Let’s Get To Know Palantir Technologies And Its Wacky CEO Alex Karp!
Because he's sure getting to know YOU!
No secret, Trump has been gunning to turn CIA/ defense department surveillance and data capabilities onto American citizens under the guise of wastefraudabuse, and no surprise, he has tapped Palantir Technologies to “data integration platform” every unclassified record the government has for every person and business in the country, from Social Security to educational, tax, immigration and you-name-it records. This is where all that scraped DOGE data is headed for.
Somewhat surprising, now some MAGA, even Nick Fuentes, are cottoning to the fact that the company is a longtime arm of the CIA.
Another Fuentes post: “Feeding every 'MAGA extremist' into an AI database controlled by a CIA/Mossad cutout. Seriously, if Palantir isn't the deep state, then what is?"
INDEED!
Heave-X’d The Patriot Voice: "People are so quick to suggest that I flipped on Trump...No, no, no...I didn't flip on Trump. TRUMP FLIPPED ON US. I'm just not willing to continue living in a LIE, and I will tell you the unfortunate TRUTH about it."
Welcome to the resistance! Somebody want to tell them that Palantir also helped track COVID data?
Is Palantir bad? Every tool is morally neutral until someone wields it, just like the crystal balls in the Lord of The Rings that the tools who run the company named it for.
Palantir’s origin story is the stuff of QAnon fever dreams, though. Thiel and and Karp met at Stanford back in the day, then they both became successful investors, and in 2003 Thiel backed Karp’s data software company Palantir Technologies. Then they got in on the wave of post-9/11 defense spending with some CIA startup cash through its In-Q-Tel venture fund.
Palantir started out mining and analyzing data to do stuff like detect roadside bombs and predict insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, and track down Mexican drug cartel leaders and financial fraudsters, by searching their data imprints. Some People Even Say it helped find Osama Bin Laden.
Then its work expanded, into building databases for ICE starting in 2011 (it has now gotten $30 million to expand the “ImmigrationOS” facial-recognition and surveillance database it runs to identify and deport people). And in 2018 after Google employees protested the company’s involvement in a Pentagon program to use artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes, Palantir picked up that business. Now it gets big-deal defense contracts, worth about $1.3 billion, and also dabbles in license-plate scanning technology and police work. Post-Brexit it got a contract in the UK, too, monitoring the goods that came across the border, and Israel uses its technology to decide where to bomb.
But who is running this show, and what do they want?
You have already met Peter Thiel, libertarian, Trump delegate, JD Vance’s sugardaddy, founder of Paypal and first investor in Facebook, co-founded a Conservative dating app with handsome Johnny McEntee, bankrupted Gawker by bankrolling a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan over posting him butt pumping away on his buddy's wife, illuminated an Eye of Sauron over San Francisco for Halloween that looked like a flaming sphincter, etc. etc.
If not, catch yourself up, hoo boy, you’re in for a treat.
Thiel and Ric Grenell look a lot alike, and they both have husbands named Matt.
Anyway Thiel is co-founder and chairman of Palantir, and his investor friend from Stanford, Alex Karp, is CEO.
Buckle the fuck up for this guy!
He’s from the disheveled wing of the brain trust, this is his official picture:
This short video sums him up well.
Or if you don’t want to watch it, here is his most power quote: “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”
Just the kind of ha ha just joking you wanna hear from a guy who has been doing analytics for the CIA for 20 years! Military domination for the sake of Western civilization / Israel is his thing, and “Software that dominates” is Palantir’s slogan.
But other than defense domination, his personal ethos is hard to pin down; his whole wikipedia page is one head-scratcher after another and really you should read it. His parents were civil rights activists, and his mom, Leah Jaynes Karp, is a Black American artist, his dad was a Jewish pediatrician, and he identifies as Jewish.
He donated to Biden, and also to Harris, “in multiples of 18 because ‘it’s mystical — 18 brings good luck in the tradition of kabbalah. I gave Biden $360,000.’” He has said Palantir supports “progressive values and causes,” whatever that means any more, and identifies as very pro-Israel and “pro-Western”. He’s ranted that pro-Palestinian protestors are a “pagan religion infecting our universities” and “an infection inside of our society.”
We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations. It’s interesting how radical that is, considering it’s not, in my view, that radical.
Spying on everybody seems pretty Maoist Chinese, but never mind. For what it’s worth, he has never married, says that the notion of settling down and raising a family gives him “hives,” and Maureen Dowd reports that he lives in the company of “his Norwegian ski instructor, his Swiss-Portuguese chef, his Austrian assistant, his American shooting instructor and his bodyguards.”
And now Trump has opened the barn to him and Thiel!
In March Trump made his “Stopping Waste, Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos” decree, ordering that:
Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure Federal officials designated by the President or Agency Heads (or their designees) have full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems — or their equivalents if providing access to an equivalent dataset does not delay access — for purposes of pursuing Administration priorities related to the identification and elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse.
The order goes to demand “unfettered access to all unemployment data and related payment records, including all such data and records currently available to the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General,” all the way down to State programs that receive Federal funding.
And,
Agency Heads shall conduct a review of classified information policies to determine whether they result in the classification of materials beyond what is necessary to protect critical national security interests.
Social Security information, tax information, none of that stuff is classified as a state secret, and lawsuits against DOGE’s intrusions are pending.
This will surely lead to more lawsuits too, and then we will find out just how much the Supreme Court plans to let Trump and technocrats build the apparatus for his surveillance state!
In the meantime, Palantir databases chug away. What do they have on you? You’d like to know, but Palantir won’t be telling.
[New York Times / 404 Media / Forbes]
These are not the weirdos and freaks I was looking for.
'he lives in the company of “his Norwegian ski instructor, his Swiss-Portuguese chef, his Austrian assistant, his American shooting instructor and his bodyguards.”'
Hello, Hollywood? Have I got a TV series pitch for you. Think of it as The Golden Girls meets an international version of The A-Team... Hello? Hello?