Palantir’s manifesto has dropped and co-founder Peter Thiel has a scary new company called Objection. I’ll round up some reactions.
Palantir Manifesto Says What?
In ancient days the priests of an imperial death cult would have dropped their manifesto on giant graven metal tablets, in 2026 they just tweet that crap with a footnote saying “Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska”:
Because we get asked a lot.
The Technological Republic, in brief.
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
2. We must rebel…
— Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 18, 2026
There are 22 points but I’ll only highlight a lucky 7 plus 1:
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
4. 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.
5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
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.
17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government 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.
21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
Fun stuff!
“Extremely Creepy”
Multiple responses to Palantir’s manifesto worth reviewing have already dropped.
I’ll start with John Ganz (known as @lionel_trolling on X.com) who reviewed Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s book upon which the manifesto is based in February, via Bloomberg:
The Technological Republic is a terrible book: badly written, tedious, and — when they can be gleaned in between the jargon, clichés and repetitions — full of bad ideas, ranging from the merely dubious to the execrable and disturbing. This book is dismal on the level of both form and content. It heralds a dark and depressing future.
The book is quite literally a call to arms. Its rough argument, or rather its repeated assertion, is that “At some point, Silicon Valley lost its way.” What started out as a bold partnership between the US government and the private sector to develop innovative new technologies has degenerated over the past 50 years to cater to consumers and the market. The Valley built social media platforms, e-commerce sites and food delivery programs, but — either out of principle or expediency — would not help its Daddy, the US Department of Defense, build neat new guns.
…
The book is also essentially an advertisement for Palantir Technologies Inc. Its authors, Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, both hail from the C-suite of the data analytics software concern that specializes in defense and security applications. Karp is the CEO and co-founder, along with Peter Thiel, and Mr. Zamiska went to Yale Law School, worked at the white shoe firm Davis Polk, and now works in the Office of the CEO as legal counsel.
…the book’s entire vision is deeply undemocratic and elitist. The idea is to enshrine an unaccountable elite of engineers who will ignore the will of a public that might mislead them. They are special souls who must be cloistered away from the world…
In Karp and Zamiska’s telling, these special few will apply a “ruthlessly pragmatic” engineering mindset to national issues and problems. And who decides what are the national issues and projects? Well, the engineers, of course.
Ganz elaborated on his Substack:
The book is extremely creepy: It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public “oversight for me, surveillance for thee.” I contend it’s a work of reactionary modernism.
If the ideas are bad, so is the writing. In fact, I strongly suspect the authors, who are big proponents of the technology throughout the book, used A.I. to write it.
…
Businessmen routinely write stupid books, that’s not surprising, but Mr. Karp is a little bit of a different case. He’s a highly educated man: he has a PhD in critical social theory from the Goethe University Frankfurt, where Jürgen Habermas was his dissertation supervisor, until they apparently had some sort of disagreement. Ultimately, he wrote his thesis under the supervision of Karola Brede, a sociologist whose work incorporates Freudian psychoanalysis. Karp’s thesis is entitled “Aggression in the Life-World: Expanding Parsons’ Concept of Aggression Through a Description of the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.” In 2020, Moira Weigel wrote a penetrating analysis of the dissertation. And you can read the whole thing translated here.
…
So, this is all very weird. To recap, Karp wrote his dissertation on a form of rhetoric that employs aggression to bind a community together and then he goes and writes a terrible, jargon-filled, cliché-riddled book about how the United States needs to rearm with the help of Silicon Valley. The shittiness, one might say, is the point: is Karp intentionally using jargon in this technical sense to create his own vision of Volksgemeinschaft? Maybe, but the rhetoric is not stirring! As for “aggression in the life-world,” Karp is saying “Yes, please!” In the book, Karp explicitly says how he wants to cultivate a more martial society to defend “the West.”
The idea of reverse engineering the Frankfurt School’s critique of low-key fascism to do a little low-key fascism yourself might strike one as crackpot stuff. But, if you haven’t noticed, the crackpots are running the show these days!
I had noticed that!
‘Silicon Valley must be free to do in America’s cities what it did in Gaza’
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis did a point-by-point rebuttal of Palantir’s manifesto, I’ll pull his responses to the 7 I featured above:
1. Silicon Valley owes an immeasurable debt to the ruling class who bailed out the criminal bankers that wrecked the livelihood of the majority of Americans. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley will defend that ruling class to the death (literally!), in the name of the majority of Americans whom they treat with contempt – i.e., like cattle that have lost their market value.
4. Glory to brute force! Ethics is for suckers. The West needs more of Palantir’s murderous software.
5. AI-powered killer robots are coming. The task is to profit magnificently by building killer robots first and ask questions later. To be able to do so, Palantir will do whatever it takes to avoid at all cost any international treaties that limit AI-driven killer robots.
6. Every poor sod (lacking the connections to avoid being thrown into the trenches with killer drones targeting them from the sky) must be drafted into the army. Forget paying soldiers a salary. All payments should be directed to Palantir, where our own people will be serving their ‘national service’ – leaving the dying to non-shareholders.
12. Palantir makes no nuclear weapons but is happily developing other weapons of mass destruction. We proudly announce that we are now ready to add to nuclear Armageddon the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence.
17. Silicon Valley must be free to do in America’s cities what it did in Gaza. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it came to granting Palantir the right to annihilate all remaining civil liberties and human rights. This must end.
18. Epstein’s syndicate should be forgotten lest lovely people like Trump and the Clintons are deterred from entering government. The public arena must be scrutiny-free unless subversives like Sanders or Mamdani enter it.
21. Time to bring back Hitler’s hierarchy of races, with Palantir’s founders and Elon at its Aryan pinnacle. The idea that it is wrong to judge someone by the colour of their skin or their ethnicity or their religion must be jettisoned.
Another Counter Manifesto
An X poster calling themselves Silicon Valley Fodder also has an interesting point-by-point response to Palantir’s manifesto:
Peter Thiel in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Palantir is ready to dismantle both. Here’s a breakdown of its little manifesto: pic.twitter.com/CwTZMABGgu
— Silicon Valley Fodder (@Playerinthgame) April 19, 2026
A More Pithy Response
Seth Harp, author of The Fort Bragg Cartel, made his points about Palantir’s manifesto with more brevity:
Palantir wants you to think they’re the dark overlords of the coming technofascist 4th Reich. The truth is rather more pathetic: Alex Karp is just a kooky right-wing sociologist & lawyer who bribes the Trump admin to buy his company’s useless product. Wow so scary and Nietzschean.
Alex Karp pretends to be an engineer because it makes it seem like he has practical skills. In reality all he has are his sophomoric political opinions and a complete lack of shame around openly bribing the most corrupt presidential administration in American history.
Preposterous manifesto for an industry that hasn’t invented anything important since about 2007, in a country that hasn’t won a war since 1945. Just a bunch of rich drug addicts who’ve bought off the government huffing the fumes of imagined past greatness while the planet burns.
‘A shareholder letter cosplaying as Cicero”
Podcaster and anti-crypto activist Aaron Day drops some zingers worth quoting:
Alex Karp, the dance PhD who runs a surveillance contractor valued at sixty billion dollars off ICE targeting tools and IDF kill lists, has written 22 commandments demanding Silicon Valley develop weapons for the state. He is very concerned we are not developing enough weapons for the state. He neglects to mention that his company already does this, extensively, and that every bullet point is a Palantir invoice with a Nietzsche footnote.
Point 1 informs the engineering elite it owes a moral debt. Point 5 asks who will build AI weapons, rhetorically, as if we do not know. Point 7 says if a Marine asks for a better rifle we must build it, which is convenient because Palantir has a billing department standing by. Point 15 helpfully calls for rearming Germany and Japan, two nations that happen to represent large untapped enterprise markets. Point 17 suggests Silicon Valley must address violent crime, by which he means predictive policing contracts written in Denver.
The document is not a civic manifesto. It is a shareholder letter cosplaying as Cicero. Karp has produced a number one bestseller arguing that the public owes his company money, and millions of people are nodding along because he included the word republic in the title.
What he calls the Technological Republic is the technocracy itself, slightly embarrassed, asking to be called something else.
Two more responses before we move on to Peter Thiel’s latest project.
CIA Cut Out Says What?
I was reading the TechCrunch response when I noticed they were quoting an unlikely critic, Bellingcat CEO Eliot Higgins.
Here’s how TechCrunch summarized Higgins’ posts on Bluesky (of course he posts on Bluesky):
Eliot Higgins, the CEO of the investigative website Bellingcat, dryly remarked that it was “extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement.”
Higgins also argued that there’s more to the post than a simple “defense of the West” — in his view, it’s an attack on what he said are key pillars of democracy that need rebuilding: verification, deliberation, and accountability.
“It’s also worth being clear about who’s doing the arguing,” Higgins wrote. “Palantir sells operational software to defense, intelligence, immigration & police agencies. These 22 points aren’t philosophy floating in space, they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.”
Presumably Higgins is attempting to compete with Palantir for CIA and MI6 money.
Putin’s Rasputin Chimes In
I kid, I kid, but that’s how Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin is generally seen in the Western media and I can’t resist a cheap yuk.
Dugin sees the Deep State in Palantir and who am I to argue:
Palantir’s Manifesto is much more important than Trump. Trump is insignificant pawn on the serious chess board. His role is total destruction. The preparations stage. Palantir is much more serious. It is the plan to safeguard the declining dominance of the West by radical means.
Palantir’s manifesto is the plan of the Western techno-fascism. The superiority of the white race based on the technology. No antisemitism, no sacredness, no socialism of old historic fascism. This time pure capitalist, Jews friendly, profane, materialist. Anglo. Posthumanist.
Palantir’s manifesto. Illiberal, anti-humanist, post-globalist. The techno-state of the global West as hegemonic pole. Unipolarity, technological racism, individualism. Epstein style. Quite compatible with Israelism (Tucker Carlson definition). Absolutely disgusting. Antichrist.
Palantir’s manifesto. Pure satanism. Ayn Rand. The logical conclusion of the capitalist age. The real end of history without liberal lenses. Quite compatible the degenerative ratchet and Fanged Noumen. Totally incompatible with multipolarity and Fourth Political Theory.
Palantir’s manifesto: real agenda of Trump’s rule. In spite of Trump himself used and abused by much more serious and autonomous powers.
Alright, I know I promised Dugin was the last reaction to Palantir’s manifesto, but there’s one more that will let us pivot to Karp’s mentor Peter Thiel and his latest.
The Philosopher’s Stone of All-Seeing Eyes
Turkish academic Emre Şan sees the philosophical fingerprints of René Girard in Palantir’s manifesto (the below is Grok’s translation from the Turkish):
pic.twitter.com/upPM4vHPTz
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 20, 2026
Now let’s look at the latest project from Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and Network State author Balaji Srinivasan.
Wait, Maybe I Do Have an Objection?
Has the media lied about you? Now you can get former CIA and FBI agents to investigate and hold them accountable. Peter Thiel and @balajis are backing Objection. pic.twitter.com/SR4fu31XlC
— Objection (@objectionupdate) April 17, 2026
So what in the family blog is this fresh Hell?
Objection Explained
I’ll go back to Aaron Day:
In 2007 Gawker outed Peter Thiel as gay.
In 2016 Thiel secretly funded $10M in lawsuits that bankrupted them.
This week he funded the AI that grades journalists.
Here’s what’s inside it:
1/ It’s called Objection. The founder is Aron D’Souza, the same lawyer who personally ran… pic.twitter.com/G0G4DB1Gkn
— Aaron Day (@AaronRDay) April 17, 2026
Full text:
In 2007 Gawker outed Peter Thiel as gay.
In 2016 Thiel secretly funded $10M in lawsuits that bankrupted them.
This week he funded the AI that grades journalists.
Here’s what’s inside it:
1/ It’s called Objection. The founder is Aron D’Souza, the same lawyer who personally ran the Gawker takedown for Thiel.
2/ Backers include Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan.
3/ Anyone pays $2,000 to trigger a “public investigation” of any reporter.
4/ The “investigators” are former FBI, NSA, and CIA officers.
5/ The jury is a panel of AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and xAI.
6/ The output is an “Honor Index” score on the journalist.
7/ Anonymous whistleblowers are ranked dead last in the evidence weighting.
8/ Corporate emails and government filings are ranked at the top.
9/ What used to take 5-10 years in court, they say, now takes 72 hours.
The man who spent a decade using the legal system to destroy a newsroom just automated the process.
Surveillance-state veterans score the reporter. AI trained by Thiel and Musk renders the verdict. Whistleblowers count least. Power’s paper trail counts most.
Speech for me. A score for thee.
And while I’m blogging about Palantir, there’s one more story worth highlighting.
Memetic Warfare and the People Who Do It
Barrett Brown has a new piece in Byline Times that’s well worth reading, highlighting some names that are well worth following in future:
NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence’s official journal StratCom, published a paper entitled ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare’.
Its author was Jeff Giesea, an investor and political operative, who had run companies on behalf of pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of defence surveillance giant Palantir and business partner of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
At the time Giesea defined memetic warfare, a term he coined, as “a subset of information operations or psychological warfare tailored to social media”.
To illustrate its applications, he drew on the expertise of a co-contributor he described as “an annoying gadfly or guerrilla warrior, depending on one’s perspective”: far-right activist and disinformation operator Charles C. Johnson.
The paper proposed methods by which to undermine ISIS: “systematically lure and entrap” recruiters; subvert its messaging via “fake ‘sockpuppet’ accounts” – online personas manufactured to simulate grassroots support or opposition – and “expose and harass people” within its funding network, “including their family members”.
…
The proposal included fabricating fake online personas, planting false information, and running coordinated harassment campaigns to discredit targets. Palantir suspended the employees involved and issued an apology, but the documents had already established that this tactical repertoire existed, was operational, and ran through Thiel’s own firm.
Those tactics had been developed and deployed over years by a loose network of far-right organisations – funded, in part, by figures directly connected to Thiel.
That infrastructure centred on a cluster of white supremacist and hard-right online platforms – among them the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer — covertly funded, according to participants, by Giesea. The same platforms served as testing grounds for the harassment campaigns, disinformation operations and memetic tactics that Giesea would later present to a NATO-affiliated journal as a respectable strategic toolkit.
Connecting those platforms to Thiel’s wider network was a single figure: Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and neo-Nazi provocateur known online as “Weev”. His ties to Thiel had been rumoured in leaked Epstein correspondence, but had never previously been corroborated. They can now be established — through Auernheimer’s own private statements and a decade of documented network activity — for the first time.
Auernheimer was, in effect, a bridge. He moved between the anarchic image-board subcultures of the early internet and organised white supremacist movements. He connected the PayPal and Palantir milieu around Thiel to the alt-right he helped create and harness. And he linked the first generation of online harassment operations to the contemporary influence networks that today increasingly shape mainstream political discourse.
Birds of a feather, flocking together, and family blogging everyone else.
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