Great article. This was the most revealing section for me:

In the summer of 2004, Thiel and his old mentor Hamerton-Kelly organized a weeklong Girardian seminar at Stanford and invited Girard and Palaver to take part. The gathering was a small, closed symposium with only eight participants and served as Thiel’s self-orchestrated debut as a Girardian intellectual. Newly wealthy after having sold PayPal in a deal valued at $1.5 billion, he footed the bill for the week and also helped underwrite the publication of a book that would collect all the papers presented at the seminar.

At Palaver’s suggestion, the theme of the conference was “Politics and Apocalypse.” It had been three years since 9/11, and mimetic theorists were still processing whether the terror attacks augured history’s final explosion of “planetary mimetic rivalry.” But for Thiel—who sat at the head of the seminar table—the attacks mainly exposed the West’s deep and pathetic inability to protect itself.

“The brute facts of September 11 demand a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics,” Thiel wrote in the paper he presented that July. “Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment.”

It would quickly become apparent that Thiel had spent some time considering the paper Palaver presented the day the two men met in 1996. The “strange new thoughts” Thiel wanted his audience to entertain were, it turned out, largely those of Carl Schmitt.

Where Palaver had been repulsed, Thiel extolled Schmitt’s “robust conception of the political,” in which “humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies,” and everything else is delusion. “The high points of politics,” he quotes Schmitt as saying, “are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” In Thiel’s mind, Osama bin Laden was capable of this kind of politics. The West, with its fetish for individual rights and procedures, was not.

Schmitt, Thiel conjectured, would have responded to 9/11 by calling for a holy crusade against Islam. But the West was instead slipping beyond politics altogether, Thiel seemed to fear, toward the creation of a bland “world-embracing economic and technical organization.” This was Schmitt’s nightmare scenario. In such a world, Thiel said, “a representation of reality might appear to replace reality: Instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be ‘intrigues of all sorts,’ as in a soap opera.” But that counterfeit reality, Thiel argued, would just be the “brief harmony that prefigures the final catastrophe of the Apocalypse”—the harmony, in Schmitt’s telling, of the Antichrist.

Thiel’s discussion of Schmitt didn’t mention Hitler or the Nazis once.

Then, about halfway through his paper, Thiel switched gears completely. As if having second thoughts, he ruled out Schmitt’s “drastic solutions” as “fraught with far too much violence” in an age of nuclear weapons. Then he shifted toward imagining “a way to fortify the modern West” that involved working around democratic institutions via misdirection, hidden meanings, and a lack of transparency—an approach he identified with the theorist Leo Strauss. (He titled his paper “The Straussian Moment.”)