There is a type of conservative who constantly clamors for war, who believes corporations and the men who run them are benevolent, who equates the cause of freedom with Western domination over the wretched of the earth, and whose every word and gesture is meant to perform a kind of late Victorian chauvinistic masculinity. This sort of conservative, while increasingly out of step with the vulgar populism of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, continues to enjoy pride of place in this country’s elite institutions. And there is no better example than our era’s most infamous bedbug: New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.

Stephens, of course, is not actually a bedbug, even though he was called one on Twitter by a once-obscure professor named David Karpf. Quite the opposite: Stephens holds one of the most influential and least accountable jobs in media—a position he’s so far used to dissemble about climate change, to defend Woody Allen’s character, to repeatedly misrepresent the outcome of last year’s midterms, to push for war against Iran, and to compare Karpf to Joseph Goebbels after failing to get him fired over his bedbug tweet.

That last incident, in which Stephens smuggled a petty subtweet into the paper of record in a column ostensibly commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, marked an embarrassing low point in the tenure of James Bennet, the Times’ opinion editor. Two years ago, Bennet brought Stephens on from the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, one of the last bastions of Laffer curve–loving, poor-shaming conservatism in the journalistic mainstream. As his profile rose, I started to wonder: Where, exactly, did Stephens come from? Who made him like this? What is the root of the haughty aristocratic conservatism the Times chooses to foist on its liberal readership twice a week?

As it turns out, Stephens’s background contains more than a few tantalizing clues. It’s an international epic, filled with sex and violence (you’ll see). It’s the story of a fascinating and unlikely family buffeted by wars and revolutions and avant-garde artistic movements—all of which somehow culminates in the matriculation of a privileged son to the elite ranks of opinion-making.

A few months ago, Stephens wrote that “ordinary” Americans are bothered by people who speak Spanish. Unsurprisingly, this set off an angry Twitter mob, to which Stephens responded by tweeting, “Fwiw, my late father was from Mexico. My mother was a refugee. I grew up in the D.F. [Distrito Federal, a common shorthand for Mexico City] I speak Spanish [...]” While none of that explains why Stephens felt the need to ventriloquize “ordinary” Americans and invest them with xenophobic views, it’s nonetheless helpful context. To understand where Stephens is coming from, you have to know a little bit about Mexico.