Right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel is accusing Pope Leo XIV of doing the work of the Chinese Communist Party with his criticisms of artificial intelligence.According to a Thursday report from CNN, Thiel told the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Tuesday that the pope was inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” when he released a 42,000-word encyclical that called for strict regulation of AI, a technology that the pontiff 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 US losing the “race” to build more advanced AI to China. Because of this, Thiel continued, the pope is essentially “working for the Chinese communists” by trying to tap the brakes on AI development.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 on Friday that Thiel in the past has even speculated that Pope Leo could be “a manifestation of the Antichrist.”Thiel has said that he instructed 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, 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.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.”
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, a research professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, says all jobs data is "noisy" when reacting to the June US employment report. Speaking on "Bloomberg The Close," Krugman also says he is "disturbed" by Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh's point of view on monetary policy and warns that the Supreme Court's Trump v. Slaughter ruling gives too much discretionary power to President Donald Trump. (Source: Bloomberg)
For nearly three decades, during the Supreme Court’s most difficult and divisive moments, Justice Stephen Breyer could be counted on to help keep the peace.
Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock (Ga.) expressed concern Sunday about Vice President Vance criticizing Pope Leo XIV. Warnock, a Baptist pastor, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he is “glad” that Vance wrote about his religious journey in his new book “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.” The Georgia Democrat told host Jake…
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York ripped into Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Friday night for saying that Republican control of Congress is the only thing keeping President Donald Trump from being held to account for his numerous scandals and abuses of power during his second term in the White House.Asked about comments made by the Speaker earlier in the day, Ocasio-Cortez told MS-NOW’s Jen Psaki that Johnson characterized future efforts to investigate or accountability for possible misdeeds or corruption by Trump, his family members, or members of his administration “as though it’s some partisan witch hunt,” she said. “But if you don’t want to be prosecuted for crimes, don’t do crimes.”Ocasio-Cortez, often referred to by her initials AOC, had been asked about remarks Speaker Johnson made at the annual summit of the right-wing Faith and Freedom Coalition, a group with close ties to Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that supports him.“If we lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats—y’all, impeachment isn’t even the real concern,” Johnson told the crowd. “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted.”The House speaker added, “I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you, OK?”Johnson’s remarks unsurprisingly sparked a series of critical reactions, including AOC’s.“Mike Johnson saying the quiet part out loud: protect the powerful. S---- everyone else,” said Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Pa.).“The Speaker of the House just talked like a guy guarding a operation that can’t survive daylight,” said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.). “Because that’s exactly what he’s doing.”“You don’t need a ‘protection program’ for people who did nothing wrong,” Levin continued. “You need one when you’re afraid of what the books would show. Congress is supposed to be a check on power, not the muscle protecting it. Johnson is a total disgrace to the office. November can’t come fast enough.”What Johnson is “talking about,” explained AOC in her interview with Psaki, is a Republican Party in Congress “running a protection racket” for Trump and his cronies, both in and out of government. “And we are already seeing that this Trump administration has run what some have called one of the largest pedophile protection programs in American history,” she continued, referencing the scandal surrounding the disgraced convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. “And so when Mike Johnson tells a group of wealthy donors, I’m the only thing standing between you, and a consequence that should rattle at the conscience of every American,” she said. “What he wants to do is create—or rather, not even create, because it’s already been created—but protect a class of impunity in America that says, ‘You can commit whatever crime, and so long as you pay a check to us, we will protect you.’ And that is a model of extortion in American politics. And you know what? That’s their pitch.”Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, responded to Johnson’s comments by detailing just a few examples of possible corruption by Trump that deserve much more scrutiny and congressional oversight.“Trump has almost tripled his net worth during this term. His sons bought drone companies and immediately received military contracts right before Trump started another war. Trump threw a crypto contest to see who could buy the most of his meme coin, with the prize being exclusive access to him in his presidential capacity,” D-Arrigo noted. “His son-in-law is getting billions in business deals from the countries and oligarchs wanting political favors. Large donors are spending millions to get pardons and investigations dropped. Trump is still actively covering up the Epstein files,” she added. “And these are just a handful of the things that were publicly reported on—imagine what we don’t know about yet.”D’Arrigo called on voters to help “flip the House” away from the Republicans and investigate these examples of grift and corruption as well as others.
Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) warned this week that President Donald Trump has openly acknowledged directing federal prosecutors to investigate elections whose results he dislikes — a statement the congressman argued the president made plainly and even boasted about."Trump just told the country, out loud, that he picks up the phone and orders federal prosecutors to investigate elections when he does not like how the vote is going," Levin wrote, adding that the president "bragged about it twice this week."According to Levin, Trump described calling a U.S. attorney in California, telling the prosecutor to "do me a favor" and look into a race his preferred candidate was at risk of losing.The congressman then laid out why he sees the claim as baseless. There is no evidence of fraud in California's primary, Levin wrote, noting that even Steve Hilton — the Republican candidate Trump claims to have rescued — said he never heard about any such call. Levin added that Los Angeles County's top elections official stated that no one at the Justice Department had touched their process.Levin attributed the slow count not to fraud but to the thoroughness of California's system, where every registered voter is mailed a ballot, every returned ballot has its signature checked against the voter's file, and late-arriving mail ballots remain valid if postmarked by Election Day."Slow is not fraud," he wrote.Levin said he would support responsible, legal efforts to speed up vote counting through better funding and modernized ballot processing. What he would not accept, he argued, is a president investigating his way to a preferred outcome.The congressman tied the behavior back to 2020, writing that because Trump still can't admit he lost that year, "every election he dislikes becomes a crime in his mind." The post was amplified by political scientist Norman Ornstein.
