Why Palantir's 22-point manifesto is being called 'the ramblings of a supervillain'

[0:00]So Palantir have posted a pretty bizarre manifesto, which has been described as the ramblings of a supervillain. People who don't know what Palantir is, it's a US spy tech giant co-founded by the billionaire and JD Vance mentor Peter Thiel. It's been called the world's 'scariest' and 'most important' company, and its tech has been used by everyone from ICE to the Israel Defense Forces. This weekend, its official account posted like a 22-point manifesto on X. The start of the post said, 'Because we keep getting asked,' but no one really knows who was asking. The key points included implying that some cultures are inferior to others: 'Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.' Heaping praise on the US for its role in global peace and progressive values, while saying that America should reinstate the military draft. And saying that 'free and democratic societies' need 'hard power' over 'soft power' and 'moral appeal.' It also said that Silicon Valley had an obligation to help out in things like national defense and violent crimes. And the future is AI war, because if we don't build the killer robots, our enemies will build them. The weirder points included saying, multiple times, we need to be nicer to public figures and billionaires. So this means not snickering at Elon Musk for not just staying in his lane and making boatloads of money. As Taylor Swift said, it's a good thing I like my friends canceled. But all of this is a worrying statement from an incredibly powerful company, one which demonstrates just how deeply embedded Palantir is in the Trump-Big Tech axis, as someone from the tech non-profit Foxglove told me. The list appears to be taken from the recent book of Palantir's CEO, the controversial billionaire Alex Karp. That book laments a widespread 'complacency' among 'engineers and founders' who build photo-sharing apps as opposed to 'collaborating with governments to secure the West's dominant place in the geopolitical order'. Side note: This is the guy who drew criticism recently for saying that AI would disrupt the power of childless cat ladies. I'm sorry, highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat, and for last year suggesting that Palantir wants, 'when it's necessary to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.' You might see all this as the self-indulgent rambling of a powerful tech company, but it speaks to a larger movement that's happening right now, where a loose coalition of thinkers and executives in Silicon Valley are more and more interested in a vision of tech power merged with state power. And what all of this indicates is that Karp views himself as not simply the head of a software company, but a pundit with important insights into the future of civilization, one in which the West deserves to be globally dominant and should use the technological might of Palantir to achieve this.