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Palantir is hungry—Germany is on the menu

AI-powered policing may soon be a reality in Europe

Tigris Vici
09/05/2026

Palantir is a Silicon Valley based company that produces AI software primarily for surveillance and military use. Its largest customer is the US Department of Defense. As per official US government spending data, Palantir has received 4.2 Billion USD in contracts (US Army, US Airforce, and ICE being the three largest). With the US government firmly in their pocket, and a foothold in the UK, with the National Health Service, Palantir has its sights set on Europe. German police agencies are likely to be next.

The software that Palantir produces creates ontologies—systems that can create an accurate model of the world by combining data from multiple sources. At a conference in February 2026, Cameron Stanley—the Chief Digital and AI officer of the US Department of War—demonstrated how their AI based tool could be used to automate the military chain of command by combining satellite data, realtime intelligence, and machine vision. A recent New York Times article reveals that “…(ICE) agents are tapping into a database, built by the data analytics company Palantir, that combines government and commercial data to identify real-time locations for individuals they are pursuing.” Palantir is becoming true to its name—an all-seeing eye for Sauron.

In 2023, all twenty police agencies in Germany (16 state and 4 federal) came together to announce a long-term vision called Police 20/20 (P20). One slide says: “In future, the existing functions will be offered within a single system in the same form for all participants.” The single system that they are talking about is very likely to be Palantir. Four states have already implemented Palantir’s Gotham software—Hessen (2017), NRW (2019), Bayern (2024), and most recently Baden-Württemberg (2025). Sachsen-Anhalt and Berlin are likely to be next. Palantir might soon have access to all the police databases in Germany.

The biggest barrier to Palantir’s entry into Germany, thus far, has been legal. In 2023, the Federal Constitutional Court placed limits on what the police in Hessen are allowed to do with Palantir’s software. Around the same time, the then Minister of Interior, Nancy Faeser (SPD) blocked federal police agencies from using Palantir. Her successor, though, has other ideas. In March 2026, Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), introduced new draft legislation that will clear the way for the use of AI based surveillance software in federal police agencies.

Opposition to the draft laws—called Lex Palantir by critics—has come largely from civil society actors. A coalition of groups including Amnesty International, Chaos Computer Club, and Pro Asyl has launched a campaign arguing that the legislation violates our fundamental rights, and is especially discriminatory towards asylum seekers. The group Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.v (GFF) has also launched a legal challenge against Palantir in Bavaria.

Organized political opposition, however, seems to be lacking. In Baden-Württemberg, where Palantir was legalised most recently, the Green party—a member of the ruling coalition—initially claimed ignorance of the deal. Later it turns out there might have been a backroom deal with the CDU—a bigger nature reserve in exchange for allowing the police to use Palantir. A recent query tabled at the Bundestag, asks the Interior Ministry about Palantir—and asks about its use at the country’s borders. The query is from—surprise, surprise—the AfD faction.
The rightward swing (lurch?) in German politics plays perfectly into the Palantir playbook. In a post on X, which is based on their CEO Alex Karp’s new book they say: “One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.” They go on to say “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price.” On their marketing website they say “Our software powers real-time, AI-driven decisions in critical government and commercial enterprises in the West, from the factory floors to the front lines.” The masks are off. Palantir’s software, combined with Germany’s plans to build the biggest army in Europe by 2039 is a truly ominous sign for the world. It will take a serious, concerted effort from the opposition to stop this. Sadly, all is quiet on the Left front!

Racial violence, ICE, and street vendors in Los Angeles

How ICE raids devastated LA’s street vendors — and what their resistance reveals about racial violence

Dr. Fazila Bhimji
08/05/2026

On July 7, 2025 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the border patrol—commonly referred to as the la Migra within the Latina/o/x communities—descended upon McArthur Park, a well-known public space in Los Angeles, drawing widespread attention in the media and amongst politicians. McArthur Park is located in the Westlake district of Los Angeles where there is a significant concentration of Salvadoran and Guatemalan residents—known as the West Coast’s ‘Ellis Island’. For many Central Americans who were affected by U.S.-shaped wars, Westlake came to be their first arrival point in the United States. According to the last U.S. census report, 52% of Westlake’s population is foreign-born, which includes individuals who are not U.S. citizens by birth. The largest share of foreign born residents are from Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador.

Along Alvarado Street, surrounding MacArthur Park, street vendors sell a range of items from food to clothes to household goods. According to an LA-based publication, LA Taco, these vendors are mainly older adults and single mothers whose main source of income is selling along this stretch. Thus, the spectacle created by ICE and the U.S. Military in MacArthur Park in early July 2025, and subsequent arrests, should be understood as racial profiling and harassment of brown immigrants and people who are most exposed, vulnerable, and exploitable, such as street vendors, resident migrants, and consumers who frequented this part of Los Angeles.

During February and March 2026, as part of a research project, I spent significant time in this area and its surrounding vicinity. I sought to better understand the impact of ICE raids specifically on street vendors, gathering individual accounts due to a severe lack of personalized and nuanced testaments in news reports. Furthermore, the international media tends to paint a passive image of survivors of ICE raids and their family. This essay aims to show their vulnerabilities, as well as their agentic ways of being.

Although ICE raids have declined in the last months, according to the LA Times, ICE, in budget documents, says it plans to remove 1 million people this fiscal year and next, compared with roughly 442,000 last year. Thus, the decline in the raids must not be understood entirely in positive terms. ICE agents’ persistent racial violence and abductions of working-class brown communities need urgent attention. Street vendors trying to earn a living suffer ICE crackdowns, financial costs, family separations, mistreatment in detention centres, and deportations; the most vulnerable are direly affected. Furthermore, the abduction of working class migrants should not be understood merely as a local phenomena. As acknowledged by People’s Dispatch: the ‘ICE-ization’ of immigration policy refers to the externalization of borders, prolonged detention, and criminalization of undocumented individuals, which in turn has resulted in complaints with international bodies.

In the German context for example, in the last decade, several reforms to German migration have been imposed in order to facilitate deportations. The grounds for detention have been broadened and additional types of detention, including detention during the asylum procedure, detention in the return border procedure, and detention during checks at external borders are being implemented. In this regard, the Left must engage not only with ICE as an institution, but with the broader “ICE-ization” of immigration policy—an expansion of enforcement logics where the state system produces necropolitical conditions for marginalized migrants in various parts of the world, where some lives are considered worthy of living while others are simply rendered disposable.

A Brief History of Street Vendors in Los Angeles

Informal street food vending in Los Angeles began in the mid-1980s. In a LA Times editorial, the executive director of the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN) and the coordinator of the street vending legalization campaign for Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) pointed out that it started with the immigration of people into the U.S. from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Latina/o/x immigrants in many instances brought with them traditions of vending from their countries of origin. From that decade on, there was an increase in vending. Some of the reasons were the economic recession of 1982 in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, as well as the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRC A), which penalized employers for hiring undocumented workers. Following resistance and campaigns by the vendors and their networks, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 946 (SB 946) in 2018, decriminalizing street vending in California. However, the Los Angeles City Council created restricted zones that prohibited street vending. Street vending was prohibited in the tourist districts of Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles Coliseum, Convention Center/L.A. Live, Dodger Stadium, Hollywood Walk of Fame, El Pueblo De Los Angeles Historical Monument, Universal Studios, and Universal City Walk. Nevertheless, in February 2024, street vending was completely legalized when the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to eliminate restricted street vending zones. According to recent estimates, street vending is said to be a $504 million industry in Los Angeles with 80% of the street vendors constituting women.

Street Vendors and ICE in Los Angeles

Street vendors in Los Angeles came under attack by ICE agents in the summer of 2025 when Donald Trump’s U.S. immigration officers began to incur immigration sweeps in Los Angeles. The immigration raids were paused for about two months in the summer of 2025, but after the supreme court reversed a temporary restraining order that banned the Trump administration from stopping people solely based on their race, language, or the type of employment held across the city, the raids increased. Several street vendors have been arrested and detained since June 2025.

In one Los Angeles neighbourhood—around 6th and Union—approximately 10 to 15 Guatemalan women between the ages of 30 and 45, along with a few men, sold breakfast, coffee, and takeaway lunches on the sidewalk to construction workers between 5 and 9AM. The street vendors animated the sidewalks in the early morning, creating a rich and pleasant sensory atmosphere. Many of the women wore colorful, hand-embroidered traditional aprons as they worked, and their tables—lined with pots of food and drinks—were covered in plastic tablecloths with colorful floral patterns. Music drifted from one corner of the sidewalk, and the aromas of freshly prepared stews, black beans, and coffee filled the air. As they served breakfast or packed take-away lunches, the women often paused to exchange a few friendly words with their mostly male customers.

In the summer of 2025, ICE abducted three of the women from this particular area while the others fled leaving their carts behind. As part of a self-designed ethnographic research project, and as an ardent solidarity supporter of LA street vendors, I decided to have conversations with them on the street during my visit to Los Angeles. Initially, some of the street vendors were understandably reticent, but upon frequent visits, many of them opened up to me. However, there were others who wanted their stories publicized. A 40-year-old woman, who had been living in Los Angeles for ten years and is a mother of six, paid $1,800 for a one-bedroom apartment, and earned a living selling taquitos, coffee, avena, and sodas, described her escape in a vivid manner. She told me: “When ICE came, I ran and ran and ran until I managed to get out of sight. My legs hurt for a week because I’m not used to running. After ICE came, I didn’t leave the house for a month, and I lost an entire month’s earnings.“ Given that ICE tactics routinely include early-morning raids without warrants, food vendors who sell breakfast and lunches to construction workers were not surprisingly targeted.

Similarly, in another part of Los Angeles, known as the El Salvador corridor where several migrants from El Salvador sell traditional foods such as pupusas along with health products and other items, ICE conducted raids over two days in November 2025. As one Salvadoran woman in her 50s who sold pupusas, earns roughly $100 to $150, and pays some rent for the space from which she sells told me: “I was not arrested, but I witnessed ICE grab six people. Usually they come early in the morning. I observed several people running and leaving their stuff.” She pointed across the street and said: “They took away the woman who used to sell there. In total ICE took ten of the street vendors, only one of whom was released.”

In other parts of Los Angeles, street vendors reported seeing masked men in unmarked vans—whom they suspected were from ICE—but said that these men did not bother them, rather they just patrolled the area and made their presence felt. Nevertheless, the majority of the street vendors I spoke with conducted their business in precarious conditions and recognized they were vulnerable to ICE raids. Furthermore, they stated that their earnings had substantially decreased by 50 to 60% since ICE began to arrest migrants. Customers, fearing ICE, chose to stay at home. Similarly, during the height of the raids and abductions, several of the vendors stated that they stayed at home and lost income. However, others were supported by community organizations who raised money and ‘bought out’ the vendors for some days, matching their lost income. The street vendors believed that they were being treated unjustly: they were simply working and had not committed any crime. As one Honduran male street vendor selling lighters in the vicinity of MacArthur Park stated indignantly: “You could penalize me if I make a mistake, but you cannot penalize me if I am here to earn my living because this is my right.” He further stated that the mood of the street vendors can be described as follows: “We are scared, we are sad, we are in pain because our freedom has been seized from us.”

Despite the precarious conditions, the vendors continued selling and remained highly visible in parts of Los Angeles. Karandikar et al point out that it is important to recognize that it is ultimately women and their children who bear the brunt of these raids in the form of: family separation, displacement, caregiving burdens, legal precarity, violations of bodily autonomy, and economic instability. Nevertheless, they were forced to sell because they needed to survive and support their families.

Adelanto Detention Center

Following ICE abductions, street vendors were held in detention centers until they either agreed to ‘voluntary’ deportations or secured release on bond, which could potentially cost thousands of dollars. For example, a street vendor Emma De Paz of Guatemalan origin, who had been in Los Angeles for 25 years, reported to the LA Times and described her experience at Adelanto Detention Center, which is located about 90 miles northeast of the city. She reported losing weight and being fed meals that included expired beans or ham. She further stated that she was denied access to her medication at the detention center.

Similarly, in the neighborhood of Los Angeles where I had spent considerable time speaking with food vendors—and where several women had experienced ICE raids—one daughter told me that those detained were taken to the same detention center where they faced harsh and distressing conditions. The daughter contacted an immigration lawyer, raised about $10,000, and the women were released on bond. She told me she had been studying to become a nurse and, fortunately, was on summer break when her mother was arrested, giving her the time to help secure her release. She initially sought support from CARECEN, an organization that provides low-cost legal services to immigrants, but discovered that they lacked the capacity to take on her case. After considerable effort, she found a lawyer who agreed to assist her. She also had to gather reference letters on her mother’s behalf and present them to the judge. She explained that each case was unique. Individuals who could demonstrate that they had dependents—such as young children or a child with a disability—were generally more likely to be granted release. However, for individuals unable to demonstrate that they had dependents, securing release became much more difficult.

Under President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the administration tripled the detention capacity of ICE, and it became the most heavily funded domestic enforcement agency. Its annual budget has risen to $11.3 billion, exceeding that of the FBI. The legislation also allocates $45 billion to expand detention facilities, $29 billion for operational costs, and provides funding to recruit 10,000 additional agents. A total of 46 people have died while in their custody or detention facilities since the start of the second Trump administration in January 2025.

A report produced by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) in June 2025 revealed deeply troubling issues in detention centres including: (1) inadequate access to medical treatment, such as life-saving medication and wound care, and exposure to widespread respiratory illnesses; (2) inadequate access to food and water, including extreme delays in meal distribution, provision of food that results in significant health issues, and a shortage of drinking water; (3) inadequate access to clean clothes, with many remaining in soiled clothing for long periods of time; and (4) minimal opportunities to contact family. Further intensifying these issues, many of the people interviewed had never experienced incarceration and felt overwhelmed and terrified by their confinement in a locked, jail-like facility.

According to CAIR LA, on 8 September 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6–3 to lift restrictions placed by a judge on immigration enforcement, effectively permitting ICE agents to ‘intensify racially profiling, detaining, and interrogating Latina/o/x and immigrant communities.’ The Supreme Court’s decision granted the Trump administration’s request to suspend a previous order from a lower federal court that barred immigration officers from stopping and targeting individuals for questioning about their immigration status based solely on broad factors—such as their perceived ethnicity, speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent, being present in specific locations such as a car wash, or the type of work they do.

Individuals targeted for detention by ICE agents have black or brown skin. People who ‘look undocumented’ and work on the streets to eke out a living are the most vulnerable to raids, arrests, prolonged detention, and even deportations. Masked men from ICE have wrongfully detained many who are either U.S. citizens or who have a legal right to be here. Thus, the raids and kidnappings of street vendors must be understood within the framework of institutional racism and systemic racial violence.

“There needs to be hope”

Interview with singer-songwriter David Rovics

Phil Butland
05/05/2026

Hi there David. Thanks for talking to us. Could you briefly introduce yourself ?

I’m David Rovics. I’m a singer-songwriter from Portland, Oregon. I’m basically fanning the flames of discontent with music in the tradition of the Wobblies, Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and a lot of other people over the ages from around the world who sing songs about what’s happening in an effort to educate and change things, to inspire people to do something about it.

I hate to do this, but could I ask you about Wim Wenders? At this year’s Berlinale, Wenders made a very confused speech in which he—inasmuch as it made sense at all—argued that Art is on a different sphere to politics. Which means that you shouldn’t be singing about politics. You should be singing about “important things”.

Yeah, it was such a bizarre thing. People often talk about how Art should be political, and I disagree with them, too, because I think Art can be anything. It’s just a tool like so many other things. It can be used for political purposes or escapist purposes. It can be right wing or left wing. It can be so many things.

It can encourage people to fight, or to empathize with each other and not fight. It’s a very powerful thing, but for Wenders to say that it’s not political or shouldn’t be political is just completely ridiculous. It has nothing to do with historical reality.

I don’t know who his funders are. I understand why, in Germany, he wants to just completely avoid the whole question of Palestine and Israel. I understand why he’d be annoyed with people who are trying to highlight that issue, because it’s so incredibly divisive, and he wants to host a film festival, not a big argument.

But still, this is the world we’re living in, where Israel is committing genocide and of course, film makers are going to respond to that, and they have done absolutely brilliantly. I would think that somebody like him would be commending the incredible film makers who have been risking their lives to cover what’s happening in Gaza, like the ones who just put out this film Palestine 36, which is brilliant.

You’re on tour in Europe at the moment. How’s that going so far?

Great. This is our third of three gigs in Germany, and we still have a month more of gigs around Scandinavia and England, Scotland, and it’s been just wonderful. All three gigs have been just fabulous.

You’ve always been explicit about your views on Palestine. Have you noticed any change in Germany this time around?

I haven’t, but I haven’t been here long enough to really say. I’ve been hearing so much about the scene in Germany. I hear a lot about protests that are happening here where the police are being violent. And, of course, I assume that there are protests happening where the police are not being violent, but I’m just seeing the ones where they are.

You see a lot of stuff on Instagram, every time somebody gets harassed for wearing a keffiyeh. You could develop the impression that this is happening all the time in Germany. We have been wearing keffiyehs all over the place, and we’ve gotten some maybe unhappy looks from some people, but we certainly haven’t been harassed by anyone.

Germany is always a complicated place when it comes to Palestine. It’s not new for it to be complicated. The first march I ever went on in Germany in support of the Palestinian struggle, there was one white German woman who was my girlfriend at the time, and it was me and one friend of hers. Otherwise, everybody in the crowd was Arab.

You are US-American. Let’s look at the States. Is Trump a qualitative shift in what’s happening there?

For anybody who’s alive in the US today, most people would say that it feels like a qualitative shift, because he just really seems to be just doing whatever he wants. He doesn’t seem to have a plan. There are other people who have all kinds of plans and want to influence him, but he himself seems to be just winging it.

That’s maybe new. He’s qualitatively different in that sense. But otherwise, in terms of the US pursuing Empire and invading countries all over the world for resources and on false pretences—that’s nothing new. It’s just that he’s so uniquely unable to even maintain a false pretence for more than five minutes.

He changes his tactics every half hour. So, it is new and scary for people in a way that most people haven’t felt that kind of fear of possible nuclear holocaust, because we haven’t had somebody who is so completely irrational.

George W Bush was pretty darn irrational, and all his advisors were making stuff up in order to go to war. So that’s really not much different, except that then it was a group of people working together to pull the wool over our eyes in a methodical way over the course of years in order to carry out their agenda. Whereas there doesn’t seem to be any real thought going on here.

I was thinking the other day that we haven’t had a US president who is so irrational. And then I thought: but we had George W Bush, and Reagan before him. We seem to be having the same discussion about uniquely mad US presidents once a generation.

Look at Reagan and George W. They all just seem so tame in comparison. Andrew Jackson maybe. With Reagan we thought that too. And Reagan was reasonable and equinimical. Maybe I made that word up.

What can our side do against the very real threat of Trump?

In the context of the US, it seems to me that the capability of the Left to organize is so degraded at this point, because of real, long-term systematic efforts on the part of the secret police to disorient the Left. They’ve been doing that for over 100 years. It’s been the main purpose of the FBI.

I think, in the wake of 9/11 and then with the rise of social media and everything that’s happened with the power of these algorithms to brainwash people, they’ve really succeeded in creating a situation where people don’t know how to organize without alienating everybody. The form of organizing that takes place is the kind that you organize a demo that nobody wants to ever go to a demo again. That’s not what we need.

The first thing we need is to remember how to organize again, and remember how to build a movement based on solidarity and bringing people together to fight for a common cause. We must understand the power of culture in that process, and use music and art to bring people together, which is something that has been systematically forgotten by the US Left in a way that has not been forgotten in most of the world.

There’s really basic stuff that needs to happen before any serious organizing is going to be able to happen. It’s a sad situation. I always want to be able to say something more hopeful, but it’s just a dismal, bleak situation on the Left in the US. You can have demos all over the country against Trump, and they hardly mention the fact that the US has just killed the entire leadership of Iran and is bombing bridges and schools.

What’s your view of the rise of the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America?

I view it as a basically positive development that has attracted a lot of energy. A lot of people have gotten involved, and they’ve supported campaigns of people like Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and AOC. All that is very positive, even if they don’t have power—because they’re such a small minority. Even if they’re running as Democrats, they don’t represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

But they can have some kind of a voice, and they can expose the rest of the party for being so warmongering. Every time Sanders puts out a bill saying, “Do you support sending arms to Israel?”—the Democrats have to vote Yes or No. That exposes who are the ones who support this genocide and who’s opposing it, but they always continue to send the arms.

It’s a positive development, but the DSA also faces the same kinds of problems as the rest of the US Left. It hasn’t figured out how to rise above sectarianism. There’s still this paranoia about associating with the wrong people who have the wrong opinions about something. The paranoia permeating the US Left also permeates the DSA.

Let’s go on to the role of culture. I don’t want to misquote you, but you said something like US culture has not managed to be as political as other cultures?

US culture historically has been profoundly political. Music and art and culture have been so central to the social movements like the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1930s, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. These were all tremendously musical movements that were incredibly impactful on society because of their emphasis on using music and art to organize and educate and inspire.

That’s not at all unique to the US. Music that came out of these movements spread around the world and impacted people in many other societies as well. But what has happened, especially in the past 20 years, has been a divorcing of culture from politics in the minds of so many Americans.

Most of the time in most of the country, when you have some kind of political rally, there is no live music, and there’s very little in the way of any artistic expression. It’s like people with signs. It looks like a protest from some TV series that’s making fun of protests for how boring they are.

The Left Berlin has a radio programme, and the people who do the music tease me for suggesting the music of old white men. For the anniversary of Kent State, I said why not play Neil Young’s Ohio? And they say there is all sorts of really interesting Latino music, hip-hop, rap that is still very political and still talking to poor people. I’m just too old to get it. Do you think that it’s possible that there is still this music going on, but it’s addressing a different audience?

Oh, definitely, yeah. In all kinds of genres. The thing about the whole rock phenomenon, people like Neil Young and everything that came out of the 50s, 60s, 70s, it’s not people’s fault that they happen to like all these musicians who are white men, because the industry itself is a totally racist industry.

Its definition of rock music was: it’s a white form of music. If you’re not white, then you’re playing rhythm and blues. It was also a white male phenomenon. All the singers of all the rock bands had to be white men. That was the arrangement. All the other members of the bands had to be white men.

The only exception to that rule was San Francisco, because nobody in San Francisco would cooperate with the industry. They allowed San Francisco to be an exception to the rule for a little while. So that’s where Janis Joplin came out, Jimi Hendrix.

Sly and the Family Stone

Yeah, and so many other bands that were not all-white or all-male. San Francisco was allowed to be the exception. But that was the industry. But when you don’t look at the industry, and you look at the music that’s coming out of the people all over the world, either overtly or metaphorically political music is everywhere. People like Silvio Rodriguez are performing political music in packed stadiums in many Latin American countries.

Those musicians are all over the place, including in forms of music that would be very familiar to people who are into rock and roll, like the folk punk phenomenon. Whether you’re into hip-hop, whether you speak Spanish or Arabic, you can name people from every part of the world. Just the names of these musicians will bring a tear to somebody’s eye, because they mean so much to them. This is profoundly political.

You mention Fairuz to somebody from the Arab world, or Victor Jara to Spanish speakers. These are profoundly important people.

We’re mainly talking here about the Global South. Do you think it’s possible to build a new political music scene with a mass audience like San Francisco in Europe or the US?

Yeah, It can totally be done. People need to realize that that’s what needs to be done. Especially in the US, and probably beyond, there’s this constant drum beat of division against the sixties generation. It’s astounding, because it’s more than 50 years since then.

But there’s still this constant drumbeat of derision from the mainstream about the sixties. They just have to make sure that everybody still remembers that playing music and having a good time, and free love, and puppets and guitars are all just terrible, terrible hippie stuff that nobody should be associating with.

People get the message enough and they think: maybe we don’t actually need more acoustic guitars in the world.

Today you were playing with Liadland. Liad is a soon to be former Israeli—she’s giving up her citizenship. She also plays electronic music. Is mixing with people of completely different genres and backgrounds the sort of thing you do often?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. That goes over well or not well, depending on the audience. It’s not that everybody into one form of political music likes other forms of political music. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. Different styles on the same bill can work well, or it cannot, but I do it a lot.

One thing it can do at least is introduce people to a sort of music that they would never have thought of listening to themselves.

Absolutely. It’s such a great chance to hear new stuff, and it’s the main way I hear new stuff too.

What future projects do you have planned?

We do have another tour planned if there’s enough jet fuel left in the world. That’s a big if at this point, right? We do have a tour in Canada, in British Columbia, in late June, early July.

Do you have a message of hope for the next generation?

I heard Jesse Welles say this. I don’t know if he’s ever heard of me before, but I’ve been saying the exact same thing for decades. He said, to paraphrase: If you don’t have hope, then there’s no hope. Hope is a requisite to anything else happening. For social movements to get off the ground, there needs to be hope.

A sense of optimism is absolutely essential, as is a real, serious embrace of cultural means of communication—building the movement and inspiring people, educating people, embracing music and art. But it all starts with having some kind of hope for the future, some kind of vision for what you’re going to do that’s going to change things. But it all starts with hope.

My main hope is that we can maybe keep things going long enough for the aliens to come from some other galaxy and rescue us. In Star Trek, one time they came to a planet, and they asked the computer some questions about the planet. The computer said: According to our calculations, things are so unequal on this planet that the civilization will collapse in 250 years. So maybe it’s a good idea to invite aliens.

Palantir’s accelerated digital fascism

A leftist reading of the Palantir Technologies manifesto

Rezgar Akrawi

The well-known and controversial technology firm Palantir Technologies recently published a manifesto. The document is neither a technical paper nor an economic vision. It is an explicitly political document that announces a new phase in the trajectory of digital capitalism, a phase in which it has abandoned its claim to neutrality and decided to reveal its full ideological face.

Palantir is not an isolated case. It is one of several major technology companies that sell their technologies to systems of repression and human rights violations. As such, it has been condemned by international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Most damning of all, reports have revealed a direct partnership between Palantir and the Israeli military, where Palantir, like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, has supplied data and targeting systems used in military operations in Gaza, making these companies effective partners in documented war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

The manifesto is a declaration of a project for a digital fascist alliance, one that does not rest on traditional violence alone, but on digital surveillance and repression, data analysis, artificial intelligence and manipulation of public opinion. An alliance whose crimes are embodied today in their clearest form in Trumpism, its alliances and its aggressive wars.

1. From Silicon Valley to the White House

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the most important financial backer of Trump’s political career, is not merely a businessman who supports a political candidate. He is the ideological mind that gives this project its political logic, and who has openly declared that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

This alliance is no coincidence. It is a fusion of two projects that share a single goal: the concentration of power in the hands of a financial and political oligarchy that believes itself to possess a “natural right” to govern its own societies and those of others.

This alliance finds its institutional expression today in what is known as the technological acceleration movement, which includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others, who are moving in a coordinated manner with the second Trump administration.

What unites them is not full ideological uniformity, but class position and shared interest: the abolition of any regulatory or democratic constraint that limits their capacity for accumulation, domination and expansion of control.

2. The Manifesto

Palantir described the manifesto as a summary of its chief executive Alexander Karp’s book “The Technological Republic”. Within a few days it received millions of views and angered many people.

But anger must not be content with emotional reaction, for the strongly right-wing manifesto deserves a precise, left-wing reading, a reading that goes deeper than indignation.

The manifesto contains 22 points, constructed with deliberate architectural precision. Some points appear moderate or even humane on the surface, such as calls to respect politicians’ privacy or to avoid taking pleasure in an opponent’s defeat.

But these points are neither innocent nor coincidental. They are the calculated facade used to win over the hesitant reader and give the manifesto a “balanced” appearance before it reveals its true face. What appears logical in the manifesto is therefore not proof of its balance, but further proof of its cunning.

The manifesto is, in short, about promoting a comprehensive ideological agenda centered on militarization, domination and a hierarchy between civilizations.

3. Fatherland, Conscription, Control, Racism

Point 1 asserts that “the engineering elite in Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to participate in the defence of the nation.” This moral framing is not innocent. When military and security contracts are presented as a “moral duty”, social pressure becomes a mechanism to compel engineers and programmers to serve the war and repression machinery. Any dissenting voice within technology companies is silenced in the name of “patriotism.” This is the transformation of individual conscience into a commodity in the service of the military-security state and its institutions of repression and surveillance.

Point 2 calls for a “revolt against the tyranny of apps”, meaning the rejection of consumer technology in favour of deeper security and military systems. This is not a critique of consumer capitalism, as it may seem. It is a call to redirect technological capacity towards the war and surveillance machine rather than the entertainment market.

Point 5 declares that “the question is not whether AI weapons will be built; the question is who will build them.” This closed logic aims to eliminate any debate about refusing the militarization of technology. When the choice is presented as “us or the enemy”, the possibility of saying “no to weapons altogether” is erased. It is the same logic used by Cold War administrations to silence peace movements and restrict left-wing organizations. It returns now in digital disguise.

Point 6 demands that “conscription should be a universal duty” and calls for reconsidering the fully volunteer military in favour of mandatory conscription. This demand reveals the manifesto’s fascist face: when the state fails to recruit volunteers to fight its wars, it resorts to institutional coercion and calls it “shared responsibility.” Most revealing of all is that the company demanding young people sacrifice their lives in defense of “the West” simultaneously earns billions of dollars from the war contracts in which those young people die. Duty for all, profit for the few.

Point 17 claims that “Silicon Valley must play a role in handling violent crime.” This proposal appears pragmatic on the surface, but at its core it is an expansion of private security companies’ powers to bypass the state’s role and transform themselves into an independent force for social control. It operates according to profit logic rather than legal logic, independent courts and democratic accountability.

Point 20 demands “resistance to the pervasive intolerance towards religious belief.” This point does not spring from a genuine defense of freedom of conscience. It is an opportunistic use of religious discourse to build an ideological alliance with conservative and religious currents that are most receptive to mobilization behind war projects.

Point 21 is the most revealing of the manifesto’s deep ideological dimension when it declares that “some cultures have produced vital advances, while others remain dysfunctional and backward.” This sentence is the theoretical foundation of colonial racism, which justifies domination, occupation and the killing of peoples under the guise of “rational management of civilization.”

This logic does not differ fundamentally from “the white man’s burden” that justified colonialism in earlier centuries. It is reproduced today in the language of algorithms and big data. What makes it more dangerous than its predecessor is that it does not require visible colonial forces. A database and a targeting algorithm are sufficient.

4. The Algorithms of Death

Reports have revealed that Palantir has established strategic partnerships with armies and security institutions to build targeting databases that are actually used in military operations. In Palestine, the use of artificial intelligence systems to build targeting lists is extensively documented. This has led to massacres of civilians in Gaza.

What the company calls an “intelligent targeting system” is in practice a machine for administering killings with industrial efficiency. Killing no longer requires a responsible human decision. It requires an algorithm, sufficient data and a green light from an apparatus that is not subject to any democratic accountability.

Most important in this context is that the use of these systems cannot be separated from the discourse that justifies classifying entire societies as backward or threatening. The crime does not begin with the bomb. It begins with the classification.

The danger of the model that Palantir is building lies not only in its direct military applications. Even more dangerous is what can be described as the “surveillance society”, when control becomes internal rather than external.

When an individual knows they are being monitored at every moment, they begin to impose surveillance upon themselves. They change their language, avoid sensitive subjects, distance themselves from radical dissenting ideas. This voluntary self-surveillance limits and weakens left-wing and progressive movements from within, without any need for arrests or direct restrictions.

5. The Left-Wing Alternative

The Palantir manifesto is not merely a document from a technology company. It is an alarm bell that progressive forces must hear clearly: the battle over the future of technology is no longer lurking in the wings. It has stepped into the open.

The fundamental question is not how technology is used. It is who owns it and who determines its goals. Technology will not become a tool for emancipation as long as it remains in the hands of digital monopolies allied with right-wing, war and repression projects.

Any serious discussion must begin with the necessity of collective ownership over digital infrastructure, and with subjecting algorithms and artificial intelligence to genuine democratic control that represents the interests of peoples rather than monopolistic elites.

It is not sufficient to produce intellectual criticism without building actual technological alternatives: social platforms free from monopoly and repression, search tools that respect the privacy of all users, artificial intelligence systems managed in a democratic and transparent manner. These are not hobby projects for the future. They are an urgent strategic necessity.

6. Technological Disarmament and the Silence of the Workers

Building alternatives alone is not sufficient unless it is accompanied by an organized campaign to strip the monopolies of their technological weapons. Just as the historical workers’ movements fought to disarm capital in factories and on farms, there is today a need for an equivalent struggle to collectively wrest lethal algorithms, targeting systems and mass surveillance from the grip of these companies.

This struggle takes several forms: boycotting their services, exposing their secret contracts with governments, prosecuting their leaders before international courts for complicity in war crimes, and pressuring public institutions to sever their ties with these companies.

It is striking and deeply suspicious that the Palantir manifesto does not mention a single word about workers, trade unions, the right to organize, or the strike. This silence is not accidental. It is an admission that the fascist technological project cannot confront the workers’ question, because workers alone, if they organize themselves, are capable of halting the production lines of death. A general strike in Silicon Valley or even in Palantir’s own offices is this project’s nightmare.

7. Digital Fascism by Its True Name

The Palantir manifesto clearly reveals that we are facing a new form of fascism: the alliance between monopoly capital and aggressive national political power, and the use of violence, repression and civilizational hierarchy to protect this alliance from any popular threat.

The only difference is that this fascism’s tools today are algorithms, big data and artificial intelligence, and it is precisely this that makes it more closed and more difficult to resist than what came before.

While Palantir CEO Alexander Karp finishes his philosophical manifesto in his elegant office, the algorithms his company has built continue their work of identifying targets, tracking migrants at borders and supporting the machinery of militarism across the globe. Philosophy and crime are two sides of the same coin.

The struggle for social justice and emancipation passes today inevitably and substantially through the struggle to liberate technology from this aggressive class alliance. It is not a technical question or an abstract ethical question.

It is a political question all the way through, and part of a historical struggle over who shall have control of the future.

6 May 1943: The birth of Andreas Baader

This week in working class history

Ekin Sarı

May 6^th marks the 83^rd birthday of Andreas Baader, founding member and one of the leaders of Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), an anti-imperialist guerrilla group that tried to denazify Germany through armed forces. Followed by the anniversary of his comrade’s death, journalist Ulrike Meinhof, on May 9^th, and the birth of the RAF itself in May 1970, this week and month are a heavy time to reflect on the influence and legacy of the RAF in Germany.

With a criminal record for petty offenses, Baader arrived in Berlin in his early 20s, had links to Kommune 1, and was part of the 1968 student movements. Radicalized by the police killing of the student Benno Ohnesorg, Baader soon made a name for himself in the left-wing scene. In Berlin, he met Gudrun Ensslin, a communist writer, who became his partner in life and crime. The pair joined the APO (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) and planned and carried out arson attacks in department stores, which led to their imprisonment.

During a subsequent visit to the prison for an interview, the group met Ulrike Meinhof, who was already a renowned left-wing journalist at the time and also a member of the APO. After Baader’s escape and a visit to Palestine in 1970 to learn about resistance, weapons, and liberation movements, the RAF members returned to Germany for the 1972 Mai-Offensive, which consisted of bomb attacks against US army bases, police headquarters and, ultimately, against Axel Springer publishing house.

The group then went into hiding. Whilst Baader, Ensslin, and other member Raspe were apprehended by the police in Frankfurt, Ulrike Meinhof remained at large for longer. The RAF continued their resistance behind bars in the form of hunger strikes, and then were transferred to the high-security wing of Stammheim Prison, in whose courthouse the Ulm 5 were recently brought to trial. Remaining RAF members’ acts, intended to release the prisoners, proved in vain: the occupation of the German Embassy in Stockholm, the kidnapping of Hans-Martin Schleyer, former SS-officer and Chairman of the Employers’ Association, as well as the hijacking of a Lufthansa aircraft.

In 1976 Ulrike Meinhof hung herself in her cell; the following year in October, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader were found dead as well, the latter with a shot in the back of the head. The state said it was meant to look like murder; the comrades said that it was. To this day, the Rote Armee Fraktion remains one of the most significant anti-imperialist movements in Germany in the fight against fascism and its oppressive anti-democratic laws, restricted fundamental rights, police authority and violence, and the nazification of the government and the state. Politics that echoes eerily familiar in today’s Germany.