Meet the Strangest Republicans Running for President Not Named Donald Trump

Times are grim if you're a Republican voter—your precious Grand Old Party has been hijacked by an orange fascist, his main challenger is mostly known for being despised by everyone he meets, and an ugly nomination fight at the convention is looming. But you have options! Sure, Jeb! Bush and Marco Rubio and Rand Paul and Chris Christie have all failed spectacularly, but there are a host of sixth-tier candidates out there quietly begging for your vote, existing as a final alternative to the inevitability of Donald Trump. Here are three of them:

Michael Bickelmeyer is an Ohioan whose campaign website mostly consists of a haphazard collection of PDFs, only some of which are relevant to his tilting-at-windmills bid for the presidency. His sparsely adorned homepage features a lifeless American flag .JPEG and a photo of a basically normal-looking white man (Bickelmeyer presumably) forcing a prom-gone-wrong smile. Beneath are the sinister words: "MILES OF SMILES!"

The most notable PDF in Bickelmeyer's arsenal is his patent for "A Gift for Children," which is what he calls an "orbital weapons system" that would direct "magnified sunrays" to "eliminate a single combatant with the variable to eliminate entire countries." This is supposedly designed for uses such as pest control (what?), and the wars on drugs and terrorism. When he describes the project, Bickelmeyer seems to believe that this thing is going to make the world a safer place; he says it's a "device to let allow and permit children to enjoy a spring breeze, play with the leaves of fall, and feel the bite of winter upon their faces, in a carefree manner without concerns. The invention is designed to erase from the world the spirits of dread and nightmare, and utilize pest-control."

Also, his drug policy is just a screenshot of an email conversation with a guy named Hal where he says legalizing weed would be bad.

Jim Hayden is basically a conservative fever dream, the corporeal manifestation of an unshakeable faith in shitty frontier justice ethos. His website is an Angelfire-esque minefield of scrolling text, crudely photoshopped memes of himself, and links that will occasionally break for no reason. He's a former Marine who served in Vietnam and really wants you to know he killed people. His policies are in the vein you'd expect: He'd launch raids against unspecified targets to break the will of "Muslims" to continue their war against "us," ban the government from helping the poor since that's a "religious activity," and, of course, ban abortion.

But Hayden's not all hard edges. When asked by a YouTube user named 2016 Presidential Interviews how he'd fix "racism," Hayden first tried to deflect the question and blame Obama for playing the race card. But pressed ever so slightly, Hayden explained that he grew up in a segregated society and that nothing tickles his fancy as much as seeing interracial couples. Over the course of just seconds, he appeared to warm to the idea and said that the best way to end racism would be for everyone to marry someone outside their own race, so that race eventually just won't be a thing anymore. (This is the Bulworth "Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody till they're all the same color" thesis.)

Jim Hayden's a weird guy.

For the sake of this investigation, let's assume Eric Cavanagh is a sincere and weird masterpiece, not merely a dress rehearsal for a future Tim & Eric character. Cavanagh is almost certainly the first Republican in history to embed a video of a Malcolm X onto his campaign site (it's right above a picture of Princess Diana). Aside from Malcolm, Cavanagh professes love for James Buchanan, Teddy Roosevelt, and in a turn that just might alienate evangelicals, the Prophet Muhammad.

His tenets, which he calls his "tenants," are pretty fun. He wants to merge the five branches of the military into just the Army and Navy, establish a 5 percent flat income tax, tax porn at a rate of 100 percent (but not tax liquor), eliminate "physicians' groups," merge police departments into multi-state entities, combine undergrad education with high school and make the whole thing free, reward "good drivers" with "negative tickets," and legalize hemp. He closes the whole thing out with a quote from his ex-wife about how "this country has decayed over the last few years when it comes to remembering that our children are the future."

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And still there are more options: James C. Mithchell advocates maybe annexing Mexico! K. Ross Newland is a former Barbazon model who based much of his foreign policy on Star Trek's Prime Directive . Zillionaire Empress Berhane is the self-proclaimed richest person on the planet and claims to be related to Haile Selassie. They may not be on the ballot, but they are in all our hearts. The next time you hear that the GOP is desperate for anyone but Trump remember: Jim Hayden is just waiting by the phone, waiting for the party leaders to call. And he's killed people.