Palantir\u2019s manifesto has dropped and co-founder Peter Thiel has a scary new company called Objection. I\u2019ll round up some reactions.<\/p>\n
Palantir Manifesto Says What?<\/p>\n
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 \u201cExcerpts 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\u201d:<\/p>\n
Because we get asked a lot.<\/p>\n
The Technological Republic, in brief.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
2. We must rebel\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2014 Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 18, 2026<\/p>\n
There are 22 points but I\u2019ll only highlight a lucky 7 plus 1:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena\u2014and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves\u2014has 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Fun stuff!<\/p>\n
\u201cExtremely Creepy\u201d<\/p>\n
Multiple responses to Palantir\u2019s manifesto worth reviewing have already dropped.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll start with John Ganz (known as @lionel_trolling on X.com) who reviewed Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska\u2019s book upon which the manifesto is based in February, via Bloomberg:<\/p>\n
The Technological Republic is a terrible book: badly written, tedious, and \u2014 when they can be gleaned in between the jargon, clich\u00e9s and repetitions \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The book is quite literally a call to arms. Its rough argument, or rather its repeated assertion, is that \u201cAt some point, Silicon Valley lost its way.\u201d 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 \u2014 either out of principle or expediency \u2014 would not help its Daddy, the US Department of Defense, build neat new guns.
\u2026
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.<\/p>\n
\u2026the book\u2019s 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\u2026<\/p>\n
In Karp and Zamiska\u2019s telling, these special few will apply a \u201cruthlessly pragmatic\u201d engineering mindset to national issues and problems. And who decides what are the national issues and projects? Well, the engineers, of course.<\/p>\n
Ganz elaborated on his Substack:<\/p>\n
The book is extremely creepy: It becomes clear in the course of reading this \u201cTechnological Republic\u201d 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 \u201cruthlessly\u201d pursue \u201coutcomes.\u201d It\u2019s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: \u201cno public \u201coversight for me, surveillance for thee.\u201d I contend it\u2019s a work of reactionary modernism.<\/p>\n
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.
\u2026
Businessmen routinely write stupid books, that\u2019s not surprising, but Mr. Karp is a little bit of a different case. He\u2019s a highly educated man: he has a PhD in critical social theory from the Goethe University Frankfurt, where J\u00fcrgen 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\u2019s thesis is entitled \u201cAggression in the Life-World: Expanding Parsons\u2019 Concept of Aggression Through a Description of the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.\u201d In 2020, Moira Weigel wrote a penetrating\u00a0analysis\u00a0of the dissertation. And you can read the whole thing translated\u00a0here.
\u2026
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, clich\u00e9-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 \u201caggression in the life-world,\u201d Karp is saying \u201cYes, please!\u201d In the book, Karp explicitly says how he wants to cultivate a more martial society to defend \u201cthe West.\u201d<\/p>\n
The idea of reverse engineering the Frankfurt School\u2019s critique of low-key fascism to do a little low-key fascism yourself might strike one as crackpot stuff. But, if you haven\u2019t noticed, the crackpots are running the show these days!<\/p>\n
I had noticed that!<\/p>\n
\u2018Silicon Valley must be free to do in America\u2019s cities what it did in Gaza\u2019<\/p>\n
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis did a point-by-point rebuttal of Palantir\u2019s manifesto, I\u2019ll pull his responses to the 7 I featured above:<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 i.e., like cattle that have lost their market value.<\/p>\n
4. Glory to brute force! Ethics is for suckers. The West needs more of Palantir\u2019s murderous software.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018national service\u2019 \u2013 leaving the dying to non-shareholders.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s existence.<\/p>\n
17. Silicon Valley must be free to do in America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
18. Epstein\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
21. Time to bring back Hitler\u2019s hierarchy of races, with Palantir\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Another Counter Manifesto<\/p>\n
An X poster calling themselves Silicon Valley Fodder also has an interesting point-by-point response to Palantir\u2019s manifesto:<\/p>\n
Peter Thiel in 2009: \u201cI no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.\u201d Palantir is ready to dismantle both. Here\u2019s a breakdown of its little manifesto: pic.twitter.com\/CwTZMABGgu<\/p>\n
\u2014 Silicon Valley Fodder (@Playerinthgame) April 19, 2026<\/p>\n
A More Pithy Response<\/p>\n
Seth Harp, author of The Fort Bragg Cartel, made his points about Palantir\u2019s manifesto with more brevity:<\/p>\n
Palantir wants you to think they\u2019re 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\u2019s useless product. Wow so scary and Nietzschean.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Preposterous manifesto for an industry that hasn\u2019t invented anything important since about 2007, in a country that hasn\u2019t won a war since 1945. Just a bunch of rich drug addicts who\u2019ve bought off the government huffing the fumes of imagined past greatness while the planet burns.<\/p>\n
\u2018A shareholder letter cosplaying as Cicero\u201d<\/p>\n
Podcaster and anti-crypto activist Aaron Day drops some zingers worth quoting:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What he calls the Technological Republic is the technocracy itself, slightly embarrassed, asking to be called something else.<\/p>\n
Two more responses before we move on to Peter Thiel\u2019s latest project.<\/p>\n
CIA Cut Out Says What?<\/p>\n
I was reading the TechCrunch response when I noticed they were quoting an unlikely critic, Bellingcat CEO Eliot Higgins.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how TechCrunch summarized Higgins\u2019 posts on Bluesky (of course he posts on Bluesky):<\/p>\n
\nEliot Higgins, the CEO of the investigative website Bellingcat,\u00a0dryly remarked\u00a0that it was \u201cextremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Higgins also\u00a0argued\u00a0that there\u2019s more to the post than a simple \u201cdefense of the West\u201d \u2014 in his view, it\u2019s an attack on what he said are key pillars of democracy that need rebuilding:\u00a0verification, deliberation, and accountability.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s also worth being clear about who\u2019s doing the arguing,\u201d Higgins wrote. \u201cPalantir sells operational software to defense, intelligence, immigration & police agencies. These 22 points aren\u2019t philosophy floating in space, they\u2019re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it\u2019s advocating.\u201d<\/p>\n
Presumably Higgins is attempting to compete with Palantir for CIA and MI6 money.<\/p>\n
Putin\u2019s Rasputin Chimes In <\/p>\n
I kid, I kid, but that\u2019s how Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin is generally seen in the Western media and I can\u2019t resist a cheap yuk. <\/p>\n
Dugin sees the Deep State in Palantir and who am I to argue:<\/p>\n
Palantir\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Palantir\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Palantir\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Palantir\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Palantir\u2019s manifesto: real agenda of Trump\u2019s rule. In spite of Trump himself used and abused by much more serious and autonomous powers.<\/p>\n
Alright, I know I promised Dugin was the last reaction to Palantir\u2019s manifesto, but there\u2019s one more that will let us pivot to Karp\u2019s mentor Peter Thiel and his latest.<\/p>\n
The Philosopher\u2019s Stone of All-Seeing Eyes<\/p>\n
Turkish academic Emre \u015ean sees the philosophical fingerprints of Ren\u00e9 Girard in Palantir\u2019s manifesto (the below is Grok\u2019s translation from the Turkish):<\/p>\n
pic.twitter.com\/upPM4vHPTz<\/p>\n
\u2014 Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) April 20, 2026<\/p>\n
Now let\u2019s look at the latest project from Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and Network State author Balaji Srinivasan.<\/p>\n
Wait, Maybe I Do Have an Objection? <\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
\u2014 Objection (@objectionupdate) April 17, 2026<\/p>\n
So what in the family blog is this fresh Hell?<\/p>\n
Objection Explained<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll go back to Aaron Day:<\/p>\n
In 2007 Gawker outed Peter Thiel as gay.<\/p>\n
In 2016 Thiel secretly funded $10M in lawsuits that bankrupted them.<\/p>\n
This week he funded the AI that grades journalists.<\/p>\n
Here’s what’s inside it:<\/p>\n
1\/ It’s called Objection. The founder is Aron D’Souza, the same lawyer who personally ran\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/G0G4DB1Gkn<\/p>\n
\u2014 Aaron Day (@AaronRDay) April 17, 2026<\/p>\n
Full text:<\/p>\n
In 2007 Gawker outed Peter Thiel as gay.<\/p>\n
In 2016 Thiel secretly funded $10M in lawsuits that bankrupted them.<\/p>\n
This week he funded the AI that grades journalists.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what\u2019s inside it:<\/p>\n
1\/ It\u2019s called Objection. The founder is Aron D\u2019Souza, the same lawyer who personally ran the Gawker takedown for Thiel.<\/p>\n
2\/ Backers include Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan.<\/p>\n
3\/ Anyone pays $2,000 to trigger a \u201cpublic investigation\u201d of any reporter.<\/p>\n
4\/ The \u201cinvestigators\u201d are former FBI, NSA, and CIA officers.<\/p>\n
5\/ The jury is a panel of AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and xAI.<\/p>\n
6\/ The output is an \u201cHonor Index\u201d score on the journalist.<\/p>\n
7\/ Anonymous whistleblowers are ranked dead last in the evidence weighting.<\/p>\n
8\/ Corporate emails and government filings are ranked at the top.<\/p>\n
9\/ What used to take 5-10 years in court, they say, now takes 72 hours.<\/p>\n
The man who spent a decade using the legal system to destroy a newsroom just automated the process.<\/p>\n
Surveillance-state veterans score the reporter. AI trained by Thiel and Musk renders the verdict. Whistleblowers count least. Power\u2019s paper trail counts most.<\/p>\n
Speech for me. A score for thee.<\/p>\n
And while I\u2019m blogging about Palantir, there\u2019s one more story worth highlighting.<\/p>\n
Memetic Warfare and the People Who Do It<\/p>\n
Barrett Brown has a new piece in Byline Times that\u2019s well worth reading, highlighting some names that are well worth following in future:<\/p>\n
NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence\u2019s official journal StratCom, published a paper entitled \u2018It\u2019s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare\u2019.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
At the time Giesea defined memetic warfare, a term he coined, as \u201ca subset of information operations or psychological warfare tailored to social media\u201d. <\/p>\n
To illustrate its applications, he drew on the expertise of a co-contributor he described as \u201can annoying gadfly or guerrilla warrior, depending on one\u2019s perspective\u201d: far-right activist and disinformation operator Charles C. Johnson.<\/p>\n
The paper proposed methods by which to undermine ISIS: \u201csystematically lure and entrap\u201d recruiters; subvert its messaging via \u201cfake \u2018sockpuppet\u2019 accounts\u201d \u2013 online personas manufactured to simulate grassroots support or opposition \u2013 and \u201cexpose and harass people\u201d within its funding network, \u201cincluding their family members\u201d.
\u2026
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\u2019s own firm.<\/p>\n
Those tactics had been developed and deployed over years by a loose network of far-right organisations \u2013 funded, in part, by figures directly connected to Thiel.<\/p>\n
That infrastructure centred on a cluster of white supremacist and hard-right online platforms \u2013 among them the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
Connecting those platforms to Thiel\u2019s wider network was a single figure: Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and neo-Nazi provocateur known online as \u201cWeev\u201d. His ties to Thiel had been rumoured in leaked Epstein correspondence, but had never previously been corroborated. They can now be established \u2014 through Auernheimer\u2019s own private statements and a decade of documented network activity \u2014 for the first time.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Birds of a feather, flocking together, and family blogging everyone else.<\/p>\n
Related Posts:<\/p>\n
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