Crackpot billionaire PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel, an avid Donald Trump supporter/adviser most known as regular sayer of outlandish things, appeared on Tucker Carlson's white nationalist-promoting Fox News show on Monday. Why a billionaire felt the need to slum around on a show more regularly devoted to promoting fringe figures mainstreaming the ideas of racist websites we (cough) cannot fathom, but he brought his own new conspiracy theory to Carlson's audience, claiming that tech giant Google is secretly working with China to do "seemingly treasonous" things to the United States.
But as a Trump booster, he also took the opportunity to insult Trump's potential 2020 opponents en masse. Except one:
"I'm most scared by Elizabeth Warren. I think she's the one who's actually talking about the economy, which is the only thing, the thing that I think matters by far the most."
Warren is not the only one talking about the economy, but she has differentiated herself from the other candidates in her very specific diagnosis of the economy's woes. She believes that corporations and the wealthy have dramatically unbalanced and endangered the economy through specific acts of deregulation and de-taxation, and has outlined a program to re-establish rules intended to protect the broader economy—and, especially, consumers—from predatory upper-crust manipulation.
It is this focus on pulling the American version of capitalism back from the brink of overt kleptocracy that has the financial industry, in particular, in spasms. Many of the too-late protections established after the last financial crisis, a crisis caused entirely by widespread crookery in the financial sector, have already been undone by still-compliant legislators and regulators. The notion of instituting fixes closer to the core of continued Wall Street recklessness has the nation's most reckless figures fearing their best money-squeezing schemes might soon by drying up.
As for Warren, she has no illusions that the Peter Thiels of the world (PayPal, remember) can be convinced to support capitalist reforms rather than fighting them tooth-and-nail, and lobbyist-and-pocketbook. Responding to reports of Thiel's remarks, Warren only tweeted: "Good."