Pope Leo XIV Just Quoted The Lord of the Rings Against Peter Thiel’s Empire — and Thiel Is Now Fleeing America
The man who calls his venture fund ‘the precious’ — Gollum's name for the One Ring — is in Buenos Aires, discussing the Antichrist over dinner.
Christopher Hale
May 28, 2026
The New York Times reported today that Peter Thiel has decamped from Los Angeles and Miami to Buenos Aires.
He has bought a $12 million mansion in the Palermo Chico enclave and enrolled his children in a local school. Since arriving in April, he has been meeting regularly with President Javier Milei and his ministers — the deregulation minister, the economy minister, the inner circle of Argentina’s libertarian government.
One detail in the Times piece deserves to be lifted out. At a candlelit dinner at his new Buenos Aires mansion, Thiel reportedly once again steered the conversation toward the Antichrist — what the paper calls “one of his favorite conversation topics.”
I am not making that up — the paper of record put it on the page.
If you have been reading this newsletter, the dinner detail will land as déjà vu. Last fall I broke the story of leaked audio from Thiel’s San Francisco lecture series in which he suggested Pope Leo XIV himself might be a manifestation of the Antichrist. The Buenos Aires dinner is the latest chapter of an obsession that is now several years deep.
Three days before the Times story landed, on Memorial Day, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical and quoted The Lord of the Rings.
What the encyclical is actually doing
Beneath the literary flourish, Magnifica Humanitas is doing something specific. The encyclical is the Vatican’s answer to two years of Peter Thiel’s public theological campaign against the moral oversight of technology. By quoting Tolkien, Leo placed the magisterium of the Catholic Church on the side of the tradition Thiel has spent his life appropriating and inverting.
Whether Thiel ever reads the document is anyone’s guess. He has been collecting backup countries for years — New Zealand citizenship in 2011, a Malta passport application in 2022, now Argentina. The Buenos Aires move was in motion well before the Vatican press office sent the encyclical to print.
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Christopher Hale
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Fairview, NC
Peter Thiel is in Buenos Aires. Trump's mentor. He genuinely believed libertarian ideology would save America. Tariffs would work. SNAP work requirements would make poor people work harder. He was wrong. Food insecurity is rising. Farms are collapsing. Now he's buying Argentine citizenship. He's running
4.2 million removed from SNAP based on conviction, not fraud. Agricultural exports to China collapsed from $12B to $5.5B. Fertilizer prices up 10-15%. Consumer sentiment at 44.8 (lower than Great Recession). His ideology produced exactly this. People starving. And he's leaving
99% of his $28 billion stays in America. He's not abandoning money. He's abandoning accountability. He destroyed the country based on faith in failed ideas. Now he's buying safety in Argentina. That's arrogance worse than conspiracy.
Here's what's sickest: The entire tech/VC world is still following him. Still pushing his ideology. Why? Because it works. For them. Stock market up. Billionaire net worth up. People starving doesn't affect them. They don't experience the economy they created.
They're psychologically invested in not admitting failure. VCs built careers on it. Founders built identities on it. Admitting it failed means admitting they were complicit in harm. Impossible. So they keep implementing it.
But Thiel is sending a signal. He has New Zealand citizenship (2011). Malta passport (2022). Now Argentina. He's not just buying property. He's buying escape routes. Positioning himself outside the reach of collapse.
Smart billionaires are watching. They're asking: If Thiel knows it's over, shouldn't we build escape hatches too? If the architect is leaving, what does he know about what's coming?
They're not abandoning the ideology. They'll keep profiting from it until the country breaks. But they're quietly building their own Argentina. Their own escape route. Their own safety.
That's the endgame of this system: Billionaires profit while people starve. Then when it collapses, they flee to countries that will protect them. No accountability. No consequences. Just escape hatches for the people who broke everything.
Thiel is the canary. His escape is the signal. Watch which other billionaires start buying property in Argentina, getting second passports, seeking citizenship abroad. That's who knows it's over. That's who's preparing for the collapse they created.
@mitchkleinmedia
