The Power the Pope Warned About Has a Guest List
The Thiel's Dialog group leak reveals a private power outside the institutions meant to govern it
On the fifteenth of May, Pope Leo XIV signed an encyclical almost no one in American politics took seriously. Magnifica Humanitas — a long, dense document on artificial intelligence and human dignity — made a warning whose central claim was structural, not spiritual: a new power has grown up in the world that does not answer to any state. It is concentrated in a few hands and it runs on the harvesting of human data. In the encyclical’s own words, “the highest level is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life.” Left unchecked, the Pope warned, the technology will “divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice.” The commentary, where there was any, called it abstract. A spiritual leader gesturing at a technology he did not really understand.
Three weeks later, a Swiss hacktivist who goes by maia arson crimew found a directory of names sitting in the page source of a website that was supposed to be secret. The names were very good ones: the Treasury Secretary, the Director of National Intelligence, the four-star general who runs NATO’s forces in Europe, a sitting senator who oversees the Federal Trade Commission, the co-founder of Palantir. They belonged to Dialog, an invitation-only society Peter Thiel founded in 2006 and spent two decades refusing to discuss. The coverage fixed on the obvious things — the celebrity guest list, the off-the-record session titles (“Navigating WWIII,” “Build-a-Cult”), the detail that none of the 222 people registered with a government email address, which keeps the whole thing outside the reach of public-records law.
Set the two events next to each other and the second stops being a society-pages curiosity. The Pope described a structure: a private power, built on data, convening above the institutions meant to govern it. The leak is a photograph of that exact structure — the powerful few, hosting the officials who are supposed to oversee them, in a room with no minutes, by a tech financier’s invitation. Leo XIV named the thing. crimew, by accident, took its picture.
And here is what the picture shows, which is more than the commentary noticed. The leak, by itself, is not the scandal. If the meetings leave no record by design, the leaked membership does not give you the meetings; it gives you a list of names. The scandal is what those names already did for each other — out in the open, on the public record, in the months before anyone knew they shared a room. The leak is the key. The receipts were already public. You just needed to know which doors to try.
The room is the index, not the evidence
Here is the move I want to make carefully, because the easy version of this story is wrong.
The easy version says: these people met in secret, therefore they conspired. That is not a claim the documents support, and I am not going to make it. Nobody has the transcripts. The entire design of Dialog — personal email, off the record, no minutes — is built so that nobody ever will. If your story depends on what was said in that room, you do not have a story. You have a guest list and a suspicion.
So invert it. Treat the membership list not as evidence of anything, but as an index — a finding aid. It tells you which public actors to line up against each other. Then you go to the public record, the part that was documented — the Treasury decisions, the contract awards, the committee jurisdictions — and you read it with the index in hand.
What surfaces is not a single conspiracy. It is something more mundane and more damning: a set of ordinary, separately-reported transactions that nobody had connected, because nobody knew the parties were in the same network. Each one was covered for a day and forgotten. Lined up, they stop looking like coincidence and start looking like a pattern — the same network surfacing on both sides of one public decision after another.
Three of them are already fully on the record.
Ledger entry one: the Treasury rescue, and then the founder moved in
In October 2025, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent approved a $20 billion rescue package for Argentina. Bessent is not a career diplomat who happened onto Argentine debt. He ran money for George Soros, then founded his own hedge fund, Key Square. Among the investors positioned to benefit was Robert Citrone — a former colleague of Bessent’s whose fund held Argentine debt, and who, Argentine press reported, called Bessent personally to ask for the rescue. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to the hedge-fund industry’s trade group asking, in effect, whether the people who stood to profit had helped write the check. Bessent denied that his finance colleagues had anything to do with it. The timing and the beneficiary list spoke for themselves. The package came with strings: the larger $40 billion version Trump floated was tied, explicitly, to Argentine President Javier Milei’s performance in his midterm elections.
That was October. Here is April.
In April 2026, Peter Thiel — the man who founded the society Bessent belongs to — relocated his family to Buenos Aires. He bought a $12 million mansion, enrolled his children in a local school, spent a week in private meetings with Milei’s government, and sat down with the president himself at the Casa Rosada. Milei called it “wonderful,” and said they had discussed how to make the austerity project “endure beyond his presidency.”
I want to be exact about what this is and is not. It is not proof that the bailout and the relocation were a single coordinated plan. There is no document that says so, and I am not claiming one. What is documented — fully, separately, by mainstream outlets at the time — is the shape: the same private network appears at both ends of the same foreign government within six months. One member’s department underwrites the regime with public money. The network’s founder then embeds with that regime personally, to help lock its program in place. You did not know those two men were in the same room until last Monday. Now you do, and the two stories you read months apart become one story.
Ledger entry two: the man who oversees the data cops, and the man who sells the data
Senator Ted Cruz is on the list. So is Auren Hoffman.
Cruz chairs the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. That committee has direct oversight of the Federal Trade Commission — the agency that holds whatever thin authority the United States has over commercial surveillance and the data-broker industry. It is not an abstract jurisdiction. In 2013, this same committee produced the landmark Senate staff report on data brokers, the one that first put the industry’s practices on the congressional record. The FTC’s 2022 move toward rules on “commercial surveillance” runs through the agency Cruz’s committee superintends. If anyone in government holds a lever over the business of buying and selling Americans’ movements and identities, it is the chair of that committee.
Auren Hoffman co-founded Dialog with Thiel. He also founded SafeGraph, a location-data broker, and LiveRamp — the identity-resolution spine of the modern advertising economy, now the corporate vessel of what was Acxiom, long described as the largest consumer-data broker in the world, holding billions of records and well over a thousand data points on the average American adult.
This is the concrete shape of the abstraction the Pope was warning about. When he wrote that “the highest level is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life,” this is the kind of thing he meant: a man whose private company knows more about the average American than any government agency is permitted to, sitting in a recordless room with the senator who chairs its only oversight.
So in one off-the-record society you have the senator with jurisdiction over the data cops, and the man who runs one of the largest data-brokerage operations they would police. No document says Cruz ever acted on Hoffman’s behalf, and the recordless design guarantees none ever will. That is not the point. The regulator and the regulated belong to the same private club; it was hidden for twenty years; and we know it only because of a misconfigured web page. The conflict does not require a smoking gun to be a conflict. The structure is the story.
And this is the one place in the ledger where the abstraction has names on it, because the data-broker industry is the one whose harms are already in the case law and the morgue. The reason the FTC’s commercial-surveillance authority exists at all is that people have died at the end of a data-broker query. In 1999, a stalker named Liam Youens bought Amy Lynn Boyer’s date of birth, Social Security number, and workplace address from a broker called Docusearch for under two hundred dollars, drove to the workplace, and shot her dead; she was twenty. The New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that a data broker owes a duty of care in handing a stranger another person’s life — the foundational precedent for the entire industry Auren Hoffman has helped build. It is not ancient history. In June 2025, a man assassinated Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounded State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette; in his vehicle, investigators found a notebook listing eleven people-search and data-broker sites — Spokeo, Intelius, TruePeopleSearch among them — annotated with what each one cost and what each one required, beside a target list of more than forty officials with Hortman’s home address written next to her name. The brokers did not pull the trigger. They sold the man the door.
I am not drawing a line from any senator’s committee to a Speaker’s killing; there is no such line, and inventing one would be the same overreach I refused at the top of this piece. The point is narrower and harder to wave away. This is the documented character of the industry itself — lethal at the retail end, by the case law and the body count — and it is the industry one Dialog member runs and another is supposed to police, the two of them in a room with no minutes. You do not have to allege a deal to see the problem. An industry whose product has a morgue attached to it is being regulated by people who keep its chairman’s private company.
Ledger entry three: the contractor and the customer
Joe Lonsdale co-founded Palantir. He is on the list. So is Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army.
Palantir is not a vendor with some government exposure. It is the data-fusion layer the federal government now runs on — the system through which agencies from ICE to the Pentagon stitch their separate databases into one queryable whole. The public contract ledger is its own indictment: a $30 million ICE “ImmigrationOS” deal in June 2025 that links tax, Social Security, passport, and license-plate data; a billion-dollar no-bid DHS purchase in early 2026; a $10 billion Army enterprise agreement; Project Maven; the VA; the USDA. These are not rumors. They are announced awards.
Lonsdale, who helped build the company that holds those contracts, sits in the same society as the Secretary of the Army, whose department signs them. Add the founder of the whole network, Thiel, whose Founders Fund seeded the surveillance-and-defense portfolio underneath all of it. The customer, the contractor, and the financier, in one room, with no minutes.
No contract was awarded in that room, as far as anyone can show — but the people on both sides of billions of dollars in federal procurement have been meeting privately for years, and arranged things so that no record of those meetings would ever exist. In normal government, that is what disclosure rules are for. Dialog is what disclosure rules look like when the people subject to them opt out together.
Why “no government email” is the whole thing
Come back to the detail everyone started with, because now it means more than it did on Monday.
None of them used a government address. That is not laziness or convenience. It is the mechanism. A public official’s job creates records — emails, calendars, correspondence — that the public can eventually demand to see. That is the deal: the power comes with a paper trail. What the personal-email registration does is sever the power from the trail. The meeting happens; the influence is exchanged; the relationships are maintained year over year — and none of it ever enters a system the law can reach.
This is not a cover-up in the usual sense. A cover-up suppresses a record that exists. This is the cleaner version: a record that is never created in the first place. There is nothing to withhold, nothing to redact, nothing to litigate for, because under the chosen channel there was never a document to request. It is the same logic by which agencies now buy location data from brokers to skip the warrant they would otherwise need, and by which an enforcement operation can finish its work before any court is permitted to rule on whether it was legal. The point, every time, is to keep the act on one side of a line the law sits on the other side of.
Dialog is that logic applied to the relationships themselves. Not “hide what we did.” Build the room so that what we did was never written down.
Hold the leak up against how power is supposed to run. Authority belongs as close as possible to the people it touches; the higher levels exist to serve the lower ones, not to rule them. Power flows up from the governed and answers back down to them. Leo XIV gave that principle its old name — subsidiarity — and warned, in the encyclical, that technology had turned it upside down. That is not a homily. It is an organizational chart. The room with no minutes is the chart inverted: the platform-builder at the top, and the Treasury and the spy services and the generals coming to him — by his invitation, on his terms, off the record. The publics those officials serve are not at the bottom of the chart. They are off it.
The people the machine catches leave no record either
You will have noticed that this whole story is missing something. It has Treasury Secretaries and senators and four-star generals and contract numbers in the billions. It does not have a single ordinary person it happened to. That absence is not an oversight. It is the same design, one layer down.
Consider the third ledger entry — the contractor and the customer — at the end where it actually lands. Palantir’s tools and the data-broker feeds that supply them exist to do one thing: find people. The mechanism is not in dispute and not secret. ICE pays LexisNexis roughly $22 million for Accurint, a database of 270 million people assembled from more than 10,000 sources; it pays Thomson Reuters a comparable sum for CLEAR; it pays Palantir $29.9 million for a targeting system called ELITE that, agents testified under oath last December, produces a dossier on a person — photo, address, an “Address Confidence Score” from 0 to 100 — and tells officers where to go. In one seven-month stretch ICE ran more than 1.2 million searches against one of these databases. In December 2025 it handed thirteen private skip-tracing firms up to $1.2 billion to locate people, as many as 50,000 cases a month, instructed to use “all technology available.”
So I went looking for the person. The named human being ICE bought its way to — the face to put on the receipt. After an exhaustive search of the public record, the honest finding is that I could not produce one. Not because it has not happened — it has happened, by the documented arithmetic, more than a million times — but because the purchase is laundered upstream of the arrest. When a broker sells your location to the government, you are never told. No warrant is served. No source is disclosed. You learn you were findable only when the unmarked car is already at the curb, and even then the paperwork records a street encounter, not a transaction. The same design that keeps the men in Thiel’s society off the public-records grid keeps the broker’s customer off your arrest record.
I will not invent a victim to make this land. That would be its own small dishonesty — and the dishonesty would be on the side of the people who built the machine. The harder, truer thing: the victim is real and the harm is mass — 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, the most in two decades — but the specific person the data-purchase delivered is, by construction, anonymous. Not unrecorded by accident. Unrecorded by design. The machine is built so that no one can name them.
That anonymity is not a gap in the story. It is the story. The room with no minutes builds the system with no source that produces the arrest with no warrant. Three layers, one principle: keep the act on one side of a line the law sits on the other side of. The powerful version of that principle protects a Treasury Secretary’s dinner conversation. The ordinary version disappears a construction worker on his way home, and leaves no one to subpoena.
This is the end the Pope could see from the beginning. When Leo XIV warned that the technology would “divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice,” he was not describing a hypothetical. The data-fusion stack does precisely that — it divides the findable from the safe, excludes the targeted from any process that could contest the targeting, and generates an injustice with no document attached to it. The encyclical reads, in this light, less like a homily than like a description of the contract ledger.
Look once more at who the leak places in that room — not as a celebrity list, but as layers. Laid out that way, the roster is a cross-section of one machine. There is the layer that harvests the raw material: the former chief executive of Google; Elon Musk, who owns a social platform and an AI company built on its feed; a director of Musk’s brain-interface venture. There is the layer that fuses the harvest into a dossier — Palantir, by its co-founder and its chief executive both. There is the capital that funds the stack — the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, KKR’s Henry Kravis, the Treasury men. And there is the layer that buys the result and points it at people: the Secretary of the Army, the Director of National Intelligence, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and General Alexus Grynkewich, who now commands all NATO forces in Europe — and who, the leak shows, has been attending these gatherings since 2021, four years before he held the post. The relationship predates the office. Harvest. Fusion. Capital. Customer. Every link in the chain, in one room, with no minutes.
Be precise about the roster, because precision is the whole discipline here. The full 222 names were never published; reporters assembled a partial list from a leaked directory and a registration sheet. So this is not the claim that every tech power is on it — Meta, Amazon, Apple, today’s Google are not among the reported names, and may simply not have surfaced. The claim is narrower and harder to dislodge: the names that did surface already fill every layer, end to end. Even the two leading AI labs are reportedly there — OpenAI by two of its people, Anthropic by one — though those come from secondary reporting, not the primary leak, and in public the labs are at each other’s throats, funding rival war-chests aimed at the same lawmakers. Which is the point. You do not need a cartel. You need only a room — recordless, invitation-only, owned by the financier whose fund sits under the whole industry — that even sworn competitors, and the officials who regulate and buy from them, all find it worth their while to enter.
The leak did not breach that design. The meetings are still dark; we will never have the transcripts. What the leak handed us was the index — which public acts to read together. And read together, they are enough. The Treasury rescue and the Buenos Aires mansion. The data regulator and the data broker. The contractor and the customer. And at the far end of that last one, the people the machine is built to find and the law is built not to see.
We have seen this room before. Last September, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco — invitation only, press barred, microphones not supposed to be on — Thiel gave a four-part lecture series naming the Antichrist of the twenty-first century as the Luddite: the climate activist, the AI-safety researcher, anyone who would slow the machine. I wrote about those tapes when they escaped, in The Antichrist as Luddite. What carries over is not the theology. It is the architecture. Those lectures had to happen in a recordless room for the same reason Dialog does: the argument cannot survive being said in public. And in them Thiel named the obstacle — “the woke American pope,” the moral authority whose teaching, left standing, would give resistance somewhere to stand. Magnifica Humanitas is that pope answering.
So the two leaks are one operation from two angles. One caught the doctrine in the recordless room — the gospel that has to stay coded because the real one won’t bear it. The other caught the network — the officials and operators who run the machine that doctrine blesses. Same inversion both times: a thing that sells itself as freedom and works as capture, and calls the man warning about it the enemy.
The Pope said a new power had grown that exceeds the state and answers to no one. People called it abstract. Then a misconfigured web page produced its roster: the officials who run the state, gathered by the man who built the power, in a room with no minutes. The structure had a name in the encyclical. Now it has a guest list. The receipts were always public. We were just never supposed to know whose they were — or that the people on both sides of them had been keeping each other’s company all along.
The RAMM documents the connections that beat reporting can’t see:
4,776+ sourced events at capturecascade.org.
1,988 Counties with signals of potential detention center expansion (Federal contracts, 287(g), real estate traces, etc) at detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org my site that tracks signals of potential cooperation with ICE and Border Patrol.
129 Community fights over detention capacity built out tracked.
The RAMM is dependant on subscriptions. All of the core work is free, and paid subscribers fund the mission.
Sources & Notes
The Dialog leak. WIRED, “Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive Dialog Society,” June 16, 2026 (the primary report; the directory was found in the site’s HTML source by the hacktivist maia arson crimew — her chosen name, styled in lowercase). The 222-name figure is the registration list for Dialog’s August 2026 Dublin retreat; the “no government email” detail is WIRED’s. Tier-1.
The encyclical. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (May 15, 2026), vatican.va. Quoted lines are verbatim from the text: §71 (“the highest level is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life”) and §9 (“can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice”). §178 names “data colonialism… colonial in another form.”
Ledger one (Argentina). $20B Argentina rescue and the $40B figure tied to Milei’s midterms: Washington Post, Oct 26, 2025. Sen. Warren’s letter to the Managed Funds Association: Bloomberg, Oct 9, 2025. Robert Citrone’s reported call to Bessent: Buenos Aires Times. Thiel’s Buenos Aires relocation and Casa Rosada meeting (April 23, 2026): New York Times; Washington Times.
Ledger two (data brokers). The 2013 Senate Commerce Committee staff report, “A Review of the Data Broker Industry”. Amy Lynn Boyer / Docusearch: Remsburg v. Docusearch, 149 N.H. 148 (2003); EPIC case archive. The Hortman assassination notebook (11 data-broker sites; 45+ official target list): The Record / Recorded Future News and Star Tribune, June 2025.
Ledger three & the data machine. ICE data-broker/targeting contracts — LexisNexis Accurint (~$22.1M), Thomson Reuters CLEAR (~$22.8M), Palantir ELITE ($29.9M): LawNext and In These Times, April 2026; ELITE use confirmed under oath in M-J-M-A v. Wamsley, D. Or., 2025. ImmigrationOS ($30M, April 2025). 32 ICE custody deaths in 2025 (most in two decades): NPR, Oct 23, 2025. The wrongful-facial-recognition precedent (Robert Williams): ACLU, Williams v. City of Detroit.
The doctrine. The Commonwealth Club “Antichrist” lectures and the recordless-room method: The Antichrist as Luddite (The RAMM, May 28, 2026).
A note on method. This piece treats the leaked membership as an index to already-public acts, not as evidence of anything decided in the room. No claim here asserts coordination, agreement, or a deal among the named individuals; the meetings are off the record by design and no transcripts exist. Where a person’s confidence on the roster is below tier-1 (the AI-lab attendees), that is stated in the text.