Yves here. Tom Neuburger looks at how Americans are being indoctrinated to accept even more state spying\u2026because, of course, baddies. It is striking that the Newspeak is so advanced that \u201cThem\u201d seems to do just fine, as supposed to what one would think are more evocative formulations: Enemies. Dissidents. Criminals. Agitators. Aliens. Threats.<\/p>\n
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God\u2019s Spies<\/a><\/strong><\/em> Masked national guardsmen fire barrage of tear gas into crowd of demonstrators on campus of Kent State University, May 4th, 1970. When the gas dissipated, four students lay dead and several others injured. (Getty Images)<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThey need to wake up scared and go to bed scared.\u201d<\/em> I want to look at a theme we\u2019ve explored recently, and put a very fine point on it. The theme: \u201cUs vs. Them.\u201d<\/p>\n Who\u2019s Us in Us vs. Them<\/em>?<\/b><\/p>\n If you see the world in an Us vs. Them<\/em> way, \u201cus\u201d is Americans, or more broadly, citizens of the West, and \u201cthem\u201d is the non-Western world: the brown, the global south, the technologically less advanced; the tribal, in many cases; the less city-fied.<\/p>\n Thus \u2014 and this has been true since the so-called Age of Exploration, if not millennia before \u2014 \u201cus\u201d in the Us vs. Them<\/em> frame is the \u201cgreatly superior.\u201d<\/p>\n That frame puts \u201cus\u201d in good odor. Alex Karp\u2019s admonition \u2014 to make sure \u201cour\u201d enemies \u201cwake up scared and go to bed scared<\/a>\u201d \u2014 puts Americans, us in the more advanced West, inside facing out \u2014 secure and protected, not just from \u201cour enemies,\u201d but from the evils we deliver to them. To put it in cruder terms, we\u2019re also safe because we\u2019re pissing, not pissed upon.<\/p>\n And this is how we\u2019re supposed to regard the muscular state, the heavily armed, punishing state, as guardians of \u201cus,\u201d as outward-facing armies guarding the gates. The state can mistreat \u201cthem\u201d because \u201cthey\u201d are not \u201cus.\u201d<\/p>\n But Karp is a billionaire, as is Trump, whom he serves, as are all of the wealthy class<\/em>, the overly rich. Karp imagines he speaks for a larger \u201cus,\u201d for his class and also Americans generalized. He says so explicitly. From the same speech:<\/p>\n Americans are the most loving God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. And they want to know that if you\u2019re waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you\u2019re a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you \u2014 and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Note the emphasis on \u201cforeign\u201d; the emphasis on wide retribution \u2014 your friends, your cousins, your lovers, your fiscal well-being; the intentionally great disproportion<\/a> between offense and response\u2026<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/00-them.jpg\")
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\u2014Alex Karp, Palantir co-founder. \u201cThey\u201d means our enemies, whoever they are.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n