Palantir Co-Founder Calls Government ‘Dysfunctional’ at Harvard Republican Club Event

Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir Technologies, called the United States government “dysfunctional” during an event hosted by the Harvard Republican Club on Tuesday Evening.

During the discussion which was led by HRC President Michael Oved ’25, Lonsdale said that a “woke mind virus” was taking over the U.S. government, which he described as growing “stupider.” He added that the U.S. should shift more towards fewer government regulations and a meritocratic system.

“There is a crisis in our country,” Lonsdale said. “It used to be that to run something in the American government, you actually had to pass some pretty hard tests.”

Lonsdale said the “leftist activists force in the 1970s” removed hiring tests for government employment because they thought they were “racist” — with significant consequences.

“You can’t test people to hire the smart ones anymore,” Lonsdale said. “You can’t fire the people who are not working out very easily — they just move around.”

“So the government just got a lot stupider,” he added.

Lonsdale said his former business, Palantir — a software company founded in 2003 specializing in military technology — worked to stop the government from “spending money on insane things” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Palantir created technologies used by the U.S. during the war in Afghanistan to predict locations of explosive devices.

He argued that “idiocracy” has since spread in the government and throughout the U.S., including Harvard.

“I think a lot of this ideology has been pushed with both our universities as well as our NGOs as well as our government bureaucracies,” Lonsdale said.

Lonsdale said that if Vice President Kamala Harris were to win the presidency, these trends would only continue.

“For me, Kamala Harris is very much representative of this side of viewpoints where she’s just constantly putting forward woke stuff based on equity and based on these kinds of Marxist ideas,” he said.

Lonsdale said he also believes most Democrats are not trying to hurt the United States.

“We shouldn’t demonize our fellow citizens,” Lonsdale said. “I think most Democrats are not people who want to do crazy values to our country and most Republicans don’t want to do anything bad to our country.”

“I do think the radical left is much scarier than people realize in terms of their power games that they are playing and what they do,” he added.

Lonsdale also advised attendees to find industries that they are passionate about for success in entrepreneurship.

“You don’t win a gold medal in the Olympics by just doing something on the side along with your 12 other things, you win a gold medal by being completely obsessed with this thing and I wouldn’t wish even on my worst enemy to have to try to win a gold medal on something they are not passionate about,” Lonsdale said.

Oved said in an interview the event’s turnout of more than 100 people was achieved through a year-long effort to increase membership of the Harvard Republican Club.

“Over the past year, what you’ve seen is we’ve actually built up the Harvard Republican Club,” Oved said. “We did it by bringing in people with very differing perspectives, engaged in different industries, who are interested in different ideas.”

“So I think what we’ve done here, we’ve made it cool to be a Republican again,” Oved said.

But attendee Johnny Ni ’27 said that the group’s events aren’t only for Republicans.

“Everyone thinks that these events are super conservatively, rightly, etcetera, but it doesn’t really have to be,” Ni said.