Accompanied by the explanation \u201cwe get asked about it a lot,\u201d the Palantir X account published a long post on Sunday summarizing The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, a book co-authored by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and published a little over a year ago. Nicholas W. Zamiska is the other credited co-author.<\/p>\n
Because we get asked a lot.<\/p>\n
The Technological Republic, in brief.<\/p>\n
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.<\/p>\n
2. We must rebel\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2014 Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 18, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I guess people must have been spamming Palantir with requests for a 22-point summary of a book that, according to Gideon Lewis-Kraus\u2019s review in the New Yorker<\/a>, \u201creads like an automated Spotify playlist of the greatest hits of national decline.\u201d Why anyone would ask for this I have no idea, but if that was you, I hope you enjoyed Palantir\u2019s long answer.<\/p>\n The summary comes with no single thesis, but a picture emerges of America as decadent and devoid of a sense of possibility, in need of a unifying technological-military project to compete with\u2014and presumably kill\u2014our enemies with the help of AI, the new supreme weapon for a post-nuclear era. No surprises so far, since Palantir overtly pitches itself as an AI-powered death delivery system<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the process, the post essentially says we should respect our tech leaders instead of being mean and doing cancel culture to them, and we should quit acting like all cultures are good when some cultures, Palantir\u2019s post says, \u201chave proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful,\u201d while others have \u201cproduced wonders.\u201d<\/p>\n The final point is this:<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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?\u201d<\/p>\n Patient and generous readers of conservative thought (or listeners of the Know Your Enemy podcast<\/a>) will recognize a lot of what\u2019s in this Palantir tweet as a hi-tech riff on ideas from twentieth century thinkers like Leo Bloom\u2014someone who, by the way, denied being a conservative. Bloom denounced the education system of his day for devaluing the Western cannon of books and of Western thought in general, an essential wellspring of wisdom in his view.<\/p>\n Similarly, Karp, it may or may not be worth pointing out, voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 while many of his friends and business associates abandoned liberalism and became ride-or-die MAGA<\/a>. But for what it\u2019s worth, Karp also once claimed<\/a> to \u201cspend a lot of time talking to Nazis.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, at a time when hard-rightists and racists don\u2019t mask their ideology or drape it in euphemism, it\u2019s fair to at least acknowledge that Karp and Zamiska\u2019s views have the dubious virtue of being murky.<\/p>\n Palantir isn\u2019t a blog or newsletter, though. It\u2019s a defense contractor with a market capitalization of about $350 billion<\/a>, and it\u2019s currently getting what it seems to wish for in its X post. Its AI tools are already being used in wars around the world<\/a>. One of those wars is being framed by our president as a clash of civilizations in which one is capable of completely wiping out the other, and just might do so if it doesn\u2019t get its way<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, assuming it\u2019s meant to be viewed as a statement of purpose at this consequential moment in time, Palantir\u2019s X post is genuinely clarifying.<\/p>\n