Are you serious? Are you fucking serious?” Scott asks me, shaking his head. “Oh my lord. The things you don’t see.”
I am confused. He had called me a liberal and compared me to “Justin Trudeau, the son of Fidel Castro.” I laughed, thinking that “son of Fidel Castro” is a hyperbolic way of describing the Canadian prime minister’s politics. But from the way Scott is looking at me, I can tell that’s not what he meant by “son of Fidel Castro.” I can’t figure out what he does mean. Does “son of Fidel Castro” mean that Trudeau is a dictator? Does “son of Fidel Castro” mean Trudeau gives speeches that are unnecessarily long? Does “son of Fidel Castro” mean Trudeau has got himself into a fashion rut by refusing to take off an old, unattractive hat?
It turns out that “son of Fidel Castro” means “son of Fidel Castro.” Scott opens up his computer. “You know his real father was Fidel Castro. I can’t believe you don’t know this,” he says. I am still confused, since Justin Trudeau wasn’t an orphan with unknown parentage. His father was Pierre Trudeau, who was the prime minister of Canada for more than fifteen years.
Or so I thought. Scott shows me photos of Justin Trudeau’s mom hanging out with Castro. His next image search brings up pages of side-by-side photos of Justin Trudeau and Fidel Castro that do look similar. Justin Trudeau is the same height as Fidel Castro, but four inches shorter than Pierre Trudeau. It turns out Justin Trudeau’s parents’ marriage was weird: Pierre and Margaret met when he was forty-eight and she was eighteen, and they eloped while he was prime minister. Margaret Trudeau was bipolar and wrote that she cheated on her husband with Ted Kennedy. Though it turns out that Margaret Trudeau did not meet Fidel Castro until after Justin was born. It also turns out that if two people have enough photos online, you can find pictures in which they both make the same facial expression from the same angle. SPY magazine proved this in a feature called “Separated at Birth,” which included side-by-side photos of Mick Jagger and Don Knotts. I fear I have started a rumor about Don Knotts and Mick Jagger’s mom.
This is addle-brained conspiracy mongering. I tell Scott that this reminds me of when far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos told me that Bill Clinton had a black son.
Scott looks at me like I’m the one who is crazy. “You didn’t know about Danney?” he asks. Scott tells me all about Danney Williams, the supposed secret son of Clinton and a prostitute. Danney was only the start of my ignorance about Clinton genealogy. “Chelsea is Webb Hubbell’s kid,” he says, referring to Bill Clinton’s associate attorney general who was imprisoned for fraud. “Look at the pictures.” Some of the side-by-side photos of Chelsea Clinton and Webb Hubbell that he shows me were posted on Twitter by Danney Williams.
The myth about Danney was easily disproven in 1999 with Bill Clinton’s DNA samples, which are the easiest DNA samples in the world to get. The rumor sprang from the suspicion that elite liberal baby boomers were malleable on issues of sexual morality. But the newer conspiracy theories about Chelsea Clinton and Justin Trudeau’s bloodlines didn’t stem from panic about prurience, which no one cares about anymore. They were gestated in a new fear about the elite. That we are a tiny, incestuous group that makes secretive deals to enrich each other. Although I find this ridiculous, after doing a lot of photo research I have come to the conclusion that my real father is Charles Schwab and hope he does the honorable thing and acknowledges this in a legally binding way, such as a will or estate plan.
As we look at more pictures of Danney Williams making the same face as Bill Clinton, Scott assures me that he’s not a racist. This is something that the people in Miami also told me a lot, which I found weird, because my friends and I are always talking about how racist we are. To prove that his concerns about immigration are nonracist and based on the type of objective facts he has spent all day telling me don’t exist, Scott shows me a clip from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, in which he says that noncitizens commit 22 percent of all murders and 72 percent of all drug possession crimes in the United States. This makes no sense, since only about 7 percent of people living in the United States are noncitizens, and they are apparently way too high to do all that murdering. I take over Scott’s keyboard and go on Wikipedia to show him that immigrants commit less crime than citizens. I know it’s stupid to litigate statistics with a person who wrote a book subtitled Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, but I am doing it for me. I will not give up the core of my elite, fact-loving soul.
I thank Scott for being such a good host, and he hands me a tiny refrigerated bottle of water for the road. On my way to the airport, I drive through Pleasanton and get a vanilla soft-serve cone from the smiley teenagers at Meadowlark Dairy. I couldn’t understand how Scott, who sees this idyllic version of America every day, wants to tear down the elite who keep it running.
I didn’t know that five days earlier, Trump had explained away this paradox in the most unlikely way.