Demonstrator ejected from Palantir's talk at DC AI expo
Protestor kicked out of the SCSP AI Expo in DC this morning while chanting 'Stop Palantir. Stop Killing Kids in Gaza. Stop Surveillance Here.'
In his new role as head of defense of the military surveillance company Palantir, former Congressman Mike Gallagher’s interview of current U.S. secretary of the navy John Phelan on “Delivering Maritime Dominance” was interrupted by a protest of the company’s support for the ongoing mass murder of women and children in Gaza.
“Stop Palantir. Stop killing kids in Gaza, stop surveillance here,” chanted a protestor affiliated with the anti-war advocacy organization Code Pink — who requested anonymity — before being marched down the escalator and out the front door of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C. The interruption took place just yards away from both the Israeli embassy’s booth and a meet and greet with Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, who recently published an op-ed entitled, “A genocide is happening in Gaza. We should say so.”
Gallagher’s interrupted interview began just 45 minutes after the start of the second-annual three-day AI Expo of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). After a requisite tribute to the late former U.S. secretary of defense Ash Carter, who is widely considered the father of the ‘Third Offset Strategy’ incorporation of articial intelligence into the U.S. military, the event opened with an interview with current vice president of Taiwan Bi-Khim Hsiao regarding her plans to turn the country into an “AI island” in the context of Pentagon fears of an imminent invasion attempt by the People’s Republic of China.
I was the sole journalist to follow the anonymous protestor and his security guard escort out of the conference and am directly publishing the footage.
“I was hoping to inspire the conscience of the people who attend,” stated the protestor, who stated that he was unsurprised at being forcibly removed from the event.
Update at 4:23 pm ET: A link to the Code Pink footage of the interruption of Mike Gallagher’s interview of Navy secretary John Phelan was added.