Who's the 'Us' in 'Keeping Us Safe'?

It's not who you think

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)

“They need to wake up scared and go to bed scared.”
—Alex Karp, Palantir co-founder. “They” means our enemies, whoever they are.

I want to look at a theme we’ve explored recently, and put a very fine point on it. The theme: “Us vs. Them.”

Who’s Us in Us vs. Them?

If you see the world in an Us vs. Them way, “us” is Americans, or more broadly, citizens of the West, and “them” is the non-Western world: the brown, the global south, the technologically less advanced; the tribal, in many cases; the less city-fied.

Thus — and this has been true since the so-called Age of Exploration, if not millennia before — “us” in the Us vs. Them frame is the “greatly superior.”

That frame puts “us” in good odor. Alex Karp’s admonition — to make sure “our” enemies “wake up scared and go to bed scared” — puts Americans, us in the more advanced West, inside facing out — secure and protected, not just from “our enemies,” but from the evils we deliver to them. To put it in cruder terms, we’re also safe because we’re pissing, not pissed upon.

And this is how we’re supposed to regard the muscular state, the heavily armed, punishing state, as guardians of “us,” as outward-facing armies guarding the gates. The state can mistreat “them” because “they” are not “us.”

But Karp is a billionaire, as is Trump, whom he serves, as are all of the wealthy class, the overly rich. Karp imagines he speaks for a larger “us,” for his class and also Americans generalized. He says so explicitly. From the same speech:

Americans are the most loving God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet. And they want to know that if you're waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you're a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you — and your friends and your cousins and your bank account and your mistress and whoever was involved.

Note the emphasis on “foreign”; the emphasis on wide retribution — your friends, your cousins, your lovers, your fiscal well-being; the intentionally great disproportion between offense and response…

…and the threat of punishment for uncommitted crimes: “if you're waking up and thinking about harming American citizens”.

As I said earlier, this is a crazy man. If he were your neighbor, he’d get himself put away, to a home, an asylum, a cell. But because he’s rich, American, and pretends to aim his guns outward, he’s praised, rewarded and cheered.

Friends of the Very Rich Are Not Our Friends

But let’s stand back. Who’s “them” for a man like this? That can be answered in more than one way. One is “America’s enemies.” Muslims, yes. But these were America’s enemies in 1963:

Bill Hudson/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The dead in Kent State were our enemies in 1970:

John Filo/Getty Images

And as recently as now, America's enemies include anyone displeased with the state or unhappy with Musk:

The arson attack on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home has unified the national security state around a broader threat it sees in the American people.

Inside the government, sources tell us, officials are scrambling to define the moment. They’re exploring if there’s any connection between the attempts on Donald Trump’s life; Luigi Mangione and his sympathizers; Tesla vandalism; and even earlier attacks, like the one on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

The Trump Justice Department and the domestic terrorism fighters think they have an answer: Nihilistic Violent Extremists.

So who’s really “them”? The rich have only one enemy: those who threaten their rule.

The Growing Muscular State

Be sure to remember the state when you read stories like this:

The Next US President Will Have Troubling New Surveillance Powers

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden signed legislation not only reauthorizing a major FISA spy program but expanding it in ways that could have major implications for privacy rights in the US.

The ability of the United States to intercept and store Americans’ text messages, calls, and emails in pursuit of foreign intelligence was not only extended but enhanced over the weekend in ways likely to remain enigmatic to the public for years to come. …

At the urging of the agencies and with the help of powerful bipartisan allies on Capitol Hill, the program has also been extended to cover a wide range of new businesses, including US data centers, according to recent analysis by legal experts and civil liberties organizations that were vocally opposed to its passage.

Or this, which first quotes the New York Times…

Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security. This month, House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from federal agencies including the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data.

…then goes on to say:

[Julia] Angwin, author [of the Times piece, is also author] of Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance, obviously knows the Homeland Security Department was created with the specific aim of taking “siloed” information and merging it into a single database. She’s almost certainly familiar with the initial proposal for the DHS, which read, “The Department would fuse and analyze intelligence and other information pertaining to threats to the homeland from multiple sources, including the CIA, NSA, FBI, INS, DEA, DOE, Customs, DOT and data gleaned from other organizations.”

She also knows that list is far from complete: Dragnet Nation is full of examples of the DHS and NSA culling info not just from databases like the Census Bureau but state auto vehicle records, foreclosure records, and private data from “giant companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Verizon and Microsoft.” She mentions the DHS sending $50 million “to state law enforcement agencies to purchase automated license plate readers that allow them to keep tabs on citizens’ movements in ways never before possible,” and even finds a DHS mailer about youth cyber activity that makes anodyne lines like “Know What Your Kids Are Doing” feel creeptastic (there’s even a suggestion about installing monitoring tools that can be used “with or without a kid’s knowledge”).

Or this, a warning about how smart home devices are universal spies:

The spies in your home: How WiFi companies monitor your private life

…In the case of Plume, its devices can scrape together detailed information from every internet-connected device, no matter the make or purpose. Even household chores can be monetized by companies you may not even be aware of.

This raises important legal and ethical questions about consent, data security, and the extent to which your data can be passed to third parties.

All this is to say, it was never about foreign surveillance and foreign deterrence, not since Bush-Cheney’s spy shop created total surveillance and PRISM, not since the Palmer raids birth of the FBI. There’s only one “them” in the mind of Alex Karp’s class: those who would threaten the rich.