JOHN DEATON, the cryptocurrency lawyer who recently announced a Republican campaign to unseat Sen. Elizabeth Warren, brings a colorful life story to the race. It apparently includes a healthy share of sex and drugs, but is anchored by accounts of his childhood, raised by a single mother on welfare in a poor enclave of Detroit. 

“I’ve overcome poverty, grew up in one of the worst neighborhoods in America,” Deaton said in an interview. “I listened to my mom cry at night when she couldn’t feed us.” 

Deaton says he’s the only one in his family to finish high school, never mind college and law school. He’s gone on to score big as a lawyer representing clients in asbestos and mesothelioma cases and, more recently, as an advocate for the crypto sector. 

As Deaton unspools his story and talks about how it inspired him to want to go to Washington to fight for the little guy, it’s hard not to think of the origin story that Warren says drives her, growing up on “the ragged edge of the middle class” in Oklahoma. 

Warren’s tale, detailed in her 2012 autobiography, A Fighting Chance, included her maintenance worker dad once losing a car to the repo man. 

Deaton has penned a memoir of his own, and Food Stamp Warrior makes Warren’s ragged-edge-of-the-middle-class roots look like a day at the beach. 

According to Politico’s Lisa Kashinsky and Kelly Garrity, Deaton writes that his upbringing came complete with brass-knuckle beatdowns, being the victim of sexual assault, and a situation in which, at 17, he may – or may not – have shot someone with his friend’s gun after the friend was gunned down in a drive-by. (Deaton emptied the gun on the fleeing car, but doesn’t know if he hit anyone.) Later, after going through a divorce, Politico says he writes of going on a “coke-fueled sex bender” before eventually settling down with his current partner. 

Deaton, one of crypto’s highest profile champions, and Warren, who has charged that the sector needs to follow the same rules as others in the financial world, seem poised to clash on that issue. But crypto aside, the Democratic senator who made her name going after Wall Street honchos and the Republican challenger she may face in November sound like they’re singing off the same song sheet, if not belting the exact same tune.

In a recent interview on Fox News Business, Deaton calls himself “the ultimate underdog,” a background that has compelled him to fight for the underdog. “I fought for the little guy. I took on the greedy corporations and the heartless insurance companies, and I won,” Deaton says in his campaign announcement video.  

He “tells a story not unlike that of the incumbent he wants to unseat,” concludes WBZ-TV political analyst Jon Keller. 

Deaton tries to push back against that idea, but still has a ways to go in finding his campaign footing. 

“She’s great at fighting against people. She fights against the rich and wealthy. I fight for the poor and the working-class,” he said in an interview with CommonWealth Beacon. “That’s the fundamental difference. Where she pits American against American, I’m about uplifting people.” 

The idea that lifting up working people doesn’t necessarily involve taking some shots at those with all the power and wealth seems a bit out of character for a guy who sports a brass-knuckles necklace in his Fox News Business interview and says in his kickoff video that he will “fight for what is right.” 

Deaton, a first-time candidate who moved last month from Rhode Island to Swansea, has time to hone his message. But his familiarity with being an underdog will come in handy as he tries to unseat a Democratic US senator in deep-blue Massachusetts. 

That said, Deaton is far from a MAGA Republican. He said he would not support Donald Trump as his party’s nominee for president. 

“I’m a fiscally conservative Republican who’s socially moderate,” said Deaton, who is pro-choice. He emphasized that “unlike Elizabeth Warren, I’m not a partisan person,” and has been a registered Democrat, independent, and now Republican. 

“She promised to be a champion for those in need,” he says about Warren in his announcement video. “Instead, she gives lectures and plays politics and gets nothing done for Massachusetts.”  

Not surprisingly, Warren took issue with that charge when asked about Deaton’s volley at a Democratic Party event on Saturday in Quincy. And for all her high-profile battles with “Republican extremists,” her message was all about bread and butter.  

“I’ve spent my whole life fighting for working people, long before I ever got into politics,” Warren  said. “And [in] the two terms I’ve had, it’s been the honor of a lifetime to be in this fight and to get important things done, like reducing costs for families – $35 insulin, nearly 4 million people who’ve seen their student loan debt canceled, cutting the cost of hearing aids – all the pieces that make life work better for working families.”