Just before noon on Saturday, Palantir, the defense-tech company that holds several multi-billion-dollar contracts with the United States military, published a 22-point manifesto on X detailing why Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to go to war for America.
“Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible,” the corporation wrote in a post from its official X account. “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”
From there, the manifesto goes on to argue a baffling series of ideas, some of which seem to come out of nowhere. Between calling for an end to “the postwar neutering of Germany and Japan” and a reinstatement of the draft, Palantir also demanded an end to cancel culture and more competitive pay for civil servants. One particularly disturbing point makes the claim that some cultures are objectively superior due to the advances they’ve made in technology, while “others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”
California-based journalist Gil Durán called the manifesto a “worship of violence and speed that’s typical of fascism.”
Durán, a former Democratic strategist, has covered Silicon Valley’s hard turn to the right since 2024 in his blog The Nerd Reich. His X account was suspended after he reposted the manifesto with the caption, “TLDR: Fascism,” but he was far from the only one who called out Palantir’s disturbing rhetoric. The manifesto provoked a largely negative reaction on social media and alarmed political leaders abroad; the Guardian reported that one liberal member of the UK parliament compared it to “the ramblings of a supervillain.”
But Palantir has been circulating these ideas for more than a year. The post on X is a summary of several points made in The Technological Republic, the grandiose political book lamenting the “complacency” of the West and glorifying a return to “hard power,” co-written by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska. The book was published in February 2025.
So, why would Palantir reprise it now?
“It’s hard not to read this in light of the conflict that emerged last month between Anthropic and the Department of War,” said Dave Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, who frequently writes about Silicon Valley’s rightward swing.
“The government has made it pretty clear that it wants its defense contractors to be enthusiastically MAGA,” Karpf said. “If what Palantir needs to say is ‘Rah-rah MAGA,’ they’re gonna say that with their whole chest.”
Karpf also noted that Palantir is frantically trying to balance a financial house of cards. Its price-to-earnings ratio, a measurement of how over or undervalued a company’s stock is, currently hovers around a dizzying 217. (For reference, Ford Motor’s P/E ratio is around 13.)
“That is full memestock level,” Karpf said. “The only way to sustain that stock price is to constantly do look-at-me tactics that get them in the news, get enthusiastic fans supporting them, and hopefully get the government throwing them contracts.”
But even if that works in the short-term — which Karpf predicts it will — Palantir’s brand as the shadowy and everpresent watchman for Trump’s totalitarian state will become what he called “a real albatross” as the national mood shifts back leftwards.
“Palantir is quickly becoming one of the most hated companies in the world, due to its open complicity with an authoritarian regime,” Durán told Gazetteer SF. “They have a major public relations crisis.”
Durán also thinks “it’s becoming clear that the Democratic party is going to have to define itself as the party that will destroy Palantir.” That may be why the Peter Thiel-founded company hired two Democratic lobbyists last month, he suggests. With Trump’s approval ratings plummeting, the Republican party in turmoil, and midterm elections looming, Palantir may be hedging its political bets.
A liberal rebrand of Palantir would be a near-impossible pivot. Two years ago, few people outside of Silicon Valley had ever heard of Palantir. Anyone who knew the name was probably a Lord of the Rings fan, familiar with the all-seeing technology corrupted by an evil wizard, for which the surveillance software company is named.
But since Trump retook office, Palantir has become a household name as it stoked public ire again and again by selling war tech to Israel, providing personal data to ICE, surveilling civilians, and spreading its influence through the government, as Durán said, “like a cancer.”
Durán also believes a lot of the moves made by Palantir and its executives recently — the reheated manifesto, Thiel’s Antichrist tour, the company’s inexplicable streetwear brand — simply boils down to operating from a place of panic.
“There’s a lot of anxiety coming out of Palantir,” Durán said. “They know they’re headed for destruction.”
