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 chemicals.

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. By March 22, 1933 Hitler had opened Dachau to jail his opponents and murder them. Not elected. Violently assaulted political opposition and murdered them. Don’t say elected.

This video is full of basic factual errors and it’s bad. Really bad.

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, without looking at America building Hitler.

So it’s bad at analysis too, which of course derives from getting the 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?

What is going on here is painful disinformation. The legend being spread that the CEO is steeped in culture of Frankfurt School in general, let alone Habermas, is 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 claims 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 Nazi family being kind to him and trying to win him over after the war reveals opportunism, which has been documented as worse than fanaticism (7:44). Even the most fanatical Nazis were known to draw a red line somewhere, whereas opportunists would do Hitler’s worst deeds everywhere and anywhere.

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 Jews!

See all the problems? It’s probably the worst video I’ve seen in years. The latent antisemitism it pushes is ridiculous and totally unnecessary.

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. 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.

There’s a billionaire in South Korea acting like an Elon Musk. As you may remember from my earlier post, Musk regularly uses Tesla and Twitter to promote Hitler and demote democracy.

Starbucks Korea ran a “Tank Day” promotion on May 18 for a “Tank” tumbler line with the tagline to slam it down with a “Tak!” sound. This “bang the desk” line was read as mocking the torture death of student activist Park Jong-chul.

The campaign is on the anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising, where the military killed hundreds of citizens in 1980. The official count stands near 165. Independent scholarship puts the dead between 600 and 2,300. The killing was by paratroopers and special forces with gunfire and bayonets, not by tanks as such, yet tanks are the symbol of the tragedy.

The Starbucks CEO was fired hours later and the stock crashed. Unlike America, where Elon Musk’s constant promotion of violent fascism is only growing, there has been immediate and fierce condemnation in South Korea.

Commercial infrastructure was built to push unwanted content through trusted channels. It’s no stretch to say a state can place an order. We sometimes nonetheless hear people talk about PSYOP on tech as a novelty, as if it’s something more than a premium ad buy on a delivery system that was compromised the same way these systems have always been compromised for propaganda.

The ad network operates as a primitive trust-laundering machine. It abuses a publisher’s credibility to drop a payload that a user would reject if it arrived under its own name. The ad buyer wants attention one day and the next day wants a political defection. Or maybe even the same day. The network bills the same way, either payload.

Compromise it once, reach every device that trusts it. This is what I was talking about in 2012 when I called it “Big Data’s Fourth V”.

By 2005 we were fighting supply chain risks from ads being injected. I remember it well. Malicious banner slots serving exploits through trusted publishers show up, and then landmark recognition events become the 2009 NYT malvertising incident, then the Angler-driven campaigns. Push content tampering was a big pain at the time, not to mention defacements.

By 2016 the security industry was talking malvertising as a constant threat. Pop the delivery platform, serve the payload through borrowed branding. If you think this wasn’t being used in wars, well I have news to push to you.

When web push went mainstream, browsers had to bolt permission gates onto the Push API because sites were abusing it to deliver scareware and ad spam straight to the desktop. The “fix” was called a trust prompt, which is ridiculous when you think about it. Imagine having a banner on disinformation banners bombers as a trust prompt.

So all the BadeSaba hubub feels like rehashed malvertising with an obvious state as the buyer and defection as their creative intent. The prayer app is a very well-known publisher target surface for military intelligence.

The notification backend is the ad server. The weeks or months of pre-positioning is barely persistence in a delivery platform, and the ordinary lifecycle of an adware campaign. Establish access, stay quiet, wait for the flight date, serve.

Start at 2009 and we’re talking at least seventeen years of this stuff in disinformation study circles. The Iranian Green Movement was being called a Twitter Revolution in real time. Mobile and social platforms as the delivery layer for regime-change messaging was the defining argument of that period, Iran specifically. And that’s exactly why I was talking about it a lot in 2012.

For some reason today, however, I see “nobody had done it” claims like this.

Push notifications on a smartphone are a more effective delivery mechanism than leaflets dropped from aircraft. That much should be obvious, but nobody had done it in a real war until now. In my book PROPAGANDA (CRC Press, 2024) I predict and describe exactly this scenario.

A 2024 prediction about something decades old seems, awkward? I feel bad for the author. He clearly wants to report something new. But what’s new?

Russia was pushing mobile text (apps, if you will) on Ukrainian soldiers through cell site simulators by 2014, with surrender appeals, threats, and fake payment alerts. Raphael Satter alone documented forty-plus of these messages at the front in May 2017, where an IMSI-catcher pushed content directly to phones in a combat zone.

That truly feels like forever ago, so let’s talk about July 2021. Attackers took control of the official Formula One app during Austrian GP qualifying and pushed notifications to the userbase. F1 confirmed Push Notifications Service was the only thing in scope. A trusted app’s notification channel, seized, used to send content the operator never authorized. The backend being the target and the push being the delivery was no joke, although it’s common to frame it that way to avoid investigations. A push backend hijack is in fact still a growing problem, such that BadeSaba is the same attack, different day.

Here’s another way to look at it.

Obscene and racist notifications were pushed to Apple News subscribers by Fast Company in September 2022. It’s not rocket science. A default password is the exploit for an entire delivery system, that gives a ride on Apple News, to hit the whole subscriber base under the provider identity. That is the point.

And even if we talk about synchronization being novel at war, there’s plenty of priors there too. Kursk, 6 August 2024. “I Want to Live” pushed surrender messages to Russian soldiers’ phones the same day Ukraine opened the cross-border offensive. Content to enemy phones, timed to a kinetic operation, calling for defection.

And this is why you should invite an historian to your research instead of waiting for the book promotion novelty party.