Episode 505 – I Read The Palantir Manifesto

You know, Palantir, right? And you know Alex Karp, Palantir’s deranged CEO? Have you read his manifesto? Well, I have! Do you want to know what he says? Then gather around for today’s episode of The Corbett Report!

Video player not working? Use these links to watch it somewhere else!

WATCH ON:  /  /  /  / /  or DOWNLOAD THE MP4

TRANSCRIPT

JAMES CORBETT: So, you know about Palantir, right? The “software services” company that specializes in creepy, AI-powered surveillance and targeting software for militaries and intelligence agencies around the world.

REPORTER: Founded in 2003 by billionaire Peter Thiel, alongside current CEO Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Nathan Gettings, Palantir’s tech helps detect unusual or suspicious patterns in large datasets using techniques that the founders learned working together at PayPal. The CIA was one of the company’s earliest investors and its only customer for a number of years. Eventually, other intelligence agencies like the FBI and the NSA jumped aboard.

 

SOURCE: How Palantir And Its Data-Mining Empire Became So Controversial

And you know Alex Karp, right? The self-declared “batshit crazy CEO” of Palantir, who seems only capable of giving uncomfortable interviews and public statements while apparently high as a kite.

ALEX KARP: Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and on occasion kill them.

 

SOURCE: Palantir Technologies | Q4 2024 Earnings Webcast

[Explosion in Gaza]

ANA SORO: Alex, as always we have a lot of individual investors on the line. Is there anything you’d like to say before we end the call?

 

KARP: We’re doing it! We’re doing it! And I’m sure you’re enjoying this as much as I am!

 

SOURCE: Palantir Technologies | Q4 2024 Earnings Webcast

[Explosion in Gaza]

KARP: I was absorbing the full risk of our stupidity. You were absorbing the full risk of my stupidity by putting me on there and knowing all the crazy shit I was going to say. And you were going to have to sit there and listen to it. And you did it!

 

SOURCE: Palantir C.E.O. Alex Karp Defends Aiding Trump’s Immigration Policies 

CORBETT: Well, in case you didn’t know, that self-same Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, has co-written a manifesto. It’s called The Technological Republic, and I read it cover-to-cover. And, yes, it’s exactly as unhinged as you might expect it to be.

So, here’s what I found.

THE CORBETT REPORT THEME

Welcome back to another edition of The Corporate Report. I’m your host, James Corbett of corbettreport.com, coming to you from the sunny climes of Western Japan here in June of 2026 with Episode 505 of The Corporate Report podcast, “Episode 505 – I Read The Palantir Manifesto (and yes, it is totally unhinged!)”

And yes, as that title would indicate, today we are going to be talking about, the recently published manifesto by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his co-author. But if you need to get caught up to speed on Palantir, you’ve just crawled out of a rock and have no idea what this is, well, boy, do I have some resources for you! Specifically, a couple of editorials that I’ve written along the way.

This 2022 editorial on “How Palantir Conquered the World” is a good overview to get you started, which notes that:

Founded by billionaire PayPal co-founder and Facebook early investor Peter Thiel, this plucky little Silicon Valley startup has long been the darling of the US military and the intelligence community, and it’s increasingly the darling of the corporate world. And—given Palantir’s ability to surveil, track and, ultimately, control every aspect of your daily life—it isn’t hard to see why.

And later on, I get into more of the nitty gritty details about Palantir. But before I do, I note some of the corporate whimsy that is part of the Palantir story:

Its offices are named after locations in the Tolkien fable. Thus, Palantir’s Palo Alto headquarters is The Shire, its office in McLean, Virginia (located just six miles from the CIA), is Rivendell; its Washington, D.C., branch is dubbed Minas Tirith, etc.

 

It has a hotline called the Batphone that allows engineers to anonymously report to company officials any customer requests that they consider to be unethical.

 

Two of its core analytic software programs, Gotham and Metropolis, are named after cities in the DC Comics universe.

 

One of the conference rooms in The Shire has been converted into a children’s ball pit.

 

Oh, how delightfully quirky! Surely no Silicon Valley startup with such an eclectic working environment could be involved in anything evil, could they?

Well, maybe they could. And I get into it by, for example, pointing to the research of Whitney Webb and her two-volume tour de force, One Nation Under Blackmail, where she talks about the story of the founding of Palantir in the immediate wake of the scrapping of a—well, I won’t say little known, little known in the normie world, well known in conspiracy research circles—program from DARPA.

As it turns out, “May 2003 was the exact time when the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began officially backing away from its proposed the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, renaming it Terrorism Information Awareness before Congress defunded the program altogether.” And we all remember the wonderful logo of the TIA program, the Information Awareness Office, the all-seeing eye at the capstone of the pyramid radiating the earth. Exactly. What could go wrong?

So, that’s the real origins of Palantir. And what does it do? Well, “From the content of your emails to the subject of your phone calls to the details of your credit card transactions to your social media ramblings to your cell phone GPS logs, if it can be digitized, Palantir aims to feed it into a database and data mine it to discover relations and connections that are not immediately obvious to the average analyst.”

Well, that’s one of the things that Palantir does with one of its software suites that it offers to its clients, who for the first several years of Palantir were all government clients, in fact, just the CIA at first, but then expanded into other government agencies.

Some other things that Palantir has been involved in along the way that have dribbled and drabbled out through the establishment lapdog press:

• Palantir helped the NSA build the software to facilitate and augment the use of XKEYSCORE, the NSA’s “widest reaching” program, which captures “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.”
• Palantir helped tech security firm HBGary formulate plans for attacking Wikileaks and its supporters, including exposing the identities of those trying to leak to the organization and smearing journalists who defend the site.
• Palantir helped New Orleans implement a “predictive policing” program, giving Palantir access to millions of searchable public records, court filings, licenses, addresses, phone numbers, and social media data without the knowledge or approval of the city council.
• Palantir partnered with the Centers for Disease Creation on its Data Collation and Integration for Public Health Event Response (DCIPHER) program, a partnership that has expanded in the COVID era to include “supporting the U.S. fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, from vaccine distribution to new areas such as improving supply chain resiliency and the distribution of life-saving therapeutics.”
• And Palantir expanded its biosecurity business to other countries, including overseeing the processing of sensitive medical records in a new partnership with Britain’s National Health Service, which has been in the news recently. If you happen to be in the UK, I’m sure you’ve seen it as there is more and more public protesting about Palantir’s relationship to the NHS.

But if that seems like an exhaustive list, I can assure you it is not. In fact, Palantir has been involved in a lot more over the years.

So, for example, in 2025, I had this editorial on “What Does Palantir Actually DO?” where I go into much more detail about the specific functioning of Palantir and what it actually does, from the panoptic surveillance of everyone—which, of course, we all know by now—to the pre-crime concept, like that New Orleans Police Department program that was exposed in 2018 that had been operating for years without the public knowing anything about it, to AI weaponry, of course, the AI-powered targeting systems and AI-powered autonomous weapon systems that are increasingly using Palantir software U.S. government contracts to, for example, help facilitate the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza and to participate in the killing fields in Ukraine, etc. Genomic surveillance, which is something that I have talked about in the past, and optimizing wage slavery, amongst other things.

So, there’s much more information here if you need to get caught up to speed on the Palantir story generally.

But today we’re going to be talking, as I say, specifically about Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir. Not Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, but Alex Karp, who you probably know by now if you follow the news and have seen any of the unhinged interviews and public performances that Alex Karp has given in recent years.

But you wouldn’t know it from the establishment, puff piece, a journalism that is used to prop up his PR public image like this one from Quartr.com: “Alex Karp: The Unconventional Tech Visionary.”

Oh, he’s “unconventional,” guys! He’s “neurodivergent,” to use the kid’s lingo these days. It’s not that he’s hyped up on goofballs or anything.

So:

Early life and education

 

Alex Karp was born on October 2, 1967, and grew up in Philadelphia. Being raised by parents active in political and labor rights demonstrations, influenced Karp early in questions of civil rights and social justice. His academic journey was impressive and varied: he earned a Bachelor’s degree from Haverford College, a J.D. from Stanford Law School, and later pursued a Ph.D. in social theory from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. This diverse educational background helped shape his philosophical and ethical perspectives, particularly his interest in German philosophers which influenced both his studies and later his business practices.

…and, as we shall see, his later writing.

Then it goes on to talk about Palantir in general. And then it talks about Alex Karp’s leadership style.

A self-described progressive and socialist, he has often challenged the industry’s fixation on rapid growth and profitability. Karp has been outspoken about the risks of technology misuse, stressing the need to uphold democratic values[…]

Yes, guys, you see, Karp is so concerned about “democratic values” and “human rights” and “transparency in the deployment of AI and data analytics.” That’s the thing that keeps Alex Karp up at night.

Personal insights

 

Alex Karp’s personal life is defined by a commitment to balance and mindfulness, unusual for a CEO in the high-pressure tech sector.

Oh, and he does Qigong and Tai Chi, which “underscores a broader philosophy of health and wellness.” And “this outlook extends into Palantir’s culture, where Karp has taken a hands-on role in promoting well-being, most notably by leading employee meditation sessions.”

All right. So, anyway, this is the puff piece. This is what we are expected to swallow about Alex Karp. “Man, he’s just a quirky but interesting CEO of this firm that’s kind of into this AI stuff. But don’t worry, guys, he’s concerned about human rights and civil rights! And he wants to make sure that we keep the AI monster in its cage and use it as a powerful tool, but only as a tool, guys,” et cetera, et cetera. That’s the way the official story goes.

But as usual, reality is 180 degrees opposite of what’s being reported in puff pieces like that. So if you want to get a little bit closer to what Karp actually thinks, why not actually go to the source himself?

As you will recall from NWNW #627 back in April, James Evan Pilato of MediaMonarchy.com was covering the then-recently released tweet about Palantir’s corporate manifesto. For those who don’t remember, Palantir decided that this Technological Republic book that had been released the year before, “we get questions about it a lot.” So, they decided to tweet out a summary of this book. And we covered it on New World Next Week and [you can] go watch that coverage at the time.

But, long story short, here are some of the important points—things that you would expect an AI-supplying new age military industrial contractor to be saying. I think some of these things would not be surprising points at all.

For example: “Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible.” Again, more of that feel good rhetoric. “See, guys, we’re just we’re paying our moral debt to this country that’s made us possible by helping to helping them to kill people!”

it gets quite explicit about that and quite warmongery. “The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.” That’s right, everybody! We need a military, a strong military to go in and beat the bad guys. And who are the bad guys? Well, whoever we say.

Number five: “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose.” Oh, the Chinese are coming! We’ve got to build the AI weaponry before they do.

Six: “National service should be a universal duty.” Yes, literally, Palantir calling for a draft.

Number seven: “If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software,” which is a somewhat odd reference, but is explained more in the book itself.

Number nine: “We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life,” i.e., “oh, won’t somebody think of the poor politicians? Oh, they get so much hate.”

Number twelve: “12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.”

Number fifteen: “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone.” Let’s re-militarize everyone! Germany, Japan, all of them. This stupid Japanese pacifism garbage. Come on, let’s get rid of that. Even though, of course, that was dictated into the Japanese Constitution at the point of the gun by MacArthur. But whatever. Now we’ll use the gun to dictate them to re-militarize!

Number seventeen: “Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime.” OK. Again, exactly what you would expect. But it is an interesting way of framing these Orwellian pre-crime type programs that Palantir and others are involved in. “We’ll watch and surveil everything and give police and other, would-be authorities the power to surveil everyone in real time, going back however far we want to go back, and it’s deep into their personal lives as we want to go in order to find and connect dots that, otherwise, how would we find it? That’s the way we keep people safe. You want us to address violent crime, right? Well, just live in a perfect panopticon where we see and look at everything you’re doing at every moment of every day!”

Anyway, as I say, a lot of things that you would expect an AI software vendor for government and big business to be saying. But then some things that don’t necessarily make as much sense or seem slightly off the beaten path. Why is the Palantir CEO talking about “the pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted.”

Or: “Some cultures have produced vital advances. Others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden.” In other words, let’s scrap all that and let’s start making judgments about cultures and let’s see who Karp thinks should be out on top.

And: “We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?”

Anyway, as you can see, there are some interesting points in the summary, but I can guarantee you, having read the book, that you don’t really understand these points or their context or what is really being said until you actually read the book itself. Like any summary, I don’t think it adequately is up to the task of really summarizing a book like this, The Technological Republic.

So, let’s get into the details, the nitty gritty details of this book. And I am tempted to provide my own very pithy summary of this, essentially that this is the unhinged rant of a cocaine-fueled madman, or, slightly less uncharitably, as the work of a neurodivergent and morally reprehensible arch conspirator.

For example, just take a guess, how long does it take for Karp to start justifying killing people by using the Talmud as a source of moral certitude? Well, it takes exactly three chapters. It’s in the literal opening paragraph of chapter three that he starts doing that.

Or, here’s a question: Does he use the ancient occult symbol of the beehive—as in, a society in which all these drone bees are useless workers at the behest of the queen bee that has been seized upon by would-be tyrants and occultic leaders throughout history. Does he use that as a symbol to talk positively about how humans can be organized in self-directing ways? Answer: He sure does! How ever did you guess? Yeah.

You know, again, I could just dismiss it like that and in that manner. But let’s be fair. Karp actually makes, I think, a good point at one point in this book where he says:

A respect for one’s intellectual adversary, even if begrudging, can be an enormous advantage, particularly in a culture that has grown accustomed to belittling its opponents instead of engaging with them. In the realm of politics, and certainly business, far too many participants are incapable of maintaining a sense of emotional distance from their adversaries, or approaching them with the clarity and almost magnanimity that the best competitors bring to the arena. The most effective minds are often the ones who understand deeply the advantages and skills of their antagonists and refuse to fight religious wars of outrage and moral indignation. A fog of self-righteousness is often lethal to good judgment.

You know what? I agree. I think that’s well said. There should be a respect for one’s intellectual adversary…at least with the caveat, when they are being intellectually honest. You should take what they say and examine it without all of the emotional rhetoric and what have you.

So, yes, it is tempting to say these are just the deranged delusions of an unhinged madman, But that does a disservice, I think, actually to us, because whatever this man is or is not, or whatever his psychic state is, the point is this is a person with a great degree of power and influence, and he is using that in service of an agenda. So when he writes a book talking about that agenda, I think it behooves us to at least read it and take it seriously.

Now, as I say, all of that respect for one’s intellectual adversary only applies if they’re being intellectually honest, which, at some points, obviously, he is not. But let’s see if we can discern when and where he is and is not being honest with the readership.

So, first of all, I should clarify, this is The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief in the Future of the West. It is written by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, who I understand is the legal counsel for Karp and a corporate officer at Palantir. So, I’m not sure to what extent this is Karp and to what extent it’s Zamiska. But anyway, let’s attribute this to Karp because at the very least he signs on the bottom line for all of it.

And so the question is: what is the central argument of the book?

And I think he puts that right up front in the introduction.

The central argument that we advance in the pages that follow is that the software industry should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its effort and attention to constructing the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities that will address the most pressing challenges that we collectively face. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project—what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand—and, by extension, to preserve the enduring yet fragile geopolitical advantage that the United States and its allies in Europe and elsewhere have retained over their adversaries. It is, of course, the protection of individual rights against state encroachment that took its modern shape within “the West”—a concept that has been discarded by many, almost casually—without which the dizzying ascent of Silicon Valley would never have been possible.

I mean, that isn’t particularly surprising, I would say at first glance. This is obviously a book by a CEO of a major tech firm that is selling military-industrial—modern AI-powered military-industrial—software to the military. So, yes, “Of course we need a closer relationship with government and we need these software companies to start helping to build a national project and have some sort of geopolitical vision to maintain US supremacy.” Again, it’s the type of thing that you would expect a military-industrial contractor to talk about, although perhaps not quite so openly.

But this book reveals more about the mindset of someone like Karp than perhaps Karp even intends. Because you get to see the way that he thinks about certain issues that, well, I—and I would assume many people in the audience—would think very differently about.

What am I talking about? Well, let’s look at a case study of what makes this book so instructive for examining the psychopath mentality. For example, in Chapter 12, Karp and his co-author discuss “The Disapproval of the Crowd,” where they talk about a couple of psychological experiments that will be well-worn, well-familiar territory for Corbett Report listeners who have been around for some time.

Like the Asch Conformity Experiment, which you will know about from my Solutions Watch episode on The Bystander Effect, and the Milgram Experiment, which you will know about from Dissent Into Madness.

And, if you have seen those productions or if you know about those experiments at all, you’ll know, for example, the Asch Conformity Experiment, where you have the actual test subject in a room full of conspirators who all are playing parts in this experiment, including parts of fellow students. “We’re all just subjects in this one big psychological exam. We’re all on the same page.” And they’re shown, for example, the graph of the different lines and [asked] which one is the longest. And they documented that when a large number of the cohorts who are in on the plot all lie and say, “Oh, you know, A is bigger than B” or whatever the case may be, then the actual person will be more inclined to go against what they can visibly see with their own eyes and go along with the crowd. That’s an interesting experiment with some interesting implications, which, again, you can find out more about in that Solutions Watch episode.

Or, of course, famously, the Milgram experiments, which I went over in Dissent Into Madness, [with] the subject,being placed in the task of essentially shocking people to death, or at least being led to believe they are shocking people to death, with Milgram’s stated purpose for that experiment being to see how far you can get people to go just by giving them orders. Will people just follow orders in order to even kill people or bring people to the point of death? And the answer was surprising. And as I elaborate in Descent into Madness, it’s not just the famous result that everyone knows about. There are other implications to the different iterations of that experiment. But again, if you don’t know about that, please do see Dissent Into Madness.

But how does Alex Karp interpret these experiments? Not in the way I would expect. For example, he talks about [how]:

Many of those who participated in the Milgram experiment proceeded to administer what they believed were significant doses of electricity to victims yelling for the experiment to stop. The prevalence and indeed ease with which so many submitted were, of course, stark reminders of our shortcomings as a species. But they also suggested a path forward, or at least exposed the psychological obstacles around which one must maneuver in business in order to have any hope of creating something new.

 

The instinct toward obedience can be lethal to an attempt to construct a disruptive organization from a political movement to an artistic school to a technology startup. At many of the most successful technology giants in Silicon Valley, there is a culture of what one might call constructive disobedience.

So, he takes those experiments as some sort of object lesson for would-be CEOs of large Silicon Valley tech startups. Like, “Guys, this is how we can break out of the box and do things that people are—”

Again, it’s approaching that particular problem from a very, very different mindset, I would say, than most people would. To me, of course, those are harrowing stories about the manipulation of people’s thoughts and perceptions and the way that group conformity works and the ways that authority or presumed authority can be used to undermine people’s morals and goals. But for him, it’s about business and how you can be more disruptive and create a company that will, I don’t know, create AI-powered military software that will help kill people on the battlefield in a better, more disruptive way. Yay!

Again, I think that’s just an interesting moment of insight.

But perhaps an even more instructive bit of insight comes in Chapter 13 on “Building a Better Rifle,” where Karp is specifically addressing the American military occupation of Afghanistan post 2001, post 9-11, and what ultimately developed there. And it starts with the dramatic recounting of one of the first IED attacks—”improvised explosive device” attacks—on US troops in Afghanistan on September 28th of 2011, in which a James Butz and his fellow soldiers were attacked and ultimately killed. And as Karp goes on to explain, this was the beginning of a wave of IED attacks. There were tens of thousands of attacks that obviously maimed and killed many US forces.

So, he presents the context of this problem. And then he presents it essentially as an engineering problem to be solved by engineering better software:

By 2011, it had become clear to nearly everyone in the US military that better intelligence was needed to assess the safety of particular roads and potential routes across the country, as well as to identify and capture the bomb makers themselves. The frustration of so many soldiers and intelligence officers in the field was that they had the information they needed—the records and locations of prior attacks, the types of bomb-making materials that had been used, the fingerprint scans and mobile phone numbers of captured insurgents, and the reports of confidential informants who had been recruited by American intelligence agencies, to name only a few of the data sets that were available. The information was sitting there, in dozens and hundreds of government systems, for anyone with the right clearance to access. The task of stitching it all together, however, into something useful—into something actionable that patrols could use as they planned their next route to visit a neighboring village, or decided which prisoners to question and what information they might provide—was often effectively impossible.

Now, on one level, once again, this is just a blatantly self-serving argument and something that you would expect the CEO of any company would present. What is the answer to this IED problem? It’s Palantir, says the CEO of Palantir. Yes, of course. Obviously, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

But actually, I think this goes to show the underlying psychopathic mentality, which differs, I would say, quite markedly from somebody who has their head screwed on straight. Because when you approach this problem—the problem of all these soldiers getting blown up with IEDs—as an engineering problem, then, of course, the solution is going to be some version of, “How do we take these multi-million-dollar vehicles and equip them with more sensitive equipment and software and what have you so that we can better dodge the places where they’re going to get blown up and or add more armor, etc.? How can we throw more money at this as an engineering problem to design it so that these attacks will be less effective or will hit these vehicles less often?” Rather than addressing the actual root of the problem, which is not an engineering question. That is completely the wrong domain with which to be analyzing the problem itself. And so you’re going to arrive at something that is not a true answer to this question.

The irony here is that, in fact, in the book, Karp almost gets at the real root of the problem and what really is happening here, where he’s writing about these attacks—14,500 of them against U.S. And allied soldiers across Afghanistan in 2012 alone. And he says:

The bombs, whose explosive material was often made from widely available crop fertilizers, presented an escalating crisis for American forces, which had been sent to Afghanistan to build meaningful relationships and coalitions with local militias, in villages and towns that were scattered across the region—work that required constant travel and interaction with civilians.

Do you see what the problem is there and how he almost arrives at the real answer? “Work that required constant travel and interaction with civilians.” Wait! OK, that work, I suppose, might have required that sort of travel. But why was the work itself required? Why was that work of the US going across Afghanistan—US forces to build relationships with local militias?—why was that work itself required? A national security concern? Something that had to be done there in 2012, whereas, say, here in 2026, of course, that’s not required. The US government has decided it is not. And the US forces are not there anymore, and they’re not doing that work anymore. Thus, they’re not being hit by the IEDs at all. And you don’t need any fancy AI-powered software to protect US forces from such attacks, right?

So, actually, the real root of the problem is a political question, not an engineering question. The question is not: “How do we build these trucks better or make more fancier software so that we can avoid these—” No, the question is: “Why on earth are the soldiers there at all? And what on earth do you think that the putting them in harm’s way is going to do? What is the point of that?” That is a political question, not an engineering question.

And so, again, from a self-serving—just a purely monetary perspective—it’s obvious why the CEO of a software company would put the problem in the perspective that the only possible solution would be a software answer. But that completely misses the point.

What was the point of Afghanistan? Why was the U.S. there? What did it accomplish? Is Karp happy that now the US isn’t there? So, you know, “I’m happy with all the work that we did for the US forces while they were there to help them accomplish their mission, which was to occupy the country for a couple of decades and then then disappear in a flash.” Was that was that really worth it in the end? Does that does that bring you joy?

Again, I’m trying not to be just dismissive. “Oh, he’s just a crazy psychopath. And who cares what the hell he thinks? He’s just a cabal member.” Yeah, of course. But realistically, who in their right mind could possibly look at that and say, “Well, that was all worth it! I’m glad we created that engineering solution to that political problem that no longer exists because the political calculus has changed.”

There are some deep-seated problems with Karp’s thinking that I think are revealed in these types of passages that the average person would not think of in this way. So, that chapter goes on to talk about, “well, this is why Palantir ended up ultimately suing the US military (and winning!) for a contract that they wanted to bid on to supply services to the US military under a 1990s regulation reform act that had been passed to try to, essentially, streamline the Pentagon acquisition process and that they should be using outside contractors to do things when they can, etc.

Anyway, so Palantir sued and won against the US military in order to provide their services. Because, of course, Palantir has always been a cutout for the CIA and the deep state and DARPA and what they’ve always wanted to accomplish. So, it’s no surprise that they’re successfully suing the US government in order to acquire billions dollars more in contracts from the US military.

But anyway, that’s an interesting part of this story. And I think we see a similar thing when Karp briefly sort of touches on—but not really—the New Orleans Police Department relationship that Palantir had cultivated for their pre-crime Orwellian program, which he very vaguely references and just sort of introduces. But the way that he talks about it is, of course, instructive. So what is this program?

If you want to know more about it, you can go to that aforementioned “What Does Palantir Actually DO?” editorial, in which I talk about this pre-crime program and what it was really doing.

In 2018, it was revealed that the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) was employing Palantir’s software in a program that “traced people’s ties to other gang members, outlined criminal histories, analyzed social media, and predicted the likelihood that individuals would commit violence or become a victim.”

So it’s not just aimed at, of course, the perpetrators of crime, but even at the people who will receive crime. “This guy looks like he’s about to get beaten up, so we better go in and prevent that” Or at least that’s the theory that’s being sold.

But of course, underlying all of that is the necessity for a constant surveillance system that’s monitoring people through not only facial recognition or gate recognition cameras and gunshot detectors and license plate readers and all of the infrastructure for the surveillance state, but also, of course, the AI software behind the scenes that’s coming to its own determination of who is and isn’t a criminal.

But:

Realizing that a program designed to predict people’s criminal behaviour before it even happens would be controversial, the NOPD went to extraordinary lengths to keep its relationship with Palantir secret from the public. “No one in New Orleans even knows about this, to my knowledge,” admitted James Carville, the Democrat political operative who works as a paid adviser to Palantir and who was instrumental in bringing about the NOPD/Palantir partnership.

And of course, it didn’t end with New Orleans, although that was the one that gets attention and that’s the one that Karp writes about in his book. But:

In 2023, for instance, it was reported that the Los Angeles Police Department was using Palantir software in its “Operation LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration).” The program, according to reports, “involves Palantir-provided software that gathers data on criminal history and affiliations from sources like license plate readers and social media networks, and calculates a ‘chronic offender score’ for the individual.”

 

Subsequent reporting confirmed that Palantir’s spying and “predictive policing” technology is also being used by police and sheriff’s departments in New York and Chicago and that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), run by the Department of Homeland Security, is using Palantir’s “Gotham” operating system to run digital dragnets on a further 7.9 million people.

Et cetera.

So, there you go. This is the scope of the problem of the Palantir surveillance grid that’s creating this pre-crime surveillance dragnet that is—whether you know it or not, walking down the street, your face is being recorded, you’re being judged on social media posts and whatever, some parking ticket that you got three years ago, you’re being assigned a score behind the scenes. And if you trip some sort of red wire, then the flags will go off and police will be sent to your area.

How absolutely crazy. I keep saying Orwellian. I guess this is “Dickian” in “The Minority Report” sense. But anyway, how crazy is this technology? But you better believe Karp, of course, very vaguely describes, “Oh, there was a program that Palantir had with New Orleans Police Department. And wouldn’t you know it—gosh! shucks!—people got really angry about it. And there were all these critics who were coming out to malign this program, but they didn’t realize it’s all really about keeping you safe. Don’t people care about safety anymore?”

The subtle, interesting, and difficult discussion was not whether the abuse of such systems was justified but rather whether their proper use had any role to play in stemming violence in our cities. Thousands of people are murdered every year in this country. Hundreds of thousands and arguably millions more live in the shadow of such violence. For many critics of the use of software by local law enforcement, those lives hardly seemed to matter much in the moral calculus.

Oh, yes, we’re just trying to solve “gun violence in New Orleans,” as he frames it earlier in that chapter. And you’re not for gun violence, are you? If you don’t think it’s important to solve gun violence with Palantir, then you’re one of these horrible monsters who just doesn’t care about victims, right?

Therefore, you need to be in support—in active, full-throated support of the creation of an entire technological infrastructure of surveillance and control that could be used, at the very least, if we could imagine someone bad getting in political office one day, as a turnkey totalitarian state. Just, suddenly, there it is, and suddenly anyone who has political wrong think can be rounded up at the flip of a switch. But, guys, if you’re not for that then you’re clearly a monster who doesn’t want to solve violence.

Anyway, you get the point. This is the way this book is argued, and I find it quite wanting on a number of levels, one of which, of course, is just the complete lack of details in any of these arguments. It’s always presented in the most hand-wavy, vague, gestural manner, talking about, “We had this contract with New Orleans in 2012, and it was about solving gun violence.” That’s literally all he says about it. It doesn’t talk about any of the actual technological aspects of the system or what it was doing, how it was being employed, why it was done in complete secrecy so that not even people within the New Orleans City office even knew it was happening. I mean, it’s a crazy program and it’s only one of many, many that are operating like this that Palantir has its snoot in, but you won’t find those details in here. And you won’t find details, about many of the other programs and activities with which Palantir is involved in this book.

Now, having said that, for the people who are inclined to go out and actually read the book, I will say, well, have at it. And you will notice that towards the final chapters, he does get into some of the more arcane aspects of Karp’s sociological/philosophical background, talking about aesthetic judgment and the creation of nation-state identity, et cetera.

But of course, all of it has to be framed and understood in the context of this large, self-serving manifesto about how AI is the way of the future. “We need closer cooperation between Silicon Valley and the US government and maybe some allied governments to the extent that that fits in. And boy, you’ve got to get on board with this or else you’ll become a relic of the past”…is essentially the central argument. And everything else is surrounding that, including his argument for a draft instead of a volunteer army, et cetera. It’s in service of that agenda in one way or another.

And I think that’s the key for unlocking this book. Essentially, it is very self-serving for a technocratic broligarch to be making this argument. And as I say, I’m never one to dissuade people from reading. So, if you are inclined to read it, go and read the book and come to your own conclusions. Do not trust any summary.

But, essentially, I think my main takeaway from this book is that, yes, on the vaguest sort of broadest level, some of these arguments sound like the type of thing that at the very least you would expect a tech company CEO to be saying in the position that Karp is in. But it is so vague and broad and general and does not get into any of the specifics of how any of Palantir software actually works precisely because when you add in the little niggly details about, oh, I don’t know, how the genocide enablers in Palestine are now working to snarf up data in country after country so that they can help with biosurveillance and/or predictive policing, it becomes a little bit harder to defend.

VICKI YOUNG: You know—and it’s not just Zack Polansky who makes this point—that there are other people, too, who have probably what you call ‘moral objections’ to the other contracts that your company has in the US, when it comes to immigration enforcement organization (ICE) and your work with the US and Israeli militaries. I mean, do you understand those sort of moral objections, if you like, that people have?

 

LOUIS MOSLEY: I understand why people have concerns about US policy, about Israeli policy. But both those contracts—our contract for the Department of War in the US and for the Immigration Enforcement Service, ICE—were actually contracts that began under President Obama and that we have provided ever since under multiple changes of administration. So, we are not playing politics in that sense. We are serving the properly elected, democratically elected government in the US.

 

YOUNG: But do you make moral judgments about those contracts? Who would Palantir not work with about those contracts? So is there anyone you wouldn’t work with, for example?

 

MOSLEY: Well, we don’t work in any country and have never done so, that we would consider adversarial to the west. So Iran, Russia, China. But those countries that are democratic and subject to the rule of law, that is where we will work. And those are the higher standards to which we will hold ourselves accountable.

 

YOUNG: OK. Faiza, do you have objections to Palantir having a contract in particular with the NHS?

 

FAIZA SHAHEEN: Yeah, with NHS. But you spoke there about [how] it’s not political. Like, you have and Palantir has such a key role in helping kill children in Palestine and Lebanon. That has to be aligned, surely. And what does a company that is so involved in how to kill children with Israel and how to deport children from the US have an interest in the NHS and in our data?

And I think that’s the concern here, is the lack of trust. Now, you can read out that list. Absolutely. You speak to doctors, they say that it’s fragmented and the information isn’t all in one place and the rest of it as patients as well. But there’s lots of other companies that could do that who don’t have this deeply immoral approach in the way that they do their business. And I think we are absolutely right and and Zack Polansky is absolutely right to say that we want your company out of the NHS.

 

SOURCE: Should Palantir have contracts with the NHS? | BBC Politics Live

CORBETT: That was Faiza Shaheen arguing against the VP of Palantir UK, Louis Mosley, on BBC Politics Live

Hmm, Mosley? Why does that name sound so familiar in British politics? I wonder who Louis Mosley (UK Palantir VP)’s literal grandfather was. Look that one up. Little interesting nugget.

But anyway, I am happy to report that that is not so much of a rarity: People speaking with fire and righteous indignation, backed up by data, speaking directly truth to power—at least in those venues and in those fora in which such pushback is allowed. In fact, this is, I would say, part of the rising movement that I documented, for example, in the recent Solutions Watch episode on “Butlerian Jihad When?” Talking about this neo-Luddite(?) Butlerian Jihad(?) movement of people coming together to fight back against the AI data centers and the AI, the would-be AI overlords generally.

And in those venues where people are allowed a voice—not the establishment media lapdog journalists who of course only ever ask the simple and easy questions with no follow-ups. No, when actual people get a voice, they are not shy about speaking with righteous indignation against these spiders weaving their web around us.

KARP: And then at some point, you know, there was the whole consumer internet, where people figured out that a few people get wealthy and if you said platitudes that were obviously stupid, you could—

 

PROTESTER: You’re getting wealthy off of killing Palestinians! Palantir kills Palestinians with their AI and technology.

 

KARP: Oh

 

PROTESTER: You’re killing my family in Palestine.

 

KARP: Yeah. And, you know—

 

PROTESTER: What kind of person are you? How do you sleep at night?

 

KARP: Well, if you—

 

PROTESTER: Shame on you!

 

KARP: Do you want to hear my answer? So the primary source of death in Palestine is the fact that Hamas has realized that there are millions and millions of useful idiots that will—

 

PROTESTER: Stop using that excuse. This is why you don’t get a platform. How dare you! Your AI and your technology from Palantir kills Palestinians.

 

KARP: Mostly terrorists. That’s true.

 

PROTESTER: No, it’s not. If you say “mostly,” so it’s okay to kill other innocent civilians?

 

KARP: Do you, do you, d’you—Look, if your argument was so strong, wouldn’t you let me talk. If anything—

 

MODERATOR: OK, have a great day!

 

PROTESTER: You all are sick if you support genocide, too!

 

SOURCE: Palantir CEO Alex Karp | Forging the Technological Republic: Power, Purpose, & the New America

CORBETT: Maybe the kids are all right after all.

Yes, that is none other than Alex Karp himself getting confronted about the slaughter in Gaza, which Palantir, of course, is a proud part of. And they will—as Louis Mosley did in that BBC Politics Live discussion that we looked at earlier, as he went on to talk about, “Well, we don’t participate in the Lavender program, the other specific targeting programs.” Of course, they will use that excuse. But as Karp is happy to talk about, “Yes, we on occasion, we do kill our adversaries. And it’s great, guys. It’s wonderful! Yay. We’re doing it. We’re doing it!”

Alright, I will refrain from devolving into caricature but it is hard to do so because not only is carp “neurodivergent,” as he likes to say, no, he is obviously suffering from a more important moral problem that is manifest in his manifesto.

So, once again i will direct your attention to the actual book itself, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief in the Future of the West, in which he lays out his vision for this future of humanity driven by this AI-powered software and the various things that come along with that.

And, once again, let me reiterate that I think it is a valuable exercise to give your intellectual adversary the respect of listening to his argument and taking it seriously…up to the point where he demonstrates that he is not arguing in good faith. As, for example, we see in that clip where he talks about, “We’re mostly killing terrorists,” as if that was a moral argument, even if we were to take it at face value, which you should not. But even if you did, it still is a highly morally dubious argument, is it not?

But those are the types of arguments you’re going to get from him. And the second thing that you get from actually listening to and and asking your intellectual adversary to elaborate on their agenda items, to elaborate on their manifesto, is that they dig their own grave with their words. They are the ones cinching their own noose around their own neck and hoisting themselves by their own petard. Because you give him the time and space to speak and Karp is going to tell you about the “wonderful things we’re doing to kill our adversaries around the world and to create all these wonderful programs that are watching over you with loving grace.”

Well, anyway, enough editorializing for today. I am interested in your commentary. Have you read this book? If anyone does have any specific commentary on that, I’d be interested to hear it, or on Karp and Palantir generally. I think it is an interesting and very timely subject of discussion.

So, interested Corbett Report members can log into the website at CorbettReport.com and specifically go to corbettreport.com/manifesto for the complete hyperlinked transcript of today’s episode with all the links to all of the things that we’ve talked about and looked at today. And of course, there you can leave your comments on this episode, but that’s going to leave today’s exploration there.

I’m James Corbett of corbettreport.com thanking you for investing your time in today’s episode. And I’m looking forward to talking to you again in the near future.