...or
maybe you do:Peter Thiel stood before the Aspen Ideas Festival on Tuesday and told the crowd that Pope Leo XIV is “working for the Chinese Communists.”
The audience laughed, but Thiel was dead serious.
CNN reported the remarks Thursday from a non-recorded panel in Colorado, where Thiel appeared alongside the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, and reporters were permitted to take notes.
The logic behind the accusation runs through the pope’s own words. In May, Leo published Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, a 40,000-word document declaring that artificial intelligence “must be disarmed” and calling for stronger international oversight of the technology.
Stop right there. I think I see the problem. Leo called for stronger international oversight of AI. Which is anathema to a TechBro, who must be allowed to do as he pleases, first the benign all humankind, and because we cannot allow a mineshaft gap!
Because Americans might actually heed that teaching while the Chinese Communist Party ignores it, Thiel argued, the encyclical threatens to slow exactly one side of the AI race between Washington and Beijing. A pope who asks his flock to think before they build becomes, by this arithmetic, an asset of a foreign adversary.
The Vatican did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Readers of this community know the longer arc.
Last November, I wrote the story of leaked audio from Thiel’s private San Francisco lecture series, in which he suggested Leo himself might be a manifestation of the Antichrist — and revealed that he has urged Vice President JD Vance to ignore the pope’s moral guidance.
By March, Thiel had carried his Antichrist lectures to Rome, staging the invitation-only events blocks from the Holy See. The lectures unnerved the Vatican and prompted two Catholic universities to state publicly that they had no role in hosting them.
The encyclical itself arrived on Memorial Day carrying a quotation from The Lord of the Rings — a literary choice that writers from the United States to Italy read as aimed squarely at Thiel, while the Catholic Herald in Britain asked whether the whole encyclical targets his empire. Within days, The New York Times found the billionaire settled into a $12 million mansion in Buenos Aires, steering dinner conversation — once again — toward the Antichrist.
Thiel is really only worried about
his money and his freedom.
The New York Times reported in May that Thiel has grown so concerned about the political situation in the US that he’s created a “foothold” for himself in Argentina, which is currently being governed by ideologically likeminded libertarian President Javier Milei.
“Thiel, who has a history of collecting backup countries as he hedges his bets against the United States, is considering making Argentina another Plan B,” the Times reported. “Born in Germany and raised in the United States, he received citizenship in New Zealand in 2011, and applied for a passport in Malta in 2022.”
Thiel won’t put his money where his ass is. He just wants to be sure the regulatory environment is conducive to him making money.
The pope occupied one slot on a longer roster of enemies Thiel described in Colorado. He claimed, without offering evidence, that Anthropic — “a woke liberal company” he credits with “winning the AI race” — would “rig the elections in 2028” on behalf of Democrats.
The San Francisco lectures had already counted regulators, environmentalists, and Greta Thunberg among what Thiel calls the “legionnaires of the Antichrist.” Anyone who asks his industry a moral question ends up, in his telling, working for something sinister.
Thiel is not comfortable with competing viewpoints. But he seems to have tired of the shibboleth of the “Antichrist,” and he’s moved to another golden oldie: commies under the bed!
Thiel spent another stretch of the panel defending the name of his surveillance company, which he drew from the palantíri, the seeing-stones of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
“Toward the end, it gets used by the good guys,” Thiel said of the seeing-stone. “Anybody who tells you a different story of Tolkien,” he added, “doesn’t even know what they’re talking about, on the level of literature.”
The good guy in question is Aragorn, and the scene undoes Thiel’s defense. As John Grosso argued at Where Peter Is — a reading I walked through in May — Aragorn prevails with the stone by surrendering through it: he reveals himself to Sauron deliberately, drawing the enemy’s gaze away from Frodo so someone smaller and weaker can finish the work. The stone rewards sacrifice and destroys everyone who reaches for control.
The Palantir was turned to evil; and was never turned back. Thiel's intelligence is really rather limited to only certain subjects.
The encyclical Thiel now brands as Chinese propaganda quotes Gandalf’s address to the captains of the West from the very council where that gambit is proposed: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set.”
Put the two theologies side by side, and the argument settles itself. Thiel warns that the Antichrist will arrive as a one-world government promising to protect humanity from existential threats like artificial intelligence. No world government has materialized. His software, meanwhile, already runs the data engine of the Trump administration’s mass deportation program, part of billions of dollars in Palantir’s federal contracts.
Leo’s teaching moves in the opposite direction. The human person carries a dignity no machine may override, and the technologies of the powerful must answer to the people they surveil, sort, and deport.
The pope chose his name with machines in mind. Days after his election, he told the College of Cardinals that Leo XIII had answered the first industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum, and that the Church now faces another industrial revolution in artificial intelligence, with new threats to human dignity, justice, and labor.
The Church has been asking who the machine serves since 1891, and no version of her answer has ever named a government or a fortune.
This week a room of wealthy Americans laughed while a billionaire accused the successor of Peter of serving a communist state. The laughter deserves attention, because it measures what money has learned it can say without consequence.
Leo shepherds a Church that buried her martyrs under emperors who demanded she choose sides, and that Church outlived every one of them. The laughter will fade by autumn, and Magnifica Humanitas will still be teaching long after the seeing-stones of Silicon Valley have gone dark.
Thiel is not only fighting out of his weight class; he doesn’t even understand what arena he’s in.
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