Hella Nation - Evan Wright [165]
THE EVIL GENIUS
OUR BREAKFAST AT THE LAX HOTEL is the first time I have seen Dollard since his return from Iraq. A couple of days later I accompany him to an invitation-only pool party on the roof of the downtown Standard hotel. Breitbart has introduced Dollard to Morgan Warstler, a thirty-something entrepreneur who dabbles as a conservative operative. Warstler has promised to be Dollard’s “evil genius.”
We meet Warstler, an impish redhead (with an uncanny resemblance to Danny Bonaduce), by the pool. Dressed in jeans and a green baseball cap, he invites Dollard to sit on some plastic cube chairs by the dance floor. While sipping a rum-and-Coke, Warstler lists his credentials: “I was a national-champion debater. I made the president of the Yale debate team cry. I called him a dildo in front of five hundred people.”
“Mad props to you,” Dollard says, drinking a black coffee.
“I deal in ideas,” Warstler continues. “People are hosts to ideas, like viruses. When two people meet, ideas jump out of their heads, looking for new hosts. What I’m after is for my idea to jump out of my head and crush the ideas in someone else’s head.”
Warstler lays out a series of schemes for Dollard to spread his conservative, pro-war views, using viral-marketing techniques. “There is a whole vast, untapped market of Americans who don’t know shit about geopolitical bullshit, but who want this war to succeed,” Warstler says. “Those people need arguments. So if they’re in a bar somewhere arguing with somebody, they can just hold up their cell phone, play the latest installment from you, and be like, ‘End of argument.’”
Dollard warms to the plan. “I’m like this gonzo character, but I fucking support the whole conservative agenda.”
Warstler takes a long, reflective pull from his drink. He tells Dollard that he personally digs “the whole Hunter S. Thompson direction you’ve been going in.” He says, “I loved the guy. I once spent a night drinking with him, but once he killed himself, that brand died.”
BLOWING SMOKE
A FEW DAYS LATER, Breitbart arranges Dollard’s introduction to Ann Coulter. They meet after she tapes an appearance on The Tonight Show, rendez-vousing at the Acapulco, across from the NBC studios in Burbank. When I enter, Coulter is standing on the patio surrounded by about thirty fans, leading them in a chorus of “God Bless America.” Coulter wears a black dress stretched tightly over her thin, angular, almost starved-looking frame.
Dollard hovers by the entrance, dressed in a Morrison Hotel T-shirt, waiting for their dinner, which will take place at a nearby steak house. When Coulter finally walks out, Breitbart hustles Dollard over for the introduction.
Dollard attempts to ditch his cigarette. “No, no,” Coulter tells him. “Blow smoke in my face.” She leans her oblong, Brazil-nut-shaped face toward Dollard’s lips, and he exhales through his yellow, cracked teeth. Coulter, who later explains she recently quit smoking and is still jonesing for tobacco, shuts her eyes and coos, “Thank you.”
A few days after their dinner Coulter e-mails me her impression of Dollard: “The main thing I’d say about Dollard is that when you first meet him, he looks like a bad-ass degenerate and then the moment he starts talking, you realize he’s highly intelligent, interesting and funny. . . . I would trust anything he says implicitly.”
Through Breitbart’s tireless networking, Dollard travels to New York in July to meet with a magazine editor, who offers him a job as a war correspondent. In an e-mail to Dollard, the editor reveals the mixture of awe and obsequiousness Dollard increasingly receives from the swelling ranks of new acolytes:
“So . . . I shit my pants just thinking about all the shit you’ve been through Your shit is so raw and real. . . . The knives must be out for you. . . . Hollywood eats its young so my