The Seeing Stone
This week, during Women’s History Month, Alex Karp — CEO of Palantir, one of the most powerful companies most Americans have never heard of — sat down with CNBC and said this:
“This technology disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters.”
He was announcing it. Highly educated, often female, largely Democratic voters — his words, same interview — are the target. Anyone who objects belongs in an insane asylum. His words.
She does not know the name Palantir.
She knows her job. She has held it for nine years. She is a medical billing coordinator at a regional hospital in Memphis, a paralegal at a mid-size firm in Atlanta, a financial analyst at a regional bank in Columbus, the marketing director who built her department from three people to eleven. She has a degree. Maybe two. She earns $47,000. She earns $91,000. She has a daughter in the third grade and a student loan payment that comes out on the fifteenth and a performance review her manager keeps postponing.
She read the headline this week about the Iran war. She scrolled past the one about deportations. She never saw the one where the CEO named her.
Palantir has always known her.
There Are No Secrets
Palantir named itself after a cold sphere of glass in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. A seeing stone. The object the dark lord used to watch his enemies across Middle-earth. To find them before they found him. To show those who looked into it only what he wanted them to see.
Palantir chose that name.
The company logo reads: There are no secrets.
Palantir is a defense and surveillance technology company currently running the targeting system for the Iran war, tracking families for deportation, and staffing the Trump administration. It was founded in 2003 with seed money from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, built to help intelligence agencies find terrorists after September 11. It never stopped. It just found new targets.
Project Maven is the AI targeting system at the core of the Iran war right now. It processes drone footage and satellite imagery in real time to identify targets and coordinate strikes. At least 1,300 people dead. 9,000 injured. The Pentagon spent $11.3 billion in the first six days without congressional approval. Karp said this week he has read that Palantir is the core backbone of those operations. He smiled when he said it.
ImmigrationOS: $30 million contract with ICE, April 2025. Palantir’s systems pull data from passport records, Social Security files, IRS tax returns, and license-plate readers to build what the company calls a comprehensive AI-driven profile of individuals. The same platform is being expanded to link tax, medical, financial, and immigration records across agencies into a single searchable database. Bank account numbers. Student debt amounts. Medical claims. Disability status.
Yours too.
The architect of the deportation policy holds a financial stake in the company. The co-founder bankrolled the Vice President’s Senate campaign with $15 million and has said, on the record, that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. He has been the company’s chairman since the first dollar. 17 of his people are inside the administration now. The company donated to the $250 million gold ballroom.
$4.48 billion in revenue in 2025. Stock up 25-fold in three years.
The targeting system abroad. The profile system at home.
One architecture.
One seeing stone.
The seeing stone shows you what it was built to show, and withholds what it was built to withhold. The difference between those two things is where the damage is done.
The Blueprint
He had commanded the largest military operation in human history. He had watched the defense industry build itself around the war and then refuse to stop building when the war ended. He spent eight years in the White House watching contracts flow from the Pentagon to private companies and back again, watching former generals take board seats, watching the machinery grow larger and more permanent and more entangled with the government that was supposed to oversee it. He knew what he was looking at because he had run it.
Three days before he left office, January 17, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower sat down in front of a camera and said the thing no one inside the machine ever says.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
He also warned in the same speech that public policy could become “the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
We put the speech in a textbook. We named a highway after him. We kept building exactly what he described.
The captive of a scientific-technological elite does not only mean the weapons contracts. It means the information. It means knowing what you have not yet thought to protect.
This is not the machine Eisenhower feared arriving. It is the machine he described, sixty-five years later, announcing its next target.
“If you are going to disrupt the economic and political power significantly of one party’s base — highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat — and you feel like that’s going to work out politically, you’re in an insane asylum.”
Eisenhower named the architecture in 1961. The blueprint and the execution are the same document. Written sixty-five years apart.
Pushed Back
Women are nearly three times as likely as men to have their jobs automated by AI. In the United States, 79% of employed women work in jobs at high risk of automation compared to 58% of men.
The receptionist and the managing partner. The medical billing coordinator and the financial analyst earning $91,000. The entry-level copywriter and the marketing director who built her department from three people to eleven. Women are nearly 60% of all accountants and auditors in America. Paralegals: 80% risk of automation by 2026. Legal researchers: 65% by 2027. The nation’s largest law firms have already cut entry-level hiring by 25%.
Middle management. The rung women fought hardest to reach. AI projected to eliminate over 50% of those positions by end of 2026. The $120,000 manager replaced by a $20 monthly subscription.
Medical transcription: already 99% automated. Medical billing and coding: 40% gone in 2025. Marketing, communications, content strategy stripped of entry points one job posting at a time.
The bottom rung is being removed entirely. You cannot grow into the career if the door no longer exists. That is not a pipeline problem. That is a generation.
It is not only women. Black workers are 10% more likely to face automation-based job loss. 4.5 million jobs disrupted according to McKinsey. This week Meta announced it is considering cutting 20% of its workforce to fund AI infrastructure. The week Karp named educated women on television, Zuckerberg was planning the layoffs that will hit the workers below them.
The same platform measuring your output against the machine already has your tax return.
Within living memory a woman could not get a credit card without a man’s signature. Not until 1988 could a woman in many states start a business without her husband’s permission. They fought through that. Built anyway. Became the professionals this country said it rewarded — not because the country made room for them but because they made room for themselves inside a country that was not designed to hold them.
These were not gifts. They were the architecture of independence. Built by hand. Inside a structure that was never supposed to accommodate them.
Women now hold more college degrees than men. 32.6 million versus 31.9 million. They out-educated the competition. For every dollar a man earns in the same role, they take home eighty-two cents. In 2026. After all of it. And the CEO of the company bombing Iran and deporting families just named their economic relevance as the problem his product solves.
They started behind.
They are being pushed back further.
What You See
Picture the stone.
Dark glass. Cold and ancient, shaped in an age whose name you do not know, patient in the way that only very old things are patient, waiting as it has always waited for someone to look. You look. And you see everything — the war, the raids, the contracts, the revenue, the gold ballroom, the men in the administration who used to work for the company that built the stone you are holding. Further and further you look. All of it real. All of it true. All of it exactly what the stone was built to show you.
What you do not see is your own file.
The meeting where they decided the software could do your job before they told you the software existed. The job posting that went up under a different title for sixty percent of your salary. The contract your firm signed with the AI vendor six months before junior hiring quietly stopped. The performance review that keeps getting postponed because the numbers already say what it would have to say and no one wants to be in the room when you hear it.
You were not imagining it. The gap you felt was real. The silence was not incompetence. It was the stone already knowing what you did not yet know about yourself.
The stone sees your passport. Your tax return. Your medical claims. Your student debt. Your license plate at 8 a.m. when you pulled into the parking garage. It has been building your profile since before you knew the company’s name, as the stone was always intended. That profile is already in the same system as the one tracking families for deportation. The same architecture. The same platform. The same seeing stone.
The sequence is not accidental. The architecture was built before the unemployment. The unemployment is the architecture working.
You did everything right. The degrees. The credentials. The years. The output. You out-educated the competition and still take home eighty-two cents and now the CEO of the company running the Iran war just told a television camera that your economic power is the problem his product is designed to solve.
The knowledge you obtained was, doubtless, often of service to you. And yet.
The stone does not show you those things. It shows you the power. What it withholds is what comes next for you.
Eisenhower named it in 1961. Karp announced the target this week during Women’s History Month. He had already calculated the cost.
The question was never whether the stone would find you.
The question is who decided what you would see.
NOTES & SOURCES
The Karp Quotes
Karp first quote and second quote, CNBC interview, March 12, 2026. https://newrepublic.com/post/207693/palantir-ceo-karp-disrupting-democratic-power
Karp on warfare, AIPCon 9, March 2026. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Palantir-defends-its-role-in-the-kill-chain-We-are-very-very-proud-of-that-11211275.html
Palantir — The Company
Palantir founding, CIA seed money, history. https://www.britannica.com/money/Palantir-Technologies-Inc
Palantir Q4 2025 revenue, $4.48 billion full year. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/02/palantir-pltr-q4-2025-earnings.html
$900 million in federal contracts, Stephen Miller stake, ImmigrationOS details. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-immigrationos-palantir-ai-track-immigrants/
ImmigrationOS $30 million ICE contract, April 2025. https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2025/05/01/palantir-deportations-ice-immigration-trump
IRS mega-database, surveillance nightmare, ten members of Congress. https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-ocasio-cortez-demand-answers-from-palantir-about-plans-to-build-irs-mega-database-of-american-citizens
Co-founder Thiel: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” 2009. Thiel bankrolled Vance Senate campaign with $15 million. https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/07/palantir-spearheads-as-the-master-database-on-americans/
Project Maven, Iran war, $11.3 billion Pentagon spending first six days. https://gizmodo.com/palantir-ceo-insists-he-doesnt-support-regime-change-wars-but-supports-iran-war-2000732971
Palantir donated to $250 million gold ballroom. https://afsc.org/palantir-explainer
The Eisenhower Warning
Eisenhower Farewell Address, January 17, 1961. https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/farewell-address
Women and AI Job Displacement
Women nearly three times more likely to have jobs automated. 79% of employed women in high-risk roles. https://fortune.com/2025/05/20/ai-workplace-3-times-more-likely-to-take-a-womans-job-mans/
Women 60% of accountants and auditors. Paralegals 80% automation risk by 2026. Legal researchers 65%. Middle management 50% elimination. Medical transcription 99% automated. Medical billing 40% gone. Entry-level job postings down 13%. https://www.demandsage.com/ai-job-replacement-stats/
Law firms cut entry-level hiring 25%. https://salesforcedevops.net/index.php/2025/02/28/the-white-collar-recession-of-2025/
Women now hold more college degrees than men. 82 cents on the dollar. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/17/women-are-a-rising-share-of-us-managers-and-professionals/
Black Workers and AI
Black workers 10% greater likelihood of automation-based job loss. 4.5 million jobs disrupted. https://nul.org/news/op-ed-automation-threatens-future-black-workers-america
Meta Layoffs
Meta considering cutting 20% of workforce to fund AI infrastructure, March 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/14/meta-planning-sweeping-layoffs-as-ai-costs-mount-reuters.html
Women’s Economic History
Equal Credit Opportunity Act, 1974. Women could not get credit without male co-signer before this. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2023/03/22/on-the-basis-of-sex-equal-credit-opportunities/
Women’s Business Ownership Act, 1988.https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/5050
The naming of Palantir is a other example of the perversion of Tolkien’s works by the broligarchs. The palantiri were created by Fëanor during the First Age of Middle Earth. They were brought to Numenor by Elros, and later taken to Middle Earth by Elendil so he could govern his kingdom by using their seeing powers. Sauron obtained his palantir when he conquered Minas Ithil and used it to corrupt Saruman and Denethor. Tolkien’s work is full of warnings about how evil can corrupt the best intentions.
Your essay is another sterling example of how power corrupts and how unforseen capabilities of new technologies can manifest in evil ways. I hope more progressive decision makers read your earnest warnings. The post is a terrifying read.
Chilling