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From Philosophy to Power: The Misuse of René Girard by Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance

René Girard’s Legacy This past summer, I was surprised to encounter a face I knew in two most unexpected places. The first was in a photo montage accompanying an article written by Josh Kovensky of...

Vance becoming the Vice Presidential nominee, entitled “A Journey Through the Authoritarian Right.” Arranged in the collage among images of a ripped man with lasers shooting from his eyes, of anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin, and of Peter Thiel rubbing Benjamins between his thumb and forefinger, was my former professor and friend from Stanford University, René Girard. That some wannabe billionaires have ordered Violence and the Sacred or Deceit, Desire and the Novel from Amazon and scanned its chapters in search of an “open sesame” to affluence is as surreal a proposition as it is doubtless something that actually occurs—the aspiring mogul’s equivalent of clicking on one of those “one weird trick” links that promise a hack to making money and improving your health. Author Mark Helprin, in his introduction to Best American Short Stories of 1988, lambasted attacks on the literary canon by a new generation of university professors he compared to the Chinese Red Guard—singling out Stanford as a campus rife with “militant revisionist scholars” intent on replacing classics with works chosen for class, race, and gender.

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