This Fucking Guy: Alex Karp (Reprise)

Apologies, I was going to skip the This Fucking Guy this week, but the Alex Karp bullshit and the freakout made me write this quickly. This guy, and the cohort in general all think they're gonna get to rebuild the world order. That MUST not happen.

Look, we have been here before with Alex Karp. He is not a new flavor of asshole. He is a legacy asshole, a vintage asshole, an asshole with provenance. So when Palantir posted a 22-point summary of his 2025 book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, on X last weekend, and the internet collectively lost its shit and started throwing around words like "technofascism," I had one overwhelming reaction: where the fuck have you people been?

Anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention to Karp over the past decade is not surprised by a single word of this. Not one. The man quoted Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations in a shareholder letter for fuck's sake. He told an earnings call that Palantir's mission was to "scare enemies, and on occasion, kill them." He has defended the IDF's use of Palantir software to plan strikes in Gaza. He has called for the US to prepare for a three-front war against China, Russia, and Iran. He keeps tai chi swords in his office. The man is not hiding the fucking ball here.

But sure. A bulleted Twitter post. Now we panic.

Let's talk about what this actually is, because the hyperventilating is unhelpful

The 22 points are excerpted from a 320-page book that came out in February 2025. The book has been out for over a year. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller. The people calling it a "bombshell manifesto" this week either didn't know the book existed, didn't read it, or are performing shock for engagement. All three are possible. The first two are embarrassing. The third is just the discourse being the discourse, which is its own species of brain damage.

Dave Karpf at TechPolicy.Press – who actually read the book, god bless him – put it cleanly: the message of both the book and the manifesto is that Palantir wants to be THE weapons manufacturer of the next century, and would very much like the government to spend an exceptional amount of money on Palantir products, please and thank you. The entire philosophical apparatus is a sales pitch dressed in a trench coat and a PhD.

 "These 22 points aren't philosophy floating in space, they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating." – Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat

That is the correct read. Everything else is noise.

Now, is there still plenty to be furious about? Abso-fucking-lutely. Some of these 22 points are genuinely regressive horseshit dressed up in the rhetorical register of a continental philosophy seminar. Point 21 – "some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive" – is the kind of thing that sounds almost defensible until you spend thirty seconds thinking about who gets to make that call and notice that the guy making it runs a company deeply embedded with the Israeli military and US immigration enforcement. Point 22's pearl-clutching about "hollow pluralism" is just culture war red meat with footnotes. Point 16 is a defense of Elon Musk that nobody asked for, from a man who should know better, written with the energy of a guy who wants to sit at the cool kids' table.

But calling it fascism? I am going to need you to slow your roll. It is not fascism. It is something weirder and in some ways more depressing than fascism. It is the political philosophy of a very smart, deeply strange man who got lucky, got rich, got powerful, and concluded that his success was evidence that he had figured out something everyone else missed.

Sidebar: what comes after Trump? Does MAGA live on? Questions a lot of the commentariat are jockeying for. But the one thing that must be guarded against is these chucklefuck Broligarchs racing in to fill the void, because they are the fucking worst

He has not figured out anything everyone else missed. He has read a lot of books and built a surveillance company and confused the two.

Here is the archetype, and here is why it keeps producing these fuckers

Karp is the most philosophically credentialed member of a very specific and very tiresome species: the broligarch who thinks he has the answers. The genus includes Musk, Thiel (who co-founded Palantir with Karp, which, yes, tells you something), Marc Andreessen, and assorted lesser specimens. They all share certain traits that are worth cataloguing, because understanding the pattern is the only way to not be surprised the next time one of them drops a manifesto.

Trait one: The one trick. Every single one of these guys had one genuine insight or one lucky break that made them obscenely wealthy, and every single one of them concluded from this that they were omnicompetent philosophers with something important to say about governance, civilization, human nature, and the proper organization of society. Musk built electric cars and rockets (or more accurately, paid people who could to do it for him) and now has opinions about which elected officials should be fired. Thiel got in early on PayPal and Facebook and now funds political projects to dismantle democracy because he read too much Girard. Andreessen backed the right startups and now publishes manifestos about the moral righteousness of capitalism so unhinged that people genuinely wondered if he was okay.

And Karp? Karp co-founded a data analytics company with CIA seed money and a Peter Thiel co-signature, built it into a surveillance apparatus that governments and militaries find indispensable, and has decided that this qualifies him to opine on the fall of Rome, the failures of Western pluralism, and why Germany needs to rearm. He has a PhD in social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt, where he studied under Jürgen Habermas. He is genuinely more intellectually serious than most of his cohort. And somehow this makes it worse, not better, because he can dress his sales pitch in enough Frankfurt School vocabulary that it sounds, briefly, like something other than "please give us more defense contracts."

Trait two: The perpetual 14-year-old boy who never quite figured out how to talk to girls. This is the one that nobody in tech journalism wants to say out loud because it seems unserious, but I am going to say it anyway: there is something stunted and adolescent at the core of this entire worldview. The hard-power fetishism. The Heinlein-esque "strength or death" binary. The idea that civilization is fundamentally a contest between the strong and the weak, and that the right people being in charge of the right weapons is the solution to most of human misery. This is the political philosophy of a smart teenager who read Starship Troopers and did not read enough else to complicate it. Heinlein was, not coincidentally, a direct inspiration for both Andreessen and Musk. The moon is a harsh mistress and so is governing a pluralistic democracy, but you don't have to govern anything if you just own the software that runs it.

The tells are everywhere in the manifesto. Point 6 calls for national service and a return to the draft, the idea that everyone should "share in the risk and the cost" of war -- a sentiment that is slightly more defensible than it sounds, right up until you notice it's coming from a guy who has never served, whose company profits from the wars being fought, and who is advocating for other people's children to go get their asses shot at so that Palantir's kill chain software can get its workout. Point 14 rhapsodizes about how "American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace." The people of Gaza, Yemen, and Iraq might have some fucking notes.

Trait three: The terrible sense of humor. Karp once told Wall Street analysts he was "an arrogant prick" with what appears to have been genuine self-satisfaction. The book, according to Karpf, includes a whole section about how cool it is to work at Palantir, including a bit about how "the meeting-industrial complex has driven some toward the edge and, apparently, even self-harm" -- which is the kind of glib edgelord joke that lands differently when it's cracked by the CEO of a company helping to run AI kill chains. Ha ha, meetings, right? Wacky! The humor of a man who has not been told "actually, that's not funny" by someone he respected in a very long time, if ever.

Trait four: The captain's chair problem. Here is the thing that ties all of this together and makes it genuinely dangerous rather than merely embarrassing. These guys are not thought leaders. They are not philosophers. They are not the wise men the republic needs in its time of trial. They are people who got very good at one specific thing, accumulated ungodly amounts of capital and therefore power, and have now been placed – or have placed themselves – in positions where their half-baked ideas about civilization have real-world consequences. Karp is not just writing books. Palantir is deeply embedded with the US military, ICE, the NYPD, and intelligence agencies. The manifesto is not an academic exercise. The products it is advertising are operational right now, and people's lives are affected by them right now.

The manifesto's release right after Anthropic got booted from a Pentagon program for refusing to enable autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance is not a coincidence. This is Karp waving his hand at the administration going "we will do the thing they wouldn't do, please renew our contracts." It is, as the TechPolicy.Press piece notes, "equal parts sales pitch and pledge of fealty." The philosophy is packaging. The contracts are the product.

So: is Karp different from the others? Yes, and also, it doesn't matter

Here is where I will give the man a sliver of credit that I would not extend to Musk or Andreessen: Karp is not a fraud. He is not performing intellectualism. He genuinely studied social theory, he genuinely wrestles with the ideas, he is a genuinely strange and complicated person who grew up in a progressive household and has spent his adult life building the infrastructure of state power. There is real cognitive dissonance there that he has at least tried to think through, even if his answers are wrong and his conclusions conveniently happen to involve very large government contracts for his company.

The problem is that being more sincere than Elon Musk is an extraordinarily low bar. It is the philosophical equivalent of being the tallest person at a Lollipop Guild audition. Yes, Karp has actually read the books he cites. Yes, he is more than a performance. But the output is still a surveillance company with a P/E ratio north of 230, still a manifesto calling for the philosophical legitimization of hard power and cultural hierarchy, still a company that Amnesty International says has flagrantly disregarded international law in its work with US immigration enforcement and the Israeli military.

The sincerity of the worldview does not launder the consequences of the products. It just makes for a more interesting villain.

And so Alex Karp remains a This Fucking Guy – reprised, undefeated, and apparently just getting warmed up.

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