Palantir CEO: College protests are 'full-on regression from below our Constitution'

Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp slammed anti-Israel protesters on college campuses, saying their arguments make no sense and that liberal progressives need to stand for Western values in the face of protesters' "new religion."

Karp spoke with Fox News' Jennifer Griffin at an artificial intelligence (AI) expo in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday and said that he considers himself "a classic progressive, meaning I want fairness, I want people to live better. I especially want lower class people and people who are disadvantaged to have a better life."

Karp, whose company recently extended an initiative that offers college fellowships to students looking to get away from antisemitic demonstrations on college campuses, likened the demonstrators' fervent views to a form of religion that's disconnected from Western political and social norms.

"This new religion, which has nothing to do with Judaism, Christianity or Islam, it has nothing to do, actually. It's a full-on regression from below our Constitution, from below the Western tradition. From below the classics, below the three withstanding great religions into something pagan, discriminatory, irrational, not bound by any of the norms that we have. Not interested in fairness."

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Karp said that protesters have misguided views of their stance on justice and against discrimination, and that they fail to see that antisemitic actions or silencing opposing voices contradicts those stated positions.

"They literally are excluding and gleefully excluding. They're dedicating themselves to justice and anti-discrimination and then blocking the room and using antisemitic things," he explained. "And they're so bereft of any tethering to logic that in any way makes sense that they don't even see the contradiction. And especially people like me who are more historically on the left, we've got to enter the intellectual battlefield. Just because what they're saying makes no sense."

"It doesn't have to make sense because it makes sense to them, because it's literally a symbol of religion. They are literally praying to the altar of a new form of pagan religion," Karp added.

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"We have to stand up and say there are standards," Karp explained. "We understand the difference between terrorism and terrorizing. We see a superiority in Western values." 

"These values are the best values for the poor, weak and downtrodden in the world, especially in America. And if you really care about people who are poor or downtrodden, you will fight to have actual standards, actual justice, actual concepts of merit. You will not allow people to run rampant."

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"If you go into a college campus and say' We are going to support mass people discriminating against a discriminated population,' everyone would be aghast. College professors would suddenly be very pro-First, pro-Second Amendment. This is something we just all of us have to do — it goes way too far, and it's in no one's interest."