Shares in technology company Palantir slid on Monday after it posted a “manifesto” on social media over the weekend denouncing “regressive” cultures and espousing other far-right principles.
The company, which has military contracts with the US, UK and Israel, among others, has already attracted controversy over a range of issues including involvement in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Palantir issued its 22-point manifesto in a post on Saturday, presaging it by saying “we get asked a lot about it”.
The manifesto, which is largely adapted from the book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, co-written by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, laid out the company’s views on a range of issues including society, development and technology.
Among the points raised was a criticism of some cultures as “dysfunctional and regressive”.
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“All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgements are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures… have produced wonders,” the post reads.
“Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.”
The next point also warned against the “shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism”.
“We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?”
Elsewhere the company condemned the “pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles” and called for Germany and Japan to rearm.
Palantir, which was co-founded by billionaire entrepreneur and conservative activist Peter Thiel, also defended far-right billionaire Elon Musk over his advocacy for “grand narrative” and criticised attempts to hound wealthy figures out of public life by scrutinising their behaviour.
“The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public,” it said.
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Lewis Backon, campaigns officer at the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign, told Middle East Eye:
“It is no surprise that Palantir has issued a Twitter manifesto stuffed with far-right rhetoric about ‘dysfunctional and regressive’ cultures, and calling for the expansion of AI weaponry. The software produced by Palantir has enabled state violence across the globe.”
“It has allowed the Israeli military to generate targets for its attacks at an overwhelming speed. This has accelerated Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Yet, the British government continues to hand the company lucrative contracts, granting it access to our NHS.”
The Palantir post sparked both anger and ridicule on social media, with journalist and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins sarcastically calling it “extremely normal and fine” on Bluesky, while Lebanese historian and journalist Elia Ayoub described it as “cartoonishly evil”.
Andrew Feinstein, a journalist and former ANC MP in South Africa, honed in on Thiel’s upbringing in apartheid South Africa and what is today Namibia, saying it had influenced his “racist” and white supremacist views.
Following the manifesto’s publication, Palantir saw a slide in its share price, with market traders reacting to what analysts described as “potential reputational risks and political scrutiny” due to the company’s explicit ideological bent.
Healthcare and warfare
The involvement of a range of tech companies in Israel’s attacks on its neighbours in recent years, as well as in attacking and surveilling Palestinians, has sparked anger from rights campaigners and UN officials.
In a report produced by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese in July, several tech companies were accused of profiting from crimes including illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide in occupied Palestine.
The report referenced AI systems that were developed by the Israeli military to process and generate targets during the war on Gaza.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision making,” the report said.
According to Karp, Palantir software was also used by Israel in its 2024 pager attacks in Lebanon, in which 42 people were killed and thousands wounded, many left with life-altering injuries to the eyes, face and hands.
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In its public statements, Palantir has made no secret of its openly partisan support for Israel since the beginning of the genocide in October 2023, and senior officials have characterised Middle Eastern conflicts as wars to protect western civilisation.
The company has taken out a full-page advert in the New York Times saying it stands with Israel.
There has also been increasing scrutiny of Palantir’s involvement in a range of other industries, including healthcare.
In the UK, health workers, campaigners and MPs have expressed concern over guidance issued by NHS England to all regional health trusts that stated they should all be using Palantir’s “core products” in hospitals from April onwards.
Labour MP Emily Darlington told the BBC last week that having a “foreign tech company” involved with patient data in the NHS posed “a major security risk”.
A call published in the British Medical Journal last month from health worker campaign group Medact urged trusts to “disobey” the order from NHS England to use Palantir’s federated data platform (FDP), which was created during the Covid-19 pandemic with the stated aim of helping manage a federalised health service at a time of national crisis.
Palantir won the now £1bn ($1.35bn) contract in November 2023. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign called on the British government to cancel all its contracts with the company immediately.
MEE contacted the Department of Health and Social Care for comment on Palantir’s manifesto and its impact on the contract, but had not received a response at time of publication.