The Silicon Valley billionaires just bought the best VP money can buy.  Vance will do whatever it takes to enact high-tech programs in the Trump administration and create the first geneation of american oligarchs and Crypto fraudsters.

The selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate is the most blatant political purchase in modern American history.

A senator for only one year, Vance had a shockingly fast rise to power.  As the VP choice, he leapfrogged ahead of more experienced politicians like Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, and Gregg Abbott.  His disconnected history as a strong Trump critic (he once compared Trump to Hitler and said Trump was “an idiot” and “reprehensible”) and his turnaround on protecting the environment and advocating for civil rights are also very suspicious. 

Today, Vance has adopted elements of the “Great Replacement Theory,” a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that Black and brown people are replacing white Americans. Vance is also a frontman for the pro-crypto movement, its fraudsters, and its anti-federal regulation crusade.

Schizophrenic behavior is nothing new in Trump circles.  Look how many of Trump’s opponents changed overnight to protect their cushy political jobs as they adopted the MAGA right-wing platform.

But Vance’s chameleon switch is exceptional.  If we follow the money, we see why he changed.

Vance had a tough childhood and attended Yale, earning a law degree. At Yale, he attended a 2011 talk by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and supported right-wing candidates. The two developed a relationship in which high-tech billionaire Thiel exclusively sponsored and paid for Vance’s short political career. 

This led to Vance’s short-term, mediocre career as a venture capitalist.  Fast Company says, “Over six years, Vance worked at three different VC firms, which wasn’t long enough to be a success or a failure in the job.”

Fast Company also found that Vance “only served on one board during his time with the company—AppHarvest, a food production company operating indoor farming in Appalachia. The company went bankrupt in 2023, two years after Vance had left the board.”

But what’s more interesting is how Thiel brought Vance under his wing, financed him, probably brainwashed him, or, at the least, fueled his antagonism towards Ivy League elites and his old neighbors, whom he considered too lazy to lift themselves out of poverty. 

Between 2016 and 2017, Vance served as a principal at Thiel’s firm, Mithril Capital. In 2019, Vance co-founded Narya Capital, a venture capital firm in Cincinnati, with financial backing from Thiel and two other Silicon Valley billionaires. Both Narya and Palantir are names, or variations of names, from the Lord of the Rings books, which are Thiel’s favorites.

To do this, Vance had to be exposed to Thiel’s shady philosophies, which include eugenics, trans-humanism, and the benefits of technocrats to decide what to do for other average Americans. 

The world of high-tech billionaires would not appeal to Trump and the MAGA crowd.  This is a philosophical world that  includes discussions about stakeholder capitalism, NGOs, public-private partnerships, crypto as a replacement for the U.S. dollar, corporate control of the government, the rampant corporate influence of politicians, putting private corporations on an equal level with the elected public government (aka corporatism), and the fusing of the private, public partnerships (aka, the classic form of fascism.) 

The elite billionaires want to micromanage society as they push for a fourth industrial revolution, a phrase describing the rapid tech advances of the 21st century. This includes large-scale machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is an enthusiastic, well-funded push for billionaires to play god.   

This is also the stage for the coronation of America’s first generation of oligarchs. Elon Musk is the first American oligarch who made billions from the privatization of NASA and the huge federal subsidies for electric cars, batteries, AI, and all the associated tech that supports it. Musk also fits the oligarch profile: weird, selfish, arrogant, unaccountable, vindictive, anti-union, anti-average person, and profiteer.  Thiel and others want more, so this oligopoly cadre created by Trump-Vance is now attracting the most aggressive and greedy of the billionaires.

The JD Vance Connection To Oligopoly

So, where does Vance fit into this?

Vance’s financial career and ideological background are shallow and pliable.  Money shaped him more than a solid adherence to any political philosophy.  Vance’s link to Thiel also shows that Vance is Thiel’s potential man in the White House.  This means he will advocate for goals central to Silicon Valley—minimal regulation; unfettered access to private data via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms; using AI in all telecommunications; and elevating ‘libertarian” policies into federal legislation.

In short, Vance is Silicon Valley’s Manchurian Candidate.

Thiel:  An Advocate of Esoteric, Shady Right-Wing Philosophies

However, the above goals are Silicon Valley’s visible and well-discussed policy choices.

As wealthy elitists, these billionaires are the Top 1% of America’s wealth, and they have their vision of what they are entitled to and how average Americans should be treated.  Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Thiel, and PayPal Mafia, the founders and early investors of tech companies, are politically insulated and, like Trump, have elevated visions of themselves.  Musk, for example, has 12 children by three wives, is not married, and said that fathering children is his way of propagating his genetic superiority.

Like other Silicon Valley billionaires, Thiel is a right-wing technocrat advocating a fringe philosophy called “effective altruism.”  Thiel owns companies that provide secretive surveillance, data analytics, and surveillance platforms to government agencies and finance companies that operate in exotic, less regulated markets.  Effective altruism came into public discussion when Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto fraud con man, said it was his guiding philosophy.  Thiel is also a Bitcoin maximalist pushing for it to become a global currency as it would make the US Dollar a second-tier reserve currency. 

This is why Mark Cuban said the Vance appointment is part of a cryptocurrency play.  If Trump wins, the SEC would be barred from restricting crypto.  Who benefits from this?  Trump and Project 2025 advocates that it would eliminate the power of the Federal Reserve, re-orient global trade, and shift power to other blocks controlled by wealthy oligarchs and royalty overseas.

The Vance-Thiel partnership would also see a national and global surveillance state emerge in its darkest version. Including Musk in the mix could also include implanting chips into people to track their movements. Musk owns a company, Neuralink,  which manufactures and implants a brain-computer interface that the company says can help people with spinal cord injuries move their limbs and “could effectively cure” paralysis, blindness, mental illness, and neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.

One Thiel-owned company, Palantir, uses technology in the surveillance industry to provide these services to government agencies and law enforcement. While they don’t have a single program called the “Palantir surveillance program,” their software and services have been used in various surveillance initiatives, raising concerns about privacy and civil liberties.

The company’s name is derived from The Lord of the Rings, where the magical palantíri were “seeing-stones,” described as indestructible balls of crystal used for communication and to see events in other parts of the world.  

More specifically, Palantir specializes in:

• Predictive Policing: Palantir’s software has been used in predictive policing programs to predict future crimes and identify potential offenders based on data analysis. This approach has been criticized for its potential to reinforce biases and disproportionately target marginalized communities.
• Immigration Enforcement: Palantir’s technology has been used by immigration authorities to track and deport undocumented immigrants, raising concerns about the potential for human rights abuses and racial profiling.
• Lack of Transparency: Palantir operates secretively, making it difficult to assess the full extent of its surveillance activities and the potential implications for privacy and civil liberties.

A Pew Research Center study found that 72% of Americans say there should be limits on how much money individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns. 

So, since Americans, including Republicans, oppose money in politics, they should be alarmed by the blatant outright purchase of Vance, as Trump’s VP running mate, by Thiel and the Silicon Valley billionaires. 

Suppose Americans ever wanted any restrictions on social media, crypto regulation, privacy protections, and the enactment of policies by Trump’s administration that QAnon followers never considered. In that case, they should hit the panic button on how an unknown from Ohio, who works for a convicted criminal and known sociopath, is now potentially a partner in the White House.

If the Democrats don’t overcome their inertia, this sick Trump-Vance combo elevates the threat level of American fascism to near reality.