The Palantir Manifesto is a technofascist blueprint
Palantir posted a 22-point summary of The Technological Republic on X last week. The Wall Street Journal called it âno less ambitious than a new treatise in political theory.â General Mattis blurbed it. Keir Starmerâs government is reportedly inspired by it.
I want to tell you what it actually is, and what itâs already doing.
The document
The Technological Republic was co-written by Alexander Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, and Nicholas Zamiska - Palantirâs head of corporate affairs and legal counsel. Both are Palantir executives. Both are paid by Palantir.
The book argues that Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to build weapons and surveillance infrastructure, that democratic deliberation about AI is naive obstruction, that some cultures produce greatness and others are âdysfunctional and regressive,â and that âhollow pluralismâ is weakening the West.
Palantir recently inked a contract with the U.S. Army worth up to $10 billion for software, data, and AI. Its Maven AI targeting platform ingests data from more than 150 sources - satellite imagery, drone video, radar, infrared sensors, signals intelligence, and geolocation data - now a permanent Pentagon budget line item. Roughly 55% of Palantirâs revenue comes from government customers.
A billionaire surveillance contractor wrote a manifesto arguing that building surveillance infrastructure is a moral duty. He published it. It became a bestseller. People are treating it like philosophy.
Itâs a sales pitch. The ideology is the packaging.
The moves that matter
Point 5: âThe question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications.â
This doesnât argue that AI weapons are good. It argues that asking whether we should build them is naive. Ethical deliberation is âtheatrical.â The debate has already been settled by the adversary, and the only remaining question is who cashes the check.
Notice what this framework does. It makes âshould we?â permanently unanswerable. Every surveillance system, every autonomous targeting platform, every tool ever deployed to harm civilians can be justified by pointing at an adversary who might build it first. There is no technology this logic cannot justify. That is the point. Karp has engineered a philosophy with no ethical off-switch, and he did it while running a company that needs there to be no ethical off-switch.
This isnât a new argument. Itâs the oldest argument in weapons development. The scientists who built the atomic bomb were told the same thing - Germany might get there first, so the question of whether to build it was already settled. Then Germany surrendered before the bomb was ready. The question of whether to use it was never seriously reopened. The United States dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 110,000 to 210,000 people, most of them civilians. The logic that made the bomb inevitable made its use inevitable too. That is what happens when you engineer a philosophy with no ethical off-switch.
Then there are points 21 and 22, which are doing something uglier.
Point 21: âSome cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.â
Letâs not be coy about what this means or who it means it about. This is not a critique of institutions. Itâs not a policy argument about governance structures. It is a statement that certain groups of people are, by the nature of their culture, inferior - a drag on civilization, a problem requiring management. We donât need to speculate about who âdysfunctional and regressiveâ describes in practice. Look at which neighborhoods end up as shapes on a Palantir map. Latino immigrants. Muslim communities. Black neighborhoods. The people ICE is currently running algorithmic raids on. Clinical language. Very old, very ugly work.
Point 22 follows immediately: pluralism is hollow. âInclusion into what?â The multicultural democratic project isnât just failing - it was never legitimate to begin with. The hierarchy is the point. The hierarchy has always been the point.
These two points are load-bearing. If some cultures are inherently dysfunctional, then surveillance infrastructure that sorts and targets communities along cultural lines isnât a civil liberties violation. Itâs a technical solution to a natural problem. The cultural hierarchy argument pre-justifies everything that comes after it. It tells you who deserves to be on the map before the map is drawn.
To be clear: using this infrastructure on undocumented immigrants is already unconscionable. These are human beings - people who, for the most part, came here seeking safety, work, family, survival - being hunted by an algorithm that ingests their medical records and assigns them a score. There is no acceptable version of this. There is no population for whom âtarget-rich areaâ is an appropriate phrase.
But what stops this from expanding? The infrastructure doesnât have opinions. The cultural hierarchy argument doesnât name a stopping point. Once youâve built a system that sorts people by who is âdysfunctional and regressiveâ and routes them toward enforcement, the only thing limiting who gets sorted is the political will of whoever is running it.
What about trans people, already being systematically stripped of legal recognition and access to healthcare? What about Muslims, already subject to years of federal surveillance programs? What about Black activists, whose communities have been targeted by law enforcement intelligence operations for decades? What about queer people broadly, in a political climate where the language of âgroomerâ and âdegeneracyâ is creeping back into mainstream discourse? What about political dissidents, journalists, organizers, anyone whose name ends up in the wrong database at the wrong moment? What about you?
The answer - the honest, terrifying answer - is nothing. Nothing structural stops it. The ideology Karp is selling doesnât contain a limiting principle. âDysfunctional and regressiveâ is definitional clay. It means whoever those in power need it to mean, and the infrastructure to act on it is already built, already running, already funded to the tune of billions of dollars.
This is how othering works. It never announces itself as dehumanization. It uses the language of realism - hard truths, things sophisticated people understand, observations the squeamish wonât say out loud. It builds a hierarchy, insists the hierarchy is just observation, and then the infrastructure that enforces the hierarchy becomes inevitable. Questioning it becomes naive. Theatrical. Dangerous.
What the philosophy looks like in production
Hereâs where we stop talking about the book and start talking about what the book is justifying.
In April 2025, ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to build ImmigrationOS - a platform designed to track and deport immigrants faster, pulling data from the IRS, Social Security, passport databases, and license plate readers to build profiles of deportation targets.
Thatâs the press release version. The operational version is an app called ELITE that populates a map with people. Each person has a dossier - photo, address, and a âconfidence scoreâ predicting whether theyâre actually there. Agents draw shapes on the map to select âtarget-rich areasâ for raids. The data comes from Medicaid records, DMV files, utility bills, court records. Update your address to get medical care, and that feeds your confidence score.
This is not a tool for finding a specific person. Itâs a tool for volume. An agent draws a shape around a neighborhood, a building, a workplace, and queries everyone inside. It facilitates collateral arrests. ICE agents have called the locations it identifies âtarget-rich areas.â That is the language Palantirâs infrastructure produced. That is the language Karpâs philosophy produced.
And then those arrests end here: at least 32 people died in ICE custody last year. 2026 is already on track to be worse, with 14 deaths in the first months of the year alone. ICE is now purchasing warehouses to expand detention capacity. People inside face medical neglect, preventable deaths, solitary confinement, blocked access to lawyers, and racist treatment. A comprehensive review found 95% of those deaths were preventable with adequate medical care. Infections. Diabetes. Heart conditions. People denied care until it was too late.
The term âconcentration campâ does not require extermination to apply. Historians use it to describe facilities where civilians are mass-incarcerated without due process, in degrading conditions, outside the normal criminal justice system. Nearly 73% of those detained by ICE have no criminal convictions. ICE is converting warehouses into facilities holding up to 1,500 people, run by private contractors. People are dying of treatable conditions. Oversight has been gutted. Legal access is obstructed. Decide for yourself what term applies. But donât let squeamishness about the term do the work of pretending the conditions arenât what they are.
This is what technofascism looks like
Fascism is the merger of state and corporate power under an authoritarian nationalist framework, where democratic accountability is an obstacle to efficiency. Technofascism is that same merger, but the corporate partner is a surveillance and weapons platform, and the authoritarian logic is laundered through the language of inevitability, engineering meritocracy, and civilizational duty.
The sequence isnât complicated. Establish a cultural hierarchy - some groups are dysfunctional, regressive, a problem to be solved. Declare that pluralism, the political project that extends rights across that hierarchy, is hollow and weak. Build the infrastructure that sorts people according to the hierarchy. Declare that anyone questioning the infrastructure is naive and theatrical. Profit.
The Technological Republic is steps one and two. The ELITE app and ImmigrationOS are step three. Point 5 is step four written in advance as a preemptive defense.
Over the past year, some 230,000 people were arrested and deported by ICE. The tool Palantir built to find them calls neighborhoods âtarget-rich areas.â The book providing the moral framework for that tool is on the New York Times Best Seller list, and heads of government are calling it inspiring.
The manifesto and the machine are the same project. One decides who is dysfunctional. The other finds where they live. The detention facilities hold whatâs left.
Karp didnât invent fascism. Heâs just making it more efficient and calling it philosophy.