Disclaimer: Side effects may include laughter and/or anger. Read or watch at your own risk.
Let’s talk about Alex Karp — CEO of Palantir Technologies, the largest government surveillance software operation in human history. It is absolutely Skynet, and it is growing.
We’ve discussed this man before. The ponytailed philosopher-warrior. The neurodivergent übermensch in a tailored blazer who speaks in complete sentences that sound like they were translated from the original Nietzsche by a malfunctioning ChatGPT running on jet fuel and grievance. A man who looks exactly like what would happen if a mad scientist crossed Ernest Borgnine with a pigeon, then gave it a $350 billion market cap and told it to fix democracy from the outside.
Alex Karp wants your children to go to war. He is very passionate about this. He has published a whole book about it — The Technological Republic — which is the kind of title that tells you immediately this guy has never had to parallel park, do his own laundry, or explain to a draft board why his knees don’t work.
He and his co-author slapped together a 22-point manifesto, dropped it on X on a Sunday like a flaming bag of dog poop on the nation’s doorstep, and among those 22 radiant points of visionary insight was a crystal-clear call: universal national service. A draft. The whole deal. Everyone goes. Everyone shares the risk.
Everyone, that is, except Palantir Technologies, which paid:
Exactly zero dollars — none, zip, goose egg, the big donut, not a thin dime — in federal income taxes in 2025, despite reporting a cool $1.5 billion in U.S. income.
They used a provision in something actually, genuinely, sincerely called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — which sounds like the title of a Schoolhouse Rock episode written by a defense contractor — to deduct their research expenses down to approximately nothing. So your kids can share in the risk and the cost, and Palantir will share in the profits.
That’s the deal. That’s the manifesto. Does this seem fair to you? Because Alex Karp has a ponytail and a philosophy degree and he thinks it’s extremely fair.
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Now let’s acknowledge the sheer, almost supernatural audacity of all this. What we’re witnessing is a $350 billion company — which holds a ten-billion-dollar contract with the U.S. Army, meaning it’s got the Pentagon on retainer like a very well-armed family lawyer — publicly agitating for a military draft while simultaneously not paying the taxes that would fund said military.
That’s like a fire hose manufacturer burning your house down and then selling you the hose on credit. That’s not a business model. That’s a hostage situation with better branding.
Palantir’s platforms also power something called Project Maven — the Pentagon’s AI-driven targeting and surveillance program, which has reportedly been used to help generate targeting lists for the Israeli military in Gaza. So when Karp told an earnings call that Palantir’s mission was to —
“Scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them.”
— Alex Karp, Palantir Technologies earnings call
— he wasn’t doing a bit. He wasn’t workshopping material for the Aspen Ideas Festival open mic. He meant it like a business objective, delivered with all the casual serenity of a man ordering a medium drip coffee and a side of geopolitical consequence.
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Palantir dropped their draft manifesto during week seven of U.S. military involvement in Iran. The Selective Service, meanwhile, is already moving toward automatic registration of all eligible men ages 18 to 26, set to kick in December 18th, 2026 — meaning the government is literally building the intake funnel right now, while Palantir stands outside the funnel with a megaphone yelling “fill ‘er up.”
The infrastructure for mass conscription is assembling itself like a Transformer that nobody asked for, and the company with the AI targeting contracts is cheerleading from the sideline, tax-free.
· · ·
Thomas Jefferson — tall fella, wrote some stuff, complicated legacy — warned in 1777 that a military draft would be:
“The most unpopular and impracticable thing that could be attempted.”
— Thomas Jefferson, 1777
He called conscription “the last of all oppressions.” In fact, the Royal Navy’s habit of press-ganging American sailors was so enraging it made it into the Declaration of Independence itself — one of the actual 27 grievances against King George III that justified the whole revolution. The founding document of the country you’re currently living in contains a specific complaint about forced military service. It’s not fine print.
And here comes Palantir, in the year of our Lord 2026, going: “You know what, Jefferson, you big baby — we’ve thought about it, and we think universal national service is actually a great idea. Everyone should share in the risk.”
And then they go back to not sharing in the tax burden.
There’s a word for this. Several words, actually. Most of them aren’t suitable for public radio before ten p.m.
It’s like a tobacco company publishing a pamphlet titled Yes, We’ve Been Killing You — Here’s How To Buy More Cigarettes. The audacity is so total, so complete, so crystalline in its perfection that it wraps around and becomes its own kind of genius. The French have a word for something so ugly it becomes beautiful.
The draft was last used on December 7th, 1972. Vietnam. It ended because the American public made it extremely clear — through protest, through civil disobedience, through the sustained and righteous fury of a generation that didn’t want to die in a jungle for reasons nobody could quite explain — that the whole business was, as Jefferson put it, the last of all oppressions.
That was fifty-four years ago.
And Palantir, for its part, did not respond to Fortune magazine’s request for comment. Of course they didn’t.
They don’t respond to comment requests. They issue manifestos. There’s a difference, and that difference is what happens when you’ve got ten billion in Army contracts and zero federal taxes and a guy with a ponytail who’s read too much Schmitt and not enough Thoreau.
Alex Karp wants your kids. He just doesn’t want your tax bill.
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