Immigrants, other races, sexual minorities, the poor and the powerless in general lack this freedom. They don’t get to make their voices heard or make public the criminal activities of the elite.
This is one of the key takeaways from the 2025 book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West written by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, with the help of Nicholas Zamiska, another executive at the firm.
Palantir released a 22-point summary of the billionaire’s manifesto in mid-April. Here are some of the most important ones:
• 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 nation’s defence. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and in this century, hard power will be built on software. The question is not whether AI 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. They will proceed.
• The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
• The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
One should not read these points as signs of a conservative distortion of AI. In fact, they perfectly reflect how AI effectively functions in our societies. They do not describe an ideology externally imposed on AI but rather the ideology inscribed into its very technological organisation, which, at a minimum, squashes or marginalises possible alternative uses.
The first point advocates nothing less than a total integration of AI within the framework of defence—or, since Trump changed the “Department of Defence” into the “Department of War”, war.
Naturally, this is presented as a necessary measure to protect our openness and democracy. Needless to add, this integration is already a fact.
The second point demands that we resist the “pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles”. These “circles” are, of course, those of the liberal “elite”. The argument is that intolerance towards religion runs against the “openness” of our society. Up to a point, one can understand this argument. However, is not the opposite intolerance much more pervasive and dangerous today, the intolerance towards critical doubts about different religious beliefs?
For me, the third point is the most interesting, with its complaint about the “ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures”. I cannot help but read this as an establishment reaction to the revelations in the Epstein Files.
I disagree with the implicit link between the second and third points. Is it really the case that “space for forgiveness” can only be grounded in a “genuine belief structure”? Aren’t atheists usually prone to forgiveness because many of them conceive of human beings as products of their environment, not fully responsible for their acts?
Karp probably has in mind the strict moralism of the “politically correct” towards racists, sexists, etc. But aren’t religious fanatics much more prone to a non-forgiving stance? The catch is what Karp means by “genuine belief structure”.
In our era of AI, the line between what is and isn’t “genuine” gets more and more difficult to draw. In a recent podcast, John Oliver mentioned niche AI products like bible.ai, which allows users to interact with biblical figures, and noted that premium options sometimes allow chatting with Satan.
While it is easy to make fun of such cases, Oliver is nonetheless justified in his main argument. There are chatbots which function relatively well as psychoanalysts, so what about chatbots—which, of course, already exist—serving as priests, who not only take my confession, but also patiently try to make me a believer. My point is that, even if we perceive such phenomena with brutal irony, the effect can be indistinguishable from a full, genuine belief.
But I think Karp’s point is much more cynical, even if sincere. The Epstein case is the actual focus of his critique. What worries him is how the media mercilessly probe into the past sins of public figures like politicians and businessmen without taking into account that the actions they are investigating took place years ago. His message is that people change and deserve forgiveness. That’s why he mentions the ruthless exposure of public figures’ private lives.
By now, it has become common knowledge that, once the Epstein files became public, they turned the lives of the public elite into a permanent emergency state. As one commentator put it, if the investigation were truly brought to an end, with complete publication of unredacted files and public scrutiny of them, the entire “Deep State” of the US would be shattered.
My reaction to this insight is: so what? Even if we reject limitless probing into private lives, we should bear in mind that what Karp opposes is the public exposure of political and social elites. He doesn’t mention the millions of ordinary people whose secrets are rendered public and whose lives are destroyed by fake news delivered by the very digital media controlled by oligarchs from Karp’s circles.
This brings us to Melania Trump’s recent attack on Jimmy Kimmel. “Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” she declared. “His monologue about my family isn’t comedy. His words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.”
The remedy she proposes is silencing him. “People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community?”
I think the author of these lines should be renamed “Melania Palantir”, since her attack aligns perfectly with Karp’s demand to limit the “ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures”.
What about the ruthless exposure of the private lives of ordinary “private” individuals, individuals who are not public figures?
Whatever one thinks about Kimmel—I do not follow his late-night show—he clearly analyses and makes fun of the public acts of figures like Melania and Trump. As far as I am aware, he does not probe their private secrets; he simply draws conclusions from the ambiguities and nonsense in their public acts.
The problem with Melania is that she herself wrote an autobiography which leaves parts of her past in darkness.
How did she obtain a US green card in 2001 through the EB-1A Visa program, which is often called the “Einstein visa”, since it was designed for individuals with “extraordinary ability” in fields such as arts, sciences, or business? What was her link with Paolo Zampolli? Since it was Melania herself who made her past life public, it is fully justified to question the holes and inconsistencies in her account.
In a perspicuous analysis of Melania’s weird press conference on 9 April 2026, Melissa Kite wrote in The Spectator, “’I have never been friends with Epstein… To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice, Maxwell.” Now, hang on a minute. We all know that since Bill Clinton denied having ‘sexual relations’ with that woman” that saying you haven’t had a relationship can be code for accepting you had something else.”
“What on earth has gone on, we ask ourselves,” Kite went on. “if she is denying she had a ‘relationship’, rather than simply denying they were friends?”
“But the dynamite of the statement is about to come. She continued: ‘I am not Epstein’s victim.’”
This was the strangest aspect of Melania’s statement. “’What the hell?’ This is just an unbelievably explosive thing to say. No one has said, at least that I know of, that she was Epstein’s victim. So by denying it before it’s been said, she is putting that out there. There’s getting ahead of the curve if something is coming, and there’s setting a hare running.”
Kite brought this train of thought to its logical conclusion. “It only serves to make me think: is she somehow, in some way, however far removed, Epstein’s victim? And while that thought may be completely wrong, she herself is the one who put it in my mind. And she must know that would be the effect.”
As a philosopher, my reaction is that here we encounter negativity in the Hegelian sense. Why did Melania defend herself against things nobody accused her of? Why did she act so that her very denial gave rise to what she denied?
Her statements should be read literally: she was not Epstein’s victim, but… Furthermore, as many commentators noticed, if Melania were actually worried about political sickness in the US, she should begin by attacking the obscene and tasteless acts of her own husband. Instead of this, she calls for direct institutional censorship of persons whose show she doesn’t like.
Ultimately, this echoes Karp. Although he advocates and wants to protect freedom of speech, what he really means is Trumpian freedom of speech, reserved for the privileged few to deploy against everyone else.
Photograph courtesy of Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù. Published under a Creative Commons license.
