George Santos is the newly elected Republican House member from Long Island who Pinocchioed his way into Congress and who represents a growing segment of American society. Liars. Now if you're sort of hazy on the details of Santos's life don't worry, so is he. When they film his biography it'll start with, based on a false story.
This guy lied about his schooling, his career, his sexuality, and his charity work. What kind of family raises a person like this? We don't know because he lied about them too. He lies like a goose shits. If he's not doing it at this very moment he's about to.
He said he attended the prestigious Horace Mann prep school. They have no record of him, nor does NYU where he said he got an MBA or Baruch College where he falsely claimed to have graduated in the top 1% of his class and starred on the volleyball team. I would say you can't make this shit up but he just made this shit up. And it raises a lot of questions starting with if you're gonna lie, why volleyball?
He also claimed he ran an animal charity that neutered 3,000 Stray Cats, he didn't but again, what a strange thing to brag about. He literally lied about cutting off cat's nuts and that takes a lot of balls. Don't think Santos isn't pioneering something new in American politics. Of course we've seen liars before but it was always about tracking from the extreme to the center of your own party. What Mitt Romney called shaking the Etch-a-Sketch.
But Santos is the first one to realize that since we are all in our hermetically sealed media bubbles now, you can pretend to be everything to voters in both parties, and no one on either side will notice. Some of Santos's lies appeal to far-right Republicans like being all in, as he was on Trump's election denying, or making the white power sign in the halls of Congress or claiming he was a Wall Street wonderkind who made Millions working in Goldman Sachs, which he didn't. Or that he was a luxury Yacht broker, which he wasn't.
The giveaway here is that Santos's district is Long Island, New York, a suburb of Manhattan, not as liberal but almost always went Democratic. Biden won it by eight points. So how did a Trump-loving, election denying, white nationalist get elected in a democrat-leaning district? Simple, he told them what they wanted to hear too.
What do liberals love? Identity politics and victimhood. So he said he had a brain tumor and he was one of the first New Yorkers hospitalized for Covid. He said he lost four co-workers in the famous Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016. He's from Brazil, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, but when he ran in New York he said he was Jewish and that his grandparents fled Ukraine to escape the Nazis. That's right, his Jewish Ukrainian forefathers escaped the Holocaust by being born Catholic in Brazil.
Also he claims to be half black, although I doubt that's the half that wears a blazer with the fleece vest. He also claims to be gay but he divorced the woman he was married to two weeks before the campaign started. George knows where the sweet spots are with Democrats too. He once said, “I'm very much gay.” What does that mean, very much gay? Do you have a blue checkmark on Grindr?
Everybody keeps asking how could a guy like this get elected? I'll tell you how, because no one cares anymore about substance. It's all tribalism. The only thing that matters is he is on our team. Is he doing our schtick? Santos is just the first one to realize you could do both sides schtick and get away with it because people have completely tuned out anything that doesn't already fit their narrative. Republicans love a winner and Democrats love someone whose life story makes you want to kill yourself.
For Republicans George claimed he went to the Capitol on January 6th. Yes, he personally attended the insurrection and has tweeted hashtags like ‘Dems are destroying America’ but that obviously didn't matter to plenty of Democrats in his district. What mattered is that he's a brave, sad, proudly gay, half-black Latino Holocaust victim with a brain tumor. Vote for him? I'm surprised they didn't have him host the Oscars.
Yes, everyone saw in George Santos what they wanted to see. Republicans saw a Trump-loving rich prick, Democrats saw a proudly gay person of color and the Proud Boys saw a guy who would blow them after a couple of beers and not tell anyone.
–Bill Maher 1/20/2023
