Harvard Republican Club Hosts Blackwater Founder Erik Prince for Talk on Privatized Government

Founder of private military company Blackwater Erik D. Prince argued that private companies should take the lead in traditionally governmental activities — from defense to infrastructure to space exploration — at an event hosted by the Harvard Republican Club Friday evening.

In his wide-ranging speech, Prince endorsed deregulation and the founding of private city-states while blasting policies that he said held back private development.

“I’m interested to see what happens over the next four years, and then some, as the private sector is allowed to flourish,” he said, suggesting that “the private sector needs to play a much greater role” in international development and in peacekeeping through military force.

Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, founded Blackwater in 1997. The company became the subject of multiple federal investigations after reports surfaced that several of the company’s employees had shot and killed 17 Iraqi citizens.

Though Prince left Blackwater in 2009, he has stayed in the business of war — attempting to broker arms deals and mercenary agreements in Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ukraine.

Prince has long backed Donald Trump, even recruiting former spies to infiltrate groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda during the 2016 presidential race. On Friday, as roughly 50 attendees waited for his talk to begin, a timer featuring clips of Trump and the words “Make America Great Again” overlaid on stock footage was projected onto the front of the lecture hall.

When the clock hit zero, president of the Harvard Republican Club Leo A. Koerner ’26 opened the event by applauding the executive orders President Trump has signed during his first months in office and Prince’s character.

“Forty-six days ago, we began the Golden Age,” Koerner said. “But alongside a good president, you need good people and ideas. A man who might have one is here with us tonight.”

Koerner also read aloud a message, which he said Harvard required him to deliver, about free expression and reasoned dissent, which referenced the University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities.

“We anticipate that members of our community and their invitees will be free and unencumbered to share and discuss their ideas, whether or not they’re agreeable to all indeed,” Koerner read.

Harvard did not respond to a request for comment regarding the statement Koerner read.

Before Trump took office in January, Prince began lobbying him to use private military force to back Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda in a $25 billion deportation plan that would have involved a private fleet of 100 planes and a small army of deputized private citizens. On Friday, he commended Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric.

“There needs to be a set of rules and laws because I think borders delineate different governance paradigms,” Prince said. “There’s a reason that we govern a certain way in America versus how Mexico governs, and we need a border to reinforce the attributes that we want to live under.”

Prince also praised Trump’s administration for loosening the reins on the private sector and avoiding “constant bureaucratic harassment.”

But at times, Prince’s speech seemed to highlight tensions within the Trump movement. While touting the efficiency of American wheat farming, Prince gave a nod to Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a skeptic of commercial agriculture who has endorsed bans on seed oils, ultra-processed food, and pesticides.

“Yes, RFK is right — there’s a lot of unhealthy stuff that goes on in our food, and that’s a whole other topic that’s not my area of expertise,” Prince said. “But private capital, with private know-how applied, has made our farming the most productive in the world.”

Prince argued that the entire history of global development was a history of “private capital, private talent, private military capability.” He cited the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Jamestown settlement by British joint stock companies, as well as the settlement of Cape Town by the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company.

“It involved slaving and other things which are horrific, but the idea of settling and developing new territories — believe me, if we go to Mars, we definitely want SpaceX in charge of it, not NASA,” he said.

“Hong Kong started as a trading port. Singapore, the same way,” Prince added. “As controversial as it may sound, the private solution is going to give you the longevity and especially the cost effectiveness.”

He contended that the private sector, when left alone, is “significantly better” at completing tasks ranging from “telecommunications” to building infrastructure.

Fostering a favorable environment for private enterprise is key to development, Prince maintained. He referred listeners to Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who served as an adviser to former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori.

De Soto, a key force behind the Washington Consensus, argued that countries could succeed economically by providing stable institutions to enforce contracts and property rights.

“Why is Peru such a shithole? Why is Switzerland so fantastic?” Prince said. “Switzerland has the fundamental elements of governance that make private capital formation possible.”

He suggested that changing technologies — like drone warfare and artificial intelligence targeting — would forward the “democratization” of military capabilities, allowing small states or private companies to compete with world powers.

“I will always vote on freedom, and I will always vote on the private sector running circles around government,” Prince said.

—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.