There’s a lot of competition but I think we have a winner.

Evil is easy and it takes a lot to be number one but Palantir has it all. Created by techno-fascist Peter Thiel and now managed by psychopath Alex Karp, the AI technology and surveillance company has been providing Ukraine with data systems that control and accelerate the military “kill-chain” since shortly after the outbreak of war with Russia in 2022. The kill-chain, which aggregates huge amounts of data to track a target to the point of a strike, or death, is controlled by an AI system made by Palantir called Maven. Another Palantir system, Prisma, directs drone attacks, while a third Palantir product, Metaconstellation, assigns low earth orbit satellites to survey a designated area anywhere on the planet before calling in a strike. Palantir turned Ukrainians into lab rats and has helped destroy the country.

Palantir has also provided Israel with AI targeting programs which helped Israel commit the genocide in Gaza. Palantir, which has been active in Israel since 2014, held its first board meeting of 2024 in Tel Aviv to celebrate Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and shortly after began supplying the IDF with AI tools to help Israel execute its mass destruction and slaughter. With enthusiastic support from Palantir Israel has turned Gaza into a dystopian hell of surveillance, repression and destruction. Palantir’s proprietary AI has played a starring role in the leveling of cities, the mass, indiscriminate slaughter of populations, the confinement and surveillance of the survivors, while enabling a propaganda effort to obfuscate the genocide and distract western audiences.

Palantir’s Maven AI system is also the core system for the US military and was used to massacre 120 children in Minab, Iran, on the first day of the US-Israeli attack on the country. Maven, was blamed by Pentagon itself for providing “wrong targeting” data that led to the “triple-tapping” missile attacks on the Minab girl school on the opening day of the illegal war. Nevertheless, Palantir leads the pack of Silicon Valley firms racing to supplant traditional weapons makers in the Military/Industrial/Complex (MIC) feeding frenzy.

And, what happens on the periphery always returns to sender. Here in the homeland, Palantir has been working with ICE and supplying it with AI and data tools for over a decade, enabling ICE to surveil, track and murder immigrants and activists, like Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. Palantir’s Investigative Case Management platform, is used by ICE to scrape and aggregate massive amounts of data on individuals including school status, family relationships, employment information, phone records, personal connections, biometric information and residential addresses. There’s a common thread between Palantir’s actions in Gaza in the US in that ICE’s operations increasingly resemble Israeli occupation.

What’s distressing is that Palantir’s psychopathic behavior has thrilled investors who watched the firm’s stock soar. In Ukraine, Gaza and the US AI war-tech firm Palantir has embedded itself deeply within military systems and civil society, turning the countries into laboratories in order to profit from its dystopian technologies of surveillance, tracking and murder. The billionaire tech warlords–Karp and Thiel–don’t care about the suffering of those who they are surveilling, targeting, bombing and murdering. All of the data gleaned from the campaigns will be fed back into Palantir systems and allow the company to refine and market future AI war-tech products. The war-tech complex profits from a real-world laboratory, and it profits from dead people, whether Ukrainians, Russians or Palestinians, or Americans.

Palantir is evil without a doubt but what does that say about Americans who invest and profit from their AI murder machine? I think that Matt Stoller is on to something with his “the number go up” characterization of the US economy, where precarious Americans have turned to the stock market in order to salvage their middle-class lifestyle. I know friends and co-workers, that I think of as descent, who are profiting from Palantir’s deprivations, and wonder if they are simply unaware or if they are caught in a cruel economic Faustian bargain.

The most evil corporation in the world, unfortunately, is the norm rather than the exception, and further evidence that the US is an increasingly lawless country where it’s everyone for themselves.

Welcome to Galt’s Gulch.