In April 2026, Palantir Technologies posted a 22-point manifesto on X. Thirty million views. Immediate backlash. Critics called it technofascism.

The gist: Silicon Valley owes a "moral debt" to build weapons. Some cultures are "regressive and harmful" while others produce "wonders." Pluralism is "vacant and hollow." Also, apparently Germany was defanged too much after World War II, which was "an overcorrection."

This from a company that builds kill lists for Gaza, tracks migrants for ICE, and paid CEO Alex Karp $6.8 billion in 2024. So where does this worldview come from? Philosophy, apparently. Serious philosophy. The kind with German names and footnotes.

The problem is, they're reading it the same way Jordan Peterson reads Jung and Nietzsche. Selectively. Taking the bits that sound powerful and skipping the inconvenient parts.

The Manifesto Nobody Expected

Tech companies don't usually publish manifestos about cultural hierarchies and the hollowness of pluralism. They talk about innovation and disruption and making the world a better place. Palantir just said the quiet part loud.

Point 21: "Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive... certain cultures and indeed subcultures... have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful."

Point 22: "We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism."

Even Palantir employees started asking which side they're on. You can dress this up in philosophical language about defending Western civilization and hard power versus soft power, or you can call it what The Nation called it: "oligarchic hubris and authoritarian nihilism."

But here's what makes it interesting. Alex Karp has a PhD in social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt. Peter Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford. These aren't ignorant people randomly quoting dead Germans. They've read deeply. They can cite their sources.

Which makes the selective reading even more revealing.

Spengler and the Men Who Think They Can Predict the Future

Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West between 1918 and 1922, right after Germany lost World War I. His basic argument: civilizations move through predictable cycles, like organisms being born, growing, and dying. The West is in decline. Democracy is a temporary phase in a culture's old age.

Eventually, an age of money (plutocracy) inevitably gives way to an age of Caesarism, where strongmen rule. Not because it's good or bad, but because it's historically inevitable. Spengler thought he'd discovered the pattern. He could see the future because history repeats itself in these grand cycles.

It's all very German, very sweeping, very convinced of its own profundity. The problem with thinking you can predict the future is that it makes you fatalistic about the present. If democracy's collapse is inevitable, why defend it? If Caesarism is coming, why not position yourself to be one of the Caesars? Mark Zuckerberg apparently took the hint literally, growing a beard and wearing shirts with Latin inscriptions like "Aut Zuck Aut Nihil" ("Either Zuckerberg or Nothing"), because apparently when you're worth $100 billion, historical cosplay counts as strategy.

Thiel quotes the ending of Spengler's Decline of the West in his 2004 essay "The Straussian Moment", and he does it in untranslated German and Latin. The passage is about how "fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling" into the age of Caesarism. Most readers won't catch it because it's not translated. That's the point. Analysts have called this classic Straussian esotericism: hide your real message from the masses, signal it to the initiated elite.

The essay appears to end with a moderate call to "side with peace," but the real conclusion is buried earlier in code. Liberal democracy will collapse. It's historically determined. The question isn't whether, but who the Caesars will be. Here's the thing about historical determinism: it's incredibly appealing if you're rich and powerful. It means you're not responsible for anything. You're not choosing to undermine democracy or build authoritarian tools. You're just recognizing reality. Positioning yourself wisely for what's inevitable anyway.

It absolves you completely. The future is determined. You're just smart enough to see it coming.

Evola and the Spiritual Aristocrats

Julius Evola is the philosopher nobody wants to admit they've read. Italian esotericist, self-described "superfascist," spent his career arguing that modernity is spiritual decay and true civilization requires aristocratic rule by a spiritual elite. In today’s world: to fight the Antichrist, whoever that may be.

Evola influenced Italian fascism, and after the war, he influenced neo-fascist movements across Europe. His books advocate for hierarchy, traditionalism, rejection of democracy and egalitarianism, and the idea that some people are simply born to rule while others are born to serve.

He thought he understood the grand spiritual patterns of history. Civilizations rise when ruled by spiritual aristocrats who understand esoteric truths. They fall when they embrace equality, materialism, and democracy. The solution isn't political reform but spiritual transformation, returning to ancient hierarchies and rejecting everything modern.

You see echoes of this in certain corners of Silicon Valley. Not direct citations (Evola's too toxic to quote openly), but the structure of thinking: reject egalitarianism as naive, embrace hierarchy as natural, position yourself as part of an enlightened elite who see truths the masses can't handle, frame it all as civilizational necessity.

Whether Thiel or Karp have actually read Evola is debatable. But the style of thought is there. Traditionalism repackaged as innovation. Hierarchy justified by appeals to deeper patterns. Democracy dismissed as a temporary aberration that will inevitably give way to rule by the excellent few.

Both Spengler and Evola share something crucial: they claim to see patterns that determine the future. For Spengler, it's civilizational cycles. For Evola, it's spiritual-traditional forces. Both say liberal democracy is doomed not because of policy failures or political choices, but because of deep historical or spiritual laws.

But here's the thing about people who claim they can predict the future: they're always wrong about the specifics. Spengler was writing in 1918-22, convinced the West was in terminal decline. A century later, liberal democracies are still here. Imperfect, struggling, but still here.

Evola spent his life predicting spiritual renewal through traditional hierarchy. It never came. What did come was liberal democracy, feminism, civil rights, everything he hated.

The people who claim to see historical inevitability are just projecting their preferences onto the future and calling it prophecy.

Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Friendship That Ended Over Nationalism

Richard Wagner was Nietzsche's hero until he wasn't. They met in 1868, when Nietzsche was 24 and Wagner was already Germany's most famous composer. Nietzsche was captivated. Wagner represented genius, art, culture, everything Nietzsche valued about creative achievement.

Then came the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71. Wagner celebrated German military victories with nationalistic fervor. Nietzsche, who had enlisted to tend the wounded, was horrified by what he saw. The barbarity, the cruelty, Wagner's vengeful nationalism, it disgusted him.

Over the next decade, as Wagner became more invested in German mythology and nationalism, Nietzsche became more alienated. Wagner's opera Parsifal (1882) was the final straw. Medieval Germanic legends, Christian redemption, the whole thing dripping with nationalist mythology.

By 1888, Nietzsche wrote Nietzsche Contra Wagner specifically to make the break explicit. He called Wagner a "decaying" nationalist. He described Parsifal as "an attempted assassination of basic ethics." He asked: "Is this still German? Out of a German heart, this torrid screeching?"

This wasn't a personal grudge. It was philosophical. Wagner's nationalism represented everything Nietzsche opposed: herd mentality, cultural supremacy, the worship of a mythological past instead of creating new values, militarism disguised as high art.

The friendship ended over nationalism. Not over music theory, not over money, not over personal drama. Over nationalism and what it represented.

What Nietzsche Actually Said About Nationalism

In Ecce Homo (1888), Nietzsche wrote: "This most anti-cultural sickness and unreason there is, nationalism, this nervose nationale with which Europe is sick, this perpetuation of European particularism, of petty politics... is a dead-end street."

Not subtle. Dead-end street. Sickness. Unreason.

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Section 251, he listed the follies of German nationalism: "It must be taken into the bargain, if various clouds and disturbances (in short, slight attacks of stupidity) pass over the spirit of a people that suffers and WANTS to suffer from national nervous fever and political ambition: for instance, among present-day Germans there is alternately the anti-French folly, the anti-Polish folly, the Christian-romantic folly, the Wagnerian folly, the Teutonic folly, the Prussian folly..."

He literally called German nationalism one folly among many. An attack of stupidity.

In The Gay Science (1887), in a section titled "We Who Are Homeless," he wrote: "We are not nearly 'German' enough, in the sense in which the word 'German' is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other..."

National scabies. Blood poisoning. He called himself a "good European." He advocated for European unification against nationalist fragmentation.

This wasn't a minor theme. This was central to his mature philosophy. Nationalism was herd thinking. Cosmopolitanism, intellectual courage, creating new values beyond national boundaries, that was the path forward.

The Sister Problem and How Nietzsche Got Misread

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche married an anti-Semitic agitator named Bernhard Förster in 1885. Nietzsche refused to attend the wedding. They founded Nueva Germania, an "Aryan colony" in Paraguay. It failed. Bernhard poisoned himself in 1889.

Elisabeth stayed four more years before giving up and returning to Germany, where she found her brother an invalid from mental collapse. He would never write coherently again. He died in 1900.

Elisabeth took control of the Nietzsche Archive and spent the next 35 years reshaping his legacy. She published The Will to Power in 1901 from his unpublished notes, heavily edited to fit her nationalist worldview. She forged nearly 30 letters. She withheld Ecce Homo until 1908 because it contradicted her version.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nietzsche Archive received financial support from the Nazi government. Hitler attended her funeral in 1935.

For decades, the world knew Nietzsche through Elisabeth's nationalist lens. Scholars didn't publish accurate editions based on original manuscripts until the 1950s and 60s. So you could blame Elisabeth for the Nazi appropriation. They didn't read real Nietzsche, they read Elisabeth's forgeries.

Except here's the thing. We've had accurate editions for 70 years now. The anti-nationalist passages are right there in published works. And people still read Nietzsche the same selective way.

Not because they're reading the wrong books, but because they're choosing which parts to remember.

The Karp Quote That Reveals Everything

In February 2025, during a talk promoting his book, Alex Karp said: "I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us." Let that sit for a second. This is a man worth $18 billion, with access to military-grade surveillance technology and government contracts to build targeting systems, fantasizing about chemical weapons attacks on critics.

The Nation pointed out that Karp is 58 years old, has never served in the military, and has no children. When Palantir's manifesto advocates for "national service" as a "universal duty," Karp isn't signing up. National service for thee, not for me. Weapons built by others. Wars fought by others. And he dresses it up in philosophy about strength and power and defending civilization.

Nietzsche would have had a field day with this. A billionaire who never fought advocating that others should fight. Calling it strength. Calling it hard power. Calling it will to power. That's not Nietzsche. That's exactly the kind of herd thinking Nietzsche spent his career attacking. People who need grand narratives about defending civilization because they can't create their own values.

The irony is Karp probably thinks he's living Nietzschean ideals. Building the future. Transcending conventional morality. But he's doing it by wrapping himself in civilizational language, defining cultural hierarchies, building tools for nation-states. That's not transcending the herd. That's Wagner. The nationalist Wagner that Nietzsche broke with.

Jordan Peterson and the Selective Reading Playbook

Jordan Peterson does this constantly with Nietzsche and Jung. He quotes them on strength, on overcoming adversity, on the dangers of egalitarianism and the necessity of hierarchy. He skips the parts that don't fit.

With Nietzsche, he skips the anti-nationalism, the cosmopolitanism, the parts where Nietzsche mocks exactly the kind of masculine posturing Peterson celebrates. With Jung, he takes the archetypes and the collective unconscious but misses Jung's deep skepticism about political movements and mass psychology.

The pattern is always the same. Quote the bits about power and hierarchy. Skip the bits about what power actually costs, what hierarchy actually does to people, what happens when you confuse strength with domination.

Build a worldview that sounds philosophical and deep but is really just justification for things you already wanted to believe. Tell young men they need to be strong and hierarchical and that this is ancient wisdom. Don't mention that the philosophers you're quoting spent their careers critiquing exactly this kind of thinking.

Peterson turned Nietzsche into a self-help manual for resentful men. Clean your room, stand up straight, embrace hierarchy. All perfectly fine advice on its own. But it's not Nietzsche. Nietzsche would have called this slave morality with a self-improvement veneer. I explained this in more detail in another blog post. You can read it here. 

The real Nietzsche was calling people to transcend all received values, including the ones about masculine strength and hierarchical order. To create their own meaning in a meaningless universe. That's terrifying and liberating in equal measure. Way harder than buying a self-help book.

What Gets Quoted and What Gets Skipped

Here's the thing about selective reading. You can make any philosopher say almost anything if you're willing to ignore enough context.

With Nietzsche, it's remarkably consistent. Everyone quotes the will to power, the Übermensch, master morality versus slave morality, the critique of Christianity as weakness.

Nobody quotes "national scabies" or "blood poisoning" or the entire book Nietzsche Contra Wagner about how nationalism destroyed his most important friendship. Nobody talks about how he called himself homeless, a good European, how he advocated for European unification against nationalist fragmentation.

Nobody mentions how he broke with Wagner specifically over militarism and nationalism. Nobody discusses Section 251 of Beyond Good and Evil where he lists all the German follies, including nationalism, as "attacks of stupidity."

Scholars who actually study Nietzsche are pretty clear on what he meant. Will to power wasn't about dominating others, it was about self-overcoming. Creating your own values instead of accepting received ones.

Master morality wasn't about elites ruling masses, it was about psychological independence. The Übermensch wasn't a CEO or strongman but anyone brave enough to face nihilism and create meaning anyway.

But that's way less useful if you're trying to justify building surveillance systems and calling it civilizational defense.

The Philosophical Toolkit of Power

What makes Palantir's manifesto interesting isn't just Nietzsche. They've assembled an entire toolkit of 20th-century thinkers who wrote about crisis, power, and the limits of liberal democracy.

Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish philosopher who fled Nazi Germany, wrote about esoteric writing (hiding dangerous truths from the masses) and whether democracy can survive existential threats. René Girard, the French anthropologist, wrote about mimetic desire (we want what others want) and scapegoat mechanisms (societies channel violence onto sacrificial victims).

Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist, wrote about friend-enemy distinctions and why liberal democracy is weak in the face of real conflict. He literally provided the legal framework for Hitler's regime. Thiel cites him when arguing about existential threats.

You can read these thinkers seriously and engage with their ideas about violence, power, and political order. Or you can cherry-pick them to build a worldview where liberal democracy is doomed, pluralism is naive, cultural hierarchies are natural, violence is inevitable, and tech elites should build the tools of control.

One critic noted that Karp's book is basically "Palantir loves getting big contracts from the Department of Defense" dressed up in philosophy. Everything else is justification for what they already want to do.

What They Miss in Their Own Philosophers

Take Girard. His entire project was about recognizing the scapegoat mechanism so we could transcend it. He argued that Christianity revealed the innocence of victims, which created the possibility of building a world without scapegoating.

This was deeply ethical. About compassion for victims. About recognizing our violence and choosing differently. Thiel reads this and concludes that elites need to manage violent masses, that the scapegoat mechanism must be preserved or replaced with something else (surveillance? algorithmic control?).

It's not just a misreading. It's an inversion. Girard's philosophy was about siding with victims against persecutors. Thiel's application is about controlling populations.

The same thing happens with Strauss. Yes, he wrote about esoteric writing and the limits of liberal democracy. But he also fled Nazi Germany and spent his career deeply concerned about tyranny and nihilism.

Using Strauss to justify hiding your authoritarian aims behind moderate language isn't Straussian philosophy, it's just lying with extra steps. Strauss was warning about the dangers of political collapse, not providing a manual for causing it.

Why This Actually Matters

Look, you can dismiss all this as academic inside baseball. Who cares how tech billionaires read philosophy?

But Palantir's technology tracks migrants for deportation. It builds targeting databases (kill lists) for the Israeli military in Gaza. It aggregates vast amounts of personal data on Americans for government surveillance.

And the company doing this just published a manifesto saying some cultures are "regressive and harmful," pluralism is "vacant and hollow," and they have a moral obligation to build AI weapons.

Philosophy isn't window dressing here. It's the justification. It's how you tell yourself that building kill lists is actually defending civilization. It's how you call surveillance "hard power" and make it sound noble.

It's how you take Nietzsche's critique of herd morality and use it to justify elite rule. It's how you quote Spengler about historical cycles and conclude you should position yourself to be one of the Caesars.

The selective reading matters because it reveals what's actually happening. They're not engaging with these philosophers seriously. They're shopping for quotes that justify what they already want to do.

What Nietzsche Actually Stood For

Nietzsche called himself homeless. A good European. He advocated for European unification against nationalist fragmentation. He broke with his best friend over nationalism and militarism.

He called nationalism "national scabies" and "blood poisoning" and a "dead-end street." He spent his last lucid years attacking German culture, German nationalism, and everything Wagner represented.

His philosophy was about individuals creating their own values. Transcending herd thinking. All herd thinking, including the herd that thinks it's superior because it read philosophy or built technology or made billions.

Not about elites ruling masses. Not about cultural hierarchies. Not about hard power and civilizational struggle. About individuals brave enough to face meaninglessness and create meaning anyway.

That's a lot harder than building surveillance systems and calling it defending the West. It's harder than quoting Spengler about inevitable decline while positioning yourself to profit from it.

It's harder than reading Evola's spiritual aristocracy and thinking you're one of the enlightened few. It's harder than selective reading.

The Problem Isn't Which Edition You Read

The accurate scholarly editions of Nietzsche have been available for 70 years. The anti-nationalist passages are right there in published books, in clear language.

"National scabies." "Blood poisoning." "Dead-end street." "Attacks of stupidity." Not subtle. Not ambiguous. Not open to interpretation.

Nietzsche hated nationalism. Thought it was herd behavior for weak people who needed to feel part of something bigger than themselves. Broke with his best friend over it. That's not a controversial scholarly interpretation. That's just what he wrote.

So when tech billionaires build a manifesto about cultural hierarchies and hollow pluralism, and people say it sounds like selective philosophy reading, they're right.

Same pattern as everyone who wants philosophy to justify power instead of questioning it. Same pattern as Peterson turning Nietzsche into masculine self-help. Same pattern as the selective readers who came before.

The books are there. The passages are there. The question is whether you read the whole thing or just the parts that make you feel strong.

Whether you're actually engaging with ideas or just shopping for quotes that confirm what you already wanted to believe. Whether you're creating your own values, like Nietzsche actually advocated, or just wrapping yourself in someone else's philosophy to justify building kill lists and surveillance systems for nation-states.

The problem isn't which edition you read. It's which parts you choose to remember.