While attending Yale Law School sometime in 2011, J.D. Vance first met Venture Capitalist and far-right agitator Peter Thiel. Thiel, the reclusive billionaire outed as gay by Gawker 3 years prior, gave a speech at Yale that Vance attended.
Vance wrote later that Thiel’s speech was extremely consequential in shaping his worldview.
Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. My worry that I had prioritized striving over character took on a heightened significance: striving for what? I didn’t even know why I cared about the things I cared about.
Vance, writing in Catholic magazine The Lamp in 2020, sounded more like a ship in search of a rudder than eventual “top tier politician” who would be the Republican Vice Presidential nominee.
“I fancied myself educated, enlightened, and especially wise about the ways of the world—at least compared with most of the people from my hometown,” he wrote. “Yet I was obsessed with obtaining professional credentials—a clerkship with a federal judge and then an associate position at a prestigious firm—that I didn’t understand. I hated my limited exposure to legal practice. I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.”
Thiel and Vance would go on to be close friends and collaborators. More recently, Vance has reportedly been trying to “persuade” Thiel to donate to his and Donald Trump‘s campaign.
SOURCES
- The Lamp online magazine
- USA Today
- The Daily Beast
- Featured image credit: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg/Getty Images
