Israel pours $730m into global propaganda machine as reputation collapses
The Cradle | May 1, 2026
Israeli lawmakers last month approved a sharp increase in the 2026 public diplomacy budget, allocating roughly $730 million to the global messaging apparatus, also known as “Hasbara,” according to a report by the Jerusalem Post on 29 April.
Surveys point to a deepening collapse in international support, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and continued aggression toward its neighboring countries have sent the Tel Aviv’s reputation into freefall on the global stage.
The funding accounts for more than four times the previous year’s allocation, and forms part of a broader push led by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, who characterized the effort as a strategic imperative, saying it should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors” and calling it “an existential issue.”
The campaign spans large-scale digital outreach and political engagement aimed at bending perceptions and influencing narratives around Israel.
Around $50 million is being funneled into social media advertising, and roughly $40 million is going toward flying in foreign delegations such as politicians, clergy, and influencers as part of the outreach effort.
Officials insist the strategy improves perceptions abroad, with Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, Israel Bachar, claiming that “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you have to fly out a lot of people.”
However, polling data cited in the reports shows a sharp collapse in public opinion towards Israel, particularly in the US.
A Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of US respondents now view Israel unfavorably, with declines cutting across political, religious, and demographic groups.
Analysts and researchers dismiss the spending outright, arguing it cannot offset the impact of Israel’s actions on the ground.
Communication scholar Nicholas Cull said, “Our conclusion was, it’s the policy, stupid,” referring to Israel’s policy of genocide and apartheid, and its broader military conduct as a central pillar of its expansionist agenda.
“Yes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they’re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.”
“The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore,” said Ilan Manor, another expert cited in the report, warning that increased funding may expand reach but will not restore trust.
That push is reinforced by what Israeli officials describe as a parallel “Eighth Front” – a so-called “Digital Iron Dome” that combines mass reporting campaigns, AI-driven targeting, and coordinated influencer networks to suppress dissenting content and flood platforms with state-approved narratives in real time.
Israel had invested millions in coordinated digital influence campaigns, including a $6-million contract to shape AI outputs, targeted Gen Z messaging, and large-scale ad buys, in an effort to control online narratives and counter declining public support in the US.
The country’s propaganda arm had previously deployed a large network of at least hundreds of fake social media accounts and fabricated news sites to spread unverified claims linking UNRWA to Hamas’s 7 October Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in order to undermine its humanitarian mission in Palestine.
Zionists Are Gunning for Your Freedom of Speech
By Jack Hunter | The Libertarian Institute | May 1, 2026
The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States guarantees the right to free speech. This right has long differentiated the United States from other Western nations like the United Kingdom and Canada where laws against so-called “hate speech” laws exist and are enforced.
Thankfully, America is different. In our country, even alleged hate speech is protected speech to ensure democratic principles and debate.
In a 1929 dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the Constitution secured “freedom for the thought that we hate.” In 2011, Chief Justice John Roberts said in a ruling that the First Amendment serves “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
This constitutional protection has been increasingly threatened recently, particularly by pro-Israeli forces that have tried to frame any criticism of that government as “anti-Semitism” and thus hate speech punishable by law. This has included everything from arrests, to squashing campus debate to buying TikTok to an attempt to cover up human rights absuses in Gaza. President Donald Trump has even issued executive orders that use vague definitions of what constitutes “anti-Semitism” that comes with criminal penalties.
Mark Levin is an American-born Zionist radio host who is an outspoken advocate for Israel’s government, regularly calling anyone who criticizes the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and conflict in Gaza “Nazis.”
Toward this agenda, Levin recently appeared to not agree with his own country’s free speech rights. On his latest Sunday Fox News program, unironically called Life, Liberty and Levin, the neoconservative pundit explained why free speech liberties in the U.S. have gone too far.
Seemingly worried that certain speech is protected in the United States, Levin said in the wake of the Secret Service taking down a shooter at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Friday, “First time things like this have happened, but it really is problematic because so much of it is protected.”
“And you hear people say, don’t you believe in the First Amendment?” Levin said. “They don’t even know what the First Amendment believes.”
Certain “speech” is “problematic” because “so much of it is protected.” You could see where this was headed.
Levin then explained what he believes “the First Amendment believes.” “Do you want to de-platform people?” he ranted. “You know, the libs do that. I don’t have any problem with de-platforming Nazis or jihadis.”
“Nazis,” Levin says. Levin uses this term loosely, all the time, and that’s putting it mildly.
Prominent libertarian personality Josie Glabach, known most popularly as “The Libertarian Redhead,” made a telling list of the many people and groups Levin has called Nazis since 2024:
- The Democrats
- The Democrat media
- An Australian bakery
- The Pakistani defense minister
- Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton
- The entire Libertarian Party
- College students
- MMA fighter Jake Shields
- Nick Fuentes
- Putin’s buddies
- Influencer Dan Bilzarian
- The Houthis
- Comedian and libertarian personality Dave Smith
- Anyone who associates with Dave Smith
- Tucker Carlson
- Beirut
- Hezbollah
- A veteran who asked Mark to be more tolerant
- Influencer Myron Gaines
- The city of London
- Hamas
- The New York Times
- New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
- A New York Times correspondent
- Terrorists;
- The “woke reich”
- Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner
- The United Nations
- Harvard University
- The city of Amsterdam
- Columbia University students
- Iterations of the “Iranian Nazi regime,” the “Islamic Nazi regime,” the “Islamo Nazi regime,” the “Islamist Nazi regime,” and “All of Iran (the new Nazis)”
- The Ayatollah (presumably of Iran)
- Former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi
- A protestor on a subway
- Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
- President Joe Biden’s entire State Department
- Turkish Preisdent Recep Erdoğan
- College basketball analyst Bruce Pearl
- Certain Arab, liberals and journalists
- Reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro
- ISIS
- Seventeen random Twitter users
This eclectic group of entities great and small, many of whom are regular critics of Israel’s government, are “Nazis” in Levin’s view. As Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods succinctly put it, “Nazis’ includes everyone who mocks Levin.”
Levin continued his Sunday rant against “Nazis”:
“I don’t have any problem with de-platforming them. What does that mean, de-platforming them? A government law? No. It means that X or Twitter or Facebook or Amazon with Twitch and someone says you know what? You’re a low life we’re not paying, you know, get off our platform. What’s wrong with that?”
The neocon pundit appeared to say that private platforms should police speech according to the political views of Mark Levin. He is right that this is no violation of the First Amendment. Private companies can allow or restrict speech as they please. “It’s called private enterprise,” he said. “I got no problem with that.”
Then Levin basically said such speech was no different than pornography, which is not protected under the First Amendment. Levin continued, “I mean, what if they have this horrific pornography on? Is that okay? No, it’s not okay.”
“Because our kids have access to it,” he said. “People who are impressionable have access to it. “What if they had people screaming at the top of the lungs saying, assassinate this guy and assassinate that guy? Well, they shouldn’t do that.”
“Why? What’s the standard?” Levin went on. “You need to have a standard. What should the law be? What does the Constitution say?”
The Constitution says that all speech is protected, but “true threats” and obscenity are not.
But political opinions about Israel that go against Levin’s views are protected, whether he likes it or not.
That’s when Levin basically outright said that speech that criticizes Israel should be forbidden just like pornography. “I just think we’ve taken this too far because we’re not even talking about political speech, which is the most protected of all speech,” Levin said.
“We do limit speech,” he insisted. “We limit speech, pornography. We limit speech.”
What Levin, like so many other Zionists, truly want is for the First Amendment to be amended itself. They believe, whether they say it forthright or not (and Levin appears to be doing just that), that this legal provision designed by the Founders precisely to protect political speech should no longer protect speech that is critical of Israel’s government.
Americans have historically valued their free speech. American Zionists like Levin now want a carve out.
But the free speech guarantee enshrined in the United States’s governing charter is so integral to the American experience, to gut it for any reason would be to drastically alter the DNA of the soon to be 250-year-old country.
As an American, Mark Levin doesn’t seem to have a problem with doing just that—all in the service of a foreign country.
It might be better for Americans to instead wish other nations well, yet solely concentrate on our own affairs at home, and perhaps just as important, to stop listening to American pundits whose primary allegiance seems to be countries other than their own.
When a Train Ticket Costs Your Passport: The Eurail Breach and the Digital ID Problem
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | April 25, 2026
Eurail wanted people’s passport number to let them ride a train. Now that data is for sale on the dark web, and some of the 308,777 people caught up in the breach are being told to cancel their passports and pay for replacements out of their own pocket.
The Dutch company, which sells the Interrail passes used by young travelers across 33 European countries, confirmed this week that a sample of the stolen dataset has already surfaced on Telegram.
“We can confirm that data copied during the security incident has been offered for sale on the dark web and a sample dataset has been published on Telegram,” a spokesperson said. “Customers whose personal data was included in the sample dataset are being informed directly where contact details are available to us.”
The full haul contains exactly the material identity thieves dream about, including passport numbers, passport expiry dates, full names, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth. For users of the EU’s DiscoverEU program, which hands out free travel passes to young people, the exposed records also include photocopies of passports, bank account details, and some health data.
The breach happened on December 26, 2025. Eurail only began notifying affected individuals on March 27, 2026, three months after hackers walked out with the files and a full month after the data appeared on a cybercrime forum.
In February, a hacker claimed responsibility publicly, saying they had stolen roughly 1.3 terabytes of data from Eurail’s AWS S3, Zendesk, and GitLab instances, including source code, database backups, and support tickets. The same hacker said negotiations with Eurail had failed, which is why the files were being dumped.
None of this was information Eurail needed to sell a train ticket. Rail operators ran Europe’s networks for decades without demanding scanned passports and dates of birth from every customer. The identity-verification stack that now sits behind a simple rail pass exists because identity checks have become the default business model, not because anyone can explain why selling a seven-day Interrail pass requires a permanent copy of someone’s government-issued ID.
The Eurail breach is a working demonstration of what happens when governments treat identity collection as the default setting for ordinary life. The UK is moving toward a mandatory digital ID scheme. The EU is rolling out its European Digital Identity Wallet.
Online Safety Act compliance in Britain now requires “age verification” across huge swathes of the web, with platforms demanding government IDs, face scans, or credit card details before users can access content that was freely available a year ago.
Every one of these systems rests on the same assumption that sank Eurail’s customers, which is that identity data can be collected safely, stored securely, and kept out of the wrong hands indefinitely.
That assumption has never held up. The pattern is consistent enough now to be predictable. A government or regulator decides identity verification should be mandatory for some activity, whether that is buying a train ticket, watching adult content, opening a bank account, or posting on social media. Private companies build the verification infrastructure, because governments rarely build their own.
Those companies then hold databases of passport numbers, biometric scans, and home addresses, secured according to whatever corporate security practices happen to be in place. The databases get breached, because databases always get breached, and the consequences fall on the people whose data was collected rather than the entities that insisted on collecting it.
Court Forces German Chancellor Merz to Open Files on 300 “Insult the Chancellor” Cases
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 25, 2026
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has used the German state to pursue around 300 criminal investigations against people accused of insulting him, and his Chancellery spent months trying to keep the public from finding out which prosecutors were handling the cases. That wall has now come down.
The Higher Administrative Court of Berlin-Brandenburg has ordered the Bundeskanzleramt to identify every prosecutor’s office running a Merz-insult investigation, along with the file number for each one.
The ruling, which rejected the Chancellery’s appeal against an earlier decision of the Berlin Administrative Court, came after a legal challenge by Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel. Until the judgment, roughly 300 criminal proceedings over alleged slights against the sitting head of government had been shielded from any journalistic scrutiny.
The legal hook for all of it is Section 188 of Germany’s criminal code, a special provision that gives people in political life reinforced protection against insult. The official English translation of the statute states that anyone who “insults a person who exercises a political office in relation to their office or in connection with their office shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years.”
A politician gets to sit at the center of a prosecution aimed at a citizen who said something unpleasant about them, and the punishment on the table is years in prison.
How cases enter the pipeline is itself revealing. Citizens are encouraged by NGOs and state-run reporting portals to flag supposed insults, sometimes anonymously.
Those reports travel to the Federal Criminal Police Office, which routes them to the relevant regional prosecutor’s office. The targeted politician is then notified and decides whether to file a formal criminal complaint or whether to leave the prosecution to run without objection. The Chancellery alone receives between 20 and 30 such files every month.
Merz has said he does not sign complaints himself, but also does not block the prosecutions that have been opened in his name. Whether that account holds up against the actual paperwork is precisely what the Chancellery was trying to prevent anyone from checking.
The Chancellery’s argument in court was that no heightened public interest justified handing the information over, and that merely naming the prosecutor’s offices and file numbers could violate the rights of accused individuals. The court did not accept it. The judges held that the Chancellor’s distinctive role in these proceedings made disclosure necessary, and that neither jurisdictional objections nor the absence of urgency stood in the way.
The scale alone deserves attention. A head of government who has triggered roughly 300 criminal investigations over things people said about him is using the machinery of the state against ordinary speech at a volume that does not look like an occasional recourse to legal remedy. It looks like a policy. And the instinct, once the numbers started circulating, was to hide the details rather than defend them.
The chilling effect of a regime like this does not depend on convictions. It depends on the knowledge that a critical Facebook post, a rude placard, or a sharp comment can summon the Bundeskriminalamt, a prosecutor, and potentially a house search. A Stuttgart man who called Merz a “Suffkopf,” roughly a drunkard, saw his home searched after Merz signed a complaint against him.
The lesson lands well beyond the individuals actually charged. Self-censorship becomes the rational response, which is the real product of the law.
Section 188’s defenders describe it as protection for democratic institutions against targeted harassment of officials. The practical architecture of the provision tells a different story.
The category of “insult” is elastic. German courts have struggled for years with where sharp political commentary ends and punishable disrespect begins, and individual judges have reached wildly different conclusions on facts that look almost identical. Into that vagueness steps a provision that hands the sitting Chancellor and his office a direct line to prosecutors considering whether to put a citizen through a criminal process.
The deeper question sits where it has always sat. A democracy that lets its head of government send police to the homes of citizens who call him names has already made a choice about which it values more, the dignity of the office or the tongue of the citizen. The court has forced some sunlight into the process. The provision that makes the process possible in the first place is still waiting for someone to deal with it.
The Surveillance Accountability Act Demands Warrants for Data
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 23, 2026
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) have introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act, a bill that feels like someone took the Fourth Amendment and actually meant it.
The legislation aims “to ensure that all searches that significantly impinge on the privacy or security of a person require a warrant based on probable cause” and to create “a right of action for violations of Fourth Amendment rights.” That covers the kinds of searches federal agencies currently conduct without judicial oversight: pulling your financial records from banks, requesting your browsing history from ISPs, buying your location data from brokers, and harvesting your biometric information from surveillance cameras.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The bill lands in the middle of a brutal Congressional fight over FISA Section 702, the surveillance authority that currently lets the FBI search Americans’ communications.
The new legislation goes much further than the various reform bills circulating around that debate. Where the SAFE Act and the Government Surveillance Reform Act target specific loopholes in FISA, the Surveillance Accountability Act tries to close all of them at once by rewriting the baseline rule: if the government wants your data, it needs a judge’s permission.
The main part of the bill adds a new Section 3119 to Title 18 of the US Code with a simple default: “no search may be conducted without a warrant issued by a neutral and detached magistrate upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.”
The bill defines “search” broadly enough to actually matter, covering “any government-initiated act that intrudes upon an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy,” whether through “human, digital, or automated means.” It explicitly lists what falls under warrant protection: “communications,” “associations,” “employment,” “social media usage,” “internet usage,” “financial transactions,” and “travel.”
The bill goes further, extending protection to “the acquisition and analysis of any data, metadata, or information pertaining to a person’s digital or physical life,” including “geolocation,” “personal device activity,” “biometric identifiers,” and “behavioral signals data.”
The government is already collecting and analyzing patterns of how you act online, and Massie and Boebert’s bill is the first piece of legislation to name it directly and bring it under warrant protection.
The Third-Party Doctrine Problem
The most significant provision attacks the legal fiction that has allowed warrantless government surveillance to flourish for nearly fifty years. The third-party doctrine, established by the Supreme Court in Smith v. Maryland (1979), holds that you lose your Fourth Amendment protection over any information you voluntarily share with a third party, like a phone company or a bank.
The logic made a certain kind of sense when it meant the government could see which phone numbers you dialed. It makes no sense at all when every aspect of modern life generates data that passes through corporate servers.
The Supreme Court acknowledged as much in Carpenter v. United States (2018), ruling that cell phone location data requires a warrant even though it’s held by wireless carriers. But Carpenter was deliberately narrow. The Court didn’t overturn the third-party doctrine. It just said that this particular type of data, cell site location information, was too revealing to leave unprotected.
The new bill does what Carpenter didn’t. It creates a blanket presumption of privacy for all data held by third parties. The bill states that “the government shall not access any data, metadata, or personal information held by a third party, including financial services providers, telecommunication service providers, internet service providers, cloud storage companies, or data brokers, without a valid warrant, regardless of whether the third party consents or cooperates.”
Your bank can’t waive your constitutional rights for you. Your phone company can’t either.
The bill goes further still: “No contractual agreement between a user and a third party may be interpreted as waiving the government’s warrant requirement for access to the data of that user, unless such waiver is knowing, voluntary, and explicit.” This kills the argument that by agreeing to a terms of service, you’ve somehow consented to government surveillance. That argument has always been absurd, and the bill finally says so in statute.
Facial Recognition and License Plate Readers
The bill’s limitations section targets two surveillance technologies that have spread across American cities with almost no legal oversight: facial recognition systems and automated license plate readers.
The bill prohibits the “warrantless collection, retention, querying, or analysis” of data gathered from people simply going about their lives in public. That prohibition covers “biometric data, including facial images, faceprints, gait, voice recognition, or other unique physical identifiers, obtained through facial recognition systems or comparable surveillance technologies.”
It also covers “license plate images, vehicle metadata, or vehicle movement patterns obtained through automated license plate readers or similar systems.”
Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies have been building vast databases of facial recognition and license plate data for years, treating the fact that you walked down a public street or drove on a public road as blanket permission to track your movements indefinitely. The bill says that’s not how it works. Being in public doesn’t mean consenting to biometric surveillance.
Suing the Government When It Violates Your Rights
The second half of the bill creates something that currently doesn’t exist in federal law: a clear right of action for Fourth Amendment violations by federal employees. The bill’s language is direct: “Every person, including a Federal employee, who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of the United States, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or any person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Fourth Amendment, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.”
Courts can award attorney’s fees to the prevailing party, which means the threat of litigation carries financial weight.
This is significant because of the Supreme Court’s steady erosion of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), the case that originally allowed citizens to sue federal officials for constitutional violations. The Court has spent the last decade and a half narrowing Bivens to the point where it barely functions. Massie’s bill creates a statutory alternative that doesn’t depend on judicial willingness to recognize new causes of action.
The right of action covers every federal employee except the President and Vice President. That’s a wide net. An NSA analyst who runs a warrantless query on your communications, an FBI agent who buys your location data from a broker, an ICE officer who accesses your records through a Section 702 backdoor search, all of them could face personal liability.
The Political Context
Massie has been fighting this battle for over a decade. He sponsored an amendment in 2014 to stop warrantless backdoor searches of Americans’ online data, which passed the House 293 to 123. He introduced the Surveillance State Repeal Act in 2015, seeking to repeal the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act entirely. He’s called for Edward Snowden to be pardoned and for former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to be prosecuted for lying to Congress about the NSA’s phone metadata program.
The Surveillance Accountability Act arrives at a moment when the politics of surveillance are stranger than they’ve been in years. Massie has publicly demanded “No FISA reauthorization without a warrant requirement for US citizens!” on social media, attaching screenshots of past statements from President Trump, Vice President Vance, and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan warning about FISA abuses.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus, 98 House Democrats, has formally voted to oppose any Section 702 reauthorization without dramatic reforms. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton is pushing an 18-month clean extension with no reforms at all, arguing that the war with Iran makes this the wrong time to weaken intelligence capabilities.
The warrant amendment that would have required court approval for FBI searches of Section 702 data lost by a single vote in 2024, a 212-212 tie in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson cast the tiebreaker against it.
“The Bill of Rights is not a suggestion, and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches conducted by the government are not optional,” said Massie. “The Surveillance Accountability Act requires government employees to first obtain a warrant based on probable cause before searching Americans’ personal information even if the information sought is stored on a phone, in the cloud, or held by a third party. Warrantless searches are unconstitutional, and this does not change when the data the government seeks is in digital formats or held by a third party.”
“For years, the federal government has treated the Fourth Amendment like a suggestion. They’ve built a massive surveillance machine that tracks, scans, and spies on law-abiding Americans without a warrant, without probable cause, and without any accountability. Enough is enough,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert. “The Surveillance Accountability Act puts the Constitution back in charge. It protects every American from an out-of-control federal government that thinks it owns your data, your movements, and your life. This is a true bipartisan issue for anyone who still believes in limited government and individual liberty.”
Massie’s bill goes beyond Section 702. It rewrites the entire framework, or tries to. The chances of the Surveillance Accountability Act passing in its current form are, being realistic, very low. The intelligence community will fight it. The national security establishment will call it dangerous. The administration has already signaled it wants a clean FISA extension with no conditions.
But the bill is a marker. It describes what actual Fourth Amendment compliance would look like if Congress took the text of the Constitution at face value. Warrants for searches. Probable cause. Judicial oversight. No exceptions for data that happens to sit on a corporate server. No loopholes for biometric surveillance conducted in plain view. And real consequences, financial ones, for agents who ignore the rules.
The gap between what the Surveillance Accountability Act proposes and what Congress is actually likely to pass tells you everything about how far the federal government has drifted from the privacy protections Americans were supposedly guaranteed 235 years ago.
#FreeYousofAzizi: Petition launched to seek release of Iranian academic, anti-war activist detained in US
Press TV – April 23, 2026
A petition has been launched calling for the release of Yousof Azizi, an Iranian researcher, journalist, political analyst, and PhD candidate at Virginia Tech, who has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) despite holding valid legal status.
According to a website launched by his supporters, Azizi was taken into custody in front of his home in Maryland on April 13 and denied access to a lawyer.
Press TV was the first media outlet to report on his arbitrary arrest by ICE.
A day later, he was held at the Baltimore ICE Detention Center, and visitation was prohibited to his family or lawyers.
On April 15, Azizi was transferred to Louisiana against his will. His lawyer immediately requested his release by posting bond.
Two days later, on April 17, he was transferred again to Arizona against his will, as he informed his wife over a short phone call, notes the website.
Azizi is a father of two young children and an active member of the Iranian community in the US who has publicly and unapologetically spoken against the unprovoked and illegal US-Israeli war of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
A media personality with regular appearances on multiple international English and Persian media outlets, including Press TV, Azizi has been one of the few voices in the Persian media sphere to openly and vociferously oppose the Zionist lobby’s influence on US foreign policy.
His media commentary has consistently criticized US military aggression against Iran and the Israeli genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon.
His case has alarmed civil rights advocates in the US, who view it as an example of politically driven immigration enforcement, which has become common under the Trump administration.
“When no clear legal violation is presented, we must ask: on what basis is he being held,” the change.org petition that has garnered significant attention notes.
Supporters of the campaign say the case raises serious concerns about due process, justice, and the increasingly blurred line between law and politics in the US.
They stress that silence does not serve justice and that awareness matters, demanding a fair review of Azizi’s case and his immediate release from ICE custody.
Hundreds of foreign nationals, including Iranians, have been detained or deported by immigration authorities in the US in recent months on flimsy pretexts.
You can join the petition to press for Azizi’s release here.
Al-Akhbar’s Amal Khalil assassinated by Israel, left to die under rubble
The Cradle | April 23, 2026
Lebanese Civil Defense confirmed late on 23 April the death of Amal Khalil, Lebanese journalist and reporter for Al-Akhbar newspaper, who was deliberately targeted by Israel and trapped for hours under the rubble as the Lebanese government awaited permission to rescue her.
Khalil was reporting in south Lebanon’s Tayri with fellow journalist Zainab Faraj when the strikes took place.
A civilian vehicle accompanying the journalists – who were in a separate car – was first hit by an Israeli drone, killing the two people inside it.
Khalil and Faraj exited their car and took cover behind a tree upon the first strike. Contact was then made with ambulance teams and Lebanese army intelligence, yet the Red Cross was not allowed to act until receiving clearance from the US-led ceasefire monitoring mechanism.
Another drone strike hit right near the journalists’ vehicle shortly after, prompting them to shelter near a house.
About an hour later, amid reports that access to the site was being refused and that UNIFIL was asked to avoid the Haddatha–Bint Jbeil Road, a warplane hit Tayri. It was later confirmed that the house where they were sheltering was targeted.
The Red Cross was not given approval to move until 10 minutes after the Israeli warplane struck home.
Rescue workers reached and rescued Faraj, who was seriously wounded, while also retrieving the bodies of the two who were killed in the first strike.
Israeli forces fired at the rescue teams as they attempted to reach Khalil, halting search efforts, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
“After nearly three hours of being besieged in the town of Tiri in south Lebanon, journalist Amal Khalil remained in direct contact with the relevant authorities and was reported to be in good condition, until the enemy deliberately targeted her and photographer Zeinab Faraj in a second airstrike,” wrote Lebanese journalist Dr Marwa Osman.
“She was alive for so long, talking to her family and colleagues from under the rubble. But the imps in the Lebanese presidency and prime ministry took all the time they needed to grovel at the feet of the enemy through the US terrorist mechanism, until Amal died of the wounds she sustained from the Zionist strikes on Lebanese land,” she added.
Many others were also outraged by the failure to rescue the veteran journalist, who spent her career covering Israeli war crimes and Lebanese resistance against occupation.
“The US ambassador, in his capacity as custodian of the ‘mechanism,’ did not grant permission for a bulldozer to access Al-Tayri to clear the rubble in search of Amal Khalil,” journalist Hassan Illaik reported.
The Lebanese presidency released a statement condemning Khalil’s killing, saying it was “aimed at concealing the truth of [Israel’s] aggressive acts against Lebanon.”
“Amal Khalil passed away in the place dearest to her heart, in the region with which her name was synonymous, on the most volatile front line, in the deep south … For Amal Khalil, the cause of resistance was not a trivial detail, but rather deeply rooted in her convictions, daily actions, and professional choices. She chose the south, even though the media organization where she had worked for nearly 20 years hadn’t asked her to settle there,” wrote Al-Akhbar.
“On the contrary, she had been based in Beirut offices since the launch of Al-Akhbar. However, as she recounted on more than one occasion, she couldn’t remain in Beirut long while the voice of the South called to her. So, she left and chose daily confrontation with the enemy, who had repeatedly threatened her. Yet she never backed down.”
Khalil had previously received death threats from an Israeli number, telling her to leave Lebanon “if you want to keep your head on your shoulders.”
Drop Site News journalist Jeremy Loffredo reached out to the Israeli number and asked for a comment on the threats against her.
“These are not innocent people. The journalists affiliated with Hezbollah that Israel eliminated were also spies for Hezbollah, approaching our soldiers and then informing the terrorist organization where our soldiers were in real time. Similarly, on 7 October, journalists affiliated with Hamas were eliminated because they were intelligence officers. Send greetings to all journalists affiliated with Hezbollah, for anyone who works for the organization should know that they are destined for death,” the response said.
The phone number belongs to an Israeli who runs a social media account called “Middle East with Gideon Ben Avraham.”
He wrote in a post: “Journalists from all over the world called me, trying to get a response from me about why the Lebanese journalist who worked for Hezbollah was killed or eliminated? Because by chance I sent her a message in the past saying that if she endangers Israel’s soldiers, she won’t live long like her colleagues who deliberately acted to harm the IDF, so there are dozens of articles about me in Lebanon claiming that I eliminated her. Excellent!”
Israel has been killing Lebanese journalists for years, as it has consistently done in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Last month, Al Manar correspondent Ali Shoeib and Al Mayadeen correspondent Fatima Ftouni, along with her photojournalist brother Mohammad, were killed in an Israeli strike in south Lebanon.
Amal Khalil is the ninth journalist to be killed by Israel in Lebanon since the start of this year.
On Mass Surveillance, Will the Deep State Win Again?
By Harrison Berger | The American Conservative | April 22, 2026
For nearly two decades, Congress has obediently renewed one of the federal government’s most expansive and unconstitutional domestic surveillance authorities, typically with total bipartisan enthusiasm, little floor debate, and even less public attention. Last Thursday morning, at 2 a.m., House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) kept that tradition alive, summoning members back to the Capitol in the dead of night for what Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) accurately labeled “a secret vote to reauthorize FISA while America sleeps.”
That law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was first enacted in 2008, when Congress voted to retroactively authorize parts of a secret warrantless surveillance program constructed under the George W. Bush administration, after it was exposed in December 2005 by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times. They revealed how under a presidential order signed in 2002, the NSA had been monitoring the international calls and emails of people inside the United States without warrants, targeting hundreds of Americans. The whistleblower Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald later exposed the true scale of NSA domestic wiretap programs, which targeted virtually every American citizen under an internal agency motto of “collect it all.”
Ever since that law was enacted, there has been a gradual expansion of the executive branch’s surveillance authorities and shredding of Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections, which this outlet has covered in depth. Under the pretext of targeting foreigners abroad, Section 702 has become a vehicle for warrantless backdoor searches of Americans’ private communications, with the FBI conducting up to 3.4 million such queries in 2021 alone. Those abuses triggered a reform battle in April 2024 that ultimately failed, when Johnson, a Constitutional lawyer, abandoned his longheld opposition to mass domestic spying and cast the deciding vote to reject a warrant requirement amendment, extending the program to April 20, 2026.
Patrick Eddington of the Cato Institute was one of the few who predicted that outcome, telling The American Conservative two days before the vote that he expected “at least a double digit group of GOP House members” to vote against a renewal, which is exactly what happened on Friday, when 20 Republicans joined most Democrats to block Section 702 reauthorization. Eddington correctly identified three in particular—Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX), Ralph Norman (R-SC), and Morgan Griffith (R-VA)—as key votes against, with all three having voted for a warrant requirement amendment in 2024 and each of them noticeably absent from a Tuesday night Rules Committee meeting where the panel voted to bring a clean reauthorization to the floor.
Eddington sees the vote as representing something much larger than a mere procedural defeat for Johnson. “I think what this speaks to is probably the beginning of the end for Trump,” he told The American Conservative. “So many more voters who went for him, even those who went for him three times, are walking away from him. There are members of the House who now feel they can take some more distance from this guy with less political risk.”
For now, Section 702 survives on a 15-day temporary extension, and the prospects for blocking a clean renewal of the government’s surveillance authorities remain uncertain. Greenwald, whose reporting alongside Snowden’s disclosures first revealed the true scope of NSA mass surveillance, frequently says that “the deep state always gets what it wants,” though he told The American Conservative that he “has been through about four of these and got [his] hopes up every time.” During a livestream last Friday, Greenwald sustained that pattern, holding up some hope that there were enough votes in Congress to stop reauthorization.
Tucker Carlson, who has covered surveillance overreach extensively on his show, seemed even more skeptical. “I doubt it,” he told The American Conservative when asked whether Trump’s push for a clean renewal could still be stopped. “He’s determined. It’s very dark.”
“Well there are a couple of clues,” he continued, pointing to the raw intelligence sharing agreement between the NSA and Israeli intelligence, first revealed by Snowden and reported by Greenwald, under which Americans’ signals intelligence data is handed over “to be used, God knows how.” He also pointed to a 2024 presentation by Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), a security state loyalist and then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in which the Congressman advocated for using Section 702 authorities against American college students protesting the war in Gaza. To his point, a “Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations,” in 2024 told Congress that FISA 702 was needed for “the safety and security of Israel.”
Carlson has more than a passing interest in FISA Section 702, having been the subject of domestic surveillance himself. “They admitted spying on me,” he told The American Conservative.
When the NSA responded to Carlson’s 2021 allegation that the agency had been monitoring his communications, it said only that he had never been an intelligence “target,” a carefully lawyered denial that conspicuously avoided saying his communications had never been queried under programs like FISA Section 702. The NSA’s response was also unusual since three-letter agencies typically neither confirm nor deny whether any specific individual’s communications have been collected.
On how Trump, another documented victim of FISA abuse, and Johnson, who built his political identity around opposition to FBI overreach, both ended up as the leading advocates for a clean renewal of those spying powers, Carlson pointed to institutional capture and coercion. “I think it’s a combination of carrot and stick,” he said.
“But I’ve noticed that members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, especially the chairmen, are invariably weak and screwed-up people and therefore easy to control,” Carlson observed. “Alcoholics, compulsive philanderers, etc,” he added, noting that disgraced Rep. Eric Swalwell, who is currently dealing with a sex scandal that seems likely to end his political career, was a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
A Palantir Manifesto
By Alan Mosley | The Libertarian Institute | April 22, 2026
Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s book, The Technological Republic, is a clarion call for Silicon Valley to abandon its consumer trinkets and rush headlong into the arms of the military-industrial complex. According to Karp, America’s future depends on wielding hard power through technology—arming soldiers, AI-weaponry, and mass surveillance systems—rather than on the “soft” influence demonstrated by free markets and liberty-first principles. The book claims that “the survival of the American experiment depends on the technological revitalization of the military-industrial complex” and urges the country’s engineering talent to focus on national defense. Karp and his co-author, Nicholas Zamiska, argue that tech bros should “grow up” and start killing America’s enemies before they kill us.
This techno-militarism dressed up as patriotic duty presumes that concentration of power in the state and its corporate allies (isn’t there a word for this?) is not only desirable, but morally required. In other words, The Technological Republic is far from a roadmap back to a prosperous America; it is a blueprint for a high-tech Leviathan. As reviewed in January by the Libertarian Institute’s own Laurie Calhoun, Karp’s willingness to aid the regime in its most notorious activities at home and abroad is not because “he is more ingenious or better informed than the competition, but only because he appears to be completely devoid of scruples.”
The Palantir X account posted a 22-point breakdown of the book’s themes, opening with the premise that the tech industry owes a “moral debt” to the country. American tech engineers are scolded for nurturing consumer-centric apps and free email services instead of focusing on what Karp sees as their true obligation: building the state’s war machine. Karp suggests that they should feel a “sense of purpose” in serving the defense industry, as if innovating weapons of war is akin to military service.
The book’s theme of military service doesn’t stop at the tech industry. “National service should be a universal duty,” Karp declares, arguing that America should “move away from an all-volunteer force.” It’s true that he suggests the reasoning is that the country will be less likely to go to war if everyone has skin in the game, but in practice the children of political and financial elite have never borne the same responsibility as the common man’s sons when a draft was required. Of course, it always bears repeating: conscription is slavery. Far from being fresh ideas, the same boogeymen tactics are employed in Karp’s argument as have always been to mobilize a nation. In this case, the external enemies are the “AI-enhanced posse of China, Russia, and Iran.”
Along the same vein, Palantir’s manifesto pledges “if a US Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software.” The excuse for responding to the Pentagon’s every whim is that we should remain “unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.” But bloated federal budgets, especially the Pentagon’s, exist to justify their own largesse and demand more. In practice, The Technological Republic would turn a blind eye to decades of waste, fraud, and abuse in favor of committing American taxpayers to bankrolling endless defense contracts. It should not escape notice that Palantir’s own business is building the very military tools that they argue should be beyond public debate.
Throughout the book, Karp espouses a paternalistic tone: ordinary people are infantilized consumers who need guidance from a technocratic elite. He admonishes the tech industry, saying it should “build where the market has failed to act.” Beyond the praise for billionaire visionaries like Elon Musk, Karp implies that entrepreneurial success is possible despite, rather than a result of, a free market. As such, private industries deemed critical to the nation’s interest should be remade into the image of a national project. This position arrives at centralization as the panacea without a moment’s pause to question just how “free” the nation’s free market has truly been under the political and economic centralization that already exists. What’s more, as new industries become nationalized, how long will it be until we’re told, under the weight of centralized mismanagement, that they are “too big to fail?”
For those nursing fears of a digital and surveillance prison being constructed by the megalomaniacal tech bro, the company behind The Technological Republic offers little respite. To the contrary, Palantir is far from a neutral observer; it has built many of the systems it now glorifies, and its own track record is rife with abuses. The ACLU, for example, catalogs how Palantir software underpins ICE’s deportation force, combing through social and medical data to target immigrants. In 2025, Amnesty International warned that Palantir’s “ImmigrationOS” platform enables “constant mass monitoring, surveillance, and assessments of people… often for the purpose of targeting non-US citizens.” Even if one is in favor of the immigration policy on display during the Trump administration, it is the height of naivete to believe these tools will not someday be turned on Americans. As Senator Ron Wyden (R-OR) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently warned, Palantir is even helping the IRS build an unprecedented “mega-database” of citizen data—a “surveillance nightmare” that could break privacy laws and enable politically motivated spying. In other words, the tech Alex Karp champions being used against Americans has already passed from plausible future to chilling present.
Palantir’s support for aggressive state projects goes hand in hand with troubling secrecy and influence. In the United Kingdom, for instance, it enjoys a £330 million NHS contract despite strong privacy objections. Civil rights groups bemoan that British officials even hired consultancy megafirm KPMG using taxpayer money to “promote the adoption” of Palantir’s software in hospitals, only to refuse Freedom of Information requests about the deal. In the United States, Palantir’s tentacles reach into nearly every government agency, often on sole-source or highly confidential contracts. Public filings reveal a $795 million Pentagon award for Palantir AI work and deployments of its software at DHS, HHS, FDA, CDC and NIH. In short, Palantir leverages its political connections to win lucrative government deals—even while civil rights advocates raise alarms. This is hardly the modus operandi of a virtuous tech company whose only interest is the benevolent reshaping of America’s future. Put simply, Palantir’s business model is about power and profit at the expense of taxpayers and privacy.
For all of the bluster about defending “Western values,” Palantir’s recent political posturing reveals its true tribalism. The company took out a full-page ad in The New York Times proclaiming it “stands with Israel,” and has even held a board meeting in Tel Aviv. Critics have decried Palantir for its alleged complicity in war crimes, equipping the Israelis with surveillance and targeting tools it has used against Palestinians in Gaza amid accusations of apartheid and genocide. Whether one agrees with these charges or not, the fact remains that Palantir’s politics are unapologetically partisan. If Israel’s national interests and America’s national interests do not align, then how can Palantir be trusted to pursue the latter over the former?
Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic is sold as a patriotic wake-up call. But its prescriptions amount to the very opposite of a free society. They call for compulsory service, a merger of state and corporate power, and the surrender of individual choice to the dictates of a technocratic elite. Palantir’s vision—war as a software project and culture as a pet project of the powerful—would leave little room for individual rights or market freedom, two things the company already fails to consider in its diagnosis of the nation’s ills. In the end, this “manifesto” is a cautionary tale of ideology cloaked in technobabble. The rhetoric of defending the West and saving civilization may sound noble, but the methods are anything but. History is replete with the grim realities of sacrificing liberty for security and trusting leaders to provide what they claim the market cannot.
Palantir’s Technological Republic is a blueprint for digital tyranny
The surveillance company’s unapologetically dystopian vision for the future is just 1984 updated for the AI era
By Constantin von Hoffmeister | RT | April 22, 2026
Walking through the glass-and-steel corridors of the modern tech-security apparatus reveals that the telescreen is a tireless processor of our very souls.
Palantir Technologies’ vision of a “Technological Republic” arrives as a manual for the refinement of the boot, the one destined to remain on the human face, provided the boot remains equipped with the latest predictive sensors. In the spirit of a clear-eyed look at the clock striking thirteen, we must dissect the alliance between corporate algorithmic power and the Zionist state. This is a new Newspeak, where “defense” is a moral debt and “deterrence” is the silent humming of an algorithm deciding who shall disappear.
The foundation of this digital fortress is built upon the claim of a “moral debt” that the engineering elite owes to the State. In George Orwell’s world of 1984, this represents the ultimate synthesis: the Party and the Corporation becoming indistinguishable. This “affirmative obligation” to participate in national defense is literalized in Palantir’s “strategic partnership” with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Finalized in early 2024 during a high-stakes visit by co-founders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp to Tel Aviv, this pact seeks to harness advanced data mining for “war-related missions.” The software engineers of Palo Alto have been drafted as the new Inner Party: high priests of a digital armory. Their corporate identity is so entwined with the Zionist project that Palantir held its first board meeting of 2024 in Israel, signaling that their “Technological Republic” transcends borders when it comes to the enforcement of state power.
We are told that the age of “soaring rhetoric” and atomic deterrence is fading, replaced by a “hard power” built entirely on software. Here is the transition from the clumsy violence of the truncheon to the invisible violence of the code. Reports from Gaza suggest that Palantir provides the underlying scaffolding for a system where human intuition is replaced by mathematical certainty. By synthesizing massive datasets – surveillance footage, intercepted communications, and biometric records – the software assists in the production of targeting databases that function as automated “kill lists.”
This creates a dangerous accountability gap, a form of “algorithmic plausible deniability.” When an AI-informed strike levels an apartment complex, the blame is diffused into a “black box.” The developer claims the software only “suggests,” the data scientist claims the inputs were “objective,” and the military commander claims the machine’s logic was “optimal.” Alex Karp recently boasted to shareholders, “We are in the business of building things that scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them,” a chilling affirmation of the firm’s central role in the escalating hostilities against Iran. This admission exposes a brutal reality where algorithmic precision is celebrated as a technical triumph while it systematically masks the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding under the weight of AI-driven targeting.
Within the theater of Operation Epic Fury, Palantir’s software functions as the primary cognitive engine for the US and Israeli military, processing thousands of Iranian targets with a speed that defies traditional human oversight. By compressing the “kill chain” to mere minutes, the firm has transitioned from a mere vendor to a lead protagonist in a conflict where the unblinking eye of the machine determines the survival of entire populations. In this environment, Palantir’s “unflinching commitment” to those in harm’s way becomes a mandate to silence debate regarding the human cost of the occupation.
There is a cunning piece of managed perception Palantir uses to critique the “tyranny of apps,” suggesting that the small glass slabs in our pockets limit our “sense of the possible.” The proposed remedy is a shift from the trivial surveillance of the consumer “app” to the total surveillance of the “infrastructure.” It is the complaint that the telescreen is being used for games when it should be used for the Two Minutes Hate. While the public frets over screen time, Palantir’s infrastructure works behind the scenes to monitor “regressive” elements.
Amnesty International has documented how this “made-by-Palantir” technology poses a surveillance threat to protestors. It is the realization that a society is only “free” so long as its actions are “vital” to the State’s interests. The manifesto of the Technological Republic suggests that the “decadence” of the ruling class will be forgiven so long as they deliver security. This is the ancient bargain of the totalitarian: we will feed you and keep you safe from the current “Enemy,” provided you hand over the keys to your private life and the right to remain unobserved.
The architects of this system boast of an “extraordinarily long peace” made possible by American power and its allies. This is the ultimate slogan: War is Peace. To the billions living under the shadow of proxy wars and AI-driven policing, this “peace” looks remarkably like a spreadsheet of managed casualties. It is a peace of the graveyard, maintained by a “deterrence” built on software that purports to know a subject’s intent before they have even conceived a thought.
Palantir’s call to undo the “postwar neutering” of nations such as Germany and Japan signals a calculated desire to awaken the ghosts of the 20th century. While this vision of renewed strength might appear reasonable on the surface, it functions as a demand that these nations become proper military vassals for American interests. In Asia, this requires Japan to discard its pacifist history to become an American attack dog, compelling the nation to spend at least 2% of its GDP on defense and purchase vast quantities of American weaponry. By transforming Japanese territory into a permanent frontline launchpad against China and urging Germany to serve as a fortified shield against Russia, the “Technological Republic” seeks to manage the logistics of future conflicts through its own software. In this worldview, the atomic age is ending because we have found a more efficient way to threaten one another with extinction through algorithmic deterrence.
The rejection of “hollow pluralism” in favor of a civilizational ranking is not a deviation from history, but rather the latest iteration of a continuous imperial project. While Franz Boas attempted to introduce cultural relativism as a check on Western dominance, his efforts never achieved a true global consensus; instead, the underlying structure of Western imperialism simply evolved its justifications. Where the British Empire once spoke of the “White Man’s Burden” to civilize the “savage,” and the Cold War era spoke of “democratization” to modernize the “underdeveloped,” Palantir now speaks of “technological vitality” to vanquish the “regressive.” This civilizational supremacism is the bedrock of the partnership with the Israeli state, framing a brutal, decades-long occupation as a defense of “progressive values” and “Western civilization.” By reintroducing a hierarchy where “vital” cultures possess the moral authority to dominate “regressive” ones, Palantir provides the digital scaffolding for a new kind of algorithmic empire. It is a world where the software determines who is “civilized” and who is a “target,” ensuring that the legacy of imperialist expansion continues under the guise of technical necessity.
The manifesto poses a pointed, rhetorical question: “Inclusion into what?” The answer, built into the very structure of Palantir’s corporate philosophy, is a mandatory absorption into a singular, totalizing System: a digital panopticon where the Marine’s rifle and the citizen’s intimate data are managed by the same algorithmic entity. This system establishes a stark, neo-feudal class divide; it laments the “ruthless exposure” of the private lives of the elite, seeking to resurrect a protected “priesthood” of public servants who operate within a sanctuary of state-sanctioned forgiveness and anonymity. Meanwhile, the rest of mankind is subjected to the absolute “ruthless exposure” of their own data, stripped of the right to be unquantifiable. Under this regime, transparency is a weapon used downward to discipline the proles, while opacity is a shield used upward to protect the architects of the machine.
Palantir represents a new era of the military-industrial complex, one where data is the primary ammunition and ideology is the primary marketing tool. It seeks to upgrade the Republic into a fortress where the walls are made of code and the “long peace” is maintained by the stoic demeanor of the machine. The company frames its support for Israel as a defense of democratic survival, when in reality it is the chilling realization of high-tech surveillance used to enforce a permanent state of siege. As the international community begins to react – evidenced by the $24-million divestment by Norway’s Storebrand over concerns of “international law” violations – the core question of our age remains: Should the power to decide who is a “terrorist,” who is “regressive,” and who is a “target” to be outsourced to a private company with a political agenda? In the “Technological Republic,” the most rebellious act one can commit is to remain unquantifiable, to exist outside the data-mining net, and to insist that a human life is more than a data point in a war-related mission.
Constantin von Hoffmeister is a political and cultural commentator from Germany, author of the books ‘MULTIPOLARITY!’ and ‘Esoteric Trumpism’, and director of Multipolar Press.
Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation.
Mass Murder by Artificial Intelligence
Project Maven is an AI-driven battlefield intelligence system designed by the corporation. The Defense Department, now known as the War Department, employed Maven in 2024 for “targeting support” in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Maven incorporates the AI model Claude, built by Anthropic.
More recently, in US airstrikes against Iran, “AI systems born from Project Maven have helped identify and prioritize thousands of targets, accelerating intelligence analysis and operational planning,” explains the Center for a New American Security, a military think tank founded by Michèle Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense with links to Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems. She was the principal adviser to the Secretary of Defense in the formulation of national security and defense policy.
Maven was reportedly used to shorten the “kill chain” during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. “I am proud that we are supporting Israel in every way we can,” CEO Karp exclaimed. Following the Gaza al-Aqsa Flood in October, 2023, Palantir “provided Israel with multiple AI-powered data analytics tools for military and intelligence purposes,” notes the American Friends Service Committee. The corporation has a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to assist the Zionist state and its “war effort” against Palestinian resistance to Israeli military occupation, an armed struggle recognized under international law.
“As the genocide in Gaza advances, attention is turning to the companies whose technologies may be facilitating Israel’s daily atrocities, with US-based Palantir Technologies among them,” reports the Business and Human Rights Center. “While the International Criminal Court (ICC) is stepping in to address genocide accusations, the tech barons who design and supply the tools of warfare remain largely unchallenged.”
Another Israeli AI-based targeting system, Lavender, ostensibly developed by the IDF’s Unit 8200, is said to be a Palantir project. Palantir rejected this assertion in a letter sent to Francesca Albanese, the sanctioned United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. In the letter, Palantir stressed it “stands in solidarity with Israel in response to the horrific attacks on 7 October, 2023. Our work in Israel long predates the 7 October attacks and is in line with our global commitment to U.S. allies and liberal democracies. We proudly support our partners in Israel across a multitude of mission sets, programs, and contexts.”
Israel utilized Palantir in its September 2024 attacks in Lebanon, employing exploding electronic pagers that resulted in numerous fatalities and injuries, writes AFSC’s Investigate. In addition to its collaboration with the Israeli military, Palantir also provides the Gaza Civil-Military Coordination Center with its services. This center is located at the US military compound in Kiryat Gat, which was established in October 2025 to implement the Trump administration’s plan for Gaza. Iran targeted Kiryat Gat in March, 2026.
Maven, incorporating Anthropic’s Claude, was used to target the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, killing 180 people, mostly young girls. President Trump praised Palantir Technologies, saying the company “has proven to have great war-fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies,” apparently including children.
“Creepy CEO” Advocates Involuntary Servitude in “Service to the West”
“Alex Karp, the creepy CEO of creepy defense contractor Palantir, just can’t stop talking about killing people,” Lucas Ropek writes for Gizmodo. “During a recent call with investors, the billionaire let it slip that he doesn’t mind a little bloodshed, just so long as the money keeps pouring in.”
“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them,” Karp said, with a smile on his face. The CEO added that he was very proud of the work his firm is doing and that he felt it was good for America. “I’m very happy to have you along for the journey,” he said. “We are crushing it. We are dedicating our company to the service of the West, and the United States of America, and we’re super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”
For Karp, “service to the West” includes conscription, that is to say involuntary servitude and the possibility of a violent and horrific death for an untold number of men and women drafted to fight the forever wars envisioned by the billionaire elite, including those within the “libertarian” tech sector.
However, forcing an individual against his or her will to kill and possibly be killed for the sake of the state (or foreign states, such as Israel), and in accordance with a “social contract” that demands submission and obedience, is not libertarian. In the case of Palantir, it is more accurately described as “techno-fascism,” an alliance between Silicon Valley and the state. Contrary to libertarian principles advocating against government intervention, leading tech companies frequently advocate for regulations that favor established AI companies benefiting from government funding and contracts.
Palantir, named after the “seeing stones” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, may be characterized as a “merchant of death,” a term prominent in the 1930s regarding WWI profiteering. Alex Karp may be compared to Basil Zaharoff, a Greek arms dealer and industrialist, one of the wealthiest men of his time. Unlike Zaharoff, Karp is not selling rifles or munitions, he is selling something far worse—the ability, through artificial intelligence, to murder thousands, if not millions of people with the speed and efficiency of computer technology.
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From the Archives
On ‘conflict’, ‘peace’ and ‘genocide’: Time for new language on Palestine
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | June 12, 2021
On 25 May, famous US actor Mark Ruffalo tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
“I have reflected and wanted to apologise for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding: “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of “hyperbole”? … continue
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