The Cage Disguised as a Crown On Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Misandry Hidden Inside the Men's Rights Pitch

In March 2025, Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies — a data analytics company deeply embedded in The Pentagon and intelligence apparatus — made a remarkable statement on CNBC. His AI technology, he argued, would “disrupt humanities-trained — largely Democratic — voters, and make their economic power less,” while increasing “the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters.”

The surface reading is obvious: This is misogyny. Karp is promising to strip economic power from educated women and hand it to working-class men. The political targeting is naked. He is pitching his technology to the Republican Party as a weapon in the culture war — a way to reshape the electorate by reshaping the economy.

But stop. Read it again. And ask yourself: What, exactly, is being offered to those working-class men?

The Bait

The misogyny is the bait. It is designed to be seen. It flatters a certain kind of man — the man who has been told, rightly or wrongly, that he has been displaced, diminished, passed over. It whispers: Your time is coming back. The women who got ahead of you, the degree-holders who looked down at you, the “largely Democratic” voters who didn’t vote for your candidates — they will be cut down to size. You will rise.

This is a powerful message. It activates resentment. It promises restoration. And for men who have watched their economic prospects shrink over decades of deindustrialization, automation and wage stagnation, the promise of a reversal feels, for a moment, like justice.

But notice what Karp does not promise. He does not promise those men autonomy. He does not promise them ownership. He does not promise them dignity on their own terms. He promises them jobs — jobs created, defined, monitored and controlled by the technology Palantir builds and sells to the most powerful institutions on earth.

The Trap

Palantir’s business is surveillance and data integration at scale. Its clients include the Department of War, the CIA, ICE, and numerous other government and corporate entities. Its technology does not liberate workers — it tracks them, optimizes them and makes them legible to the institutions that employ them.

Karp himself acknowledged the stakes. “These technologies are dangerous societally,” he said. His justification was the familiar Patriot Act argument: if we don’t build it, our adversaries will, and then “we will be subject to their rule of law.” In other words: The cage is coming regardless. Better that we build it.

Now ask: Who is inside the cage?

The working-class men Karp is promising to empower will indeed have more jobs. Vocational, technical, physical jobs — the kind that AI does not yet do cheaply. But those jobs will be performed under the gaze of systems built by Palantir and its peers. Every output measured. Every movement trackable. Every inefficiency visible to a management layer that sits above the technology, not inside it.

The “economic power” Karp is promising is not power. It is employment. Those are not the same thing. Power means some control over the conditions of your work. Employment, in the world Palantir is building, means becoming a human component in a machine whose owners are the same 1% who have always owned the machine — only now the machine is smarter, faster and far more total.

The Real Misandry

This is where the misogyny flips into something darker: misandry. Not the cartoon misandry of someone who hates men, but the structural misandry of someone who regards men — working-class men specifically — as instruments. As a demographic to be activated, channeled and spent.

The oldest mechanism of patriarchal control has always been this: Give men dominance in the domestic sphere in exchange for submission in the economic sphere. Tell a man he is the boss of his home, and he will more easily accept being a worker on someone else’s terms. The home becomes the one place he is king — precisely because the factory, the platform, the algorithm, has made him a subject everywhere that actually matters.

Karp’s pitch updates this mechanism for the AI age. The humanities-educated women lose economic ground — that part is real and intentional. But the working-class men gain not freedom but a more sophisticated harness. They are told they have won. They have not won. They have been recruited.

What Men Actually Lose

There is another loss that Karp’s vision guarantees, and it is one that the men’s rights framing is constitutionally unable to see: the loss of partnership.

A man who accepts this bargain — who cheers as his female colleagues and neighbors lose economic standing — does not become more powerful at home. He becomes more alone. A diminished partner is not a partner. A woman stripped of her economic agency is not a companion — she is a dependent. And dependence, in either direction, is not love. It is not respect. It is not the kind of relationship that sustains a man through the actual difficulties of a life.

The men who have lived this know it. The research is unambiguous: Men in equal partnerships — where both partners work, contribute, argue, decide together — report higher levels of happiness, longer lives, better health outcomes and more satisfying sex lives than men in relationships structured around dominance and dependence. Equality is not a concession men make to women. It is something men need for themselves.

To see your partner flourish — to watch someone you love become more capable, more confident, more fully themself — is one of the profound pleasures of a life shared. To suppress that flourishing in order to feel superior is to choose a smaller life. It is to mistake the shadow of power for the thing itself.

Who Benefits

Let us be clear about who benefits from Karp’s vision. Not working-class men. Not women. The beneficiaries are Palantir’s shareholders, the defense contractors who purchase its products, the government agencies that use its tools to manage populations and the political coalition that finds it useful to keep working-class men angry at educated women rather than at the structures that have extracted wealth from both of them for decades.

The culture war is not a mistake. It is a feature. Every hour a working-class man spends furious at a female colleague’s degree is an hour he does not spend asking why his pension disappeared, why his hospital closed, why his son cannot afford a house, why the company that employed his father for 30 years moved its operations to a country with no labor protections. The misogyny is the distraction. The misandry is the extraction.

A Different Future

There is a different vision available. It is less dramatic. It does not promise revenge or restoration. It does not have a villain who looks like the woman in your office with the graduate degree.

It says this: The same forces that threaten her threaten you. The AI that will displace her analytical work will also track and optimize your physical work. The concentration of wealth that makes her degree less valuable also makes your labor less valuable. You are not on opposite sides of this. You are on the same side, and you have been handed a story that keeps you from seeing it.

And it says this: The woman who is your equal partner — who earns, who thinks, who challenges you, who does not depend on you for her survival — is not your enemy. She is your greatest asset. She sees things you don’t. She carries weight you would otherwise carry alone. She makes you more, not less.

The men who will thrive in the world being built are not the men who cheered when educated women lost ground. They are the men who understood, early enough, that a partner is not a threat — and that the people telling you otherwise were building a cage and calling it a crown.