A strain of violent hypermasculinity seems to be driving the men who built Palantir, the technology firm with billions of dollars in government contracts that’s aiding Donald Trump’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown.
Palantir CEO and co-founder Alex Karp boasted to investors back in February about his company’s ability to help the government “scare” and “kill” its perceived enemies. More recently, he’s been on something of a press tour in an effort to downplay reports that his company is helping Donald Trump build a surveillance state that can be used to harass and spy on the administration’s foes.
Karp has also used this press tour to promote the absurd idea that his company is a bulwark against some sort of war on masculinity. This fusion of hypermasculine agita with Palantir’s mission emerged last week during a public meltdown Karp had while defending his company’s work.
During a sit-down interview at The New York Times’ Dealbook Summit, he berated the Times for its reporting on his company’s data collection practices for Trump and defended himself as an “arrogant prick.” Karp also suggested that media criticism of his company doesn’t matter to him because he has the affection of millions of American men:
Mainstream media at the Washington Post and at The New York Times doesn’t always like me. But that’s great, because you know who does like me? About 10 million people — primarily dudes — in this country. And you know what? I’m gonna use my whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical of migration and has a deterrent capacity that it only uses selectively.
(“Selectively,” of course, can have a variety of meanings.)
Karp also said it would be good for his business if the Trump administration’s controversial boat bombings in international waters — which some legal experts have suggested might constitute war crimes — were deemed constitutional. And he doubled down on a previous claim that the United States’ power and influence is not exerted through its ideas but via “organized violence.”
This kind of hypermasculine violence was echoed by another Palantir co-founder in recent days. Last week, Joe Lonsdale shared a social media post in which he endorsed the idea of public hangings as a way to demonstrate what he called “masculine leadership.”
Meanwhile, other founding members of Palantir have been generating controversy in other ways. Far-right Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who helped launch the company years ago, has raised eyebrows with his apocalyptic fantasies about vanquishing an “Antichrist” that he believes is wreaking havoc in global politics. And David Sacks, who also helped fund the organization when it was started, has been raging online against The New York Times over its report on his alleged self-dealing as Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar. That such mercurial and emotional men are the ones who established the tech company that’s enabling the Trump administration’s illiberal crackdown on immigrants (or anyone else who finds themselves in the Department of Homeland Security’s crosshairs) should raise alarms.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
