing to enforce laws and ethical norms.
You, on the other hand, are a collection of data points, and in Karp’s view the government and Palantir are entitled to scrutinize your personal life down to every purchase, message, location, and transaction. Alex Karp and Donald Trump are to be granted privacy and a consequence-free existence—you’ll scrape by in a job-starved regime running on AI and maximal surveillance, and be grateful not to end up in a detention camp or on a dissident watch list.
In fact, Karp believes that the country’s problems lie not with powerful public figures like himself but with everyday Americans, who in his view must share more fully in the risk and costs of the wars we fight. “National service should be a universal duty,” he writes. “We should, as a society, consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.” Karp is 58, has never served in the armed forces himself and doesn’t have children, so he’s not advocating for anything that would put himself or anyone he loves in danger. He has never experienced the horrors of war firsthand. Like many Silicon Valley billionaires, he travels with a personal security force that ensures his personal safety at every level—but he’s happy to endanger the lives of others if it justifies spending more money on Palantir’s burgeoning defense portfolio. Like any other war profiteer, Karp will simply keep padding his bottom line, and will never be compelled by law to fight and die in a needless war because a billionaire wanted to make more money.
Under his dystopian vision, Palantir would thrive and grow because safety and security are conflated with hard power—i.e., technological and military shows of force. Basic norms of international relations will be discarded entirely—a process now sent into overdrive by the Trump White House. “The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed,” Karp writes. “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal.”
Karp’s glib invocation of “soaring rhetoric” marks a wild distortion—or incredible ignorance—of what soft power is. American hegemony has been built less on the spoils of modern warfare than things like cultural exports, economic influence, the primacy of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and the country’s ability to form alliances with other democratic nations without ever firing a gun, much less dropping a bomb. When we have ditched this framework to go to war with other countries in the post–Cold War era—via the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran—the results have been costly and disastrous.
But there is no sophisticated theory of international relations behind Karp’s recipe for still more rudderless intervention. His assessment of global realpolitik would make Hans Morgenthau roll over in his grave–possibly with enough centrifugal force to precipitate a minor explosion himself. Karp’s bellicosity exceeds that of even the most extreme national security hawks. He explicitly disdains the idea of debating the value of technologies like the targeting-and-surveillance complexes marketed by Palantir. Instead, he believes that we should build first and ask questions later—because, he says, that is what our adversaries would do.
But beyond such affinities with the Trumpian right, Karp’s self-serving manifesto also reflects the insular worldview of the Silicon Valley elite. The billionaire cohort of tech oligarchs simply isn’t obliged to move in any space that treats the open endorsement of quasi-eugenicist racial chauvinism as dangerous or offensive. They’ve also repeatedly seen that there are no consequences for evangelizing a warmongering authoritarianism. If you’re a billionaire, you indeed rarely face any consequences for anything, because every problem can be solved with money. As far as Karp is concerned, the current problem to be solved is the “hollow pluralism,” as he calls it, that insists our democracy include all citizens regardless of their cultural background or net worth.
The key corollary, of course, is that Karp wants more scrutiny for American citizens and anyone who doesn’t belong to whatever he considers “Western civilization” at the moment. Meanwhile, there’s one group Karp thinks should have more privacy: “The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from public service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.” This is a jaw-dropping claim to make in a country whose president who is in the Epstein files, has been the subject of multiple accusations of sexual assault, has been found guilty of financial fraud—and has suffered no real consequences for any of it. If anything, the exposure of Donald Trump’s private behavior has underscored how little accountability actually matters if our lawmakers aren’t willing to enforce laws and ethical norms.
You, on the other hand, are a collection of data points, and in Karp’s view the government and Palantir are entitled to scrutinize your personal life down to every purchase, message, location, and transaction. Alex Karp and Donald Trump are to be granted privacy and a consequence-free existence—you’ll scrape by in a job-starved regime running on AI and maximal surveillance, and be grateful not to end up in a detention camp or on a dissident watch list.
In fact, Karp believes that the country’s problems lie not with powerful public figures like himself but with everyday Americans, who in his view must share more fully in the risk and costs of the wars we fight. “National service should be a universal duty,” he writes. “We should, as a society, consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.” Karp is 58, has never served in the armed forces himself and doesn’t have children, so he’s not advocating for anything that would put himself or anyone he loves in danger. He has never experienced the horrors of war firsthand. Like many Silicon Valley billionaires, he travels with a personal security force that ensures his personal safety at every level—but he’s happy to endanger the lives of others if it justifies spending more money on Palantir’s burgeoning defense portfolio. Like any other war profiteer, Karp will simply keep padding his bottom line, and will never be compelled by law to fight and die in a needless war because a billionaire wanted to make more money.
Under his dystopian vision, Palantir would thrive and grow because safety and security are conflated with hard power—i.e., technological and military shows of force. Basic norms of international relations will be discarded entirely—a process now sent into overdrive by the Trump White House. “The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed,” Karp writes. “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal.”
Karp’s glib invocation of “soaring rhetoric” marks a wild distortion—or incredible ignorance—of what soft power is. American hegemony has been built less on the spoils of modern warfare than things like cultural exports, economic influence, the primacy of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and the country’s ability to form alliances with other democratic nations without ever firing a gun, much less dropping a bomb. When we have ditched this framework to go to war with other countries in the post–Cold War era—via the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran—the results have been costly and disastrous.
But there is no sophisticated theory of international relations behind Karp’s recipe for still more rudderless intervention. His assessment of global realpolitik would make Hans Morgenthau roll over in his grave–possibly with enough centrifugal force to precipitate a minor explosion himself. Karp’s bellicosity exceeds that of even the most extreme national security hawks. He explicitly disdains the idea of debating the value of technologies like the targeting-and-surveillance complexes marketed by Palantir. Instead, he believes that we should build first and ask questions later—because, he says, that is what our adversaries would do.
Except that they don’t. By Karp’s logic, any of our foreign adversaries who have access to devastating weapons will use them. This is not just a cynic’s understanding of warfare; it’s that of an ill-informed amateur. Karp nods to the nuclear deterrence of the Cold War, but doesn’t acknowledge that an unfettered arms race by one party in a nuclear standoff is a good way to undermine that deterrence. Worse, he doesn’t understand that all war is a failure of diplomacy and should be viewed only as a last resort, not as a preemptive strategy for defense.
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The rest of his manifesto is mostly a hodgepodge of grievances about the usual preoccupations of the right wing. He claims that intolerance of religious belief is “pervasive” in America, where a majority of people are religious and provisions for the free exercise of religion are literally written into our Constitution. He says that America was too hard on Germany after World War II, even though the Marshall Plan was instrumental in preventing occupied Germany–and the rest of the European continent—from sinking into further violence. (In Karp’s ideal world, postwar Germany would be a major Palantir customer.) He dips a toe into eugenics by claiming that certain cultures are superior to others and that diversity and inclusion baselessly elevates inferior humans. He claims that we’re too cautious about public speech, but has railed against pro-Palestinian protesters and said they should be exiled to North Korea because their behavior is “unforgivable.” (Israel is also a Palantir client, and in case there was any confusion, the company recently took out a full-page ad in The New York Times that read in full, “Palantir stands with Israel.”)
Karp has claimed to be a socialist, and a liberal, when doing so has been rhetorically convenient, but it’s hard to look at his actions and speech and conclude that he’s anything but an ideological nihilist. However, even a nihilist can have a religion of sorts (Karp labels everything he considers woke “a ‘pagan’ religion”), and Karp’s is a corporatized imperialism whereby the United States acquires and maintains power via weaponized AI. As a happy byproduct of these arrangements, Alex Karp also acquires and maintains wealth and power.
As a vision statement, his manifesto is grim and muddled by personal resentments, but as documentation of Karp’s own motivations and interests, it is a good articulation of what’s going on in his head. Only a few years ago, these maunderings would have stayed in his head, but Karp’s fellow oligarchs have provided him with the technology to broadcast them—and he cannot resist. But no one has to buy his mangled self-justifications, or his ahistorical insistence that America will experience peace and prosperity only if we become a global bully ever on the lookout to eliminate nebulously perceived threats. Palantir’s tweet thread, and the nihilistic tech-bro worldview behind it, deserves what any troll on a social media platform usually gets: the mute button.
The rest of his manifesto is mostly a hodgepodge of grievances about the usual preoccupations of the right wing. He claims that intolerance of religious belief is “pervasive” in America, where a majority of people are religious and provisions for the free exercise of religion are literally written into our Constitution. He says that America was too hard on Germany after World War II, even though the Marshall Plan was instrumental in preventing occupied Germany–and the rest of the European continent—from sinking into further violence. (In Karp’s ideal world, postwar Germany would be a major Palantir customer.) He dips a toe into eugenics by claiming that certain cultures are superior to others and that diversity and inclusion baselessly elevates inferior humans. He claims that we’re too cautious about public speech, but has railed against pro-Palestinian protesters and said they should be exiled to North Korea because their behavior is “unforgivable.” (Israel is also a Palantir client, and in case there was any confusion, the company recently took out a full-page ad in The New York Times that read in full, “Palantir stands with Israel.”)
Karp has claimed to be a socialist, and a liberal, when doing so has been rhetorically convenient, but it’s hard to look at his actions and speech and conclude that he’s anything but an ideological nihilist. However, even a nihilist can have a religion of sorts (Karp labels everything he considers woke “a ‘pagan’ religion”), and Karp’s is a corporatized imperialism whereby the United States acquires and maintains power via weaponized AI. As a happy byproduct of these arrangements, Alex Karp also acquires and maintains wealth and power.
As a vision statement, his manifesto is grim and muddled by personal resentments, but as documentation of Karp’s own motivations and interests, it is a good articulation of what’s going on in his head. Only a few years ago, these maunderings would have stayed in his head, but Karp’s fellow oligarchs have provided him with the technology to broadcast them—and he cannot resist. But no one has to buy his mangled self-justifications, or his ahistorical insistence that America will experience peace and prosperity only if we become a global bully ever on the lookout to eliminate nebulously perceived threats. Palantir’s tweet thread, and the nihilistic tech-bro worldview behind it, deserves what any troll on a social media platform usually gets: the mute button.
The rest of his manifesto is mostly a hodgepodge of grievances about the usual preoccupations of the right wing. He claims that intolerance of religious belief is “pervasive” in America, where a majority of people are religious and provisions for the free exercise of religion are literally written into our Constitution. He says that America was too hard on Germany after World War II, even though the Marshall Plan was instrumental in preventing occupied Germany–and the rest of the European continent—from sinking into further violence. (In Karp’s ideal world, postwar Germany would be a major Palantir customer.) He dips a toe into eugenics by claiming that certain cultures are superior to others and that diversity and inclusion baselessly elevates inferior humans. He claims that we’re too cautious about public speech, but has railed against pro-Palestinian protesters and said they should be exiled to North Korea because their behavior is “unforgivable.” (Israel is also a Palantir client, and in case there was any confusion, the company recently took out a full-page ad in The New York Times that read in full, “Palantir stands with Israel.”)
Karp has claimed to be a socialist, and a liberal, when doing so has been rhetorically convenient, but it’s hard to look at his actions and speech and conclude that he’s anything but an ideological nihilist. However, even a nihilist can have a religion of sorts (Karp labels everything he considers woke “a ‘pagan’ religion”), and Karp’s is a corporatized imperialism whereby the United States acquires and maintains power via weaponized AI. As a happy byproduct of these arrangements, Alex Karp also acquires and maintains wealth and power.
As a vision statement, his manifesto is grim and muddled by personal resentments, but as documentation of Karp’s own motivations and interests, it is a good articulation of what’s going on in his head. Only a few years ago, these maunderings would have stayed in his head, but Karp’s fellow oligarchs have provided him with the technology to broadcast them—and he cannot resist. But no one has to buy his mangled self-justifications, or his ahistorical insistence that America will experience peace and prosperity only if we become a global bully ever on the lookout to eliminate nebulously perceived threats. Palantir’s tweet thread, and the nihilistic tech-bro worldview behind it, deserves what any troll on a social media platform usually gets: the mute button.
The rest of his manifesto is mostly a hodgepodge of grievances about the usual preoccupations of the right wing. He claims that intolerance of religious belief is “pervasive” in America, where a majority of people are religious and provisions for the free exercise of religion are literally written into our Constitution. He says that America was too hard on Germany after World War II, even though the Marshall Plan was instrumental in preventing occupied Germany–and the rest of the European continent—from sinking into further violence. (In Karp’s ideal world, postwar Germany would be a major Palantir customer.) He dips a toe into eugenics by claiming that certain cultures are superior to others and that diversity and inclusion baselessly elevates inferior humans. He claims that we’re too cautious about public speech, but has railed against pro-Palestinian protesters and said they should be exiled to North Korea because their behavior is “unforgivable.” (Israel is also a Palantir client, and in case there was any confusion, the company recently took out a full-page ad in The New York Times that read in full, “Palantir stands with Israel.”)
Karp has claimed to be a socialist, and a liberal, when doing so has been rhetorically convenient, but it’s hard to look at his actions and speech and conclude that he’s anything but an ideological nihilist. However, even a nihilist can have a religion of sorts (Karp labels everything he considers woke “a ‘pagan’ religion”), and Karp’s is a corporatized imperialism whereby the United States acquires and maintains power via weaponized AI. As a happy byproduct of these arrangements, Alex Karp also acquires and maintains wealth and power.
As a vision statement, his manifesto is grim and muddled by personal resentments, but as documentation of Karp’s own motivations and interests, it is a good articulation of what’s going on in his head. Only a few years ago, these maunderings would have stayed in his head, but Karp’s fellow oligarchs have provided him with the technology to broadcast them—and he cannot resist. But no one has to buy his mangled self-justifications, or his ahistorical insistence that America will experience peace and prosperity only if we become a global bully ever on the lookout to eliminate nebulously perceived threats. Palantir’s tweet thread, and the nihilistic tech-bro worldview behind it, deserves what any troll on a social media platform usually gets: the mute button.
The rest of his manifesto is mostly a hodgepodge of grievances about the usual preoccupations of the right wing. He claims that intolerance of religious belief is “pervasive” in America, where a majority of people are religious and provisions for the free exercise of religion are literally written into our Constitution. He says that America was too hard on Germany after World War II, even though the Marshall Plan was instrumental in preventing occupied Germany–and the rest of the European continent—from sinking into further violence. (In Karp’s ideal world, postwar Germany would be a major Palantir customer.) He dips a toe into eugenics by claiming that certain cultures are superior to others and that diversity and inclusion baselessly elevates inferior humans. He claims that we’re too cautious about public speech, but has railed against pro-Palestinian protesters and said they should be exiled to North Korea because their behavior is “unforgivable.” (Israel is also a Palantir client, and in case there was any confusion, the company recently took out a full-page ad in The New York Times that read in full, “Palantir stands with Israel.”)
Karp has claimed to be a socialist, and a liberal, when doing so has been rhetorically convenient, but it’s hard to look at his actions and speech and conclude that he’s anything but an ideological nihilist. However, even a nihilist can have a religion of sorts (Karp labels everything he considers woke “a ‘pagan’ religion”), and Karp’s is a corporatized imperialism whereby the United States acquires and maintains power via weaponized AI. As a happy byproduct of these arrangements, Alex Karp also acquires and maintains wealth and power.
As a vision statement, his manifesto is grim and muddled by personal resentments, but as documentation of Karp’s own motivations and interests, it is a good articulation of what’s going on in his head. Only a few years ago, these maunderings would have stayed in his head, but Karp’s fellow oligarchs have provided him with the technology to broadcast them—and he cannot resist. But no one has to buy his mangled self-justifications, or his ahistorical insistence that America will experience peace and prosperity only if we become a global bully ever on the lookout to eliminate nebulously perceived threats. Palantir’s tweet thread, and the nihilistic tech-bro worldview behind it, deserves what any troll on a social media platform usually gets: the mute button.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elizabeth Spiers
Elizabeth Spiers is a digital media strategist and writer living in Brooklyn. She is the former editor in chief of The New York Observer.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-fables-of-weapons-dealers
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The Fables of Weapons Dealers
Becoming an adult involves understanding that the world is more complicated than Good Guys versus Bad Guys. But billionaire weapons makers and political demagogues will try to convince you otherwise.
by Nathan J. Robinson
Current Affairs: A Magazine of Politics And Culture
filed 15 December 2024 in International
Alex Karp is a multi-billionaire who serves as the CEO of Palantir, a controversial software company that has been much more willing than some others in Silicon Valley to provide technology to Western governments for military and policing applications. The company has been described as “the West’s AI arms dealer” and criticized for its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israel Defense Forces. Unlike his more famous Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, a reactionary MAGA supporter, Karp describes himself as a socialist (he, like Elon Musk, seems to have some idiosyncratic personal definition in mind that has nothing in common with the socialist tradition).
Some comments that Karp recently made at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute about why Democrats lost were widely recirculated online. Elon Musk described the clip of Karp speaking as “based” and it racked up millions of views. It’s framed as a critique of woke ideology, but it is in fact mostly an argument about U.S. foreign policy and as such is a very useful way to examine some common American myths that are used to justify what I consider to be an incredibly dangerous set of policies.
Karp argues, essentially, for a philosophy that is often called (by its advocates) peace through strength. He says that America needs to frighten its enemies, and that while the “Berkeley faculty” do not understand this, the Real Americans do, and thus an agenda that wins popular support will focus on keeping people safe against external threats.
Here is what he says:
"Americans are the most loving, God fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. And they want to know that if you're waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you're a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved. And you know, when Americans are spending a trillion dollars on defense, what I know, what I want, and what I think my peers want is: Why are these people keeping our citizens hostage, torturing our people, attacking our allies, maligning us in what was once called the United Nations—basically a discriminatory institution against anything good.
We need to stand up, and those people need to be scared. And that's why this conference is so important, because we have the best products in the world, and we cannot have parity. Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction. If it's even they will take advantage of our niceness, kindness, our desire to be at home in Nebraska or New Hampshire or wherever we live in our peaceful environments. And they need to wake up scared and go to bed scared. And if you give that to the American people, the American people will go back and say… and honestly, probably shouldn't say, this is why I thought the Democrats are going to lose the election. […] Because people want to live in peace. They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology. They want to know they're safe, and safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe. And the average American person understands this. Unfortunately, many of the intellectually captured institutions funneled and intellectually owned by the Berkeley faculty do not. And that's what they want, it’s sure as hell what I want, and that's what Palantir and all the people in this room, I hope we're here to serve the American people, and my version of service is the soldiers are happier, the enemies are scared, and Americans go back to enjoying the fact that we're the only one with a real tech scene in this country, and we're going to win everything."
Karp often repeats variations on this foreign policy philosophy, that safety and security come from making other people “scared.” “You scare the crap out of your adversaries,” Karp told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times earlier this year. Scare the enemy shitless seems to be Point 1 of Karp’s thinking about foreign policy, Point 2 (the only other point) being, We In The West Are Better Than Other People, Who Are Bad And Want To Destroy Us. “We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,” Karp said. This is how he justifies his company’s firm support of Israel, a stance that has caused some Palantir employees to quit as Israel has wiped out more and more of Gaza over the last year: “From my perspective, it’s not just about Israel… It’s like, ‘Do you believe in the West? Do you believe the West has created a superior way of living?’”
I haven’t found Karp saying anything more sophisticated about foreign policy than these two talking points,* namely that the West is good and must be protected from the bad people, and that the way to do that is through threatening violence against not just those who hurt us, but also everyone from their “friends” to their “mistress.” Taken together, I think these add up to a highly irrational worldview that, if it is held by powerful people who may shape the future of U.S. foreign policy, endangers the entire future of human civilization.
Let’s consider first how obviously wrong Karp is about the simplistic idea that you are safer when people are scared of you. “Safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe.” On a micro level, this is plainly false. U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were dangerous to the civilian population in part because they were so scared. They thought that any Vietnamese villager, from a child to an elderly lady, was a potential threat (they could be hiding a grenade!). Fear made them dangerous. Or think about police killings. One of the things that makes the police so dangerous is that they are trained to be more afraid of the policed population than they should be. As Rosa Brooks, who served as a police officer and wrote a book about it, told me: “If you are primed to see everybody as a potential lethal threat to you, it affects what situations you will see as dangerous.”
What Karp doesn’t consider, then, is how making someone afraid can actually make them more likely to act aggressively. In foreign relations there is a phenomenon called the “security dilemma,” which people with views like Karp rarely stop to consider, whereby the steps that a country takes to make itself feel secure against external threats appear to others as being threats themselves, and cause other countries to take steps that seem like threats. Consider Iran’s nuclear program, for instance. Successive U.S. presidents have consistently used language that Iran interprets as a threat to invade it. (Not an unreasonable fear, because they saw what happened to their neighbor.) The possession of nuclear weapons would act as a deterrent to such an invasion, which is likely the main reason Iran would pursue acquiring them. (The Pentagon has assessed that Iran’s “military strategy is designed to defend against external or ‘hard’ threats from the United States and Israel” and “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”) As Iran takes steps that get it closer to possessing a nuclear weapon, however, the dominant U.S. reaction is to portray Iran as aggressive and a threat (thereby necessitating new threats of military action by the U.S. and Israel). An action seen as defensive by one party is seen as aggressive by the other.
Scaring your “enemies” into thinking you might attack them is not, then, the ideal way to achieve security. For example, It was partly because the U.S. threatened to invade Cuba that the Soviet Union decided to put nuclear missiles there as a deterrent, which the U.S. interpreted as a threat, which sparked a tense confrontation that nearly led to global nuclear war. Ultimately, we are better off when we work together, trying to build trust, lower tensions, and keep arms races from getting out of control. An institution like the United Nations (which Karp claims, without providing any examples, is “basically a discriminatory institution against anything good”) has a crucial function in bringing countries together to ease the kinds of mutual suspicion that can spiral into a violent confrontation that nobody wants. Ultimately, Karp is in error to believe that the more heavily armed and capable of inspiring fear you are, the safer you are. In fact, while sometimes violence is unavoidable, the use of threats can have unpredictable consequences, and poisons your ability to work with others.
Let’s turn to the other of Karp’s two beliefs, namely the belief that the West “has created a superior way of living” and must be protected, i.e., that we and our allies are better than other people. Noam Chomsky has said that in U.S. foreign relations, “the fundamental principle is that ‘we are good’ … ‘We’ are benevolent, seeking peace and justice… ‘We’ are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.” Karp is displaying this ideology at its most childlike. Americans are just so nice and kind that we are vulnerable, our boundless goodness is our weakness, and thus we must suppress this urge and be brutal, to be willing to threaten even people who have not directly hurt us.
What is interesting about this fable of We The Good Guys and They The Baddies is that it does not require examining the facts of what the U.S. has actually done in the world. It is a self-righteous and arrogant story, but it doesn’t come with actual proof. In fact, the actual record of historical action is excluded from discussion. Consider what Karp’s colleague Peter Thiel said when asked what he thought about Israel using AI software to select targets in Gaza, a choice that has resulted in horrific civilian deaths and injuries:
"Look again....I'm not ....I'm not...you know, you know...with... without, without going into all the... you know I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel. It's not for us to to second-guess every, everything. And I believe that broadly the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they're broadly in the right and that's, that's sort of the perspective I come back to. And if I, if I fall into the trap of arguing you on every detailed point, I'm actually going to, I would actually be conceding the broader issue that the Middle East should be micromanaged from Cambridge. And I think that's just simply absurd. And so I'm not, I'm not going to concede that point."
Now, this passage strikes me as further proof that Peter Thiel is one of the most inarticulate people I’ve ever seen speak in public, and is further proof that you do not have to be intelligent to be a billionaire. But what most fascinates me about this response is that Karp and Thiel think the West (including Israel) deserve to prevail because of their moral superiority, but when presented with evidence that Israel may not be morally superior, Thiel says that he doesn’t look into the facts, because he defers to Israel! But this is a confession that Karp and Thiel are bullshitters who do not mean what they say. If they were on Israel’s side because it is more moral, they would have to consider evidence that weighs on the question of Israel’s morality. They would have to read, for example, the Mordechai Report, a carefully-sourced analysis by an Israeli historian that documents the many war crimes Israel has committed in Gaza and ultimately comes to the conclusion that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. But I have not seen Karp or Thiel refute any of the allegations in the Mordechai Report. Instead, I have seen Karp denouncing pro-Palestine protesters as “pagan” and saying he wants to send them to visit North Korea.
There is a strong element of self-interest in Karp’s stated views. Note that in his framework, our security just so happens to be enhanced to the degree the U.S. government pays Palantir. Of course the CEO selling weapons software to the U.S. government thinks America needs to buy expensive weapons software in order to be safe, just as a vacuum cleaner salesman thinks a new vacuum is precisely what you need in order to ensure your house is tidy, attractive, and sanitary. It would be odd to hear the CEO of a company selling weapons to the United States government saying something like “Although actually, a lot of this arms race could be averted through skilful diplomatic leadership, and we’d end up even safer and without wasting so much money on military spending.”
But that doesn’t mean that Karp is being dishonest. A vacuum cleaner salesman may go into the business of selling vacuum cleaners because he sincerely believes that the world would be better off if people had more vacuum cleaners. Karp might claim, and I would believe him, that his ideology arose prior to his occupation, that he sells weapons because he believes in it. (Likewise, when I tell people magazines are the future, it is not because I am trying to sell magazines—although I am—rather I got a position selling magazines because I believe in them.) I am sure he is sincere, but also he holds the beliefs that a person in his position must hold in order to continue in it, and as we know, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. So I don’t expect Karp to read the Mordechai Report—or The Myth of American Idealism—because if he did, he might be unable to muster the same level of confidence that the world’s morality is black-and-white. He might have to become an adult, and without the mythology that justifies his work, it might be difficult to continue his role in stoking an arms race in order to get rich.
The rest of us, however, do not need to fall for this. We should be capable of understanding that an AI weapons arms race with China is a horrendous idea that is likely to end in calamity on an unprecedented scale, and that what the world needs right now is not for America to be “scary” but for it to take the lead in renewing global diplomacy, so that the people of the world can solve their most pressing problems together. We must not let rich, belligerent, self-righteous fools like Karp and Thiel drive us toward civilizational catastrophe.
*In a New York Times op-ed last year, he advocated the U.S. take the lead in an AI arms race, but merely repeated the same basic view that we are locked in a geopolitical struggle against ruthless adversaries and must prevail by striking fear into them.
Somebody should give Alex Karp a copy of:
Alex Karp is a multi-billionaire who serves as the CEO of Palantir, a controversial software company that has been much more willing than some others in Silicon Valley to provide technology to Western governments for military and policing applications. The company has been described as “the West’s AI arms dealer” and criticized for its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israel Defense Forces. Unlike his more famous Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, a reactionary MAGA supporter, Karp describes himself as a socialist (he, like Elon Musk, seems to have some idiosyncratic personal definition in mind that has nothing in common with the socialist tradition).
Some comments that Karp recently made at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute about why Democrats lost were widely recirculated online. Elon Musk described the clip of Karp speaking as “based” and it racked up millions of views. It’s framed as a critique of woke ideology, but it is in fact mostly an argument about U.S. foreign policy and as such is a very useful way to examine some common American myths that are used to justify what I consider to be an incredibly dangerous set of policies.
Karp argues, essentially, for a philosophy that is often called (by its advocates) peace through strength. He says that America needs to frighten its enemies, and that while the “Berkeley faculty” do not understand this, the Real Americans do, and thus an agenda that wins popular support will focus on keeping people safe against external threats.
Here is what he says:
"Americans are the most loving, God fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. And they want to know that if you're waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you're a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved. And you know, when Americans are spending a trillion dollars on defense, what I know, what I want, and what I think my peers want is: Why are these people keeping our citizens hostage, torturing our people, attacking our allies, maligning us in what was once called the United Nations—basically a discriminatory institution against anything good.
We need to stand up, and those people need to be scared. And that's why this conference is so important, because we have the best products in the world, and we cannot have parity. Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction. If it's even they will take advantage of our niceness, kindness, our desire to be at home in Nebraska or New Hampshire or wherever we live in our peaceful environments. And they need to wake up scared and go to bed scared. And if you give that to the American people, the American people will go back and say… and honestly, probably shouldn't say, this is why I thought the Democrats are going to lose the election. […] Because people want to live in peace. They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology. They want to know they're safe, and safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe. And the average American person understands this. Unfortunately, many of the intellectually captured institutions funneled and intellectually owned by the Berkeley faculty do not. And that's what they want, it’s sure as hell what I want, and that's what Palantir and all the people in this room, I hope we're here to serve the American people, and my version of service is the soldiers are happier, the enemies are scared, and Americans go back to enjoying the fact that we're the only one with a real tech scene in this country, and we're going to win everything."
Karp often repeats variations on this foreign policy philosophy, that safety and security come from making other people “scared.” “You scare the crap out of your adversaries,” Karp told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times earlier this year. Scare the enemy shitless seems to be Point 1 of Karp’s thinking about foreign policy, Point 2 (the only other point) being, We In The West Are Better Than Other People, Who Are Bad And Want To Destroy Us. “We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,” Karp said. This is how he justifies his company’s firm support of Israel, a stance that has caused some Palantir employees to quit as Israel has wiped out more and more of Gaza over the last year: “From my perspective, it’s not just about Israel… It’s like, ‘Do you believe in the West? Do you believe the West has created a superior way of living?’”
I haven’t found Karp saying anything more sophisticated about foreign policy than these two talking points,* namely that the West is good and must be protected from the bad people, and that the way to do that is through threatening violence against not just those who hurt us, but also everyone from their “friends” to their “mistress.” Taken together, I think these add up to a highly irrational worldview that, if it is held by powerful people who may shape the future of U.S. foreign policy, endangers the entire future of human civilization.
Let’s consider first how obviously wrong Karp is about the simplistic idea that you are safer when people are scared of you. “Safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe.” On a micro level, this is plainly false. U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were dangerous to the civilian population in part because they were so scared. They thought that any Vietnamese villager, from a child to an elderly lady, was a potential threat (they could be hiding a grenade!). Fear made them dangerous. Or think about police killings. One of the things that makes the police so dangerous is that they are trained to be more afraid of the policed population than they should be. As Rosa Brooks, who served as a police officer and wrote a book about it, told me: “If you are primed to see everybody as a potential lethal threat to you, it affects what situations you will see as dangerous.”
What Karp doesn’t consider, then, is how making someone afraid can actually make them more likely to act aggressively. In foreign relations there is a phenomenon called the “security dilemma,” which people with views like Karp rarely stop to consider, whereby the steps that a country takes to make itself feel secure against external threats appear to others as being threats themselves, and cause other countries to take steps that seem like threats. Consider Iran’s nuclear program, for instance. Successive U.S. presidents have consistently used language that Iran interprets as a threat to invade it. (Not an unreasonable fear, because they saw what happened to their neighbor.) The possession of nuclear weapons would act as a deterrent to such an invasion, which is likely the main reason Iran would pursue acquiring them. (The Pentagon has assessed that Iran’s “military strategy is designed to defend against external or ‘hard’ threats from the United States and Israel” and “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”) As Iran takes steps that get it closer to possessing a nuclear weapon, however, the dominant U.S. reaction is to portray Iran as aggressive and a threat (thereby necessitating new threats of military action by the U.S. and Israel). An action seen as defensive by one party is seen as aggressive by the other.
Scaring your “enemies” into thinking you might attack them is not, then, the ideal way to achieve security. For example, It was partly because the U.S. threatened to invade Cuba that the Soviet Union decided to put nuclear missiles there as a deterrent, which the U.S. interpreted as a threat, which sparked a tense confrontation that nearly led to global nuclear war. Ultimately, we are better off when we work together, trying to build trust, lower tensions, and keep arms races from getting out of control. An institution like the United Nations (which Karp claims, without providing any examples, is “basically a discriminatory institution against anything good”) has a crucial function in bringing countries together to ease the kinds of mutual suspicion that can spiral into a violent confrontation that nobody wants. Ultimately, Karp is in error to believe that the more heavily armed and capable of inspiring fear you are, the safer you are. In fact, while sometimes violence is unavoidable, the use of threats can have unpredictable consequences, and poisons your ability to work with others.
Let’s turn to the other of Karp’s two beliefs, namely the belief that the West “has created a superior way of living” and must be protected, i.e., that we and our allies are better than other people. Noam Chomsky has said that in U.S. foreign relations, “the fundamental principle is that ‘we are good’ … ‘We’ are benevolent, seeking peace and justice… ‘We’ are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.” Karp is displaying this ideology at its most childlike. Americans are just so nice and kind that we are vulnerable, our boundless goodness is our weakness, and thus we must suppress this urge and be brutal, to be willing to threaten even people who have not directly hurt us.
What is interesting about this fable of We The Good Guys and They The Baddies is that it does not require examining the facts of what the U.S. has actually done in the world. It is a self-righteous and arrogant story, but it doesn’t come with actual proof. In fact, the actual record of historical action is excluded from discussion. Consider what Karp’s colleague Peter Thiel said when asked what he thought about Israel using AI software to select targets in Gaza, a choice that has resulted in horrific civilian deaths and injuries:
"Look again....I'm not ....I'm not...you know, you know...with... without, without going into all the... you know I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel. It's not for us to to second-guess every, everything. And I believe that broadly the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they're broadly in the right and that's, that's sort of the perspective I come back to. And if I, if I fall into the trap of arguing you on every detailed point, I'm actually going to, I would actually be conceding the broader issue that the Middle East should be micromanaged from Cambridge. And I think that's just simply absurd. And so I'm not, I'm not going to concede that point."
Now, this passage strikes me as further proof that Peter Thiel is one of the most inarticulate people I’ve ever seen speak in public, and is further proof that you do not have to be intelligent to be a billionaire. But what most fascinates me about this response is that Karp and Thiel think the West (including Israel) deserve to prevail because of their moral superiority, but when presented with evidence that Israel may not be morally superior, Thiel says that he doesn’t look into the facts, because he defers to Israel! But this is a confession that Karp and Thiel are bullshitters who do not mean what they say. If they were on Israel’s side because it is more moral, they would have to consider evidence that weighs on the question of Israel’s morality. They would have to read, for example, the Mordechai Report, a carefully-sourced analysis by an Israeli historian that documents the many war crimes Israel has committed in Gaza and ultimately comes to the conclusion that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. But I have not seen Karp or Thiel refute any of the allegations in the Mordechai Report. Instead, I have seen Karp denouncing pro-Palestine protesters as “pagan” and saying he wants to send them to visit North Korea.
There is a strong element of self-interest in Karp’s stated views. Note that in his framework, our security just so happens to be enhanced to the degree the U.S. government pays Palantir. Of course the CEO selling weapons software to the U.S. government thinks America needs to buy expensive weapons software in order to be safe, just as a vacuum cleaner salesman thinks a new vacuum is precisely what you need in order to ensure your house is tidy, attractive, and sanitary. It would be odd to hear the CEO of a company selling weapons to the United States government saying something like “Although actually, a lot of this arms race could be averted through skilful diplomatic leadership, and we’d end up even safer and without wasting so much money on military spending.”
But that doesn’t mean that Karp is being dishonest. A vacuum cleaner salesman may go into the business of selling vacuum cleaners because he sincerely believes that the world would be better off if people had more vacuum cleaners. Karp might claim, and I would believe him, that his ideology arose prior to his occupation, that he sells weapons because he believes in it. (Likewise, when I tell people magazines are the future, it is not because I am trying to sell magazines—although I am—rather I got a position selling magazines because I believe in them.) I am sure he is sincere, but also he holds the beliefs that a person in his position must hold in order to continue in it, and as we know, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. So I don’t expect Karp to read the Mordechai Report—or The Myth of American Idealism—because if he did, he might be unable to muster the same level of confidence that the world’s morality is black-and-white. He might have to become an adult, and without the mythology that justifies his work, it might be difficult to continue his role in stoking an arms race in order to get rich.
The rest of us, however, do not need to fall for this. We should be capable of understanding that an AI weapons arms race with China is a horrendous idea that is likely to end in calamity on an unprecedented scale, and that what the world needs right now is not for America to be “scary” but for it to take the lead in renewing global diplomacy, so that the people of the world can solve their most pressing problems together. We must not let rich, belligerent, self-righteous fools like Karp and Thiel drive us toward civilizational catastrophe.
*In a New York Times op-ed last year, he advocated the U.S. take the lead in an AI arms race, but merely repeated the same basic view that we are locked in a geopolitical struggle against ruthless adversaries and must prevail by striking fear into them.
Somebody should give Alex Karp a copy of:
