JD Vance did his 40 days and nights of fasting, but he’s still lost in the desert. Currently on the outs with Donald Trump for making the mistake of thinking he was serious about that whole “no new wars” thing, the Vice President has two people whispering into his ear offering guidance: the Pope, the most important earth-bound figure in his deeply held faith, and Peter Thiel, the billionaire who made him relevant.
Unfortunately for Vance, the two are diametrically opposed forces. In one corner is Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope with a decidedly pro-human agenda in the era of artificial intelligence; a pope who should have some real appeal to a politician actively marketing a book about his adult conversion to Catholicism. In the other corner is Thiel, a billionaire weirdo who has been giving lectures on the Antichrist and reportedly accused the pope of being in league with the figure empowered by Satan to bring about the downfall of the global order—an oligarch who seems more invested in AI than in humanity’s survival
Seems like it should be a pretty easy choice, but one guy promises a kingdom in the afterlife, and the other promises it in this life, and Vance seems torn as to which he values more.
It’s clear that he’s feeling the pull from both sides.
The Pope recently issued his encyclical on artificial intelligence, which centered humanity and warned of the “risk of being misled by deceitful goals” that may arise from “the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm” (and prodded the tech bros with a reference to J.R.R. Tolkien and a read on his works that directly conflicts with the likes of Thiel and Elon Musk’s interpretation of the author’s work).
Vance, speaking to NBC News, praised the papal declaration. “What I read of it sounds very profound, and the sort of thing that you would expect and hope from a leader of the church,” he told the outlet. “The thing about morality is that the principles never change, but the way you apply those principles does, because the world changes, right?” He gave Pope Leo XIV credit for recognizing the world is changing and working to “rethink the entire Catholic social teaching in light of the new world that we live in.”
That is probably not going to sit particularly well with Thiel, who would have a hard time not feeling targeted by the Pope’s encyclical—and not just because he has a persecution complex. A recent report from Letters From Leo, a publication tracking the Pope, revealed that Thiel told Vance to ignore the moral advice of the Pope, including on the ethics of AI.
Thiel doesn’t necessarily need Vance if he has Trump in his corner, and it’s clear that Trump is far more malleable on AI issues—he just recently axed an executive order to regulate AI models at the behest of the tech industry. But it seemed Vance was supposed to be the guy in waiting who would take over after Trump and solidify all of Thiel’s preferred policies. Now the two seem to be diverging.
There’s no reason to assume Vance is saved in this regard—the pull of power is strong, and Thiel has several billion ways of putting his finger on the scale. But maybe, just maybe, Vance is starting to experience a real break from Trump world. AI “raises such profound questions for how we interact with one another, what kind of skills we need in the workforce, the kind of wars that we’ll fight and how we’ll fight our wars,” the Vice President told NBC. “I think we really need moral leadership to think through those questions, and that’s exactly what the church is the best leader to do.”
It already seems like his 2028 Presidential bid is dead on arrival, and there’s not really a whole lot of places for him to go post-vice presidency if not up. So maybe he’s considering just abandoning ship and giving genuinely held beliefs a try.
Unfortunately, Vance has more devils than shoulders, and there’s a powerful force waiting in the wings. He claims that he deleted Elon Musk’s X from his phone for Lent and the change has made him feel “healthier.” His staff has been posting on his behalf, but he plans to reinstall the app at some point in the future. “One of the good things about social media is that it actually exposes you to unfiltered raw opinions, and that’s one of the things that I need to hear as a political leader,” he said. Jumping back into the cesspool of X could be enough to make even the most faithful turn away from the light of the Lord.
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