Yves here. Tom Neuburger looks at how Americans are being indoctrinated to accept even more state spying…because, of course, baddies. It is striking that the Newspeak is so advanced that “Them” seems to do just fine, as supposed to what one would think are more evocative formulations: Enemies. Dissidents. Criminals. Agitators. Aliens. Threats.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
Masked national guardsmen fire barrage of tear gas into crowd of demonstrators on campus of Kent State University, May 4th, 1970. When the gas dissipated, four students lay dead and several others injured. (Getty Images)
“They need to wake up scared and go to bed scared.”
—Alex Karp, Palantir co-founder. “They” means our enemies, whoever they are.
I want to look at a theme we’ve explored recently, and put a very fine point on it. The theme: “Us vs. Them.”
Who’s Us in Us vs. Them?
If you see the world in an Us vs. Them way, “us” is Americans, or more broadly, citizens of the West, and “them” is the non-Western world: the brown, the global south, the technologically less advanced; the tribal, in many cases; the less city-fied.
Thus — and this has been true since the so-called Age of Exploration, if not millennia before — “us” in the Us vs. Them frame is the “greatly superior.”
That frame puts “us” in good odor. Alex Karp’s admonition — to make sure “our” enemies “wake up scared and go to bed scared” — puts Americans, us in the more advanced West, inside facing out — secure and protected, not just from “our enemies,” but from the evils we deliver to them. To put it in cruder terms, we’re also safe because we’re pissing, not pissed upon.
And this is how we’re supposed to regard the muscular state, the heavily armed, punishing state, as guardians of “us,” as outward-facing armies guarding the gates. The state can mistreat “them” because “they” are not “us.”
But Karp is a billionaire, as is Trump, whom he serves, as are all of the wealthy class, the overly rich. Karp imagines he speaks for a larger “us,” for his class and also Americans generalized. He says so explicitly. From the same speech:
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.
Note the emphasis on “foreign”; the emphasis on wide retribution — your friends, your cousins, your lovers, your fiscal well-being; the intentionally great disproportion between offense and response…
…and the threat of punishment for uncommitted crimes: “if you’re waking up and thinking about harming American citizens”.
As I said earlier, this is a crazy man. If he were your neighbor, he’d get himself put away, to a home, an asylum, a cell. But because he’s rich, American, and pretends to aim his guns outward, he’s praised, rewarded and cheered.
Friends of the Very Rich Are Not Our Friends
But let’s stand back. Who’s “them” for a man like this? That can be answered in more than one way. One is “America’s enemies.” Muslims, yes. But these were America’s enemies in 1963:
Bill Hudson/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The dead in Kent State were our enemies in 1970:
John Filo/Getty Images
And as recently as now, America’s enemies include anyone displeased with the state or unhappy with Musk:
The arson attack on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home has unified the national security state around a broader threat it sees in the American people.
Inside the government, sources tell us, officials are scrambling to define the moment. They’re exploring if there’s any connection between the attempts on Donald Trump’s life; Luigi Mangione and his sympathizers; Tesla vandalism; and even earlier attacks, like the one on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
The Trump Justice Department and the domestic terrorism fighters think they have an answer: Nihilistic Violent Extremists.
So who’s really “them”? The rich have only one enemy: those who threaten their rule.
The Growing Muscular State
Be sure to remember the state when you read stories like this:
The Next US President Will Have Troubling New Surveillance Powers
Over the weekend, President Joe Biden signed legislation not only reauthorizing a major FISA spy program but expanding it in ways that could have major implications for privacy rights in the US.
The ability of the United States to intercept and store Americans’ text messages, calls, and emails in pursuit of foreign intelligence was not only extended but enhanced over the weekend in ways likely to remain enigmatic to the public for years to come. …
At the urging of the agencies and with the help of powerful bipartisan allies on Capitol Hill, the program has also been extended to cover a wide range of new businesses, including US data centers, according to recent analysis by legal experts and civil liberties organizations that were vocally opposed to its passage.
Or this, which first quotes the New York Times…
Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security. This month, House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from federal agencies including the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data.
…then goes on to say:
[Julia] Angwin, author [of the Times piece, is also author] of Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance, obviously knows the Homeland Security Department was created with the specific aim of taking “siloed” information and merging it into a single database. She’s almost certainly familiar with the initial proposal for the DHS, which read, “The Department would fuse and analyze intelligence and other information pertaining to threats to the homeland from multiple sources, including the CIA, NSA, FBI, INS, DEA, DOE, Customs, DOT and data gleaned from other organizations.”
She also knows that list is far from complete: Dragnet Nation is full of examples of the DHS and NSA culling info not just from databases like the Census Bureau but state auto vehicle records, foreclosure records, and private data from “giant companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Verizon and Microsoft.” She mentions the DHS sending $50 million “to state law enforcement agencies to purchase automated license plate readers that allow them to keep tabs on citizens’ movements in ways never before possible,” and even finds a DHS mailer about youth cyber activity that makes anodyne lines like “Know What Your Kids Are Doing” feel creeptastic (there’s even a suggestion about installing monitoring tools that can be used “with or without a kid’s knowledge”).
Or this, a warning about how smart home devices are universal spies:
The spies in your home: How WiFi companies monitor your private life
…In the case of Plume, its devices can scrape together detailed information from every internet-connected device, no matter the make or purpose. Even household chores can be monetized by companies you may not even be aware of.
This raises important legal and ethical questions about consent, data security, and the extent to which your data can be passed to third parties.
All this is to say, it was never about foreign surveillance and foreign deterrence, not since Bush-Cheney’s spy shop created total surveillance and PRISM, not since the Palmer raids birth of the FBI. There’s only one “them” in the mind of Alex Karp’s class: those who would threaten the rich.
Palantir’s kind of thinking has been around for a while, as the Kent State photos remind us. This is Woodward’s account of hearing a tape of Nixon and Haldeman discussing Kent State in light of the brutal reaction to the Attica riots:
What’s new these days, is the power technology has to implement the fascist lunacy.
Palantir has it’s fingers in so many pies: from the original CIA seeded surveillance business, thru to weapons, drones, huge amounts of software to related companies (shared investors usually via Founders Fund or Andreessen’s firm) like OpenAI, Anduril etc. Musk’s DOGE has given Palantir the keys to the kingdom. (Fwiw Musk was rescued from bankruptcy 15 years ago via Thiel funding his businesses).
The scale of surveillance and control is scary now.
Bonus: openAI and Thielverse joint uber-creepy WorldCoin project: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/06/investigative-reports/worldcoin-sam-altmans-crypto-tool-for-technocracy/
Anybody else consider that the War of the Ring is over and Sauron just won?
I think of him more as the reification of Dr. Strangelove— a distinction without a difference perhaps.
For the last 15+ years, whenever I forward articles like this, I often enter this in the subject line:
The Eye of Sauron Has Turned Inwards
Thank you, Yves and Henry.
The NC community will be delighted to hear how Palantir is now embedded in Blighty’s health service and security system.
The quote from Nixon reminds me of what happened in the Tequila Crisis of 1994. A young British banker, working for a US bank, held the pen for a team from the US bank advising the Mexican government. A sentence was included, encouraging the Mexican government to open fire on demonstrators to show the markets and Mexican populace that it meant business with austerity.
It’s not clear whose idea that was. The Grauniad wrote about it when the banker was elected and considered a possible PM. That report has disappeared from the internet. The young reporter is no longer at the Grauniad.
The banker obtained a great office of state, but fell out with the PM, not once, but twice, hastening the PM’s demise. He works for another US bank and leads on their healthcare and technology efforts.
i would recommend the book The Creation of Me, Them and Us by Heather Marsh that goes through how ideological groups are created and how they behave. they explain them like this:
and goes into how the negative image is blamed for all guilt from the ideological group ideal, which is how they create the “justification” to hunt down all the “Enemies” “Dissidents” “Criminals” “Agitators” “Aliens” “Threats” or whatever they will call us next.
Karp is actually doing the US public a service by so candidly revealing the rather naked ambitions and ugly MO of the part of the surveillance capital state he represents: those parts of it untainted by accusations of “woke”, still at liberty to operate their surveillance and censorship systems on the public, and who have much stronger ties to the military and foreign allies. While the “NGO” dominated wing of the censorship industrial complex has fallen into disfavor (in the US at least), Palantir’s for-profit wing is still powering on. Their close relationship to Trump’s White House, especially via JD Vance, has been good for business and has no doubt emboldened their position and made MAGA’s civil liberty stance on internet censorship and surveillance ring very, very hollow.
Karp has openly bragged that Palantir’s technology “stopped” the rise of the far-right in Europe. Whether their digital crackdowns have left democracy intact is not even considered. He has more recently come out strongly on Israel’s side during the Gaza war, and I have little doubt that the likes of Palantirs technology is currently on the front line in suppressing and censoring Palestinian voices and the truth about what is going on in this war. Palantir represents the corporatised outsourcing of government censorship for fun and profit.
Such is the state of modern Silicon Valley: Digital arms dealers selling to ascendant warlords all over the west.
Americans are the most loving God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet.
This is a lie.
I can remember the 1963 Birmingham Children’s Crusade organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, when as pictured Sheriff Bull Connor sicced dogs and fire hoses on high school kids practicing non-violence by simply walking down the sidewalk in groups to protest the segregation of public facilities in their city — a legacy of race-based slavery.
I can remember the 1970 “Four Dead in O-high-O” shootings by a rank of gas-masked Guardsmen at Kent State of teenagers peacefully protesting against being forcibly drafted and sent to slaughter Vietnamese in their homes.
From a century of slaughter of indigenous peoples through the Gaza genocide, Americans have proved themselves again and again to be as bad or worse than their chosen “enemies.” But it benefits our politicians and creates more billionaires to gin-up the masses brainwashed by Hollywood with jingoism against sub-human “threats” who might resist domination.
Of course it is – one of those “noble lies” which is needed to create the endogroup described by SecondLast above, make the reader feel that they part of it, and then to justify going after the exos with extreme prejudice.
The Karp quote reminds me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGe6017JwPw
As Neuberger argues in his essay, the concept of Us vs Them can be easily linked to the muscular/punishing state continually protecting Us from Them.
However, there is also a closely aligned concept of the friend-enemy distinction which looks at conflict in a way I consider to be more profound. Carl Schmitt introduced this idea of the friend-enemy distinction in the early 20th century, as a concept that did not involve the State at all.
He argued that the foundation of what is called the political is the degree of intensity between friend and enemy. He maintains that what he calls the “political,” is inherent in the very nature of humanity, a type of intensive life and thus impossible to eliminate.
The left, perhaps 20 or so years ago, began to use Schmitt’s insight to attack liberalism, which Schmitt saw as a misguided theory of “neutralization” and “depoliticization” incapable of actually dealing with conflict.
For many decades, opinion polls revealed a majority of American voters support raising taxes on the rich. Yet, during those same many decades taxes were reduced for the rich. It’s clear the rich want power over political decisions and control over the wealth of the country and, thus, I totally agree with the final sentence of the article.
The essence of Orwell’s 1984 was that the totalitarian state is possible when you accept what you once knew was wrong, as in Biden and his supporters accepted genocide.
The freedoms of free speech and a free press can be redefined by the rulers as hate speech and misinformation. Privacy and due process becomes something that protects the bad guys while some people don’t deserve due process. I would not be surprised if the slogan ‘tax the rich’ became a punishable form of hate speech.
A new president takes an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The legislative branch takes a slightly different oath which states in part they, “will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” It seems the framers understood that if the executive branch was elected to mind the store and, instead, it and its corporate friends become a threat to liberty, then it’s up to Congress to protect the store and the Constitution.