The current political moment has given us a never-ending stream of made-for-TV figures with biographies so absurd, it’s hard to believe they’re real. There’s Steve Bannon, the lab-grown fusion of sofa lint and human cartilage who, prior to running the far-right Breitbart, was a low-level Hollywood producer of not-exactly-blockbusters like In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed. There’s Stephen Miller, the former college pal of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and current White House speechwriter who wasted the phrase “American carnage” on Trump’s inauguration screed and not, like, a black metal band name. (Going by appearances alone, he’s also the world’s only The Matrix cosplayer who thinks that Agent Smith was the hero.) And there’s Anthony Scaramucci, aka the Mooch, a guy who lasted only 10 days as White House Communications Director before Trump shitcanned him, a foul-mouthed, mirror-shaded Ouroboros of unearned hubris and auto-fellatio jokes.

But the Republicans don’t have a monopoly on obnoxious, jerkfaced weirdos who make us collectively pine for the halcyon days of characters like Mark Sanford and Gary Hart. The Democrats have Peter Daou, a Clinton political operative The Outline describes as “the weirdest man alive” and “everything wrong with liberals today”: a pugnacious digital communications adviser who excoriates “haters” on Twitter, brags about his time in a Lebanese Christian militia, and once claimed in a lawsuit to have co-founded The Huffington Post, a claim Arianna Huffington disputed.

If you’ve only just heard of Daou, it’s probably because of his new website, Verrit, a kind of…well, it’s actually tough to say what it is, although POLITICO’s Jack Shafer compared it to “North Korean agitprop.” It’s an information clearinghouse that calls itself “Media for the 65.8 Million”— aka the people who voted for Clinton, to whom it appeals with a grid of cue-card-like factoids about how “The Republican Party Is Harmful to America’s Children” and “Hillary Democrats Are the Heart and Conscience of America.” The site’s name presumably has something to do with truth, and every flash card, or recipe card, or whatever it is comes with a seven-digit “Verrit.com authentication code”—which, if you collect enough of them, could be redeemable for Bitcoin or something?

For our purposes, however, the very weirdest thing about Peter Daou is the fact that way back in the early 1990s, he had a career producing underground house music. And a pretty credible one, too: Among his engineering and production credits, highlighted in the “Music” section of his own website, are David Morales’ “Def Klub Mix” of Björk’s “Big Time Sensuality” and Bobby Konders’ Mutabaruka-sampling “The Poem,” a landmark of New York house. He’s best known for his work in a group called the Daou alongside his then-wife, Vanessa Daou. (Even then, you could hardly accuse him of a crippling humility.) Aided by a 13-and-a-half-minute Danny Tenaglia remix, their 1992 track “Surrender Yourself” went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart. It’s a great track, too—proper, old-school New York house, complete with savage organ stabs, slippery congas, and the kind of stubby bassline that Warp Records’ early signees would adapt for the short-lived Sheffield bleep sound. Frankie Knuckles was a fan, too: You can hear him drop it alongside cuts from Masters at Work, Lil’ Louis, and Ten City in this 1992 set from Hamburg’s Front Club.

The Daou’s 1991 debut album, Head Music, was, like so many products of the era, an overproduced mush of influences: digital synths, strummy guitars, ham-fisted soul jazz over mood-music breakbeats.

But they found more traction with the singles “Give Myself to You” and “Are You Satisfied?,” which benefited from club-ready remixes by Tenaglia and David Morales. Both Tenaglia’s “Grand Ballroom Mix” of the former and Morales’ “Bad Yard Dub Mix” of the latter are stone-faced stomps with attitude and endurance to spare—just the kind of qualities you need as a digital campaign manager, I suppose.

Before embarking upon the Daou, Peter Daou played keyboards on Ralph “DTR” Soler’s 1989 track “Journey Into a Dream,” a limpid deep house tune overlaid with the sounds of orgasm, for New York’s iconic Nu Groove label; Vanessa joined DTR for 1990’s flute-’n’-bleep Nu Groove single “How Many Times? (Unity).” Also in 1990, Peter and Vanessa teamed up with Victor Simonelli and Lenny Didesiderio as Critical Rhythm on two Nu Groove singles: “It Could Not Happen” and “I’m in Love With You.”