Michael Warren Davis

A couple of major news outlets got egg on their faces last week after reporting that John Bolton had officially entered the Republican presidential primary. Alas, that isn’t quite true. What Bolton actually said is that he’d run if he thought he had a chance of beating Donald Trump. “I wouldn’t run as a vanity candidate,” Bolton told Good Morning Britain. “If I didn’t think I could run seriously, then I wouldn’t get in the race.” I don’t blame reporters for jumping the gun. The story is too good to pass up. Even Trump’s enemies would enjoy watching him savage Bolton on the campaign trail: “We booked out this big, beautiful arena, folks. You know where Ambassador Lorax is having his rally? The high school down the street.

In many countries, tricking stupid people out of money is a crime. In the United States, it’s the basis of a whole economy. Cryptocurrency is the crowning glory of this broken system. You give me a bunch of your real money, and I’ll give you some of my fake money. Fantastic! It’s like tulip mania, only instead of flowers, you get… nothing. The collapse of FTX — the second largest crypto exchange in the world — will cost millions of customers billions of dollars. Some expect it to significantly worsen the recession, though I’m not so sure. If those folks hadn’t wasted their savings on Bitcoin, they probably would have wasted it on some other scam. (Is William Duvane still selling gold?) In theory, this is bad news for the Democrats.

I just went for a stroll down Main Street here in our little blue-collar New Hampshire town, and noticed the telephone polls festooned with Pride flags.  This was odd enough, given that our town had never observed Pride Month (known as June on the Gregorian calendar) before. What was really shocking, though, is that the town is flying the plain old rainbow flags, not the new “Progress Pride” flags. Ours don’t have the new chevron honoring America’s two most hallowed minorities: trans people (white, pink and blue) and people of color (brown and black). Activists claim that the chevron specifically represents trans people of color. Maybe that’s true. What’s infinitely more likely, though, is that gays and lesbians have been passé since Obergefell v.

In all my years covering right-wing politics, I’ve met an odd cast of characters: ethnonationalists, archeofuturists, transhumanists, sedevacantists, Austrofascists, neo-reactionaries, incels, identitarians, Proud Boys, Groypers, even Jeb Bush. Yet I’ve never met a Putinist. Not a one. Before we go any further, I want to be clear on this point: Putinists don’t exist outside the former Soviet Union. How could they? Putin himself is a pure nationalist. He embraces the whole ball of contradictions that is Russia. He’s equal parts tsarist and Leninist. Whatever hodgepodge ideology you want to call Putinism, it can’t be applied to the United States. You may as well try golfing with a shovel. Now, I’m sure you’ve encountered a Putin fanboy on the internet.

I’d like to state for the record that I’m officially sick of Donald Trump. Last Wednesday, Corey Lewandowski took to the airwaves with a bizarre announcement: Donald Trump is looking for someone to primary New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu. Lewandowski, who briefly ran Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was speaking to Boston radio host Howie Carr. “The president is very unhappy with the chief executive of the state of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu,” said Mr. Lewandowski. “And Sununu, in the president’s estimation, is someone who’s never been loyal to him. And the president said it would be really great if somebody would run against him.” First of all, Sununu has always been fiercely loyal to Trump — much to the Eastern Establishment’s dismay.

Every day around noon, a white pickup truck comes barreling down my street. It’s one of those big-boy toys: jacked-up suspension, aftermarket muffler, turbo…the works. It’s the kind of truck only a single man could love (or afford). You can hear it for a good ten seconds before it passes the house, and another ten seconds after. Without fail, it comes by when my daughter is napping. And without fail, it wakes her up. As a bonus, our friend also has a “F—k Biden” flag flying from the bed. My daughter is too young to read, but I doubt if the local moms are too thrilled with their kids’ surprise vocab lesson. I hate to sound like an old fogey but back in my day Republicans were the pro-family party.

Everyone knew some husky chap in college who smelled like onions and called himself a libertarian. He may or may not have worn a fedora. He wasn’t cool enough to do drugs but he figured that, if he never stopped talking about how much he wanted to legalize them, he’d get a bit of second-hand cool. This fellow was never seen without a copy of The Road to Serfdom tucked beneath his sweaty armpit. He never missed a seminar (again, lame) and would say the name of Ayn Rand out loud at least once per class. Sometimes he wouldn’t even raise his hand first; he’d just whisper it lovingly under his breath.

Conservative sadbois like two things: hot moms and Middle Eastern despots. Enter Tulsi Gabbard, the comely representative for Hawaii’s second congressional district. The single lock of gray hair tucked behind her ear and her array of red pants-suits give her an almost Palinesque allure. Her secret friendship with Bashar al-Assad and visceral hatred for the House of Saud brings us all back to our political puberty: hiding copies of The American Conservative under our beds, taking them out only when our parents weren’t home and fantasizing madly about the end of American Empire. Knowing only that, we can hardly blame an aging fogey who finds himself crushing on Rep. Gabbard.