On the fabulously rich

Who could have guessed Donald Trump's choice for VP? Seriously, the man who'd written the first book dissecting Trump's phenomenal appeal to aggrieved white folks, the man who made a couple of million in book sales by ripping Donald Trump as someone as close to Hitler as we're every likely to see in America? He's the choice? Yet, Trump looked past such conservative luminaries as Mario Rubio and Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, only to choose a guy who'd served in the United States Senate for less than two years and hadn't put up any significant numbers during that short service.

I honestly don't know if I can believe everything I heard is NPR's On Point on Wednesday, when the show traced the lineage of JD Vance, not his familial lineage, but, well, his financial family tree, for it seems--you may have read this elsewhere--that Vance has a sugar daddy by the name of Peter Thiel, a man who made his gadzillions from Pay-Pal. Thiel is, today, one of those fabulously rich media execs who hang out in Silicon Valley, a place, On Point would have you believe, is fast becoming as powerful as D.C. 

Doubt it? Consider Vance, who ran for the Senate with Donald Trump's endorsement (nothing to sneer at) and millions--literally, millions--of bucks from this guy Thiel. More than that and earlier, Peter Thiel made JD Vance successful as a venture capitalist by basically underwriting the guy's career. It's not difficult to say the man-who-could-be-king post-Trump, got there by clinging to the proffered shirttails a Silicon Valley oligarch.

Peter Thiel isn't the only one of the mega-billionaires operating within the system. There are others. And, what's more scary is that these Daddy Mega-Bucks are sometimes aligned politically and ideologically. That's scary. Consider the sheer power of, say, a dozen Elon Musks.  

Why do I shiver? Because they follow along with extremists who are anti-American. They're not communists or outright fascists, but they tend to believe that, anti-democratically, that not everyone is created equal, and their reasoning is easy enough to understand--they made millions, they cashed in on the internet, they did things no one else did, and they deserve others to bow at their beckoning. 

"Ah, Schaap," you're saying, "don't get all paranoid on me." 

I'm trying not to, but it's not difficult to wobble a little when you see the man who is a heart beat away from the presidency of the United States and emperor of the free world, and the guy has been something of the puppet of a single American oligarch whose billions have underwritten the VP's life with his own spare change.

It'll cost you an hour, but On Point opened up a whole new and powerful ideology on the rise  in these United States--something called these days, "the new right," or "alt-right." You can listen in or read the transcript here. 

Millions of Christians, like me, have been stupefied by evangelical Christians who follow the likes of the Donald. Let's be clear here. The "New Right" is something else altogether. They've just found it handy to throw their cash at Trump because he, like no one else, champions an ideology that may have sufficient strength to flip American democracy. According to On Point, these oligarchs don't necessarily like Trump, but they see him as their work horse. Think I'm alarmist?--go ahead and explain JD Vance's rise to power. 

Just try.