It is understandable that the ‘Palantir Manifesto’, from the company making its fortune from artificial intelligence, is causing such a stir. A short text, 22 points, succinct and sharply worded, calling for a shift in ‘values and norms’ – it is somewhat startling.

Yet the text itself does not say all that much; it does, however, suggest a great deal. To understand what it is really about, one needs the book on which the Manifesto is based, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, written by Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, co-founders of the company. Everything is explained in detail there, and the conclusion can only be: this is pure fascism.

It begins with a rather harsh critique of Silicon Valley companies: they are focused exclusively on consumer products; their activities do not serve a higher purpose such as the ‘nation’ or the ‘State’. They therefore do not contribute to greater security and well-being. They rely on the market, and that market does not deliver what is needed at any given moment.

Worse still, contributing to a collective social enterprise is seen as an anachronism from the last century; it has been written off. In Silicon Valley, people are convinced that individual rights must always and everywhere come first.

According to the authors, this means those companies are on the wrong track. They urgently need to reflect on a higher purpose and on what national identity can mean. Companies must align themselves with a national defense program and move away from liberalism.

Chapter by chapter, the details of this programme are discussed. How thinking in the US has strayed towards the defense of diversity and how this makes it impossible to take clear and ‘courageous’ stands. Think of the woolly statements from university directors in response to the pro-Palestine demonstrations. But ‘those who never say anything wrong often say nothing at all’.

If you want to defend free societies, more is needed than a moral appeal; hard power is required, and that can be provided by software. Progress for humanity will not come from consumer goods but from contributions to sectors ignored by the market.

This requires taking risks, intellectual courage, and therefore also firm conviction – something that is punished in our current system. Tolerance above all else and anything essentially means believing in nothing. Faith needs no evidence.

It is impossible to take everything and everyone into account, because if you want to protect the weak, you simultaneously deprive them of their humanity; you deny their capacity to act. It leads to a situation where, ultimately, you defend nothing and no one.

On the contrary, a shared narrative is needed, a canon of texts and values, a shared framework within which everyone can act as they see fit without calling that framework into question. Creativity and innovation, certainly, but within the bounds of the higher ideal. Compare it to the structure of a bee colony. Every bee knows what it must do, without centralized commands.

Therefore, no more than one grand theory is needed to reveal who we are and what our aspirations are.

The agnosticism of the modern world, the demand that people set aside their personal convictions when they enter the public sphere, throws the door wide open to market thinking.

In all this, the authors argue, lies the failure of the left-wing project. People were opposed to the market but unwilling to consider a national project and a shared identity. Post-nationalism was fundamentally flawed; it is the elites who are cosmopolitan, the people are always local, as Manuel Castells is quoted as saying.

Palantir stands for a belief in a national and communal project. We must define the core values for the good life, and that will mean that some other values cannot be accommodated. Cultural relativism is out of the question.

We must now work towards a new order, based on values, and not repeat what happened with the Enlightenment and science: thinking that one can cast values aside and must seek the truth. Now we must decide exactly what we want and for what higher purpose.

Trump’s owner

The company promoting these ‘values’ owns the Trump regime, according to journalist Dean Blundell. The programme being proposed is an empire of control and surveillance over the entire population. It is the most dangerous company in the world.

The mass deportations of migrants and the ‘self-deportations’ carried out under the ICE program are based on a contract with Palantir. Stephen Miller, a Trump aide and architect of the program, is also a shareholder in Palantir.

The US tax authority, the IRS, uses Palantir’s databases. It is simply illegal, according to some members of Congress. DOGE, Elon Musk’s agency in the early months of Trump’s second term, worked with Palantir staff.

The White House recruited Palantir’s head of the ‘Intelligence and Research’ department. Another senior figure at Palantir is reportedly set to take up a post at the Pentagon.

Contracts worth around US$10 billion are already in place at the Pentagon. The head of the defense division at Palantir is a former MP and is good friends with Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War. It is also worth noting that Peter Thiel was close friends with Jeffrey Epstein and was in close contact with him for over ten years. Epstein was one of the early investors in Palantir.

Finally, Curtis Yarvin, the author of Dark Enlightenment, was on Palantir’s payroll. Thiel invested in one of his companies. Yarvin advocates the abolition of democracy and wants to run the US like a business, headed by a CEO-king. ‘Let the real people run the show’.

Revolutionary right

The Palantir Manifesto is a political manifesto. It paints a picture of a world that is certainly not that of progressives who believe in emancipation and the value of every culture and who warn of the dangers of any form of exclusive nationalism.

What is argued regarding ‘values’ is not so much that we rely too heavily on values today, but implicitly that they are the wrong values. One need only read the constitutions of Western democracies to see that liberty, equality, and fraternity/solidarity are paramount virtually everywhere. The authors at Palantir do want freedom, but within a framework they have defined.

‘Democracy and freedom are incompatible’, as Peter Thiel stated as early as 2009. Above all, they do not want equality, because protecting the vulnerable would be dehumanizing, in the same way that, in neoliberalism, a minimum wage is to the detriment of poor people. Solidarity is not on the agenda either, although the company, along with others in Silicon Valley, is nevertheless beginning to consider how to survive in a world of immense inequality.

The existing solidarity of the welfare states is, of course, out of the question for them, but they do want to consider forms of basic income or taxation on wealth and/or capital. They realize that artificial intelligence could lead to massive unemployment. In fact, the organic solidarity of the community should be sufficient. In a purely Darwinian way of thinking, the weaker members of society may well disappear.

Not just Palantir

It is not yet clear to what extent this manifesto is limited to a single company, Palantir, or whether its values are also shared by other companies in Silicon Valley or elsewhere.

The Googles of this world were previously known as libertarian but have quickly adapted to Trump’s demands at the start of his second term. In the book, they are said to pursue the wrong objectives. As if iPhones could save the world!

Dario Amodei of Anthropic presents himself as the moral conscience of the AI sector and refused to allow his programme Claude to be used by the Pentagon. His conditions: no use for mass surveillance and no use for autonomous weapons. Trump, however, wants nothing to do with ‘woke’ artificial intelligence and his contracts were canceled.

At Google, thousands of staff took to the streets to prevent their work from being used by the Pentagon.

Genuine resistance to fascism is perhaps not to be expected from these companies. Fascism has always and everywhere been able to count on the support of the business community, which finds democracy too slow and too cumbersome. Even if some still think of non-emancipatory social policy, replacing class struggle with a unifying idea of the nation is always a bonus.

From left to right

In his study of the right wing and fascism in the 19th and 20th centuries, Zeev Sternhell speaks of a ‘revolutionary right’. Even more so than the left, the right wishes to throw the liberal order overboard. This explains, incidentally, why at the beginning of the 20th century so many left-wing intellectuals also defected to the far right. ‘They remained revolutionary but ceased to be socialist’.

This is what could happen again, for on the left the skies have certainly not cleared. Following the fall of the Wall and the failure of neoliberalism, resistance to anything smacking of genuine socialism or neoliberalism is very strong. The psychologisation of social struggle and the yearning for ‘connectedness’ and local solidarity demonstrate that the material aspects and class antagonisms are often forgotten.

In any case, what Palantir proposes is clearly revolutionary. The ‘old order’ must go and a new order must be built. ‘Ethics is for suckers’. Day after day, even in Europe, we see how various elements of such a narrative and policy are gaining ground. In the absence of a left-wing revolutionary narrative that offers a credible vision of ‘another world’, there is a risk that the ideas of the far right will gain the upper hand.

What future?

The company Palantir was founded after 9/11 and its name refers to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In that book, Palantiri are stones that see everything, everywhere, and at the same time. What the company’s founders fail to mention, however, is that anyone who abuses the stones will eventually succumb to madness.

It is not certain that Peter Thiel, Alexander Karp, and a few others are or will become mad. From a naïve progressive perspective, we might have thought so a while ago. Today, we must wake up and realize that what they propose and put into practice is simply pure fascism.

In a book on how to recognize fascism, Umberto Eco identified a number of characteristics. According to him, the presence of just one of these elements is enough to cast a fascist shadow over the whole of society.

Palantir’s book deals with far more than just one of Eco’s characteristics. The rejection of science and the pursuit of knowledge and truth, the quest for collective values and a national identity, the state’s absolute control over what people do and do not do, the rejection of tolerance and diversity…

Palantir opposes the project of the Enlightenment and modernity. Despite the great diversity of ideas and values, that project is always a quest for emancipation, for the recognition of the individual and his or her rights, and a belief in the equality—or call it the equal worth—of all people.

However, there has never been a general consensus on these values. In the nineteenth and, above all, the twentieth century, powerful intellectual movements emerged seeking to replace them with precisely those values now championed by Palantir. We called it reactionary romanticism in the nineteenth century and fascism in the twentieth.

The danger that these ideas will once again gain the upper hand today is real. Not only because neoliberalism has failed and the economic world, with its tech gurus and large transnationals, has no regard for democratic rules and conditions, but also because left-wing and progressive political and social forces are likewise striving for fundamental change.

Today’s capitalism is taking on a new form. It is against free trade and competition; it seeks monopolies and strong state power. It seeks rent rather than profit. It is building new empires.

‘Another world is possible’, as one used to say. For some on the left, this meant criticizing and even rejecting modernity in the name of respect for difference and diversity. It is, of course, true that Western colonialism and dominance have shaped history, paying scant attention, let alone respect, to anything that was ‘different’. Respectable values and norms were for the white world. Not infrequently, this gives rise to a narrative of rejection of everything Western, rather than a striving to make those values truly universal. As if universalism were at odds with respect for diversity.

This easily leads to great confusion between left and right. With the rise of the new fascist discourse, it has become clear where left-wing forces can go astray.

The left, too, strives for a collective project and seeks to oppose liberalism, free trade, boundless competition, and the market. The left, too, strives for ‘progress’ and seeks to dismantle the ‘old order’. Both the left and the right want ‘another world’.

Both the left and the right use the same words for two completely opposing projects. That the risk of confusion is not imaginary is demonstrated by Zeev Sternhell’s research, which shows how, particularly in the twentieth century, many socialists switched to the right, precisely to contribute to the struggle against liberalism.

It demonstrates once again how important it is to offer a clear project with a credible vision. The left does not yet have this. Nor do the Greens, and with much of their criticism—such as that of individualism—they even come close to fascist discourse. The importance of clarifying the differences with the right-wing project cannot be overstated.

Palantir, and many others with them, make it clear that the right-wing’s ideological political project is beginning to take shape. Day after day, we also see elements of their narrative seeping into policy in Europe.

This is no longer merely about Sushana Zuboff’s ‘surveillance’ capitalism or Varoufakis’s ‘techno-feudalism’. It is about fascism, against which ‘regulating the AI sector’ and/or moral outrage are no longer sufficient.

Palantir speaks of ‘hard power’, and words alone are not enough to counter this. They have appropriated a great many concepts and given them a new meaning. That a great part of the left in Europe is, for the time being, simply standing by and, in some cases, even cooperating in dismantling our ‘values’ is incomprehensible and unacceptable. A strong response is needed, urgently.