{ "archive_path": "archive/1790352915.600302", "base_url": "open.substack.com/pub/lettersfromleo/p/a-useful-idiot-for-the-chinese-communists", "basename": "a-useful-idiot-for-the-chinese-communists", "bookmarked_date": "2026-09-25 16:15", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/open.substack.com/pub/lettersfromleo/p/a-useful-idiot-for-the-chinese-communists", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=open.substack.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "open.substack.com/pub/lettersfromleo/p/a-useful-idiot-for-the-chinese-communists.html" }, "domain": "open.substack.com", "extension": "", "hash": "12RQ77KF3R4X180EQZAV", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=open.substack.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-25T19:19:26.450961+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790352915.600302", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-25T19:19:25.767168+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://open.substack.com/pub/lettersfromleo/p/a-useful-idiot-for-the-chinese-communists" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-25T19:19:27.231813+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790352915.600302", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-25T19:19:26.460429+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://open.substack.com/pub/lettersfromleo/p/a-useful-idiot-for-the-chinese-communists" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-09-25T19:19:37.378854+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790352915.600302", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-25T19:19:33.247783+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpechqkb4z", "https://open.substack.com/pub/lettersfromleo/p/a-useful-idiot-for-the-chinese-communists" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-09-25T19:19:33.233307+00:00", "index_texts": [ "Pope Leo XIV and Peter Thiel set against the flag of the People\u2019s Republic of China, the government Thiel claims the pope\u2019s AI encyclical was \u201cworking for.\u201d (Letters from Leo illustration)Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Make A One-Time Gift to Support My WorkPope Leo XIV landed at Orly this morning, the first pope to set foot in Paris since Benedict XVI in 2008, and I had planned to open today by writing about him. He has already given Emmanuel Macron and the French political class plenty to chew on. I will have much more from France today and in the days ahead.But something happened in Berlin on Thursday that I refuse to let slide under the radar while the cameras follow the pope through France.Peter Thiel, the billionaire who bankrolled JD Vance\u2019s political career, called Pope Leo XIV a \u201cuseful idiot\u201d for the Chinese Communist Party. He said it to Mathias D\u00f6pfner, the chief executive of the German publishing giant Axel Springer, in an interview for D\u00f6pfner\u2019s podcast that went out Thursday, the same day the company handed Thiel its Axel Springer Award at a ceremony in Berlin. Politico, which Axel Springer owns, reported the remarks.\u201cThe Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the pope,\u201d Thiel told D\u00f6pfner. \u201cThere\u2019s a chance people in the U.S. will. And so in effect, the pope\u2019s encyclical was working for the Communist Party.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m not saying he was an agent of the Communists,\u201d he added, \u201cbut he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP.\u201dWatch it yourself. Thiel even pauses to admit that \u201cmaybe it was too harsh\u201d before he says it anyway.The encyclical he means is Magnifica Humanitas, which Leo published on Memorial Day and which asks governments to set binding limits on artificial intelligence, above all on the battlefield. Thiel described it to D\u00f6pfner as an \u201canti-AI encyclical.\u201d The Vatican, per Politico, did not respond to a request for comment.This is the third time we know of that Thiel has gone after Leo over AI.The first came last November, when Thiel used a private lecture series in San Francisco to fold the pope\u2019s caution about artificial intelligence into his theory of the Antichrist, a figure he says will arrive as a regulator promising safety. He carried the same lectures to Rome in March, a short walk from St. Peter\u2019s, after the Angelicum distanced itself from the event.On June 30, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he told an audience that Leo was, in effect, working for the Chinese Communists. Two weeks after that, he wrote in First Things that the theologian Hans K\u00fcng, Benedict XVI\u2019s longtime friend, was the man Benedict suspected of being the Antichrist, after pausing to call the theory that it was Pope Francis \u201ctempting.\u201dBerlin makes three. \u201cUseful idiot\u201d is a Cold War slur for a dupe of Communist Moscow, and Thiel, who was born in Frankfurt, chose to pin it on the bishop of Rome in his native Germany.Peter Thiel is a private citizen with strange opinions, and if that were all he was, I would leave critique of him to the several hundred Berliners who stood outside the ceremony with signs reading \u201cThiel shall not pass.\u201d He is much more than that.The $15 million Thiel put into Protect Ohio Values, the super PAC that carried JD Vance into the Senate in 2022, was a sum OpenSecrets called staggering for one donor in a Senate race. Vance worked at Thiel\u2019s fund, Mithril Capital, after the two met at Yale Law School, and Thiel brought him to his first meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in February 2021, according to the New York Times. By Vance\u2019s own account, Thiel also opened the door to his Catholic faith.Vance tells that story in Communion, the memoir Harper published in June, where a 2011 Thiel lecture at Yale becomes the moment his Ayn Rand atheism cracked. Thiel, he writes, was \u201cpossibly the smartest person I\u2019d ever met,\u201d and a man who \u201cidentified very openly as a Christian.\u201dHe told the same story to Glenn Beck the day the book came out, with a caveat worth hearing now: \u201cPeter\u2019s a very unorthodox Christian,\u201d Vance said. \u201cSometimes I disagree with him. Sometimes I agree with him.\u201d Then he described sitting in that Yale lecture as a self-declared atheist and realizing that \u201chis Christianity is much more interesting than the atheism of the people that I see surrounding me.\u201dSo here is where things stand today. The vice president of the United States is a Catholic convert whom prediction markets and every early poll rate the clear favorite for the 2028 Republican nomination. The man who financed his rise, and who by Vance\u2019s own telling led him toward the Church, has spent nearly a year telling audiences across the globe that the head of that Church is doing the devil\u2019s work, or Beijing\u2019s, or both.The vice president has said nothing.He kept quiet in November, when the Antichrist lectures were first reported, and had nothing to add after Aspen, by which point he had published 304 pages about finding God; Thursday came and went without a word. Instead, Vance offered a warning on a podcast this month that the Antichrist may walk among us. In Paris last year, at the AI Action Summit, he told the assembled governments that excessive regulation, rather than the technology itself, was the danger (Thiel\u2019s argument, delivered from a vice president\u2019s podium).Notice what Thiel skipped in that interview. He never quarreled with a single sentence of Magnifica Humanitas. Nowhere does he explain why a machine should be permitted to choose whom to kill, or why the companies his Founders Fund holds stakes in (OpenAI, Palantir, and Scale AI among them) ought to be trusted without limits. His argument is that the pope should have kept quiet because the wrong government might benefit from his speaking.That is an argument about power, and the pope answered it in the encyclical itself. In paragraph 213 of the encyclical, Leo quotes Gandalf at the Last Debate in The Return of the King: \u201cIt 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.\u201d I wrote in May that the line seemed aimed at Thiel, whose surveillance company takes its name from the seeing-stones Sauron used to deceive the men who gazed into them. Four months later, Thiel is still answering Tolkien with talking points about Xi Jinping.The Communist Party of China is indeed unlikely to listen to the pope. Neither did Diocletian. A pope does not address consciences on the condition that every government agrees to be bound at the same moment. He addresses them because they are consciences. Leo said as much at the \u00c9lys\u00e9e this morning, hours after Thiel\u2019s remarks crossed the Atlantic, warning that \u201cwhen science and technology are not guided by a deeper wisdom, they can offer immediate solutions that apparently address people\u2019s wishes and their pain, but can seriously divert them from the greater good.\u201dThiel calls that a gift to Beijing. The Church has called it teaching for two thousand years.The question now belongs to the vice president. JD Vance can keep quiet while his patron calls the pope a communist dupe, or he can say, in a single sentence, that his patron is wrong about the pope. Vance owes Peter Thiel a great deal, and everyone in Washington knows it. What he owes the Church is the more interesting question, and only he can answer it.At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the millions of Catholics, and countless others of goodwill, who believe that a human life is worth more than a model\u2019s output, and that no billionaire\u2019s balance sheet carries a veto over the Gospel.In an era when the richest men alive treat moral teaching as a market inefficiency to be arbitraged away, we remain rooted in a faith that cannot be bought, however large the check.This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They want the truth about what is being built in their name, and about who is paying for it, and right now, with a Catholic vice president standing silent beside the man who calls the pope a useful idiot, that hunger has never been more urgent.If you believe this movement matters \u2014 Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the empire of the machine \u2014 I am asking you to join us.If you\u2019d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project\u2019s mission.Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.Paid subscribers receive the full biographical series on Pope Leo\u2019s Life & Formation, every installment of Pope Leo Takes On AI, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters \u2014 no matter your faith or your politics.Thank you for reading. 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