A few years ago, on a podcast called “This Is Actually Happening,” a penitent white supremacist recalled a formative childhood experience. One night his mother asked him: “You enjoying your burger?” She went on, “Did you know it’s made out of a cow?”
“Something died?” the boy, then 5, replied.
“Everything living dies,” she said. “You’re going to die.”
Plagued thereafter by terror of death, the boy affected a fear-concealing swagger, which eventually became a fascist swagger.
By chance, I’d just heard this episode when I opened “The Contrarian,” Max Chafkin’s sharp and disturbing biography of the Silicon Valley tech billionaire Peter Thiel, another far-right figure, though unrepentant.
An epiphany from Thiel’s childhood sounded familiar. When he was 3, according to Chafkin, Thiel asked his father about a rug, which his father, Klaus Thiel, explained was cowhide. “Death happens to all animals. All people,” Klaus said. “It will happen to me one day. It will happen to you.”
