In a Dolan article in "The eXile" about the newspaper and "the strange being known as the War Nerd" (mythologizing Brecher as a separate person to Dolan), Brecher is described as a community-college dropout, and "fat, miserable, and incidentally brilliant". The first hint that Brecher was Dolan was perhaps in a 2001 "eXile" article, "Cleanse the World", in which Dolan openly admitted to being a "war nerd": "Oh, my poor naive war-nerd brothers, how could you ever have dreamed that Bush."