Because it is necessary, my point-by-point rebuttal to:

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.

REBUTTAL: The Silicon Valley elite should not be co-opted by the United States’ security establishment. Instead, they should focus on democratizing technology away from a narrow oligopoly of institutions. This is the true debt they must repay.
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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.

REBUTTAL: While this is true, we must be careful about what replaces it. Are we going from an App-centric to a GPT-centric UI? Is that a better layer?
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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.

REBUTTAL: The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, is the result of spiritual decay, and the same force cannot be expected to provide salvation for the public. In fact, it is the public that is far more capable of guiding the salvation of the ruling class.
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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.

REBUTTAL: Hard power is a prerequisite for sovereignty in today’s world, but it will be built on hard assets, driven by a physical world. The centralization of data and software systems is, in fact, the West’s biggest weakness.
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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.

REBUTTAL: America’s enemies are so heavily integrated into the military-industrial complex that they will absorb any advancement in real-time. There is no hermetic seal. Without due consideration, we are headed towards mutually assured destruction by people and companies motivated by profits in the guise of patriotism.
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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.

REBUTTAL: This is the most dangerous proposal of all, in a time of human fodder in war, as the Ukraine conflict has demonstrated. Tomorrow’s wars will be fought by drones and robots, with human shields in between. An unlimited supply of the latter will only be put in the service of the former, not vice versa.
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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.

REBUTTAL: No one can argue with this fact: a national military must be equipped with the best. Yet, one must also ask, is this for the good of the empire, or the good of the republic? Is this weapon required, or is it a project supported for its profits by an industrial complex? What are the checks and balances on the use of weapons?
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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.

REBUTTAL: It is a spiritually hollow proposition that man is motivated by money when all of human history flies in the face of this. Mission and meaning have far more resonance, but in a society governed by a decadent ruling class, why make the sacrifice?
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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.

REBUTTAL: This is itself a red herring, portraying public officials today as gracefully carrying out their duties, afflicted only by the revelation of minor public scandals. The city of Washington, DC, is a cesspool of corruption. It needs to be exposed to be rebuilt at the core. Let officials have affairs and indulgences, but not sacrifice the public interest for private gain.
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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.

REBUTTAL: This masks the fact that most leading lights in Silicon Valley do not believe in a greater power, with some seeking to usher in AI as a greater power to worship, and others pursuing immortality through ‘longevity’.
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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.

REBUTTAL: This should be applied to America’s geopolitical role in the world, in which Palantir is most closely involved. Is this adhered to in practice?
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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.

REBUTTAL: We are in a physical world, overlayed by a digital reality. In that sense, we are entering the most intrinsic atomic age of all time. We will go to the very core of our physical reality in the coming decade. Those playing video games will be unprepared for what is to come.
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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.

REBUTTAL: There has been no more universal power than the United States, but the extent of the freedoms it has granted has always been only for those within the borders of its central zone. Be assured, as long as America is an empire, the rest of the world’s citizens are its slaves, even if they are prosperous ones. Yet within its borders as a force for liberty, America is the greatest country in the history of the world.
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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.

REBUTTAL: World War was not the norm of the past before the rise of European powers and the American order. The level of death due to modern weapons for everyday civilians in the 20th century shocked the human conscience. War has been a constant refrain for the past half-century in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, as has been political turmoil. There is no long peace. There has been only a long, humming war.
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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.

REBUTTAL: Be wary of those who appeal to your sense of the Republic and Nation, only to try to create new export markets for the weapons they create in the service of an internationalist empire, that reenlivens the militarism of old.
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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.

REBUTTAL: Elon Musk has genuinely advanced innovation more than any human being over the last two decades through Neurolink, Tesla, and SpaceX. But Palantir is none of those companies. It may rise on its own merits, but it should surely not ride the coattails of Elon Musk.
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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.

REBUTTAL: Violent crime in the United States is falling to all-time lows. Where it persists is due to ineffective policing, low-trust communities due to migration, poverty, and a lack of order, and corrupt governance that indulges in expanding budgets rather than problem-solving. It is not due to a lack of 1984-esque surveillance.
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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.

REBUTTAL: While this is true, we must question who is exposing private lives? Is it just for their indiscretions or also for their foreign policy positions? Who was most attacked when being appointed by the recent administration? Anyone outside of the establishment consensus for military action received the most scorn.
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19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

REBUTTAL: The assumption that exists is that there is a public square. However, incentives today are more centered on adjacent squares that overlap. This is why the right and left live in the same timeline, successfully. The real question is what debates are ‘permissible’ and what debates are off-limits? It is not about saying nothing wrong, but saying nothing at all that matters.
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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.

REBUTTAL: The greatest anti-establishment voices in the alternative elite of Silicon Valley are those who would usher in weapons of war, gambling for the poor, and pornography for the masses.
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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.

REBUTTAL: We must instead ask ourselves the more difficult question: are cultures around the world in a retrograde state, preventing them from advancing and modernizing across generations, especially if they are in opposition to the American empire project? And more poignantly, the American empire project itself is most opposed to the inherent culture of the American republic.
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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?

REBUTTAL: We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow capitalism.