Colorado Is at the Center of a Fight for Democracy and the Future of AI

When asked to describe his “lower purpose," CEO Alex Karp of Palantir Technologies, the Denver-based big data and AI analytics company, said, “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”

His February 21 statement — part of a promotional book tour in support of his New York Times bestseller, The Technological Republic — echoed calls for violence against the enemies of the nation and company, which he excitedly expressed during Palantir’s January earnings call. Coming from the leader of a firm that supports the Army, FBI and Space Force with critical enemy-targeting infrastructure, these remarks are highly disturbing and run afoul of the principles of tolerance, freedom and democracy of our state.

Days later, on February 25 — just as Donald Trump posted a gruesome, AI-generated movie of Gaza with Trump Hotels and golden idols of the president — Karp’s executive partner, Shyam Sankar, COO of Palantir Technologies, publicly targeted and condemned an ABC reporter for a piece she hadn’t even published yet, supposedly critical of Karp. Sankar accompanied his post with a more favorable headline in the Wall Street Journal, adorned by a signature of Donald Trump and a congratulatory message that read: “Alex, Great!” The admiration is mutual, Sankar confirmed: “It is true that Alex is wildly supportive of Elon Musk and DOGE and very happy with the direction of Trump’s foreign policy.”

Like Elon Musk, whose net worth has increased nearly 80 percent since Trump was elected, the founders and officers of Palantir — including Peter Thiel, a prominent J.D. Vance and Trump donor — stand to not only profit immensely from the chaos sown across our democratic systems of governance by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, but also by the escalation of war-mongering rhetoric, the spread of fear in the media, and the coming wave of techno-fascism in America. They have used the state of Colorado to set the stage for an ultimate marriage between the federal government and the tech sector — “a union of the state and software industry,” as Karp writes in his book — in a new “Manhattan Project” that stands to benefit the richest people on earth.

Palantir is not the company I thought I joined in 2021 — believing, as Karp recently put it in the WSJ, that its mission was “to support Western liberal democracy and its strategic allies." Now, Europe and its people are increasingly viewing the United States as an adversary, thanks to the work of an administration in which Palantir is taking an increasingly important role. With the recent appointment of Gregory Barbaccia, a former intelligence officer and ten-year veteran of Palantir Technologies as Chief Information Officer under the Trump administration, and the upcoming appointment of another Palantir vet, Clark Minor, to lead data for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, Palantir is excellently positioned to shape the application of critical big data and IT infrastructure across whole government departments, all under an unbridled nationalist administration that has abandoned guardrails for the ethical development of AI.

In the past few weeks, Musk threatened to imprison journalists, the administration ordered the collection of biometric data on immigrant children, and allies like Ukraine have been sidelined and humiliated at diplomatic tables — highlighting the need for close attention to this expanding collaboration. Meanwhile, executive powers are being expanded through a barrage of executive orders, and allusions to monarchy are prevalent in the communications of Trump and his allies — challenging the ultimate rule of law and constitutional rights.

More recently, fascist gestures and proposals of extending presidential term limits contributed to the concerning narratives at CPAC, and Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, removed distinguished military leaders at the Joint Chiefs of Staff for discriminatory reasons — replacing them with unqualified loyalists. As chaos unfolds, critical scientific research programs are left massively defunded, leading to chaos in the scientific community and serious international health and humanitarian crises. Trump just announced mass layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, threatening an agency with strong roots in Colorado ahead of imminent weather events and just three months before the Atlantic hurricane season is set to start.

These are not “Western” values, let alone the American values that pushed us even further ahead of Europe, the values that sought to preserve the U.S. as an egalitarian democracy, and which represent freedom for the people from tyrannical rule. These are especially not the values that represent our state of Colorado — which still has the chance of building an alternative to the greedy and domineering culture of Silicon Valley. However, they are the ones that Palantir has chosen to endorse through repeated violent rhetoric and support of the administration.

My understanding has been immensely helped by the fact that I’ve had a seat “behind the curtain.” Following the coronavirus pandemic, I spent a year and a half working as a writer and graphic designer at Palantir Technologies in its headquarters in Denver. As an English major, I thought I might have had little to contribute in the grand scheme of things. But, as reviewers of The Technological Republic and many former employees have recently realized, the key behind Palantir’s success — and its ability to build an elite, loyal following of engineers and advocates — might owe as much to its technical prowess as to its effective marshaling of language and cult-like shibboleths.

As Joe Ganz recently pointed out in a scathing review of The Technological Republic, Karp, in both his Ph.D. dissertation thesis — curiously titled "Aggression in the Lifeworld: Expanding Parsons' Concept of Aggression Through the Description of the Relationship Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture" — and in his recent writing in The Technological Republic, shows expertise in the “kind of propagandistic jargon that abjures rational discussion and plays on the aggressive feelings of the crowd.” In essence, deploying language manipulatively to confuse and rile up followers and opponents. The Palantir CEO has even gone so far as to describe the company’s culture as “Germanic.”

There might still be some time to change course. While the officers of Palantir and the administration were spreading hateful rhetoric on social media last week, 21 members of DOGE resigned in protest, issuing a public letter in support of democracy. “We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations, however, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments,” the staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press. That same day, I shared a protest letter calling out Palantir leadership for flagrant violations of its Code of Conduct — authored with the support and feedback of more than fifteen initial supporters — with the Palantir Alumni Slack group, the same group in which DOGE was recently caught recruiting. We are now collecting signatures and I encourage any Palantir alumni to reach out in support in order to finalize and publish the message, a call for tech workers in Silicon Valley to not be afraid to speak out and act against actions they perceive as violating the principles of democracy, egalitarianism and human rights.

All of these concerning events have placed Colorado — the home of Palantir Technologies — at the center of a fight not only for our democracy, but over the exploitation enabled by the mass adoption of AI technologies in society and warfare. In a state where Mexican and American families have been linked for generations, Palantir and other companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Dell have equipped Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol with the “military-grade digital tools they need to commit atrocities along the southern border and the interior.” Now they are ready to profit in a program of mass incarceration and deportation of a historical scale that could devastate thousands of our neighbors and their families.

One of the only truly provocative challenges to this administration and its actions has come from the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston. He suggested in a Denverite interview that Denver police, as well as citizens, could band together to prevent federal immigration authorities from deporting undocumented immigrants rather than compromise our national values; he's been called to testify before a congressional committee this week because of those comments. Governor Jared Polis and other state officials should join in support of Johnston. Further, they need to refuse to support DOGE and its continual funding, protect individuals who speak out against the exploitative practices of corporations and nationalist politicians, and help bring accountability to companies like Palantir.

We as a state need to live up to the legacy of Governor Ralph Lawrence Carr. An important historical figure to remember, Carr defied other state governors and challenged the federal government during World War II, calling out Japanese internment as unconstitutional and offering respectful asylum and dignity for those deported from the West Coast to Camp Amache — a monument threatened by Trump’s anti-DEI budget cuts.

There was a time when I thought that exploring and communicating the furthest reaches of big data technologies could help me deliver solutions for people’s everyday problems, and help shape society for the better. Over time, however, I increasingly felt as if I was participating in a massive lie — to businesses, the public, and even to myself. Now I feel like I could have been heralding the cusp of something much bigger: mass exploitation, inequality and death on a scale never seen before.

This is an effort to prevent that. As a freelance journalist, an immigrant and a citizen with Ecuadorian, American and Russian-Ukrainian heritage — whose great-grandparents crossed through the “Golden Gates” of Ellis Island and the Port of Philadelphia — I don’t want to live in a country where you have to be worried about voicing these fears, or about challenging those in power in support of democracy. This is not the America I sought to immigrate to, but more akin to the totalitarian governments I experienced many times growing up in Ecuador. I am speaking out without fear — as I don’t believe we are there yet.