THE AVATAR THEY DESERVE:

To you, Representative George Santos might be one of the most noxious, if also plainly ridiculous, figures in American public life right now. But last Friday night at the Beach Cafe, a pub on East 70th street beloved by right-wingers, he's the "It" girl. His wrists are bedizened with bling from Hermès and Cartier, and fawning fans line up for selfies. [...]

Sitting beside Santos, smirking, is his bald and bearded 31-year-old "director of operations." His name is Vish Burra. He's a former drug dealer from Staten Island who, while he worked for Steve Bannon, was the guy you went through if you wanted to check out the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop. (He once hosted a viewing party of the laptop's contents.) He also did crisis comms for Matt Gaetz, and, along with Santos, was part of a mini-MAGA cabal that took over the New York Young Republican Club. The club is run by Burra and Santos's buddy, Gavin Wax. He couldn't make it to the Beach Cafe for the party Friday because he was off in Hungary, meeting with members of the country's semi-fascist government.

Burra and Wax were the ones who put on the Young Republicans' most recent holiday gala; that was the one at which Marjorie Taylor Greene said that, had she and Bannon planned January 6, "We would have won. Not to mention, it would've been armed."

"I couldn't have staged that any better," gushes Burra. His own rantings at that gala ripped off chunks of Mussolini's 1935 "wheel of destiny" speech justifying the invasion of Ethiopia. ("To acts of war, we shall answer with acts of war ...")

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