The fascism expert at the heart of Palantir | If You're Listening | ABC NEWS In-depth

There's a strange story about Alex Karp, the CEO of data analytics company Palantir.Well, almost every story about Alex Karp is strange, but I'm going to tell you this one.Back in 2016, Karp was interviewing a young British man named Louis, who was applying for a position at Palantir.As Louis sat down in Karp's office, Karp began to recite this infamous historic speech.This is Oswald Mosley, the most famous British fascist of all time, giving a speech encouraging the British government to stay out of World War II and let the Nazis do whatever they wanted.Now, it may seem odd for the CEO of a tech company to start reciting a famous fascist speech during a job interview, but to Louis, the interviewee, it was particularly mortifying.

That's because Louis' full name was Louis Mosley.Oswald Mosley, the man who gave this speech, was his grandfather.Louis was applying for this job at Palantir because despite the fact that he wasn't a fascist and disagreed strongly with his grandfather's politics, mere association with a man once voted the worst Briton of the 20th century was enough to close a lot of professional doors for him in the UK.Alex Karp recited several minutes of the speech from memory.Then he got up from his desk and started doing Tai Chi moves.He keeps Tai Chi swords in his office for this kind of thing.

Then he walked out of the room without saying goodbye.So did Louis get the job?

And we are joined now in the studio by thehead of Palantir in the UK, Louis Mosley.Yep, of course he did.

Now, even on the scale of Silicon Valley CEOs, that's a pretty odd sequence of events.It's one of many odd stories about Alex Karp that have come out recently.According to his biography, he decapitates cupcakes and only eats the icing.He speaks German for at least half of every day.He's obsessed with Nordic skiing and often films his quarterly revenue statements while on skis on the side of a mountain.

One of the reasons I do this video on cross -country skiing is it's a very similar analogy.You train.and train and train and then you get to enjoy the splendor of gliding across the snow.In many ways, that's what Palletier did in the last year.

Not to mention the fact that in every interview he does, it kind of looks like it's his first time ever sitting in a chair.

Annoying each other ten years ago.Hopefully I'm annoying you as much as ten years ago.Or more.

We've been living in the world of Alex Karp for a couple of weeks now, looking at his company, Palantir, its history and what it actually does.Last week, our landing point was basically that Palantir has created software that is genuinely useful for organisations which need to deal with lots of different data sources.Palantir breaks down silos and brings genuine efficiencies to things like intelligence gathering.supply chain logistics, military operations, and apparently increasing the popularity of cricket in continental Europe.

Palantir is the platform for making cricket the number one team bat and ball sport in Europe.

While lots of people are concerned that Palantir is basically Big Brother from Orwell's 1984, it's no more inherently sinister than Microsoft PowerPoint or Gmail.But the difference may be in its leadership.

And I'm sure you're enjoying this as much as I am.much as I am.

This unusual fellow who quotes 1930s British fascists at length and swings Tai Chi swords around in the office.So who is Alex Karp?What's his deal?And what happens when governments and institutions hand someone with this particular flavour of personality an incredible amount of power and influence.

You may not like me now, but you're going to agree later.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is if you're listening.There's a reason I started with that story about Oswald Mosley, because it's an example of how nothing is as simple as it seems with Alex Karp.He isn't able to quote fascist rhetoric at length because he's a fan of Oswald Mosley.It's because he spent a big chunk of his life studying fascism.Karp was raised in a left -wing Jewish household, and in the mid -1990s he moved to the German city of Frankfurt to get his PhD in philosophy.Frankfurt is not as random a place as it may seem for an American Jew who did not speak German, like Alex Karp, to study.

It's the location of the incredibly dominant Frankfurt School of Philosophical Thought.

The ideas of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School have come to dominate some of the social science departments in various countries in Europe.and through them to have a continued and very important influence on the young.

Philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the other big thinkers of the Frankfurt School were primarily left -wing German Jews who actually did most of their early work in exile, having fled the Nazis.

And by the mid -30s, the key figures had all settled in the United States.

They spent their careers trying to figure out how the mostadvanced, educated and developed country on earth elected Adolf Hitler as chancellor and then devolved into barbarism and collapsed entirely in less than 15 years.

What actually has gone wrong in Western civilization, that at the very height of a technical progress, we see at the same time the opposite as far as human progress is concerned.Dehumanisation, brutalisation.

They wanted to try and stop it from happening again.

Fascism was militarily defeated.The potential for a repetition was still there.

The school's basic conclusion was that fascism was a byproduct of technological and scientific advances.Modernisation leads to bureaucracy.And that leads to treating humans as administrative units rather than people.And that led to totalitarianism and genocide.

In other words, with the progress of civilisation, we will have a progress in destructiveness.And it seems to me no hypothesis can better explain what happens today than that.

The relentless pursuit of progress and cultural dominance leads to dehumanisation, which leads to catastrophe.Noted chair sitter Alex Karp spent years marinating in the teachings of the Frankfurt School, learning German so he could contribute to discussions and so that he could speak to German people about their lived experience.And one family in particular made a lasting impression.

I know a family in a small village that were super nice to me and took care of me and gave me a coat.Really decent, wonderful old school family.And I talked to the father.And I was like, I asked him and he was like, look.we were all Nazis.

Karp said that they were no longer Nazis when he met them, but he was deeply interested in why their ideology shifted.

And these people were like, became Democrats and built the German society.They were, my estimation is they were in no way, you know, national socialist anymore.

And he came to a conclusion that was quite different from what his mentors and professors in the Frankfurt School thought.

And one of the most important things I learned from them was, you know, it was the fact that America and American ways of thinking made them healthier and wealthier and happier that changed how they saw the world much more than anything else.

This was a revelation for Alex Karp.American thinking cures fascism.According to Karp, when Germany was defeated and occupied by the United States, the former Nazis became healthier and wealthier and happier.And that's what made them not want to be Nazis anymore.It was through these conversations that Karp determined that the cure of fascism isn't addressing the way that progress reduces humans to administrative units like the Frankfurt School suggests.It's cured by being more American.

He doesn't see these ideas as being contradictory.In fact, he thinks the Frankfurt School has updated its thinking recently to align more with his ideas.

The modern version of it is actually neo -Kantian and pro -American.I was particularly interested in the second phase of the Frankfurt School.

Now, it's worth pausing here to make an important point.Most historians would disagree that being more American is what cured Nazism in post -war Germany.Post -war Europe wasn't prosperous just because of American cultural dominance.It was prosperous because thanks to the post -war alliance system, Europe went more than 25 minutes without destroying itself for the first time ever.500 years.The story of those 500 years was an endless cycle of great powers challenging each other for dominance, followed by a catastrophic war.

After World War II, Western Europe entered an unprecedented period of peace and economic cooperation, with a strong focus on promoting human rights.For Alex Karp, though, that was only possible because of American dominance.

I'm very culturally specific in a way that maybe, you know, not everyone is. I think the chance of world survival goes up as America becomes stronger and more dominant.

He thinks that overwhelming American military power will cause a lasting global period of peace.

The obvious solution to war is to have the West having the strongest, most precise, deadly weapons possible so that we can minimize unnecessary, innocent deaths.And by the way, the primary way you minimize these deaths is you're so strong, no one attacks you.

He's ignoring the fact that this was the perspective of every empire that ever existed.Caesar, Napoleon, the British Empire, Emperor Palpatine.They all believed that if they became powerful enough, nobody would ever challenge them.right up until their empire all came crashing down.Karp's sure that it won't happen this time, though, and has dedicated two decades of his life to building one of the most powerful companies in the world, which explicitly aims to increase American military intelligence and corporate dominance through data processing.

Like really what it is, is creating a unified view.over lots of disparate data sources which don't otherwise make sense together.

reading theory about fascism and totalitarianism.He learned German so he could read about it in its native language.He thought about it a bunch and then bent his ideology into a shape that would allow him to lead a company that reduces everything from information to resources to humans to administrative units.Or, put simply, our product is used to on occasion to kill people.In the last three years, Palantir has added AI to the mix, and the company has gone into hyperdrive, providing services to corporate law enforcement and military clients in America and in US allied countries.And Alex Karp thinks that it's all working great.

In fact, better than working, he explicitly says that Palantir has played a role in stopping fascism and far -right politics in Europe.

fire rate people.

Karp said that in February 2023, while Joe Biden was the US president.At the time, the clear policy of the US government was to support moderate political parties in Europe and support Ukraine in its fight against Russia.Palantir was very happy to help with both those things.But then something happened which challenged Western dominance more than anything had in years.On October 7th, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing more than a thousand people.A week later, Karp took out a full page ad in the New York Times, a black page with white text, Palantir stands with Israel.

On Palantir's earnings call soon afterwards, he announcedthe company's position on the increasingly fragile state of the world.

There is no such thing anymore of being on all sides.Palantir only supplies its products to Western allies.We've never supplied our products to enemies.We proudly support the US government.I am proud that we are supporting Israel in every way we can.

According to Karp's biography, the attack on Israel played a role in convincing him.that Donald Trump would likely return to the US presidency.October 7th put terrorism back on the front page and made Americans feel their way of life was under threat.

And as Karp says, If you don't protect terror, the terrorism, you get far right people.

As a result, Karp began adjusting his worldview to fit whatever Trump's America might need from Palantir.America was about to become more right wing.But it was still crucial for Palantir to ensure American dominance over the rest of the world.So Palantir was ready to help with whatever President Trump might need.And what he needed was this.

Under President Trump's leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3 ,000 arrests for ICE every day and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher.

Palantir has been working with the U .S.Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, ICE, since 2016.But their cooperation stepped up a gear after Donald Trump's second inauguration when they signed a contract to provide a product they called Elite.

So it is a map interface and an ICE official will simply draw a circle or a square onto that map and all of these small pins will appear.They'll then click onto one of those pins and that will be a specific person or an ICE's sort of vernacular, a target.That'll be their name, date of birth, a photo if they have it, and as you said, the address and the address.confidence score.

This is Palantir doing what Palantir does best.Last week we illustrated it using marbles in jars.Lots of different bits of information gathered by different parts of the government, which previously had been impossible to find and connect with each other.With Elite, ICE could get marbles of information from, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles files, police reports, and subpoenaed social media data like location history and private messages, and build a fluid web of intelligence and surveillance.

It seems to be a tool that brings together data from all of these usually separate places and sources and brings it into a sort of all -in -one single tool that ICE can use to find neighborhoods to raid, maybe write up target lists and eventually supervisors to approve those lists and send people out into the field.

For ICE investigators, what once required weeks of cross -checking siloed systems could now be done in hours or less.Does that mean that people's right to privacy is being abused?

Well, Karp thinks not.When people are worried about surveillance, of course, there's there are huge dangers there.But, you know, it's like you will have far fewer rights if we're if America's not in the lead.

Now, look, you could basically use that kind of thinking to justify pretty much anything.But it's interesting to think about this idea in the context of Alex Karp's background.How do you think he feels about his company being used by masked men to round up large numbers of people and pull them into unmarked vans?

But I'm asking you just as a person on a sort of sort of a moral basis as a human, when you see people, young people, mothers and fathers and families getting ripped apart with the masks on, with the ice folks, how you what you think of that?

Of course, but at this point you're abusing empathy because I of course don't like that.No one likes that.No American.This is the fairest, least bigoted, most open -minded culture in the world.

And yet.

This is what they fear.

Despite Palantir's effectiveness in ramping up ICE's capacity, setting quotas for deportations has led to a lot of mistakes.

Since October, courts have found more than 4 ,000 immigrants were detained illegally.

Many of the people arrested by ICE are being denied their constitutional rights.

A majority of the people that are detained have no criminal history and no basis for their detention.They can be transferred out of state at ICE's whim.

The number of people being arrested on the streets of American cities and towns has increased by a factor of 11.People, including American citizens, have been wrongfully deported.But as Karp says, this is what the American people voted for.

And I personally think that U .S.people, meaning citizens, have to decide by their vote what our immigration policy is going to be.

And therefore, to limit the U .S.government's access to Palantir's technology would be undemocratic.Last year, business journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Karp a pointed question.

You wrote your college thesis on fascism.There's a view.And I'm curious where you land.Do you think that President Trump is a fascist?

Of course not.I think that's stupid, honestly.And you know what?Again, you can go all day on this stuff.It's honestly idiotic.I grew up half my life in Germany.

I spent time with actual fascists.I went and talked to lots of former Nazis.It's like we have a democratic society.And, you know, he won in a landslide.

The key question is, does Alex Karp have a red line when it comes to Palantir's operations?Is there any request that a democratically elected president could make which he would refuse?That question has very much come to the forefront after something that happened in January this year with the AI company Anthropic and their chatbot Claude.

The US military has been pretty keen to get unrestricted access to Claude's abilities.Anthropic wasn't exactly comfortable with this.They were worried about Claude being used for surveillance and to develop weapons.

What Anthropic was particularly concerned about was Claude being used to spy on American citizens and create fully autonomous weapons.

Leading to Anthropic's CEO deciding they wouldn't cooperate with the Pentagon.

The Pentagon's position here is simple.Anthropic is a defence contractor.They are providing a service to the US military, and the US military thinks it should have the right to use that service however it wants.It's other defence contractors, the ones who make tanks, fighter jets, ships and missiles, don't get a say in how those things are used.Lockheed Martin can't say, actually you can't use our F -35 fighter jet to bomb Iran.So what makes Anthropic different?

Why should they get to decide what the democratically elected US government can use their service for?Anthropic's position is, well, we can't tell you what to do, but we also don't have to give you access to our product.

I think that there's no issue in Anthropic taking a stance.You know, in fact, that that should be applauded.There's no requirement for them to sell to the federal government.

Anthropic drew a red line and said, we will not help you spy on American citizens or hand over control of deadly weapons to AI.The U .S.government said, well, in that case, we'll find someone who will.like Anthropic's biggest competitor, OpenAI.

OpenAI, by the way, is the company the US government has just made their new AI provider.

The question that's hanging over OpenAI, and indeed Palantir, is what is your redline?Does Alex Karp have one?In November last year, Alex Karp indicated that Palantir might.

You're asking, does our product allow for civil rights abuses?And will I intervene?Yeah.Our product is the hardest in the world to violate.Will I intervene?Yes.

But he doesn't think he's ever going to have to.It is the hardest product to misuse, to take away the rights of human beings that's ever been built.

And yet, It is, at its very core, a system that reduces humans to administrative units, to dots on a map who can be killed by drones or scooped up by masked federal agents.Alex Karp, of all people, must know that there is a threat that that system will be abused by an authoritarian government.

Will I intervene?Yes.

But that relies on him identifying when his system is being abused.The trouble is, according to Karp, America is the solution to the world's problems.And so long as it continues to be a democracy, whoever runs America gets to decide what America is all about.So what right does he or any private citizen have to stand in the way?I think I should do a Tai Chi move.What is a Tai Chi move?