While drastically cutting spending on essentials like healthcare, US president Donald Trump has given a massive boost to those who profit from death and destruction. As the empire’s global dominance wanes, Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ missile shield project has essentially started a new arms race. And evil tech giant Palantir is at the heart of it. The company’s aim is to use its increasing power and control of people’s data to help secure or reassert Washington’s violent stranglehold over large swathes of the planet.
Palantir has experience helping to smear left-wing causes and back right-wing ones, while mistreating vulnerable people. It is also deep within the military and police establishment in the UK. It already has its grubby hands on our NHS data too, and more may be coming. So it was no surprise that compromised prime minister Keir Starmer quickly prioritised a shady meeting with the company when he visited the US in February. Coincidentally, his key donor (which “stood to profit” from Israel’s genocide in Gaza) has invested in the heavily pro-Israel Palantir.
Palantir is absolutely a threat to humanity. And we allow its power to grow further at our peril.
Palantir: a cheerleader for genocide (much like Trump)
Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is one of the many pro-Israel billionaires close to Trump. The company “has been vocally supportive of Israeli military action” and critics long suspected that the apartheid state used its technology to identify its targets and guide its bombs. It has even earned itself the title of “the AI arms dealer of the 21st century”. And in the last year of genocide, its stock has soared.
Amid brutal government cuts across the board under Trump, companies like Palantir which are dependent on state funds don’t seem to be worrying too much. The tech giant gets more than half of its money from contracts with the US government, and it just recently “won a new $795 million contract with the DOD” (the Department of Defense). In a cosy arrangement that’s typical of US politics, a chunk of this money makes it back to politicians (both Republicans and Democrats) in the form of donations and lobbying.
Palantir CEO and co-founder Alex Karp, however, is perhaps the perfect personification of the company’s attitudes. Despite trying to portray himself as a moral and intellectual sage, he’s actually a vile warmonger, arrogant gaslighter, and misanthropic authoritarian. When a protester recently challenged him by saying “AI technology from Palantir kills Palestinians”, he simply shrugged soullessly and responded “mostly terrorists, that’s true”.
Israel has killed at least one Palestinian child every hour in Gaza since October 2023. It has murdered around 17,000 children, including about 825 babies, 895 one-year-olds, 3,266 preschoolers, and 4,032 six-to-10-year-olds. The UN recently estimated that Israel has murdered over 28,000 women and girls in Gaza since October 2023. And data in late 2024 highlighted that the genocide in Gaza had killed more women and children in one year than in “any other recent conflict“. Karp, however, called people opposing this mass slaughter and destruction “idiots”.
US supremacy via tech-military violence
Karp doesn’t just think Israel’s genocide is good, though. He also wants to expand the concept of collective punishment of resistance throughout the world. Talking about people who resist US global dominance, he has said:
something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved
Your friends. And your cousins.
Although Israel has been working hard to normalise collective punishment, it remains a war crime. Yet here we have the CEO of an incredibly powerful corporation advocating it – again, like Trump himself does.
Meanwhile, Karp believes that technology should:
power the West to its obvious, innate superiority… [and] bring violence and death to our enemies.
This has long been the strategy of US imperialism. But rarely do we see its backers say this kind of thing so openly – which is endemic of Trump. Karp even quoted controversial theorist Samuel Huntington in a letter to shareholders, saying the West didn’t use ideas to dominate the world, but “its superiority in applying organized violence”.
Whether we refer to the US as a plutocracy, an oligarchy, or even a fascist power, the fact remains that billionaires like Alex Karp dominate its political system today. And when they tell us who they are and what they want, we should believe them, and resist.
Feature image via the Canary
