Peter Thiel's Gospel Part II: Palantir and the Philosopher-King

Brad Onishi: Palantir is the application of what Thiel took away from Leo Strauss—the guy who gave Thiel the idea that when it comes to wartime, you need to use illiberal, outside of the normal channels, kinds of tactics and strategies. To me, Palantir is the application of that, and Alex Karp is the guy that embodies that.

Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi.

Last time we did this, we talked all about Peter Thiel's gospel and the ways that Peter Thiel has developed over the last two decades a kind of techno-theology that is really heavy on Armageddon, on the Antichrist, and sees Jesus as in many ways redeeming us from our fallen nature, which is as gigantic imitation machines, and opening the way for us to be innovative tech kings. Peter Thiel calls miracles technology, and he believes that technological breakthroughs map onto creation. In other words, to be somebody in God's image is to be a tech founder and creator. So that was last time.

One of the things we emphasized there was that the decoder ring for Peter Thiel's work and his worldview is really a 2004 essay called "The Straussian Moment." That was written right in the wake of 9/11. It was written at a time when Peter Thiel himself was scared and fearful of what was next. One of his mentors, Wolfgang Palaver, has said that he saw real fear in Peter Thiel's person in the wake of 9/11.

Like a lot of people, Thiel wasn't sure if we were going to have more attacks, if this was going to become something that was normal, if it was something that would be routine for there to be terrorist attacks in the United States on a regular basis. And Thiel's reaction to that was to argue that we should really engage in illiberal tactics in order to keep ourselves safe—that liberal democracy and political correctness and the proper channels may not be the best way to do it. All right, so that's last time.

Today I want to talk about how all of this connects to one of Peter Thiel's most important and successful ventures, and that is Palantir. I want to get into how the philosophy and theology laid out in "The Straussian Moment" is embodied in Palantir.

That'll lead us back to politics. It'll lead us back to Trump. It'll lead us back to Vance. It'll lead us back to a lot of things. And eventually we'll get to Curtis Yarvin, but probably not today—Curtis Yarvin and monarchy and the dissident right and so on and so forth.

Thiel's business ventures, his political maneuvering over the last decade and a half, are to me an application of two dissonant philosophical views that he outlines in "The Straussian Moment." They're sometimes dissonant, sometimes not. It's complicated, but just hear me out and just hang with me for a minute.

In "The Straussian Moment," we have three main philosophers:

Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist—Thiel mentions him, there are ideas of Schmitt's he really likes, and then he moves on.

Leo Strauss—he spends a lot of time on Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss is a mid-20th century philosopher who corresponded with Carl Schmitt in Germany and has been a profound influence on conservative political theorists for a long, long time.

And then, of course, he goes to René Girard. René Girard is his man. He's the professor he met at Stanford, the guy that really has influenced his thinking more than anyone else.

But the person we can't skip today is Leo Strauss.

Leo Strauss argues for the moral superiority of the West. He argues that the West and the United States have a way of life to defend against, quote, "inferior cultures."

He argues that there's a need for decisive and unilateral action in order to protect the West from its enemies and expel dangerous elements within our society.

It's possible to read Leo Strauss and to take away from him a nationalistic, pro-Western, morally chauvinist, anti-democratic set of tactics that you would use in the name of defending Western values, in the name of defending freedom of thought, free markets and so on.

Now some Straussians out there will say that's not what he thought, it's not what you should do. That's fine. Thiel says that is what is happening in Leo Strauss.

Here's a couple of quotes from Strauss that are from Thiel, from the essay, from "The Straussian Moment":

He talks about how there's a universally valid hierarchy of ends, but there are no universally valid rules of action—meaning that there is good, objective good, objective right, objective morals, but sometimes you're in a situation where you need to use immoral ends in order to protect your moral right.

He says that considerations which apply to foreign enemies may well apply to subversive elements within society—meaning you may have terrorists from outside, or you may have enemies from within, which we might think of in today's moment as quite applicable.

Strauss says the most just society cannot survive without intelligence, espionage, even though espionage is impossible without a suspension of certain rules of natural right. Leo Strauss, again, is kind of like that spy movie where the CIA, the spy, has to do things that are not according to the rules in order to protect a society based on rules and law and order. You have to go outside the law in order to protect the law.

One of the things that Thiel says, inspired by Strauss, is that if we want Pax Americana after 9/11—if you want peace and security and you want the reign and preeminence of the United States—you need to put away the United Nations, and you need to go to the secret coordination of the world's spy agencies.

The secret coordination of the world's intelligence services—that's the, and I'm quoting now, that's the "path to a truly global Pax Americana." That's Peter Thiel's words.

Here's Damon Linker summarizing this:

"Strauss sets out a timeless moral standard of what is intrinsically good or right in normal situations as the just allocation of benefits and burdens in a society. But there are also extreme situations—those in which the very existence or independence of a society is at stake. In such situations, the normally valid rules of natural right are revealed to be changeable, permitting office holders to do whatever is required to defend citizens against a possibly absolutely unscrupulous, savage enemy. Who gets to determine extreme situations? The most competent and most conscientious statesman. They must identify foreign enemies as well as subversive elements at home."

For Thiel, Strauss is important, and I want you to hear me on this: Strauss is a stage on the way to filling out the full picture of human nature and human society.

René Girard is Peter Thiel's guy, and he's the one that inspires Thiel with this techno-theology of the innovator, the founder, the king, the one who does not imitate, the one who transcends human nature for something else.

Girard is the one who inspires him to think about being a living God, a king who engages in the miracle-making of technology, the unimaginable, the undreamed of. This is why Thiel—and I'll get to this at some point in the series—but this is why Thiel has gone on to do seasteading and network cities and cryogenics and immortality attempts, not to mention dabbled in the idea of monarchy.

So Girard is that guy, but it doesn't mean that Strauss isn't helpful. Because you know what? It's like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you're going to do all that stuff, if you want to create a tech feudalist world, if you want to dabble in monarchy, if you want to create network states off the coast of El Salvador, whatever it is—you need certainty and safety and security at home. You need the United States to be a place where you can be in Silicon Valley, do what you're doing, be rich, be safe, have the resources, the talent, the employees, the engineers that you need.

So after 9/11, there's a sense for Thiel of like, we need Strauss. Strauss isn't the final thing, but if you want to do the final thing, you have to have the foundation of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which in this situation is just no terrorist attacks and no subversive elements within—which, 25 years later, has a different meaning, at least in some sense, given what's happening with ICE and Palantir and all that, which we'll get to.

Thiel develops the idea for Palantir during the same period that he wrote this essay. The post-9/11 period is the moment that sets Thiel's life on the course it is now. He starts thinking about Palantir, and this essay and Palantir are both reactions to 9/11.

Here's my argument. If you want my thesis, my thesis is this: I think Palantir is the embodiment of Thiel's Straussian philosophy. I think Thiel took Strauss and said, "How do I make that? How do I apply that?"

How do I take Strauss and apply that to the United States? I'm going to use spying, espionage, so many other things in order to arrive at a place where I can protect the country from savage, unscrupulous enemies.

It's not time for political correctness. It's not time for due process. It's not time for Congress. It's not time for the separation of powers. We need to be protected. Did you see those towers come down? I'm not doing that again. What do we need to do? I don't care.

Palantir, to me, is the embodiment of what Thiel takes away from Strauss.

So that leads us to Palantir. What is Palantir? Here's a piece, a profile from The New Yorker, titled "The Palantir Guide to Saving America's Soul":

"Palantir is named for the seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings. And it had two inspirations. One was the dot-com collapse, which flattened the bubbly frivolity of early e-commerce. The other was September 11. Thiel believed that a maturing tech industry needed to put away its e-toys and devote itself to the serious business of national defense. Palantir's data integration platform pledged to discern obscure patterns that might otherwise elude human analysts. The company's overarching ambition, Alex Karp, who's the CEO, said, is to support the West, quote unquote."

Palantir says they are, quote, "saving the Shire from the Eye of Sauron." The Thiel-Karp team guaranteed a reasonable calibration of, quote, "total information awareness" and the protection of civil liberties.

They were criticized heavily by libertarians who said that they were doing predictive policing, and they were also accused of selling vaporware.

Palantir is Peter Thiel's best investment in the new millennium. He started this in 2002-2003, and he basically has a rented office with no engineers. He just has an idea, and he's like, "Look, we're going to use the data sorting methods and technology that we use at PayPal, and we're going to just sort through so much data at such a high rate that we can identify bad actors. We can identify attacks before they happen. We can identify weak points in our defense systems."

Palantir has since been used by the US military in very, very, very wide and expansive ways. Let me read a little bit more for you.

Here's Meagan Day writing at Jacobin:

"Palantir is the Trump administration's darling. The administration has showered it with federal contracts hefty enough to elicit a letter from Democratic lawmakers asking the company to explain and justify itself. Of particular concern are Palantir's apparent moves to fulfill Trump's request that the company create a unified database on American citizens.

Palantir has also signed on to create an 'immigration OS' system for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which will track immigrants' movements and facilitate their arrest, detention and deportation. They've also increased Palantir's Project Maven funding—that has accelerated the militarization of AI, enabling autonomous drone surveillance systems and algorithmic targeting. Under Trump, the administration is pushing to expand these capabilities into real-time battlefield AI tools, including giving Palantir an additional $174 million contract to, quote, 'house a battlefield intelligence system inside a big truck.'"

As you can imagine, Palantir is not without its critics. There are many, many people who worry about Palantir and what it does.

Here's what happened with Palantir: Palantir started as an idea, and for a long time was an outlier in Silicon Valley, because Palantir was openly nationalistic, openly wanting to basically marry Silicon Valley to the US military and surveillance efforts by the military, and for or by law enforcement here in the domestic sphere.

If you can imagine, at the time—it's hard to imagine, but 2005, 2010—these were not years where Silicon Valley was aligned with the government. Very famously, Google sort of turned down contracts with the US government and the US military and did not want their technology being used in those domains.

Palantir took a contrarian stance, which is pretty typical of what Peter Thiel does. But what I want to focus on today is Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp.

I want to focus on Karp, because Karp, to me, is the one who embodies my thesis for today. Here's my thesis for today one more time:

Palantir is the application of what Thiel took away from Leo Strauss—the guy who gave Thiel the idea that when it comes to wartime, when it comes to exceptional circumstances, you need to use illiberal, outside of the normal channels, kinds of tactics and strategies. You need to do whatever is required to defend citizens against savage enemies.

To me, Palantir is the application of that, and Alex Karp is the guy that embodies that.

So who is Alex Karp?

Alex Karp is Peter Thiel's friend from law school. He is Peter Thiel's friend from the early millennium, when they were both at Stanford Law. Both of them did not like law school, and neither of them ended up being lawyers.

Alex Karp grows up in a house that is full of neo-Marxist ideas, a truly progressive household. His mother is Black. His father is Jewish. He grows up on the East Coast and attends Haverford College. This is a guy that is raised in progressive political waters.

Now he goes to Stanford Law, and he hates it. And so after Stanford Law, he goes to Europe, to Germany, to the University of Frankfurt, to study social philosophy. So he ends up studying in the spheres of people like Jürgen Habermas.

This is not a guy who has a tech background. He's not a coder. He doesn't know how to—he had no experience with the startups, nothing. And he even says in a New York Times profile, "I don't know why Peter chose me."

And to me, that's really important, because if you ask others around Palantir about the lore of the beginning of it, there's a lot of different stories. But Karp himself—and I'm just going to stay on Karp—himself says, "Peter chose me, and I don't know why."

25 years later, the company is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The stock is one of the most valuable stock increases. The stock has done so well this year that it's gone ballistic in terms of its value.

Karp himself is now a billionaire because of all of the compensation he's gotten from leading Palantir for the last 20 years.

Here's a video of Alex Karp, the supposed progressive, the guy who's always talking about how, "Yeah, Peter's a libertarian, but I'm a liberal, but we get along." If you listen to Alex Karp in any podcast, any video, if you read his book, it doesn't matter what you do with Alex Karp, the first thing he tells you is about how he's a progressive.

So here's a video of this supposed progressive talking about what he wants to do to his enemies:

"You need a higher purpose. And I also think you often need a lower purpose. Like the higher purpose for me—kind of like, what's a lower purpose? Well, I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts who tried to screw us. So that's my lower purpose. But the higher purpose for me was to get this nation to be the preeminent power in the world, because whatever faults we have, they're nothing like anyone else's."

So that's pretty despicable. It's pretty gross. And as we're going to see, it's pretty indicative of who he is.

Alex Karp wrote a book called The Technological Republic. He has a co-author, but he has said in interviews that 90% of the ideas were his and 90% of the writing went to his co-author.

Here's what Karp says on one of the very first pages of the book:

"The central argument we advance in the pages that follow is the software industry should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its effort and attention to constructing the technology and artificial intelligence that will help protect us."

In other places, he has talked about how Palantir does not do business with China, Russia or other countries that are opposed to the West.

Karp and Thiel want to do business with those who are more allied and less corrupt governments, and that includes Israel.

Karp continues in his book by saying:

"The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation and the articulation of a national project. What is this country? What are our values? For what do we stand? And by extension, to preserve the enduring yet fragile geopolitical advantage that the United States and its allies in Europe and elsewhere have retained over their adversaries."

Karp is openly and consistently and explicitly pro-Western. He believes the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself—that's a direct quote.

And he says we should not appease Iran, Russia or China.

There's this sense here for Karp of openly pro-America, pro-West—and not in a way that's like, "I'm just proud to be an American." It's like, no, no, we are superior to other people. Our culture is superior. We are superior, and we should use the technology of Palantir, the spyware, the ability to sort through data and monitor and surveil people—people abroad in Iraq and Iran, people in Gaza, or people in New Orleans or in Baltimore. We should use that so that we continue to be the preeminent power of the world.

Now, for all the talk he says about America being so great, he rarely says why. He's always like, "We're superior, we're better, we're the best. They are inferior, they are less. They do not have an elevated society like us." But there's rarely any talk of like, what that means. Like, why are we the best?

Okay, now here's one place he says this:

"Americans are the most loving, God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet."

That's crazy. I don't know—we could debate all that for a long time. The most loving, God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. Take that for what you want. I don't think you need me to break that down.

"And they want to know that if you're waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you're a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved."

So he openly says, "Look, we are the best"—I guess we're the best because we're the most loving and God-fearing and fair, which sounds good. And so if you want to threaten us, the most loving, God-fearing, fair people on the planet, we're going to hurt you and your friends and your family.

Karp said at one point in a message to shareholders of Palantir:

"The rise of the West was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence."

This is a quote from Samuel Huntington, the author of The Clash of Civilizations.

In his book The Technological Republic, Karp praises Huntington, who basically had this idea that there are seven or eight different civilizations in the world, and they are clashing. They have different values, they have different passions, they have different piety, and they will never agree, but the West is superior.

Now, some folks—and we could spend the next three hours doing this—have traced Huntington's ideas, and there are links to Carl Schmitt, the friend-enemy distinction, the Nazi jurist, the whole thing.

But Huntington—well, here's Karp's words:

"Most scholars resisted what they described as Huntington's facile division of the world into seven or possibly eight discrete civilizations. But while his frame was certainly reductionist, the wholesale revolt against Huntington would end up crowding out the most serious normative discussions about the role of culture in shaping everything from international relations to economic development. Where were the fault lines between cultures, which cultures were aligned with the advancement of the interests of their publics, and what should be the role of the nation in articulating or defending a sense of national culture?"

So for Karp, Huntington was basically right in many ways. We need to talk about the normative standards of what cultures are better and which ones are worse.

He says to a reporter at one point:

"If you believe that the West should lose and you believe that the only way to defend yourself is always with words and not with actions, you should be skeptical of us, Palantir."

So let's just back up. What have we said so far? What's going on? Let's get back to our thesis here. The thesis is that Palantir is the application of Leo Strauss's philosophy that Peter Thiel wrote about after 9/11.

To me, Alex Karp was chosen because he embodies the Straussian philosophy that Thiel wants to apply. Whether or not this is faithful to Strauss, the Straussians out there can argue about, and I'm not going to take that out. What I'm interested in is Karp.

Karp is the one who's always showing up and confusing journalists and everyone else watching, because they're like:

"Peter Thiel—tech libertarian, destroyed Gawker, super lawsuit with Hulk Hogan, first guy to support Trump from Silicon Valley 2016, JD Vance patron. Peter Thiel, okay, I'm kind of starting to understand Peter Thiel a little bit. I listened to Brad's first video, that helped. Okay, good.

"Alex Karp—the mixed-race guy with a Black mom and a Jewish dad who grew up in a neo-communist household and went to liberal schools and has a philosophy PhD from Europe. What is that?"

And to me, it's a smoke screen. Part of Leo Strauss's philosophy is that philosophers often have to talk in code and in ways that are dizzying to the public and confusing to the public, so that the truths they are telling can seep their way into society—that those with ears to hear can hear them, and so the philosopher is not just run off the stage immediately.

Leo Strauss took great lessons from Plato and Socrates and Athens. Socrates is killed for being a philosopher who tells the truth. So Strauss is like, philosophers kind of have to be complex and a little bit shielded and a little bit misdirection, and a little bit of hiding and disguising and Easter-egging in their work.

Well, who would be better for that, if you're Peter Thiel, than a mixed-race person who talks all the time about how he gave money to the Joe Biden campaign and has a philosophy degree from Europe, and yet every time Karp talks, he sounds like a neo-Straussian war hawk? He sounds like somebody whose interest is in violence and retribution and vengeance against those who would dare to even talk in any way down or disparagingly of the great Western civilization of America and its European heritage.

A friend of his told a reporter that Karp sees himself as Batman, believing the importance of choosing sides in a perilous world. And the New York office of Palantir is called Gotham.

So he sees himself—Karp, let's just break this down—Karp sees himself as a billionaire superhero vigilante who does things in secret, who does things when you can't see, who doesn't follow the paperwork or the procedures or does not have a body cam, just beats people up and takes them and deals with them because he's identified they're the bad guys. No courts, no judges, no juries, just out here beating people up, deciding who's good and who's bad.

Doesn't that sound like what we just talked about with Thiel and Strauss and the ways there's—you need extreme measures when you're facing an unscrupulous and savage enemy?

Peter Thiel literally picked a guy who thinks he's Batman and is the one responding to attacks and violence by being the vigilante who can see in the dark, kind of like Palantir, right? Isn't that what it is? It sees in the dark. It sees what no one else can see. It has all the technology to do it, just like Batman.

To me, the best piece written about Alex Karp is by Jack McCordick at The New Republic. Let me give you a few quotes from McCordick:

"If there's a single pattern of thought that defines The Technological Republic, it is that of a wavering liberal hair-splitting his way towards civilizational chauvinism."

"Karp and [his co-author] admit that Huntington's division of the world into separate civilizations was 'certainly reductionist.' But isn't it a shame, they complain, that we can no longer have serious normative discussions about which cultures are superior to others?"

McCordick just talks so well about how every time Karp shows up in public, he's telling you he's a liberal, and that he's talking in a way that sounds like a neocon.

The people that he quotes in his book—almost none of them are people you would consider liberal or progressive. He's quoting Huntington. He's quoting Allan Bloom, who happens to be one of the most famous students of Leo Strauss.

Karp is, to me, the application of Strauss in a person, hand-picked by Peter Thiel.

Here's another quote from McCordick:

"Since Palantir went public in 2020, Karp, even more than Elon Musk, has turned himself into the consummate Silicon Valley aristo-populist, palatable enough to C-suite mores to grace the stage at Davos and the pages of the business press, but sufficiently based to become a cult figure in the seedier precincts of X and Reddit, where retail investor Palantirians trade AI-generated memes of Daddy Karp as a glowering Roman gladiator or toga-clad philosopher king."

Karp wants you on the surface to think of him as the opposite of Peter Thiel, and yet what he seems to espouse is something that falls in line exactly with what Peter Thiel interprets Strauss to inspire him to in "The Straussian Moment."

What does all this mean? I think what it means is that Palantir is something that is quite scary. The CTO of Palantir was one of the tech leaders who was sworn into the US military.

As we go on in the Trump administration, what we're going to see is that Palantir gets more money, and it gets more embedded in the US government, and it's going to be used to spy on people who are dissident, who are protesting, who are outside of ICE facilities, who are videotaping ICE agents. There's going to be an ability to surveil everyone all the time.

Now you can say there already is, and that's fine, and we can have that discussion. But there's a sense that Palantir is doing something that is revolutionary, and it's going to unleash that on us.

For many of us, that's scary. It feels like the infringement of civil liberties coming even more than we already experience—that what is happening with ICE is only going to get way, way worse in the next year or two.

Peter Thiel does not look at it that way. He sees Palantir as an essential function in the protection of the West from enemies without and those within. And Alex Karp is his chosen CEO, who is this perfect mouthpiece of the philosophy of Palantir, which is that Silicon Valley should contribute to the national project of building American greatness and American values and American civilization, along with Europe.

And there's a sense of vengeance and cruelty to anyone who would turn out to be in opposition to us, whatever "us" means.

What this means for me is that we can see Palantir as an instantiation of that Straussian philosophy, and it's not the end. There's more to the story.

We need to go next time to all of Thiel's forays into seasteading and network cities and life extension technologies. We also need to get into the fact that Thiel has been intimately tied to Curtis Yarvin, who is the right-wing provocateur, the dissident right-wing provocateur who is becoming the darling of the Trump administration and the alt-right—the guy who is an open monarchist and who is cheering for the end of democracy, the guy who is wanting to create city-states or feudal territories that are led by a CEO.

Curtis Yarvin has inspired many of Thiel's ideas, and Thiel, in turn, has funded Curtis Yarvin so that he has grown into something even bigger and larger.

And on the surface, you're like, those two don't go together. How can you have nationalistic America First nation-building project like Palantir and Alex Karp on one side of you, and Curtis Yarvin on the other, if you're Peter Thiel?

And Peter Thiel, to me, is like, "Well, I need Palantir and I need Karp because they have—they are going to help keep America safe. And if they keep America safe, it's not that I'm just going to stop there. Like, 'Oh, I love America. It's the greatest thing on earth. And this is the end of my life. This is the final purpose.' No, that's not what it is."

And this is why Thiel is not your run-of-the-mill nationalistic hero person. He's not Pete Hegseth. I said this last time—he thinks Hegseth is a joke, or at least a useful kind of idiot.

For Thiel, the nationalistic project provides the foundation for the Maslow's hierarchy of needs where we're not going to get attacked. And in fact, the country will do things that Thiel imagines will bring more order. It will remove many undocumented immigrants. It will remove people who are coming here for asylum or claiming to be refugees. It will deal harshly with our enemies, whether those are in Iran or in Russia or in China.

If you have security, if you don't have more 9/11s, for Peter Thiel, you can go do all that other stuff.

You can go figure out what comes after the nation-state. If you're Peter Thiel and you have safety by way of Palantir, then you can go figure out what comes after the nation.

On one hand, he's like, "Yeah, build the nation, America First. Let's do it. Silicon Valley, US military—match made in heaven." On the other, he's like, "What comes after the nation? Because that's what I'm looking for."

And some people might be like, "Totally contradictory. This guy's just a dumb billionaire with too much money. His brain's rotted." And that's fair.

But the way I look at it is it has a bizarre coherence. There's a bizarre way that for Thiel, this all holds together—that Strauss is the foundation, and Girard is the end, and Thiel is going to pursue that end as long as he can live, whether that's 80 years or 800 years, whether that's on Earth or that's on Mars. That's the goal.

So next time I'll get into Yarvin, I'll get into monarchy, I'll get into all that other stuff. But I wanted to provide a little glimpse into how I think Palantir fits into Thiel's philosophy and theology, and how it sets the stage for much of his politics over the last decade and a half or so.

All right, y'all, thanks for being here. I tried to do this yesterday, and half of the internet was down, and then I did it on YouTube Live, and that didn't work either. So I'm here today, and I appreciate you all listening, and appreciate y'all being here.

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