(Yahoo) Alex Karp, the CEO and cofounder of Palantir, said at a high-profile tech event in Washington, DC, that he wants to send student protesters to North Korea as part of an “exchange program” to give them perspective.
Politico was the first to report Karp’s comments at The Hill and Valley Forum on Wednesday, which was live-streamed on YouTube. Other speakers at the event included Jack Clark, the cofounder of the AI startup Anthropic, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and several other members of Congress.
In a conversation between Karp and Jacob Helberg, Palantir’s senior policy advisor to the CEO, about AI’s impact on warfare in Ukraine and Israel, Helberg said that “pro-Hamas slogans” were being chanted at “very prestigious universities.”
Karp claimed that some campus protesters were even pro-North Korea.
“We’re going to do an exchange program sponsored by Karp,” he said. “A couple months in North Korea, nice-tasting flavored bark. See how you feel about that.”
Earlier in the chat, Karp took a shot at anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, where New York police officers arrested about 300 protesters earlier this week.
“Look at Columbia,” he said. “There is literally no way to explain the investment in our elite schools, and the output is a pagan religion — a pagan religion of mediocrity and discrimination and intolerance, and violence.”
He said that a “double standard” has spread across campuses where protesters dedicate themselves to “an architecture of antidiscrimination while dressing in masks and excluding the population that’s been most discriminated for the last 3,000 years.”
Palantir did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
