Palantir's Manifesto Is as Subtle as a MAGA Hat

It has been a year since Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s book, The Technological Republic, was published. Karp is the CEO of Palantir, and Zamiska is the company’s head of corporate affairs. On Sunday, Palantir appeared to celebrate the anniversary of the book’s publication by condensing it to a 22-point manifesto and posting it to X.com. When I read Karp’s book last year, my reaction was, “this book should have been a tweet.” It now seems Palantir agrees.

The book itself is an irredeemable mess. It is written in the rhetorical register of a peer-reviewed academic essay, without any of the argument-sharpening benefits that come from peer-review. Karp poses as a political philosopher-CEO, someone who thinks big thoughts, but the book functions as little more than a recruitment brochure for his defense tech company. The thesis of the book is, effectively, Palantir loves getting big contracts from the Department of Defense. And when you think about it, doesn’t that make Palantir kind of heroic?

Time and again, Karp exhibits the moral compass and complexity of a Bond villain. He observes that “Several generations in the United States have now never known a war between the world’s great powers,” but the only insight he can apparently glean from this statement is that America should avoid growing soft, build a global surveillance network and hunt its enemies around the world.

An entire section of the book (Part 3 – chapters 10-14) just focuses on how cool it is to work at Palantir. In one memorable passage, Karp and Zamiska brag about how Palantir eschews long, pointless meetings. “The meeting-industrial complex has driven some toward the edge and, apparently, even self-harm.” Ah yes, haha, long meetings are such torture, says the company that is helping the US prosecute its wars abroad. There’s nothing worse than long meetings, am I right? (I have long suspected that the book’s editor let these passages stand as an act of silent protest.)

The 22-point manifesto is nonsense as well, but it at least is short enough to be clarifying. The message of both the book and the manifesto is that Palantir wants to be THE weapons manufacturer of the next century. The future of the weapons business is software plus AI. Palantir would like the government to spend an exceptional amount of money on Palantir products, please and thank you.

Everything else is just puffery. America is good. America’s enemies are bad. Hard power, good. Soft power, bad. Silicon Valley and tech billionaires, good. Holding elites accountable, bad. “The West” is good. The rest: bad.

There’s a disjointed cadence to the manifesto. One bullet point does not lead to the next. Much like the book, there is a critique of Silicon Valley decadence and of cancel culture, mixed in with an appeal to obliterate America’s enemies (which enemies, though?) and defend America’s values (which values, though?).

The final three bullet points have set off the loudest alarm bells. The manifesto concludes by declaring:

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

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.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?”

It takes a certain audacity to survey the US landscape in 2026 and assert that “elites” are intolerant to religious belief. Christian Nationalists have taken over much of the government. Likewise, the rejection of pluralism and the smug assertion that some cultures are good and others are middling, regressive, and harmful is shockingly regressive. It strikes me that there is nothing in this “America First”-sounding manifesto that wouldn’t fit comfortably within a modern-day Mussolini regime. America, in Karp’s rendering, is great because it is home to Silicon Valley, because it has fostered peace-through-strength, and because it provides for its volk, sorry, rightful citizens.

None of these statements are likely to age well. The book should have been a tweet, but the tweet probably could have just been an image of Alex Karp wearing a MAGA hat, grinning like a madman.

But in the immediate term, the gaudy techno-fascism of it all is probably the point. We saw last month with the Anthropic-Pentagon standoff what happens when defense contractors fail to adequately toe the party line. Palantir’s stock currently trades at a P/E ratio of over 230. That’s extreme meme-stock territory. Just two weeks ago, Trump praised Palantir in a Truth Social post, complete with the company’s stock ticker. That’s the clear subtext of the new manifesto: Palantir hates all the same people that the Trump administration hates, and it is eager to provide material support to its endeavors.

That, more than anything else, has been Palantir’s greatest innovation: So much of Silicon Valley has reached the conclusion that there is money to be made from American authoritarianism. Palantir reached that conclusion first, and its leaders don’t want anyone to forget it.

Alex Karp may resemble, in his words and actions, an impish court jester. But he is a jester who knows his audience, and his latest manifesto is quite a show for them.

Woe be to the rest of us, who pay the price for all this foolishness.