I watched a video that says Palantir software is not inherently sinister because it’s software (3:47) just like email. That’s obviously wrong. It’s like saying land mines are not inherently sinister because they use explosives.
I knew this was going to be bad.
Then it says Hitler was elected chancellor (5:50). That is wrong. Ugh. So wrong, and so important. He was appointed 30 January 1933.
Not elected. And very unpopular. The NSDAP was sliding and losing support all through 1932, so by March 22, 1933 Hitler opened the Dachau camp to jail political opponents and murder them during the election. He never won a majority, and not only wasn’t elected he made voting into a death sentence. Don’t say elected.
Let me more precise. This Australian “news” video heaps undeserved praise on Hitler.
the most technologically advanced, educated, and developed country on earth elected Adolf Hitler as chancellor
No, no, and no. This video is full of basic factual errors like this, and it’s bad. Really bad.
Germany was not some pinnacle of technological advancement that birthed fascism. Its own war machine ran on animals. 75% of the Wehrmacht depended on horses. The video’s framing, that the most advanced nation on earth produced Hitler, is a lie. Hitler seized control of a nation that was copying British jet patents, importing American trucks and tractors, building cars on seized Czech designs (Porsche/VW), and importing American racist doctrine.
Definitely NOT the frontier of progress.
Another huge problem with the video is Hitler was a huge fan of America (especially Henry Ford), and Nazi Germany was an implementation and industrialization of American racist doctrine. You can’t just talk about America after the war as an effect on Germany, without looking at America building Hitler.
So it’s bad at analysis too, which of course derives from getting so many facts wrong.
The Palantir CEO is patterning Hitler because he’s patterning pre-war America, and he’s opposed to denazification. It’s exactly the opposite of what this video is claiming. That’s crucial to understand why Palantir is inherently sinister. And it’s all missing from this annoyingly bad ABC News pump called “If you’re listening”.
Clearly they have not been listening.
The video even tries to boost Palantir software by claiming it has features like speed and ease of use, despite constant headlines from the UK are blaring that it’s extremely slow and unusable.
Notably, Palantir says they have to stop terrorists, while it’s well documented that they generate terrorists. Palantir says they oppose far-right extremists while it’s been proven they are providing far-right extremists tools to destroy political opponents. None of this news makes it into the video, but a whole lot of puffery about philosophy of the “German Jews” is in there.
Palantir literally has been the engine of destroying calm, replacing it with extrajudicial assassinations and violent extremist groups. Nothing about that gets mentioned, just a long Australian rant accusing group of powerful Jews running the universities and all thinking the same thing under the video banner of a “mastermind” from the Jews who were “dominating” childrens’ thought.
A video that claims ideas of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School “have come to dominate some of the social science departments” and carry “influence on the young” is an old and tired Cultural Marxism trope used in antisemitism. Did someone making this video think “oh, that’s good, let’s run that” and not know what it is and where it comes from? The video is spreading Nazi Kulturbolschewismus while claiming to be investigating a fascist.
What is going on here is painful, uninformed, disinformation. The legend being spread that the CEO is steeped in culture of Frankfurt School in general, let alone Habermas, is provably false. His actual supervisors were Karola Brede and Hans-Joachim Busch, in the Division of Social Sciences, a totally different part of the university than the claim this video makes.
Karp’s dissertation subject (“Aggression in der Lebenswelt” how aggression can be created and made acceptable) is the exact opposite of what this video claims. He wrote about the very mechanism now laundering himself, how violence gets dressed as necessity. He feared power and sought to adorn himself with aggression as a survival tactic. His own description of the German family that was kind to him, gave him a coat, and told him plainly they had all been Nazis before becoming Democrats reveals his own character failures (7:44). He read their postwar comfort, instead of being tried for their crimes, as proof that American prosperity cures them of fascism. The opportunist’s lesson was that whatever power rewards becomes the truth, which is what makes him available for anything a regime asks. That frictionless availability is an even bigger danger than fanaticism because it needs no conviction and recognizes no red lines.
I want to be clear. The Frankfurt School’s Habermas philosophy culminates in communication free of domination, which is the inverse of a surveillance-power operator. Palantir is the total rejection of the school of thought this video tries to pull in and blame for Palantir’s CEO. The only thing in common is… they’re both Jews, which weirdly seems to be a particularly important point to this narrator!
See all the problems? It’s probably the worst video I’ve seen in years, rife with mistakes. The latent antisemitism is ridiculous and totally unnecessary, but perhaps that’s revealing the frame of mind of the presenter.
A simple explanation of the problem, if they wanted to blame Jews, is right in front of everyone, yet rarely examined. The CEO is not German philosopher material. He is echoing the brutality of extremist Meir Kahane concepts of Jewish terrorism as “American supremacy” without any filter. There are radical, fringe fascists outside the norm, and not normal.
PLAYBOY: Then the only difference between you and, say, the American Nazi Party is that they’re wrong and you’re right?
KAHANE: I can’t put it better than that.
If you don’t know who Meir “every Jew a .22” Kahane is, and why he was classified a terrorist, you don’t know what Israel has become, and why Palantir is right there. The effect of Kahane needs airtime far more than the Frankfurt school of philosophy that the CEO repeatedly says he doesn’t follow.
And then the video tries to claim Anthropic won’t give data to the government (via Hegseth), without admitting that Anthropic just agreed to give all its data to the government (via Elon Musk).
Come on. Anthropic announces they will hand all the data over in a business deal and reporters are still thinking the hollow PR version is holding?
And then, worst of all, this video doesn’t even mention Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir. So you have a fascist founder in a story about a fascist CEO and that relationship gets no mention at all? Nothing? Instead we have to listen to a story about the Jews that Karp disagreed with and wanted to do the opposite of, while they’re falsely made adjacent to his fascism?
Overall this video does such a light touch on fascism, at times factually inaccurate, that it comes across as harmful gloss about fascism or even promotion of Hitler. The CEO likes to ski? How is that relevant to anything? Jewish philosophers at one time said that power prevents abuse of power? Ok. What are these useless tangents? This “Australian” view of history appears to be very broken and fixated on “weird” trivia.
Snow!
Jews!
Palantir’s CEO literally published a fascist manifesto, using Nazi vocabulary to complain about denazification, and it’s not even mentioned. Instead we get to watch him happy from skiing.
The video fails to give an inherently sinister Palantir, well documented by their fascist words and actions, the treatment it sorely deserves. Nazi land mine. You don’t want it in your country. It’s not just software.
