Barton Swaim’s column is a donor-class protection racket. His Wall Street Journal piece, published May 27, 2026, attacks Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence because the pope’s moral challenge threatens the tech and financial interests the Journal’s opinion page exists to defend. We drafted this variety of Protestant‑panic column for years; the foundation‑circuit checks cashed just the same. This column walks through the artifact’s technique deployments as they appear.
Vice President JD Vance attracted ridicule in April when, in remarks about Pope Leo XIV’s criticisms of the war in Iran, he observed that while “it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Mr. Vance had a point—the pontiff’s remarks about the war sounded poorly thought through—but the two disciplines don’t separate so easily.
The opening move is the [WSJ Appendix A.4: Pious Disclaimer as Operative Framing]. Swaim launders the column’s partisan anchor through the Vice President — acknowledging the ridicule to signal he’s in on the joke, then immediately validating Vance’s “point.” The rhetorical play is a bait‑and‑switch: concede the mockery to gain permission, then pivot to vindicate the target. We ran versions of this exact structure during the Bush years. It lets the donor‑class reader feel sophisticated about the news cycle while receiving the talking point they came for. The disclaimer is the permission slip.
Leo’s 42,000‑word encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” intermixes them in the way Catholic social teaching has often done, and in a similarly unclear and disorganized way… Its inscrutability to ordinary people is part of what robs the document of whatever power it may have had at a third the length. The more fundamental problem is that so many of the pope’s pronouncements seem aimed to please jet‑set transnationals.
This deploys [Bandura’s Mechanism 3: Advantageous Comparison] wrapped in the [Bad-Faith Catalog ID 12: The Whataboutism Smokescreen]. Swaim inflates the document’s length and “inscrutability” to construct a proxy conflict between the pontiff and “ordinary people.” The “jet‑set transnationals” become the pope’s true audience, and the reader is conscripted into identifying against that elite — even as Swaim’s own column runs in the most elite financial broadsheet in the country. This is the shell game: a wealthy columnist in a billionaire‑owned paper tells the reader to distrust the pope for being too close to wealthy elites. The contradiction is the payload. The reader is supposed to feel anger, not spot the scam.
Few such power brokers and tech‑industry elites will disagree with Leo’s assertion that “every introduction of automation and AI should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining and participation of workers” or that schools have a duty to train students to use AI tools “responsibly, critically and creatively, rather than passively succumbing to their influence.” The pope’s contention that “the use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations” won’t provoke any objections from the global glitterati.
The technique is the [WSJ Appendix A.14: Elite‑Approval Smear]. Swaim cherry‑picks passages that even tech moguls can clap for, then declares the entire encyclical inoffensive to “the great and the good.” The move insulates the reader from the document’s actual bite: the call for worker protections, retraining, and human agency in the face of automation. Those demands threaten the very labor‑cost savings that make AI so profitable for the Journal’s readership. By framing the pope’s moral witness as a banal applause‑line for “jet‑set transnationals,” Swaim teaches the reader to dismiss the substance without ever engaging it. This is the gaslight: tell the reader that caring about exploited workers is a rich person’s hobby, so the reader — who works for a living — should side with the capital that wants labor cheap.
The pope in “Magnifica Humanitas” also asks for “pardon”— from whom it’s unclear — for the church’s complicity in the slave trade and other forms of exploitation. The sentiment is unobjectionable, though the act of apologizing is made infinitely easier when the sins belong to unnamed others in centuries past. George H.W. Bush earned the ire of academics and intellectuals when, as a presidential candidate in 1988, he said he would “never apologize for the United States of America, ever,” and added “I don’t care what the facts are,” but one can appreciate the refusal to make meaningless apologies that no one would accept anyway.
This is the load‑bearing structural beam of the operation, deploying the [WSJ Appendix A.10: Historical Revision through Selective Citation]. Swaim takes a papal apology for the Church’s documented role in the slave trade — a fact of public record — and reframes it as moral cowardice by citing a defiant, fact‑averse political slogan from a former president. George H.W. Bush’s “I don’t care what the facts are” is presented not as a bug but as a feature: a model of how to refuse “meaningless apologies.” The moral calculus is inverted. Genuine institutional contrition is treated as performative weakness; a stubborn refusal to reckon with history is treated as forthright courage. This is how you launder a refusal to apologize for structural sin into a philosophical virtue. The donor‑class reader, whose cultural and financial standing rests on centuries of exploitative systems, is handed a preemptive pardon for any future demands of accountability. The real message: never apologize, because the demand for an apology is itself a political attack.
Christopher Olah spoke after the pope’s presentation of his encyclical and praised Leo for “taking up this work of discernment.” We need “moral voices,” Mr. Olah said, “that the incentives cannot bend.” I wonder if any of the cardinals and other Vatican officials in the audience winced at the notion of the Bishop of Rome taking his place as one among many “moral voices.”
The move is the [NR Appendix B.6: Poisoned Punditry]. Swaim quotes the Anthropic cofounder’s praise not to inform but to discredit — if a tech billionaire applauds the pope, the pope must be doing something wrong. The rhetorical question about cardinals “winced” at the pope being “one among many moral voices” is the operator’s sneer dressed as pastoral concern. In fact, Catholic social teaching has always engaged with other moral voices; the pope is the visible head of a universal church, not a solo prophet. Swaim’s framing shrinks the papal office to the size of a conservative pundit’s ego, precisely because a pope who challenges the tech industry from his institutional throne is far more dangerous to Swaim’s patrons than a mere “moral voice” in a crowded marketplace. The operator’s playbook ran this “who does he think he is?” move on any religious leader who dared critique the donor agenda.
A sympathetic observer might fairly wonder what the point is of a grand moral pronouncement—one issued by the pope or any religious figure—that doesn’t offend or seriously challenge honored cultural arbiters… When Pope John XXIII called for a ban on nuclear weapons… he delighted credentialed VIPs… By contrast, Pope Paul VI’s “Humanae Vitae” of 1968, reaffirming the church’s opposition to birth control, got a chilly reception… The moral substance of that issue aside, Paul’s courage recommends itself.
This is the [Bad-Faith Catalog ID 22: The Victimhood Inversion]. Swaim redefines courage as the willingness to offend the “honored cultural arbiters” — a category that, in his telling, always aligns with the left‑liberal faculty‑lounge consensus. John XXIII’s historic peace encyclical is dismissed because the New York Times reprinted it; Paul VI’s birth‑control decree, which alienated liberal bishops, is lauded for its “courage.” The moral substance of the teaching is set aside; the only metric that matters is which elites were displeased. This retools Catholic moral theology into a culture‑war grievance machine. The pope should stop worrying about the poor and start picking fights with the Times editorial board. The tech CEO reading this column over morning coffee hears a clear signal: any moral claim that makes him uncomfortable is just an applause line for his own dinner party — so he can safely ignore it.
But of course Protestants of a certain variety have long indulged the propensity to champion the Latest Thing and hope for plaudits from the enlightened. The National Council of Churches managed, over the course of the 20th century, to evacuate Protestant doctrine and sentiment from the most Protestant country on earth. Today the “mainline” denominations… have dwindled numerically and disappeared from any prominent debate on morality or policy.
Here Swaim deploys [Bandura’s Mechanism 4: Displacement of Responsibility] at institutional scale. The collapse of mainline Protestantism is reframed not as a consequence of half a century of cultural and demographic change, but as the direct result of chasing elite approval. The National Council of Churches becomes the scapegoat for an entire century of decline. This is insurance against accountability. By telling the remaining faithful that their institutions collapsed because they weren’t “faithful” in the right way — meaning, aligned with the political and cultural preferences of Swaim’s editorial page — the operator prevents the surviving congregation from asking uncomfortable questions about why their children left the pews for reasons that have nothing to do with the NCC’s 1970s statements. The fear of irrelevance is converted into a proof of righteousness. “They hated us because we stood firm” is a powerful narcotic for a shrinking flock, and it’s the exact narcotic this column peddles.
He might reflect—not that he wants the counsel of a hardened Prot—on the rapturous praise his essay received from the usual precincts. As another priest once put it, “Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”
The column closes with the [WSJ Appendix A.12: Folksy Wisdom as Policy Proxy], delivered through a weaponized Bible verse. Swaim, the self‑described “hardened Prot,” lectures the pope about the spiritual danger of receiving praise from the wrong people — a closing move that does three things at once. First, it inverts the authority structure, positioning a Protestant editorialist as a prophetic voice correcting a Catholic pontiff. Second, it recasts Swaim’s own column — published in the most powerful business newspaper on earth, aimed at the world’s financial elite — as a courageous act of speaking truth to power. Third, it completes the audience‑capture loop by transforming the reader’s potential discomfort with the column’s cynical core into a feeling of righteous embattlement. The verse from Luke functions as a final seal: your enemies’ approval is proof of your own corruption.
So here is what the column amounts to. Swaim doesn’t defend a theological vision; he defends the donor class by teaching a shrinking flock that being hated by the right people is the only proof left that they’re still in the room. The billionaire paper tells its readers they’re the persecuted outsiders — that the pope, the New York Times, the tech CEOs, and the “global glitterati” have all rejected them, and that this rejection is their certificate of authenticity. The operator’s final instruction is clear: keep them angry, keep them isolated, keep them sending money. Swaim’s piety is a premium product for men who need their contempt baptized, and his closing verse is the blessing. The billionaire paper hands its readers a certificate of authenticity so they keep sending money to the outrage machine.
— Phukher Tarlson