Palantir Is The Biggest Existential Threat To America

...and Peter Thiel and Alex Karp are leading the parade of crazed lunatics

by Patrick Wood

I can vouch for every fact, analysis, and conclusion in this video by Vanessa Wingårdh. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp have effectively dominated the world for the Intel community. Do you care? You will, after listening to the end. Disrupting America is good for us? If we miss the train, we will get our heads cut off? If we are their enemies, will they kill us? (all hinted at by Alex Karp!)

The more that I analyze Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, the more I understand just maniacally insane they are. Please share this post with everyone you know.

---

(Alex Karp) There is basically no conflict in the world where Palantir is not the first call. Well, I love the idea of getting a drone and having it fly fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts who tried to screw us. I had all sorts of fantasies of using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge, especially targeted in violation of all norms.

(News broadcaster) All right, a strong quarter. That might be an understatement. When we’re speaking about Palantir, their first quarter where revenue topped a billion dollars.

(Alex Karp) In the end, the rights you give up will be used against you.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Millions of Americans have files in government databases, their movements, purchases, and communications connected by software from a company called Palantir. And the worst part, we helped fund its creation.

What exactly does Palantir do?

Palantir has current and past contracts with the FBI, DHS, IRS, CDC, SEC, and the Pentagon. They process data for police departments in multiple countries, health care networks, including the United Kingdom’s National Health Services, Cleveland Clinic managing patient care across hospitals. They’re in the banks processing your transactions, the factories building your cars, Tyson Foods monitoring production facilities, and Fortune 500 companies from Wendy’s to General Mills.

In a letter from Alex Karp, he states, “We have chosen sides and we know that our partners value our commitment. We stand by them when it is convenient and when it is not.”

This is the CEO saying that they will support the government agencies regardless of what these agencies choose to do. No moral boundaries, no questions asked, even when it’s not convenient, meaning when it’s morally wrong.

This is a company explicitly saying they’ll enable any government action, seemingly no matter how authoritarian, as long as the check clears. Palantir operates in over 50 industries across at least 35 countries. Their CEO openly states their mission to become the US government’s central operating system, all while fear-mongering and using war rhetoric. The same software tracking you at a protest is also identifying targets on the battlefield.

(Alex Karp) Palantir is here to disrupt and make our institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it’s necessary to scare our enemies and on occasion kill them.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) To understand how one company has gained this much power, we need to go back in time. In 2002, the US government created something called Total Information Awareness. The goal—exactly what it sounds like: total information, track everything and everyone.

Every email, every purchase, every movement, every medical record. Total Information Awareness sought to keep track of every American citizen. Even going so far as to identify citizens based on how they walked. Americans at the time were outraged, claiming the US government was attempting to mass-surveil its citizens.

Congress responded to the backlash by defunding the program in 2003. Democracy worked, privacy won, and the start of a surveillance state was defeated.

Or so we thought, because in the exact same year, 2003, something curious happened. A new company was founded called Palantir. It was founded by none other than Peter Thiel, who at the time had just sold PayPal for 1.5 billion. But here’s what most people don’t know: at PayPal, Thiel had already built systems that tracked unusual patterns across millions of financial transactions. He had already proven that mass surveillance could work. He just needed to scale it up.

Aside from Thiel, Palantir had one other early investor: the Central Intelligence Agency or the CIA. Palantir was advised by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former CIA director George Tenet, and John Poindexter. (ed. note: Rice and Tenet were members of the Trilateral Commission)

Now, who is that? Well, he’s the former national security adviser to President Reagan and the man put in charge of Total Information Awareness. When I look at the technical architecture of Total Information Awareness and compare it to that of Palantir’s Gotham software patents, they’re nearly identical. In my opinion, the surveillance state was never stopped. They just privatized it.

This is the power of Gotham.

An analyst can type in a single name, maybe yours. Within seconds, Gotham pulls everything it knows about you from connected databases: your driver’s license, passport, criminal records, employment history, financial transactions, people you’ve communicated with, and even your dog’s vet records.

But Gotham doesn’t just compile the data. It looks at behaviors, identifying your routines, relationships, and most importantly, anomalies. Change anything in your routine—the system notices and alerts analysts. Gotham was built for the United States intelligence community to track potential terrorists after 2001. The same Gotham instance tracking potential threats overseas is being deployed by local law enforcement.

The Los Angeles Police Department uses it for predictive policing. The New York Police Department has used it for gang monitoring and ICE uses it to track immigrants.

The same algorithms designed for military operations are being used on civilians. Gotham operates with law enforcement in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, and Denmark.

(Alex Karp) You may not know it, but almost every European country in some form or another uses our CT product, counterterrorism product. We always have to sign these contracts, we can’t talk in Europe about who uses our product, which is slightly annoying because constantly getting yelled at by people who are protected in our product.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) But tracking people was just phase one. Palantir would do something even more dangerous and lethal: automated targeting.

In 2017, the Pentagon launched Project Maven with a simple goal: teach AI to identify targets, not just vehicles or buildings, but people. The system would analyze drone footage, satellite imagery, and surveillance video to autonomously detect, classify, and track human beings. Google took the initial contract, $15 million to build the prototype, but something remarkable happened. Over 3,000 Google employees signed a petition, with dozens of others resigning in protest. Their message was clear—they didn’t want to build war technology.

Google withdrew from the project in 2018, but the Maven project wasn’t abandoned. It just found a new home.

(Interviewer) You have reportedly taken over Project Maven from Google, which was a very controversial program in Silicon Valley.

(Alex Karp) Well, I can’t discuss the specifics of a classified program, but I can say if this were true, I’d be very proud. Military AI will determine our lives, the lives of your kid. This is a zero sum thing. The country with the most powerful AI will determine the rules. This program will quite literally determine who is standing here and what they’re saying in five years. And were we to be involved with it, I would be enormously proud.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) In 2019, Palantir eagerly accepted the contract that Google rejected. And unlike Google, Palantir had no moral qualms about building war technology.

(Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO) Palantir is also delivering AI through Maven Smart System, allowing customers like the 18th Airborne to match the performance of what used to be a 2,000 person targeting cell during Operation Iraqi Freedom to a targeting cell of roughly only 20 people today.

(Alex Karp) On the targeting on the battlefield, we’ve talked about basically two orders of magnitude in reduction of people.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Think about that—an operation that used to require 2,000 military personnel now reduced down to just 20 people. A hundred-fold reduction in human oversight for such a critical decision.

Maven isn’t limited to one branch of the military. Palantir has signed contracts to expand Maven across the entire Department of Defense. It’s also not limited to just the United States. Earlier this year, NATO completed a deal to acquire Maven for all 32 NATO countries. Palantir is partnered with the Five Eyes, consisting of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK, with additional coalition partners.

(Alex Karp) We are seeing rapid expansion and very significant demand for Maven both in America and outside of America, as all part of our core mission to provide an unfair advantage to the noble warriors of the west.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) But here’s the scam that Palantir has perfected. When Palantir and the US government work together to build some type of software, the US government is paying Palantir with taxpayer money. Effectively, we’ve funded the creation of this software that Palantir owns. They own the patents on the software. That also means, in order for the US government to be able to use the software, they have to pay a licensing fee. US taxpayers fund the government to do a second contract just to use the software we already funded and Palantir owns. Palantir then takes the software and sells it to other governments, profiting off our money. Basically, it’s the perfect scam.

In 2009, JP Morgan Chase hired Palantir for internal threat assessment. JP Morgan gave Palantir access to employee emails, GPS data from company phones, printer and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations.

Palantir’s algorithms analyzed all of this data to identify possible criminal behavior. Employees who badged in late were flagged as potentially disgruntled. This would trigger further scrutiny and possibly physical surveillance by JP Morgan’s security teams after work hours. But then something unexpected happened.

JP Morgan executives discovered they were also being monitored. Top executives found their own emails and activities being monitored by the same system they deployed on employees. The collaboration ended in controversy, but Palantir had learned something valuable: corporate America would pay for surveillance. These capabilities were packaged into a software called Foundry, rebranding surveillance as operational intelligence.

Software wasn’t enough. In 2024, Palantir became the first software company in history to win a prime hardware contract from the US Army. $178 million coming from taxpayers to fund the development of Titan, the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node. Titan isn’t just software running on military hardware. It’s a mobile command center—essentially a high-tech truck that becomes the physical hub for integrating multiple surveillance systems like high-altitude satellites overhead, drones, ground sensors, cameras, and vehicle-mounted surveillance, all feeding to one vehicle processed by Palantir’s AI in real time.

Palantir’s founders weren’t just building technology. They were building an ideology.

(Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO) At the dawn of World War II, we didn’t have a defense industrial base. We had an American industrial base. Chrysler made missiles and General Mills wasn’t just a cereal company. This is also what our future must look like: it is clear that the nation must re-industrialize and mobilize at warp speed to win. This platform will transform production in the value chains that power our kill chains.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Palantir wants to redirect civilian manufacturing toward military production through software alone.

(Alex Karp) “What they’re not understanding is the technical revolution now is so great. You got to get on the train because that train is leaving. You’re being left behind. And by the way, I’m happy you’re being left behind.”

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Alex Karp, the CEO, doesn’t hide his beliefs.

(Alex Karp) “If you’ve done something big and important, you’ve probably a good person. There was this famous professor, Ken Arrow, and if Ken Arrow said you were smart, you got tenure. It was because people knew Ken Arrow is smart. The institution he represents is the best in the world. There is no one like—honestly, the only thing like that currently in tech is a Palantir degree. If you work for Palantir, everyone knows you’re good. Like when we went to school, the schools actually had credibility. The people, the science was actually science.”

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Karp also brags about how they can change human behavior—how American manufacturing workers can become Japanese workers by using the software to change their behaviors.

(Alex Karp) “One of the advantages of AI is that if you want to do manufacturing—say you want to do Japanese manufacturing in America—you’re actually having to use Japanese methodologies with American workers. Heretofore, this has not been possible. AI can actually allow you to manage the internal dynamics of your workforce so that you get the Japanese culture with American workers in the US.”

(Vanessa Wingårdh) This isn’t just a tech CEO. This is someone who sees the world through permanent conflict and profits from it. He’s also vocal about how Americans will accept surveillance if it’s for the benefit of protecting themselves—but from whom, exactly?

(Alex Karp) “We love disruption, and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir. And I think you got it exactly right. Disruption in the end of the day exposes things that aren’t working. There’ll be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people will get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win. And we’re planning to do that and we’re pretty optimistic about the US environment.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Conflict and unrest is profitable.

(Alex Karp) We have been saying and building products for a world that is violent, disjointed, irrational. A world in which you have to show strength. A world in which if you do not show strength, people who are biased, xenophobic will rear their head.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Chaos drives growth, peace and prosperity threatens the business model.

(Alex Karp) We have seen that our view of the world—which is that there really are people that are violent and not in conformant with morality—need to be fought. And we are going to bring our warrior culture to our products, to our market fit, and the results of which we are going to bring to our allies.”

(Vanessa Wingårdh) When a company’s revenue is dependent on conflict, there’s a clear incentive to find enemies everywhere.

(Alex Karp) That focus on civil liberties is making us really rich, which drives the woke pagan religious practicing neanderthal thinking people who ignore technology absolutely nuts on the right and the left.

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Every earnings call, every public appearance, he repeats the same messages: collapse, crisis, existential threat. He makes it seem like we’re living in this permanent emergency and only Palantir can save us.

What makes Karp different from other CEOs and effectively more dangerous is he doesn’t need you. When Target’s CEO makes controversial decisions, customers boycott, revenue drops, the CEO resigns. Karp can say whatever he wants on earnings calls because his customers aren’t the American people—it’s the apparatus that surveils them. The true genius of their strategy isn’t in any single product. It’s in how they’ve woven themselves into the fabric of governments, law enforcement, and corporations until these institutions can no longer operate without them.

Palantir isn’t just another government contractor. In my opinion, they’ve made themselves irreplaceable.

It started with a lawsuit that changed everything. In 2015, the US Army sought a single contractor to build a custom software system from scratch. Palantir sued them, claiming federal law requires the government to consider the purchase of commercial software before building custom solutions. The Army fought back, but ultimately Palantir won. Think about what that means. A private company successfully sues the U.S. Army, leading to the Army eventually purchasing Palantir’s software.

(Alex Karp) “I don’t think in win-lose, I think in dominations. I don’t like this win-lose thing because it kind of presupposes it’s okay to lose and I think domination is important because I think if it’s just about money, if it’s just about winning, if it’s just about having prestige for me, that’s not enough to do that. That’s not enough because that is just real and it’s super humiliating.”

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Suing the government in hopes that they will eventually purchase their software was just step one. The “evil genius” of Palantir is how they deploy engineers. In Palantir contracts, they include what they call “forward deployed engineers.” These are Palantir engineers who embed themselves directly into agencies in the Pentagon, the CIA, and even in combat zones. They don’t just install software; they build custom solutions that only they understand. The knowledge of how it works stays with Palantir. After a while, agencies become completely dependent on these solutions.

(Alex Karp) “What is the product we can build that will create the product we ought to build? Not even the product the customers wanted, whether it was government or commercial. We never built the product the customer asked us to build. We built the product that they ought to ask us to build.”

(Vanessa Wingårdh) Then there was the executive order titled “stopping waste, fraud, and abuse by eliminating information silos.” Sounds reasonable, right? I mean, who doesn’t want efficiency? The order directs federal agencies to share information, breaking down the walls between agencies like the IRS, Social Security Administration, Medicare, and Medicaid. The Privacy Act of 1974 was specifically designed to prevent this kind of cross-agency data sharing. Now, through the private contractor loophole—aka Palantir—and this executive order, those protections are effectively circumvented.

The Army consolidated 75 separate contracts into one and awarded it to Palantir. A single contract worth $10 billion being awarded to one company. The financial reality makes removal impossible—billions in sunk costs, years of custom development that can’t be used elsewhere, entire operations that would collapse without the platform.

When governments run surveillance, there are restrictions: there’s congressional oversight, Freedom of Information Act requests, constitutional limitations, and public accountability. But when a private company does surveillance, there are limited oversight requirements, and those requirements can have loopholes.

Now, Palantir claims that their software includes privacy protections and that they’re not storing data—they just analyze it, even though they have their own cloud storage service. They claim there are audit trails, access controls, and oversight mechanisms built in. But here’s the problem: those protections only work when someone’s watching the watchers.

When the same system is used by the CIA, the FBI, your local police department, who exactly is checking those audit logs when Palantir’s own engineers have root access to customize the system, what do those access controls really mean? More importantly, these privacy safeguards don’t change the fundamental reality—a private company has built profiles on millions of Americans, and regardless if those profiles have audit trails or not, they exist.

The same Palantir tracking you through Gotham is processing your insurance claim through Foundry, guiding military drones through Maven, and controlling manufacturing through Warp Speed.

For over 20 years, US taxpayers have given Palantir 2.7 billion in federal contracts—and that’s just what’s publicly documented. Classified budgets likely add billions more. We effectively paid them to build the surveillance state that Congress explicitly rejected.

When you build your entire business on conflict, peace becomes the enemy. Stability threatens profits. Democracy, with its messy debates and privacy laws, gets in the way.

In my opinion, when a private company can sue the US Army, making it so that the Army has to buy their software; when these soldiers and law enforcement become completely dependent on this software; and when we have an executive order that consolidates all of federal agencies’ data into one platform, it starts looking more like an institutional takeover.

As Karp said himself, “we become part of the institutions we serve.” Should one private company have this much power, this much reach—not only in governments, but corporations all over the world? Should the same company tracking terrorists be tracking civilians? The surveillance state isn’t coming—it’s here. It’s been lurking in the shadows for over 20 years. They just called it Palantir.

---

Have You Seen James Corbett’s Interview of Etienne? How to Leave the Cage?

Etienne recently appeared on The Corbett Report with James Corbett to discuss his new book: To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many.

It is definitely one of Etienne’s best interviews ever! If you have ever wanted to share Etienne’s work with your friends, family or colleagues, this is the interview for you. You can get a copy of To See the Cage is to Leave It (press release) by “Going Paid” on Substack AND get access to all FOUR of the Art of Liberty’s Substacks: Important News from the Art of Liberty Foundation, The Daily News, The Daily News Digest, and Five Meme Friday. By “Going Paid” you can get access to the full transcript, all the slides, memes, and videos mentioned in the interview: How to Leave the Cage - James Corbett & Etienne de la Boetie2

The Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!

Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne's new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.

Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.

Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne's new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our "Everything Bundle" of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.