Palantir Founder: 'They need to wake up scared and go to bed scared'

By Thomas Neuburger

Alex Karp is one of the founders, along with Peter Thiel and others, of Palantir Technologies, a company with its fingers in almost every security pie in the country, and in more than a few other countries’ pies as well (looking at you, Israel).

I’ll have much more on Palantir shortly. This just a start, a taste, introductory spadework. This is what drives its founder. Needless to say, the man’s not just contradictory, he’s a madman as well, pathologically barking insane.

Also dangerous, given the company he leads and the tools it commands.

They need to wake up scared and go to bed scared

Lowlights, then full text. These two concepts stood out. First, if you’re the enemy (whoever that is), the goal is to make you afraid every day of your life.

• Our enemies need to wake up scared and go to bed scared. The average American person understands this.

This man runs one of the most important security firms in the world. And to someone like Karp, the entire world is a threat. He claims to be protecting Americans, but we’re targets too. We’re watching it happen, today.

Next, not only will these enemies pay. The dragnet of punishment will catch everyone connected — cousins, mistresses, friends, bank accounts, all. He’s a mafia don.

• If you're 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.

Everyone finding themselves on the enemies list, your world is laid waste, associates, friends, fellow travelers. Again, we’re watching that now; it’s happening today.

Note the irony in this: “if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons…” Wonder if Karp’s planning to punish the president. Just kidding; he’s probably not. Too many lost Federal contracts if he does.

Full Speech

Now the full text. You can listen above or read. At the Reagan National Security Forum in 2024, Alex Karp said this (my transcript).

Americans are the most loving God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. 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. And you know, when Americans are spending a trillion dollars on defense, what I what [garbled] know, what what I want and what I think my peers want [to know], is “Why are these people [our enemies] keeping our citizens hostage, torturing our people, attacking our allies, maligning us in what was once called the United Nations, basically a discriminatory institution against anything good?” We need to stand up, and those people need to be scared, and that's why this conference is so important. Because we have the best products in the world and we cannot have parity. Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction. If it's even [the playing field, the technology], they will take advantage of our niceness, kindness, our desire to be at home in Nebraska or New Hampshire or wherever we live in our peaceful environments. And they need to wake up scared and go to bed scared. And if you give that to the American people, the American people will go back and say — and honestly, [I] probably shouldn't say this, this why I thought the Democrats were going to lose the election, why they did — Because people want to live in peace. They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology. They want to know they're safe. And safe means that the other person is scared. That's how you make someone safe. And the average American person understands this. Unfortunately, many of the intellectually captured institutions — funneled and intellectually owned by the Berkeley faculty — do not. And that's what they want — it's sure as hell what I want — and that's what Palantir and all the people in this room, I hope, we're here to serve the American people. And my version of service is, the soldiers are happier, the enemies are scared, and Americans go back to enjoying the fact that we're the only one with a real tech scene in this country. And we're going to win everything. That's how I see it.

Like I say, barking mad. But he’s one of the bigs in our world, and has been for years.