Simon Clark

Coauthor of The Key Man. Previously @wsj & @business. [email protected]

[Sangita Myska @SangitaMyska]

It’s begun: The Great Rewriting of History by the politicians, journalists, media commentators who stayed quiet over Gaza to keep climbing the greasy pole - while a handful of us who spoke-up were smeared, abused, or fired.

As @Hamza_a96 says, don’t let them do it:

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

I'm Jewish, British & 64

All my life, I wondered how the Holocaust could have happened. I understood that Hitler & other leaders were EVIL, but how did millions of ordinary people go along with it?

NOW, seeing how so many in the West rationalise & defend the Gaza Genocide, I think I have my answer and it is profoundly disturbing

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

This week, the ICC requested an arrest warrant against Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

In response, he ordered the forcible evacuation and demolition of Khan al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank.

This is ethnic cleansing. When will our government end its complicity?

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Today is Nakba Day. You cannot understand what lies at the heart of conflict in the Middle East unless you understand what happened to 85% of Palestinians in 1948. Here Eugene Rogan explains how hundreds of thousands of refugees ended up homeless & dispossessed in Gaza

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

The extreme global reaction to hantavirus, likely spread and incubated from a garbage drump in Argentina vs the fact all of Gaza’s water and sanitation system is destroyed, rats bites and droppings everywhere, among a population of over a million. Nothing. Silence.

[Pedro Sánchez @sanchezcastejon]

España no mira hacia otro lado.
Sancionar a quienes defienden la justicia internacional es poner en riesgo todo el sistema de derechos humanos.

La UE no puede permanecer de brazos cruzados ante esta persecución.

Por eso, hoy pedimos a la Comisión que active el Estatuto de Bloqueo, para proteger la independencia de la Corte Penal Internacional y de Naciones Unidas, y sus acciones para acabar con el genocidio en Gaza.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

The lack of news on Gaza isn’t because the genocide is over.

It’s because Israel slaughtered the journalists and Western media pretends there’s a ceasefire.

[Amnesty MENA @AmnestyMENA]

🚨We are deeply concerned for the safety of activists #SaifAbuKeshek and #ThiagoAvila who are being taken to #Israel for questioning after being arbitrarily detained by the Israeli military after the unlawful interception of the #GlobalSumudFlotilla vessels in international waters.

🚨The two activists were participating in a peaceful solidarity mission aiming to break Israel's unlawful blockade of the #Gaza Strip and deliver aid to Palestinians struggling to survive under Israel’s genocide and unlawful occupation.

🚨They are at great risk of human rights abuses, including torture and other ill-treatment given @amnesty's previous documentation of the abuse inflicted on flotilla activists detained in October 2025 at the hands of the Israeli authorities

🚨It is especially concerning that Saif Abu Keshek, a Palestinian-Spanish-Swedish national, is being detained on suspicion of affiliation with a terrorist organization given Israel's discriminatory laws and persistent record of harassment and oppression of Palestinians under Israel’s system of apartheid. Israel must immediately release them and ensure they are protected while in custody.

🚨Israel’s defiance of international law must end. The ICJ has been clear: Israel’s #occupation is #unlawful and must be brought to an end. States must act now to restore some faith in international law by holding Israel accountable for its violations and crimes.

[Frances 'Cassandra' Coppola @Frances_Coppola]

This is disgraceful, @Reuters. He is charged with the attempted murder of THREE men, two Jews and one Muslim. It is wholly unacceptable for a newswire to mislead the public by reporting incorrect information.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

Wow. The Pope was just asked his stance on migration. His answer is amazing:

“I would change the question: what is the global North doing to help the global South in its situation that forces them to migrate.”

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

Gaza levelled, snipers on elevated mounds built from the pulverised earth, shooting anyone who crosses an unmarked line, including children.

What word would we use to describe the concentration of a people into a small camp under threat of death?

[Richard Sewell @sgcjerusalem]

Happy St George’s Day!
St George is beloved by Palestinian Christians, especially because his roots are in Palestine. His shrine is in Al-Lydd/Lod, near Tel Aviv. Palestinian Christians channel the spirit of St George because of his courage and his victory over tyranny.

[Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane]

Lebanese Christians and Italian UNIFIL soldiers replaced the Jesus Christ statue in the town of Debel, southern Lebanon, which had been destroyed by Israeli soldiers.

The residents rejected the statue Israel sent yesterday as a replacement.

[Jack Nassar | جاك نصار @jacknassar33]

This is a picture of my grandfather with his parents and siblings, taken in Jerusalem in 1934. My Christian family lived in Jerusalem continuously since the time of Jesus, and our family tree that we have today can trace our roots back to around 1400 in Palestine, though it goes much further than we can track.

Until 1948, when Zionist terrorists ethnically cleansed them from their city, stole their home, personal belongings, clothes, documents, books, money, and properties… and turned them into refugees overnight.

Today, NONE of my family lives in Jerusalem. ZERO. Not a single one. And that is because of Israel, not Muslims.

[Haaretz.com @haaretzcom]

A Jesus statue gets more empathy than Palestinians in Israel
https://t.co/n3cIRuHWTk

[Andrey X @the_andrey_x]

I think this is the best picture I've ever taken

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

If governments were actually doing their job, this Palantir document 👇 wouldn't be a manifesto they proudly boast about, but a clear sign of the urgent need to purge its software from the public institutions it has infiltrated.

What are they saying, essentially?

They basically promote a clash of civilization worldview in which there exists a "they" - the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures the document codes as inferior - and a "we" who must stop indulging in decadent restraint and invest massively in AI weapons and defense software (which conveniently makes Palantir's product catalog the civilizational cure).

Look at point 4 for instance. They write that "the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software."

It all rests on a pretty massive assumption: that coexistence is impossible. Why would "free and democratic societies" (by which they obviously mean Western-style liberal-democracies) need to "prevail"? Why can't they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems out there?

Nowhere in the document do they defend this assumption: it's simply asserted as the starting condition of the argument.

But it's the entire ballgame: if civilizations and political systems can coexist - as they largely have, imperfectly but recognizably, throughout history - then the entire case they make in the document evaporates.

In fact one can argue that, studying history, the big problem was not that civilizations couldn't coexist: it was that, from time to time, one of them decided that others were inferior, threatening, or standing in the way of its rightful expansion - and acted accordingly.

So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others.

The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history: it's arguing for reviving them!

Or take point 15: they explicitly call for the re-armament of Germany and Japan, and an end to "Japanese pacifism". Basically undoing one of the foundational settlements of the post-WW2 order.

I mean, think about the insanity of this for a second: a private company - unelected, answerable only to its shareholders - is casually proposing to overturn the security architecture of two continents. A settlement that took a world war, and tens of millions of dead to establish.

Why do they propose this? There is obviously a commercial motivation: a remilitarized Germany and Japan are massive new defense-software markets.

But the more troubling answer is that point 15 fits into the ideological project the rest of the manifesto lays out - a civilizational contest requires a consolidated Western bloc, and pacifist members are a liability in such a contest.

So taking a step back we now have what's the most influential defense-software company in the world, with its code deeply embedded in all the machinery of Western states - intelligence agencies, militaries, police forces, welfare systems, border controls - openly outing itself as an ideological project.

They're effectively saying "our tools aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours."

Because, worryingly, that's what they CAN do. Palantir software is all about basically telling states: "these are your threats, these are the people and groups to watch, these are the patterns that matter, these are the targets that warrant action."

For instance the DGSI - the French intelligence services - use Palantir (see: https://t.co/3YJk88k4QY): do you honestly think the software is warning them about, say, the NSA tapping the phones of French government officials? About the weaponization of US extraterritorial law against French companies? Did it warn them about the AUKUS ambush that cost France a sixty-billion-euro submarine contract? Obviously not.

And that's exactly what the manifesto is saying. They've positioned themselves as advocates of Western civilizational unity, so their software can't undermine it. The ideological position and the product roadmap have to align, or the whole project falls apart.

This makes their software not only deeply dangerous for the world as a whole but also, almost by definition, for any country using it. When it comes to your security as a state, it is primordial you base yourself on truth as opposed to ideology. The entire point of an intelligence agency is to tell its government what is true, not what your so-called "allies'" defense contractors would like you to see.

A state that outsources its threat assessment to a company with an explicit ideological agenda is not gathering intelligence, it is essentially subscribing to propaganda.

The conclusion couldn't be more obvious. Every government still running Palantir software in its intelligence, security, or public-service infrastructure needs to start ripping it out, now! Lest they want to be embarked on the delusional and deeply destructive clash-of-civilizations crusade Palantir has now openly committed itself to.

[Laila Al-Arian @LailaAlarian]

Normalize naming every Palestinian child killed by Israel in the headline

[Simon Clark @ClarkWriting]

This is fascism.

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. 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.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

https://t.co/8igjazz1On

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

There is bread for everyone if it is given to everyone. There is bread for everyone if it is taken, not with a hand that snatches away, but with a hand that gives. In this way, the food was abundant. It was not rationed out of necessity. It was not stolen in strife. It was not wasted by those who gorge themselves in the presence of those who have nothing to eat. #ApostolicJourney #Cameroon
https://t.co/rtIuNbQl83