The Man Who Cannot Stop Talking About Killing

On Alex Karp and the "technological republic"

Yesterday, Palantir‘s official account posted on X a list of twenty-two excerpts from CEO Alex Karp’s book, The Technological Republic. “Because we get asked a lot,” the caption read. The post has, as of this writing, nearly thirty million views. I read it and thought it was stupid. Stupid in a specific way — the stupidity of a man who has decided his pronouncements about civilization are civilization. I was going to write nothing about it.

Then I went back and read it again, slowly, against the larger record of what Karp has said in public over the last two years, and I realized the document was not stupid. It was diagnostic. And the thing it was diagnostic of is not an idea, or a policy program, or even a political orientation in the ordinary sense. It is a psychological display. A man in one of the most consequential positions in the American defense-intelligence ecosystem has been, for the better part of two years, showing us something about himself.

I am not a clinician and there are many people who will take issue with me psychologically diagnosing Mr. Karp with some kind of psychopathology in public, without credentials. I mean, I understand why these norms exist. They make sense. Mental health diagnoses can be weaponized to dehumanize people and rob them of their dignity. I agree with all of this. But the man is the CEO of a company that apparently our government runs on. And he strikes me as mentally unwell.

I am not a pacifist. I believe in a conception of just war theory. But I place myself inside a tradition that sees such things as tragic necessities. I believe Ukraine is fighting a just war against Russia for its sovereignty. I want the war to end and for peace to be restored. But only under conditions of justice. I do not revel in the violence which is necessary to establish such a future. Mr. Karp, from what I can tell, is positively delighted at the notion of ending human life. He exhibits what I might characterize as a pornography of violence in the way he talks about these things.

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In February 2025, during an investor call, Karp said this: “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.” He said this with what observers have described as a smile on his face. He followed it, moments later, with this: “We love disruption, and whatever’s good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir. Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

Some people are going to get their heads cut off. On an investor call.

At an AI conference on Capitol Hill in May 2024, Karp joked about drone-striking his business rivals. In the same appearance, speaking about campus protesters whose politics he disapproves of, he proposed an exchange program: “We’re gonna do an exchange program sponsored by Karp. A couple months in North Korea, nice-tasting flavored bark. See how you feel about that.” When a protester interrupted him at another forum a year later, he watched her removed from the room and remarked that he had not had so much fun in years. “Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. He later described the protester as “an unwitting product of an evil force.”

At the World Economic Forum, he dismissed the United Nations as “basically a discriminatory institution against anything good.” On earnings calls he has returned, again and again, to the theme of Palantir‘s role in helping the West kill its enemies more efficiently, framed as a moral duty and an investment thesis simultaneously. “The obvious solution to war is to have the West have the strongest and most precise deadly weapons possible,” he told an audience after the May 2025 protester interruption, “so we can minimise unnecessary deaths, and the best way you minimise those deaths is that you’re so strong that nobody attacks you.”

Nothing this man is saying can possibly be viewed as serious by anyone who has spent more than a moment considering the broader context of history. The last half of the twentieth century was a period of unprecedented declines in global conflict — the longest stretch without great-power war in modern history, and a decline in inter-state violence that reshaped what human life could be for billions of people. The architecture that made this possible was not built by hard power alone. It was built by the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the nuclear non-proliferation regime, the international humanitarian law framework, the European project, and a web of alliances and norms that Karp dismisses out of hand in favor of a vision of deterrence through better targeting software. A man advocating the undoing of the postwar settlement — “the postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone” — is advocating the undoing of the architecture that produced the peace he claims to want to preserve.

I must confess, as I dive deeper into this deconstruction of Karp and this 22-point plan for a “Technological Republic” — which is apparently summarized from his New York Times bestselling book that I have largely ignored and have no intention of reading — that it is taking some discipline to even bring myself to keep going here. That this violent imagery features so prominently in his thoughts invites questions about the potential presence of a psychopathy. It is obvious to me. And yet, a lot of very special people among us need to be hand-held through this in order for them to see it. So I continue.

Karp and his repeating imagery of killing.

He does not say Palantir helps its partners succeed. He says Palantir helps its partners “scare and on occasion kill enemies.” He does not say market disruption is uncomfortable. He says “some people are going to get their heads cut off.” He does not say he disagrees with campus protesters. He jokes about sending them to North Korea for re-education and eating bark. He does not say he regrets business conflicts. He muses about drone-striking rivals. He does not say he found the protester’s interruption frustrating. He says he “had not had so much fun in years” and may “come back tomorrow.”

The relationship between the speaker and the violence he is describing is not the relationship of a person who has thought carefully about violence and concluded, regretfully, that it is sometimes necessary. It is the relationship of a person for whom the imagery of violence appears to produce pleasure. The smile that observers have noticed on his face during earnings calls is the tell. The “fun” he reported having at the protester’s expense is the tell. The drone-strike joke is the tell. Each individual tell can be dismissed. The aggregate cannot. A person who repeatedly, in public, returns to the same imagery and shows positive affect toward it is displaying something about their inner life. The display is not subtle.

And the imagery is specific. It is not the generic imagery of hard power or strategic deterrence that you would expect from a defense-industry CEO performing the required vocabulary. It is the imagery of killing people, personally. “Scare and kill them.” “Heads cut off.” “Drone-strike rivals.” “An unwitting product of an evil force” about a protester. The grammatical subjects are concrete. The verbs are violent. The objects are specific human beings or categories of human beings. This is not a man describing the abstract machinery of national defense. This is a man describing, with evident enjoyment, the application of lethal force to identifiable targets.

If your neighbor spoke this way at a dinner party, you would not invite him back. If your cousin spoke this way, you would worry. If a public school teacher spoke this way, the teacher would be in the principal’s office by Monday. The social register for ordinary humans contains rules about how often, and with what affect, one is permitted to return to imagery of killing one’s enemies. Karp has been violating those rules in public, in front of cameras, for years. The rules exist because most human communities have noticed that people who return to the imagery of killing the people they dislike are a specific kind of person, and that kind of person is not the kind of person communities elevate to positions of power. Karp has been elevated anyway. The elevation does not mean the rules were wrong. It means the people who elevated him were not paying attention to what they were looking at.

Then there is the other register, which runs alongside the violence register and is its constant companion. “The West is obviously superior,” he told CNBC, as if this were a daring insight he was delivering to an audience too cowardly to receive it. “We will be the most important software company in the world,” he has declared. When he speaks about Palantir, he speaks as though he were describing the technological wing of Western civilization itself. “We are dedicating our company to the service of the West,” he has said, “and the United States of America, and we’re super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”

Places we can’t talk about. The phrase is the self-aggrandizement of a teenager writing a spy novel. Every defense contractor on earth has places they can’t talk about. The phrase is doing rhetorical work, not informational work. The work is to position the speaker as privy to a level of consequence and secrecy beyond the comprehension of the audience. The audience is invited to feel awed. The invitation is the tell.

Put the registers together and you see the posture: the speaker is a great man engaged in great matters, his enemies are both absurd and dangerous, his work is civilizationally necessary, and his willingness to contemplate killing his enemies is a measure of his seriousness rather than an alarming departure from ordinary human norms. The self is inflated. The enemies are demonized. The violence against the enemies is offered as evidence of the greatness of the self. The shape is recognizable even to a layman.

One more thing is worth knowing, because it changes what the display actually is. Karp has a PhD in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. He has been allowed, for years, to have it reported that he studied under Jürgen Habermas. He did not. His actual supervisor was Karola Brede, a social psychologist at the Sigmund Freud Institute. Moira Weigel did the archival work on this in 2020 and published it in Boundary 2. The Habermas myth is a useful piece of decoration — it supplies the critical-theory credentials that inoculate Palantir against the critique that a surveillance company run by a Habermas student could not possibly be building what it is building. The myth does this work precisely because it is false.

Karp’s dissertation, published in 2002, is titled Aggression in the Life-World. Its opening sentence: “This work began with the observation that many statements have the effect of relieving unconscious drives, not in spite, but because, of the fact that they are blatantly irrational.” He wrote his PhD on exactly the phenomenon I have been describing. He studied, academically, the mechanism by which irrational public utterances relieve unconscious aggressive drives. He is now, on investor calls, making irrational public utterances about killing that relieve unconscious aggressive drives — and the market applauds. He understood the mechanism well enough to get a doctorate for describing it. He is now performing the mechanism he once described. The Frankfurt School tradition, whatever his relationship to it actually was, has a specific commitment to emancipation from exactly this kind of dynamic. Weigel’s conclusion: Karp “adapts Frankfurt School concepts for technical purposes” and “in the process, he also abandons the Frankfurt School commitment to emancipation.” He abandoned the tradition somewhere between the dissertation and the seven-billion-dollar net worth.

And the enemies are a recurring cast. Campus protesters. The United Nations. China. Progressive academics. Woke pagans. Google employees who refused to work on Project Maven. The pattern of his descriptions is consistent. They are not people with views he disagrees with. They are products of an evil force, adherents of a thin pagan religion, praying at altars, corrupting the civilization he is defending. The vocabulary is eschatological. His opponents are not interlocutors in a democracy. They are spiritual adversaries in a cosmic struggle, and he is the designated instrument of the civilization’s response.

None of this, he wants you to understand, makes him a reactionary. Karp calls himself a liberal. He voted for Kamala Harris, he has said. He donated to Democratic candidates. He describes himself, in interviews, as progressive but not woke. And this self-description is the permission structure that lets the rest of it travel. It allows Karp to deliver the most reactionary content imaginable — civilizational superiority, pagan religion as a category of political analysis, the suggestion that college protesters should be sent to North Korea for re-education, the continuous celebration of lethal force against enemies — while claiming the authority of a reformed or honest progressive who has seen through the excesses of his own side. The rhetorical effect is to make readers who would reject the same content from an open reactionary listen to it from Karp. Even liberals are saying this now, the framing allows. Karp is one of us and he has come to tell us hard truths.

There is no serious sense in which Karp is a liberal. A liberal is a person who holds a specific set of commitments: to the legitimacy of democratic contestation, to the moral equality of persons regardless of their position in cultural hierarchies, to the protection of individual rights against concentrated power, to the maintenance of institutions that preserve the possibility of the commitments themselves. Karp’s public record is the systematic violation of every one of these commitments. He treats democratic protest as pagan religion. He celebrates the application of lethal force against designated enemies. He advocates the reduction of oversight over the powerful and the intensification of surveillance over the weak. He frames civilizational hierarchies as self-evident. He welcomes the Trump administration’s deconstruction of federal capacity as revolution and pronounces, with relish, that “some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

The liberal self-identification is not a contradiction to be puzzled over. It is a performance to be decoded. It is the specific performance of a kind of reactionary figure who understands that open reactionary identification would cost him access to a particular segment of the elite audience — the Silicon Valley-adjacent, the centrist financial press, the Aspen-ish convening class — and who therefore preserves the aesthetic of liberalism while holding the commitments of the reaction. The performance is useful to the reaction because it supplies the reaction with a figure the liberal audience will hear. That is what Karp is for, in the current configuration of the American right. He is the liberal who has been converted by his own experience to say what the reactionaries want said.

Which brings me back to the document, the twenty-two excerpts Palantir posted on X, the Technological Republic in brief. Read it against his public statements and the function becomes visible. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country — which licenses the demand that Silicon Valley serve the defense apparatus Palantir sells to. Soft power is insufficient; hard power is built on software — which is the Palantir product pitch translated into civilizational vocabulary. The question is not whether AI weapons will be built but who will build them — which is the argument that moral objections to AI weapons are irrelevant, because the weapons will exist either way, and therefore the only serious question is whether Palantir will profit from them or its competitors will. National service should be universal — which produces a larger military, a larger military produces more procurement, more procurement produces more Palantir contracts. If a Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it, and the same for software — which is the argument against any form of ethical constraint on defense procurement, framed as solidarity with troops. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone — which is advocacy for the expansion of the defense markets Palantir serves. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime — which is the domestic Palantir sales pitch, because Palantir sells predictive-policing tools to law enforcement, and the item frames the sales pitch as civic concern. Some cultures are better than others — which provides the philosophical license for the hierarchy Karp’s business interests depend on, the hierarchy under which the West’s prerogative to surveil, target, and kill its designated enemies is underwritten by the West’s civilizational superiority.

Every proposition in the document, on inspection, points toward the same outcome: more authority for Palantir, more markets for Palantir‘s products, less oversight over the class Palantir belongs to, and less cultural constraint on the application of lethal force to the targets Palantir helps its clients acquire. The civilizational vocabulary is not a frame through which the underlying interests are viewed. It is the laundering mechanism through which the underlying interests are presented as civilizational duty.

And a person who does not notice they are doing this is more alarming than a person who does. The tell, in the document and in the public record, is the absence of friction. A person engaged in genuine civic reasoning eventually reaches a position that costs them something. Karp’s civic reasoning never does. Every position he takes, on every question he addresses, happens to align exactly with what is good for Palantir. This is not evidence that he is engaged in cynical self-interest. It is evidence that the self-interest and the worldview have fused so completely that the worldview no longer performs the work of checking the self-interest. There is no longer a place inside the worldview from which the self-interest could be seen as self-interest. This is a specific pathology of the ideological self, and it is what you would expect from a person who has spent two decades being told by everyone in his proximity that his business is civilization.

When I listen to Karp talk, I hear a man who has built himself a future he finds beautiful. In the future he has built, the West prevails by killing its enemies with software. Palantir‘s tools pick the targets. The targets die. The survivors learn to be afraid. And the man describing this to investors, to reporters, to whoever will have him, cannot quite hide how much he likes the sound of it.

There is pleasure in it. That is the thing I keep coming back to. Not the grim satisfaction of a person who has looked at violence and concluded, with sorrow, that it is sometimes necessary. Something else. The pleasure of a person who has at last been permitted to live inside his preferred picture of the world — a world where the categories are finally clean, the enemies are finally named, and the violence against them is finally licensed as civilizational duty rather than as the appetite it actually is.

In this picture, there is no room for the protester who interrupts the panel and accuses Palantir of killing her family. There is only the option of escorting her out and remarking on how much fun you had. There is no room for the Gaza civilians who have no military affiliation and no political agency and who have been dying by the tens of thousands. There is only the abstract mathematics of “minimizing unnecessary deaths” through the application of the most precise deadly weapons the West can produce. There is no room for the university student who thinks American foreign policy has been unjust. There is only the category of pagan religion adherent who should perhaps be sent to North Korea to eat flavored bark.

I hear a man whose picture of his own righteousness has so fully saturated his perception of reality that the reality’s capacity to resist the picture has been lost. The bark joke, the drone-strike joke, the heads-cut-off joke, the North Korea joke — these are the utterances of a mind that has lost the feedback mechanism that tells ordinary humans when they have said something they should not have said. The mechanism has been replaced by the laughter of the audience at the conferences and the applause of the market on the earnings calls. The laughter and the applause have confirmed, over and over, that the imagery of killing Karp’s designated enemies is a thing he is right to enjoy. The enjoyment has deepened. The utterances have intensified. And now we are where we are.

Where we are is this: a man who runs a company that provides the software infrastructure for American and allied military targeting has built, over years, a public persona organized around the pleasure he takes in contemplating the application of lethal force to designated enemies. He does not hide this. He announces it. He announces it on earnings calls, at defense forums, on CNBC, in his book, in his tweets. And the institutions he serves have not blinked. The financial press reports the statements as colorful. The investors buy the stock. The defense department renews the contracts. The lawmakers invite him back to speak.

I cannot say with certainty what is going on inside Alex Karp. I am not a clinician. But I can read. And what I read is a man who should not be the CEO of a company. Certainly not the CEO of one of the critical software contractors in the American national-security architecture. A man whose register about violence, enemies, and his own relationship to both has drifted so far from what any functioning civic institution should tolerate in its elite class that the ongoing toleration is itself evidence of institutional decay.

I am not saying this in order to shame Karp. Shame is not available to a man in Karp’s position, and Karp has demonstrated in any case that he is not subject to it. I am saying it because the display is evidence. It is evidence about the ideological formation of a specific faction of the American oligarchy, and about what that faction has come to consider acceptable speech from its leading representatives, and about what kind of speech the American media and political establishment will tolerate in exchange for the access and advertising revenue that such representatives supply.

The faction is not marginal. It controls, through Palantir, substantial portions of the American intelligence and military software stack. It controls, through Thiel’s network, portions of the Republican Party including the Vice Presidency. It controls, through its alliance with the broader tech-right, a growing share of the media environment in which political ideas are formed. The faction’s ideological project is the one Karp articulates in The Technological Republic and the one he performs on earnings calls. The project is the fusion of American military power, corporate defense contracting, civilizational-hierarchy ideology, and the explicit celebration of lethal force against designated enemies, delivered in the vocabulary of civic renewal.

A person who fantasizes, in public, about drone-striking business rivals and sending protesters to North Korea is not a person who should be near the instruments of state violence. A person who laughs on earnings calls about heads being cut off in a revolution is not a person whose picture of American civic life is one a republic should entrust with its surveillance infrastructure. A person whose corporate worldview celebrates “scaring and killing enemies” as a product feature is not a person whose ethical constraints on targeting decisions can be assumed. These are the plainest possible observations, and the fact that they have to be made at all is a function of how badly the institutions that should have noticed have failed to notice.

I wrote in The Positive Case for Liberalism that the positive case must be made again because the ambient discourse has forgotten what it is for. This is what it is for. It is for the preservation of a civic order in which the kind of man Alex Karp has become does not hold the kind of power Alex Karp holds. It is for the maintenance of institutions that recognize the difference between a serious public figure and a man displaying the psychological features of someone who has spent too much time fantasizing about killing. It is for a culture capable of noticing, when one of its oligarchs begins speaking the way Karp has been speaking, that the speaking is evidence, and that evidence of this kind ought to produce a response.

We are not producing the response. Karp continues to speak. Palantir‘s stock continues to rise. The contracts continue to be awarded. The Capitol Hill forums continue to invite him. The financial press continues to describe his statements as colorful. This continuation is not the absence of judgment. It is the presence of a specific judgment, which is the judgment that the display is acceptable because the money is good and the access is useful. This judgment will be remembered.

The display will also be remembered. The record of what Karp has said is preserved in earnings-call transcripts, in video clips, in the book he published and continues to promote. When the consequences of the fusion he represents become visible in a form the current political economy can no longer disguise, the record will be there. The drone-strike joke will be there. The North Korea joke will be there. The “some people are going to get their heads cut off” will be there. The smile on his face while he said these things, which was not hidden, which was published and repeated and celebrated at the time, will be there.

Moral witness is not primarily for the present. It is for the record. I am writing this for the record, because someone should, and because the ongoing failure of the institutions that should be writing it is one of the facts about our moment that the record should also show.

Alex Karp is a deeply troubled man. I submit my witness of this to my posterity. And I look forward to the congressional hearings to come when the Democrats take control of Congress.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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