 While Millgram’s view is extreme in the demands it takes Nietzsche’s writing to place on the reader, demands of the broad sort he indicates—a demand, for example, to hear Nietzsche’s interventions in the right tone, or “spirit”, if they are to be understood—do seem to be imposed by some rather straightforward features of the texts. Consider, for instance, what the point could be of that most obvious feature of Nietzsche’s rhetoric—the heat and vitriol with which his condemnations of traditional values are presented. The Genealogy of Morality advertises itself as “a Polemic”, but even in that genre, it is an outlier for rhetorical intensity; Nietzsche passes up no opportunity for emotionally charged attacks, he repeatedly blasphemes what is held most sacred in the culture, he freely deploys offensive anti-Semitic tropes (turned back, ironically, against anti-Semitic Christians themselves), he fairly shouts, he sneers between scare quotes, he repeatedly charges bad faith and dishonesty on the part of his opponents, and on and on. It is impossible to conclude that the work is not deliberately designed to be as offensive as possible to any earnest Christian believer. Why? Given Nietzsche’s expressed conviction that many Christians ought to remain ensconced within their ideology because it is the best they can do for themselves (that “the sense [Sinn] of the herd should rule in the herd”; KSA 7[6], 12: 280), perhaps the right way to understand this much rhetorical overkill is that it operates as a strategy for audience partition. In Nietzsche’s mind, those who cannot do without Christianity and its morality would only be harmed by understanding how destructive and self-defeating it is; Nietzsche wants to explain those terrible effects, but he also wants to protect Christianity-dependent readers from harm. He achieves both at once by ensuring that exactly those readers will be so offended by his tone that their anger will impair understanding and they will fail to follow his argument. If this is right, the very vitriol of the Genealogy arises from an aim to be heard only by the right audience—the one it can potentially aid rather than harm—thereby overcoming the problem that