Pope Leo hit by crazy ‘Chinese Communist agent’ claim
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s bizarre allegation after the pontiff called for strict regulation of AI
Right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel has accused Pope Leo XIV of doing the work of the Chinese Communist Party with his criticisms of artificial intelligence.
According to a CNN report last week, he told the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado that the pontiff was inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” when he released a
42,000-word encyclical.
In the formal pastoral letter, the pontiff called for strict regulation of artificial intelligence, a technology that he said heightens the “risk of dehumanization” throughout the world.
Thiel argued that this sort of thinking was dangerous, CNN reported, because it could result in the United States losing the “race” to build more advanced AI to China.
Because of this, he continued, the pope is essentially “working for the Chinese communists” by trying to tap the brakes on AI development.
AI critics
Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has long decried AI critics in harsh terms. Over the last year, he has been delivering a series of lectures in which he has said that opponents of AI development are working as agents for the Antichrist.
Journalist Christopher Hale, who writes the Letters From Leo newsletter, noted that Thiel in the past has even speculated that Pope Leo could be “a manifestation of the Antichrist.”
Thiel has said that he instructed US Vice President JD Vance, a longtime political ally who received major funding from the tech billionaire for his 2022 Senate campaign, to ignore the pope’s moral guidance, despite influencing Vance to convert to Catholicism, Hale added.
“Thiel seeded the vice president’s Catholic faith,” Hale wrote, “and he now tells wealthy festival audiences that the leader of that faith works for a communist government.”
In addition to his attacks on the Pope Leo, Thiel also warned about “a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,” pointing to recent victories in New York and Colorado of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.
Thiel said that this “takeover” would doom the US, arguing that “when the Democratic Party goes, this country is over,” according to CNN.
In May, the New York Times reported that Thiel has grown so concerned about the political situation in the US that he has created a “foothold” for himself in Argentina, which is currently being governed by ideologically like-minded libertarian President Javier Milei.
Backup countries
“Thiel, who has a history of collecting backup countries as he hedges his bets against the US, is considering making Argentina another Plan B,” the New York 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.”
Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is republished from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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