Thomas Edsall’s latest New York Times essay opens with a Peter Thiel quote from 2010 that deserves far more scrutiny for historic parallels than the NYT gives it.

We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.

A minority that can’t win elections. A conviction that persuasion is futile. A technological mechanism to bypass democratic consent entirely.

This is a very well studied pattern from 1930s Germany.

Joseph Goebbels articulated the same exact structure in 1928, using radio and institutional capture rather than Silicon Valley.

The Playbook

Step five is where we are, so hopefully people start seeing the problem soon. The NYT certainly isn’t helping by acting like Nazism is now the norm. Karp’s CNBC appearance, quoted at length in Edsall’s piece, reads like we are supposed to just accept a warning. It isn’t normal. It’s Nazi doctrine being delivered to the public as if that’s just the way it is in 2026.

Karp says AI will somehow on its own destroy the economic and political power of only the educated, largely Democratic voters. He says anyone who thinks this will “work out politically” without capture of the military is delusional. He says the “only justification” for absorbing societal disruption is for national security.

Every sentence sounds like general concern. Every sentence is constructed to benefit Palantir. The company already has corrupted the system to force collection of defense contracts, without accountability for technological failures. It has cemented intelligence community relationships, and it built the institutional armor that Karp says you need to undermine voters. When he tells the rest of Silicon Valley that technology without political cover is reckless, the operative message is: we are in control and you can’t do this without us.

That’s straight out of Nazi history. Karp was only missing a shout out to “my struggle” and Goebbels 1928.

Hu Contrasts This

The most helpful voice in Edsall’s piece belongs to Margaret Hu, who directs the Digital Democracy Lab at William & Mary. Where Karp treats replacing voters with technology as a management problem, something to cover in the right political framing, Hu names it correctly as the problem itself.

A.I. systems and their techno-kings have the potential to manifest almost monarchical aspirations.

“Techno-kings” with “monarchical aspirations.” That’s far more than an observation about labor markets or partisan realignment. That’s the correct diagnosis of the political structure being built. Hu goes further:

The A.I. cold war is not just a tech innovation race for military advantage. It is a race for global dominance economically and culturally, and geopolitically.

This is the frame Karp doesn’t want you to use. Karp’s version: ending democracy with information warfare tools (whether newspapers, radios or AI) is inevitable, the only question is whether you wrap it in a flag. Hu’s version: the disruption is a political choice made by identifiable actors pursuing identifiable power, and the military framing is just part of the power grab, not a check on it.

Karp says technology needs politics. Hu says technology is politics. More specifically, the political campaign of concentration is masquerading as inevitability.

What Edsall Misses

Edsall’s essay is valuable for assembling sources, particularly the Brynjolfsson and Hitzig paper showing that AI demolishes Hayek’s argument against central planning. But Edsall treats Karp’s CNBC quotes that echo Nazism as a “thoughtful reaction” rather than what they are: the CEO of a surveillance company explaining to his peers how to make the end of democracy politically survivable.

The Thiel quote at the top of the column and the Karp quotes near the bottom are the same perspectives. They’re the two phases of the same Nazi project Hitler used to seize power.

Thiel announced he was using the Goebbels theory. Karp is delivering the after-action report and next steps. Karp says “nobody should do what we did” from the commanding position of having already done it.

That’s just like Hitler. It’s an announcement they’ve built a moat with a drawbridge. And Palantir is expecting they will be the only ones to survive inside.

Matthew Yglesias runs a Substack called Slow Boring where he routes every problem in American political economy through zoning reform. His latest piece asks why Silicon Valley hasn’t done more for most Americans, and his answer is: not enough apartments near Cupertino.

Facepalm.

Paul Krugman had pointed out that tech generates a negative externality by producing billionaires who corrupt democracy. True.

Yglesias called this “puzzling” and used it to change the subject to housing density.

The problem is that Yglesias doesn’t seem to know the history of the examples he’s citing. Yup, I said it. HISTORY. Pull up a chair because I’m about to open a can of whoop-history on Yglesias.

He invokes Chicago in 1900, Detroit in 1920, the California Gold Rush, and Shenzhen. My God. He pulls all of that to our attention without appearing to notice that every one of these is a well-documented case study in the exact failure mode he’s ignoring.

Imagine being the guy who says Germany 1938 is a great example of how broken windows can fuel the economy.

Yeah, that bad.

The Fabian Society was founded in 1884 specifically because the industrial boomtowns Yglesias romanticizes were producing spectacular wealth for owners and squalor for everyone else. It’s like Krugman was so right that he didn’t even have to use history to know it, but if he had it would have cemented his point even more. Meanwhile Yglesias responds by walking through a minefield of his own examples and stepping on every one.

Here’s what Yglesias says, and what Fabians discovered over a century ago. Like explaining water is wet, I humbly present now, something hopefully obvious.

What Yglesias Says vs. What Fabians Would Say

Let me just reiterate that Shenzhen is government-owned land, state-directed investment, and party-controlled development. It’s literally the Fabian model, as the state captured the land value. Yglesias completely inverts reality and cites his error as his evidence for removing zoning restrictions.

Similarly, “selling shovels during the gold rush” is famous precisely because the miners with shovels went broke. It proves Yglesias wrong. Sure, Levi Strauss and Sam Brannan got rich by being smart while hard workers lost everything and died as nobodies. We’re supposed to want that? But the real lesson not to avoid is the abject cruelty, like the man who built the university at the center of Silicon Valley who got rich through government fraud, racism and genocide. That’s some devastatingly real harm Yglesias is romanticizing.

But what do I know. I’m not on Substack.

A “water rat” in German (Wasserratte) is someone who swims extremely well. Think of it like “book worm”. A “book rat” (Leseratte) is someone very proficient at reading. The compound logic is simple: an animal plus an environment equals command. It belongs there.

A “desert rat” (Wüstenratte), following the same grammar, is something in command of a wasteland. The more you bomb them the better they thrive.

The Tobruk Problem

Britain in 1941 had a weak, conciliatory commander in North Africa. After pushing the Italians out of the Libyan port of Tobruk the resulting apathy allowed Rommel’s Afrika Korps to reclaim it. A garrison of Allies who refused to give it up, approximately 14,000 Australians of the 9th Division, along with British, Indian, and Polish troops, dug themselves into underground positions. Rommel couldn’t budge them, as they held for eight months.

William Joyce, broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Hamburg, Germany under the name “Lord Haw-Haw,” described them thus:

Poor desert rats of Tobruk, who live like rats and will die like rats.

Joyce clearly, calling people rats, was not German. He was born in America, raised in Ireland, and held a first-class honours degree in English literature from the University of London. Goebbels hired the Irishman to be fluent in English. In English, to Joyce, calling someone a “rat” was meant to convey filth, cowardice, treachery. To the Nazis, hearing the Allied forces were to be known as Tobruk rats, their own propaganda signaled a foe of great competence and command.

Joyce foolishly had peddled English “rat” to mean an insult, but facts on the ground kept delivering the German meaning of the word instead to the Germans. Everything he described about Allied troops burrowing, surviving bombardment, refusing to leave, outlasting the siege was all proving to be competence. The nouns insulted. The verbs complimented. The garrison struck medals celebrating the rat, cast from the aluminium of a downed German bomber, and tuned in nightly for more.

One defender recalled that Lord Haw-Haw broadcasts “never failed to cheer us”, opposite to what Goebbels expected.

Every broadcast confirming they were still there was an advertisement that Rommel couldn’t fight, the Afrika Korps could not take the port. Nobody in the German propaganda ministry apparently caught the problem. Their translation of propaganda was becoming notoriously “witzig”.

Nazis had found an Irishman happy to be their native English speaker precisely so they would not have to think how the words landed. Consider Joyce much like an AI agent today. Nazis inherently are so clumsy and didactic they aren’t going to know how to generate useful, nuanced results.

Joyce took a German compliment, translated it into English contempt, and the compliment kept showing through because it fit the ground truth of adaptation, persistence, mastery of a hostile environment. And he never knew, just like how an AI agent is always in “hallucination” mode.

The Australian War Memorial notes that Joyce’s insults “were often turned into badges of honour.”

The standard account explains this as defiant reclamation where soldiers seized an enemy’s slur to wear it proudly. That is the English-language reading that gives Joyce’s mistake far too much undeserved credit instead of ridicule. The German-language reading is clearer: there was nothing to reclaim. The German propaganda produced praise when it attempted to insult. Joyce was a stage clown who couldn’t stop hallucinating, and deserves to be called out for it.

The Pentagon Podium, March 2026

Fast forward to the modern day Haw Haw, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Last Friday he told reporters that U.S. forces in Iran would proceed with “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

“No quarter” has a specific meaning in military law, and it’s not a good one for Hegseth. It means kill those who surrender. The Hague Convention prohibits it. The Geneva Conventions prohibit it. The Pentagon’s own law of war manual prohibits it. The Nuremberg tribunals prosecuted German officers for it.

Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, translated for anyone who missed it:

An order to give no quarter would mean to take no prisoners and kill them instead.

Hegseth perhaps thought he was going to communicate resolve by acting like he is a Confederate General who can order prisoners to be tortured and killed. Does he think this is 1865 and the southern states won? He produced instead, on the record, a war crime platform. A statement that the Pentagon’s own legal framework classifies as a war crime. The audience he intended to reach sits among the war crimes prosecutors, allied governments weighing coalition support, and Iranian propagandists looking for recruitment material. They all heard the same Haw Haw.

The same day, Hegseth described Iran’s military as “destroyed” and its attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz as “sheer desperation.” At the time of this statement, the strait was functionally closed to commercial traffic, global energy prices had spiked, the U.S. Navy still refused to provide armed escort to tankers, and 13 American service members were dead. Iran’s capacity to close the world’s most important oil transit route is the asymmetric capability its military was built around. It is the opposite of desperation. It is the plan working.

Hegseth called it desperation for the same reason Joyce called the Tobruk garrison rats.

The framework is meant to show contempt. However that contempt cannot process evidence of enemy competence, even when the propagandist is the one presenting it. “Destroyed” is English framing about a closed strait that has a very different ground truth. And if there’s one thing I learned in forty years of working with disinformation history, ground truth matters a LOT more than spin doctors realize.

At an earlier briefing, Hegseth addressed reporters about American casualties:

When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it, the press only wants to make the president look bad.

Six soldiers had been killed in Kuwait by a drone that struck a shipping container serving as an operations center. “A few drones get through” is a description of a force protection failure, command failure, delivered in the register of a complaint about media coverage.

The Pentagon has also been releasing propaganda videos set to music, missile strikes intercut with video game footage, produced in the idiom of social media content. The White House communications director responded to criticism of one video by posting a Grand Theft Auto cheat code for unlimited ammunition. In the videos, every missile hits. There are no American casualties. There is no closed strait.

There is no girls’ elementary school in Minab where at least 165 children were killed in a school America double-tap (war crime) bombed on the first day.

Joyce broadcast every night to a garrison he said was doomed, the end, and yet every broadcast served to confirm they were alive. The Pentagon releases daily videos of a war it says is won, over and done any minute, and every video confirms the need to keep persuading people it is still winning, and maybe needs help.

The Grammar

Joyce’s problem was simple. The traitor needed the English meaning of “rat” to produce contempt, but the garrison’s behavior matched the German Wüstenratte, not vermin, psychologically having the exact reverse effect on soldiers in the fight. The insult misfired at the level of language itself.

Hegseth’s problem is structural as well as linguistic, and the mechanism is identical. “No quarter” in his register means strength. In the legal framework he is bound by, it means weakness because a prosecutable offence. “Destroyed” in his register means victory. On the operational map, it means the opposite, an enemy whose most effective threat of waterway disruption is functioning. “Desperation” in his register means weakness. In strategic terms, it means an adversary executing the doctrine it was designed around.

Each statement delivers two messages simultaneously. Hegseth thinks there is only one. The people that matter most probably hear both if not just the other.

Joyce was hanged for treason in January 1946. His broadcasts had, by the assessment of the Imperial War Museum, minimal impact on Allied morale. The insults were adopted as honours. The nightly confirmation of a garrison standing became the proof of its own endurance.

The question with Hegseth is not whether his primitive Goebbels-like propaganda errors will fail. Propaganda built on contempt for an enemy who is performing competently always fails. The question is what it costs America before it does. And will he be hanged for it.

Stephen Colbert also has exposed Haw Haw Hegseth errors using simple humor: