Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
(1) He was a low-level finance guy, making ~55k/year, with a criminal background in Brazil (2) He got a jr exec job at a company that turned out to be a ponzi scheme (3) When the ponzi went bust, a bunch of the former execs started a new company. That company paid him between $750k-$5 million, depending which (contradictory) disclosure of his you believe. (4) Shortly afterwards, he began running for Congress
Raises more Qs than answers, but seems like the type of thing where there'll be a follow-up
The number of Republicans who where willing to vote for Trump in the first election but not the second cost them the second election. That’s a common pattern where electing people you don’t like ends up weakening the party long term.
I am not saying you need to love everyone you vote for, but for people who are “holding their nose” you have to consider both short term and long term effects. To use a Democratic example, Biden is likely to be dead weight going in the 2024 election.
IMO, Biden v Trump 2024 is a poison pill for the whichever party wins the presidency. Political power is about more than who’s sitting in the white house.
This isn't always possible. I would call myself left in most senses, but I value 2a, and am a campaign badge holder. I am almost always voting against my biggest interests no matter what way I may vote.
The real answer here is more parties that reflect Americans interests better than two parties ever can, imo.
The 2020s - well, really any time post 2010 - is a new era of fraud. The last elements of self-restraint honor culture have vanished, and the cultishness of culture wars makes people eager to throw their money at people who will tell them the right lies.
The precipitous drop in readership at the WaPo and related layoffs are a hopeful sign that perhaps a correction is in the works.
Meanwhile, Biden makes false claims about his past all the time, such as how he used to drive an 18 wheeler.
Or this fun one about his use of Amtrak:
“When I became vice president, one of the Capitol Hill newspapers estimated that I had taken more than 7,000 round trips on Amtrak over my career,” Biden said. “I think that’s an exaggeration. I’m going to rely on those two conductors. … One of them was a guy named Angelo Negri.”
Biden continued, telling the audience Negri estimated Biden had traveled 1.5 million miles on Amtrak trains around his fourth or fifth year as vice president, which would have been in 2013 or 2014.
“My mom was sick, and I used to try to come home almost every weekend as vice president to see her,” Biden said. “I got on the train and Angelo Negri came up and he goes, ‘Joey, baby,’ and he grabbed my cheek like he always did. … He said, ‘Joey, what’s the big deal? One-point-three million miles on Air Force Two? Do you know how many miles you traveled on Amtrak?’ I said, ‘No, Angie, I don’t know.’ He gave me the calculation and he said ‘You traveled 1.5 million miles on Amtrak.;”
However, an obituary for Negri says the conductor retired in 1993, decades before Biden’s supposed story took place, while he was still a senator from Delaware. Biden’s mother died in 2010.
110 * 2 * 164 * 36 ~ 1.3 million miles.
My hypothesis is that an Amtrak conductor gave Biden this calculation, but his brain associated the story with a different, more colorful conductor.
[https://ballotpedia.org/117th_Congress_legislative_calendar]
What's their job?
Who's their boss? To whom are they accountable?
They appear to be doing the job they're paid to do. Despite claims that they should behave counter to their employers' interests.
> Biden makes false claims about his past all the time
My favorite was about how he was in prison with Nelson Mandela. I can only assume that due to a transitive property of the Mandela effect, Biden died in prison.
The Republican party recruited him. Same way they recruited a bunch of actors from ExploreTalent.
- Lied about completing a Bachelor's degree
- Lied about working at Goldman Sachs
- Has an open check fraud case in Brazil from 2008
- Voted in as Congressman for Long Island
And to think of all the times I agonized over making sure every item in my resume/CV was 100% accurate, verifiable and spell-checked.
It's plausible his mother was an ethnic Jew. However, given his unverifiable history, an outright fabrication seems more likely.
The guy even used to be present on the Bundestag website and in public marketing material.
I happen to know about this because a company I worked for produced a media DVD for the parliament back in the days and this guy was included.
I get you can't time a story always, but I feel like so many stories like this break after the person achieves some sort of position of note.
Then again, maybe they only started investigating congress persons because they won elections, and this is the post win rake in action?
Not every race gets the same scrutiny by the opposition due to things like limited funding, probability of losing etc.
You're right though, you'd think they'd have enough funding to handle this nation wide in every race, but alas, maybe not.
It's plausible that something like this happens:
- For 10 of them, the dodginess doesn't ultimately check out.
- Five of them become aware that the media is onto them; either they give up, or their party cuts them loose. They don't run.
- Of those who run, one or two have their dodginess revealed _before_ the election. They lose (er, probably, maybe not, who knows, see Donald Trump!)
- Of the remainder, the media's been slow in digging up the dodginess, but one or two lose the election anyway.
- One actually wins, before the paper is ready to publish. (This guy)
Like, arguably, if the media was doing a perfect job here, you'd probably never hear about it at all; the dodgy politicians would never run, and "someone who _might_ have run for office but didn't is a fraud" is just not an interesting story; even if they bother to publish it won't get much circulation.
(There is another factor; when someone wins election that may prompt people to come forward with tales of their dodginess, too)
Had they not, the Democrats may have retained control.
I can only guess, but it's ambiguous, irrelevant and needlessly casts this as a partisan issue.
Implicit in your statement is that oppo research is at least as good as the journalism machinery. Perhaps the answer to your question is that they did some vetting, but are nowhere near as effective as the press. It's fashionable to dunk on the press (or "mainstream media") lately, but perhaps they have a useful function whose effectiveness does not wax and wain with the election seasons.
The starting point seems understandable:
> In November 2015, a landlord in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens filed an eviction suit in housing court accusing Mr. Santos of owing $2,250 in unpaid rent.
> In May 2017, ... Mr. Santos’s landlord accused him of owing more than $10,000 in rent ... and said ... one of his tenant’s checks had bounced.
Okay. Poverty can catch folks out. I can imagine how he got into that situation. But then this:
> early 2021, ... Mr. Santos said on Twitter that he was a landlord affected by the freeze. "Will we landlords ever be able to take back possession of our property?"
> Mr. Santos said that he and his family had not been paid rent on their 13 properties in nearly a year, adding that he had offered rental assistance to some tenants, but found that some were "flat out taking advantage of the situation."
> But Mr. Santos has not listed properties in New York on required financial disclosure forms ... Property records databases ... did not show any documents or deeds associated with him.
I can at least understand heartlessness from ignorance but this. He practically narrates his own story but then reboots it so that he's the victimized landlord (over seemingly fictitious tenants).
I couldn't generate enough contempt to properly cover the sheer volume of his disingenuousness.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/curious-george/sharetok...
American (and maybe other?) political parties are in the business of creative storytelling as a means to the ends of their special interests.
They do sleight of hand with their political platforms, why not also with their disposable hired actors?
The part I find amazing about situations like this, is the default starting position of "it's American politics, things you'd normally go to jail for, are structurally unenforceable here".
This should never be allowed.
"Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection"[1]
We have to start somewhere.
To me, it seems obvious and intuitive that "fake it till you make it" is a mostly harmless comment on mentality for confidence. You act calm and confident talking to the person you want to date when you see them at a party, even though internally you're nervous and scared. You act like a big business deal is routine for you even though it's actually make-or-break for your company.
Suggesting that it means "fraud is ok" seems preposterous to me, the sort of thing that my intuitive reaction is to think "Nobody could honestly believe that, they're being intentionally difficult". But the world is a big place, full of people whose brains work very differently, who process language very differently, who grew up in different cultures and were taught different lessons about how the world works.
Which is all to say, no of course this isn't "fake it till you make it". But that it'd be interesting if some sociologist did research on what level of acting, deceiving, misrepresenting, etc different folks see the line between "fake it till you make it" and "dishonesty" or "fraud".
But without a better source of revenue for local news, I’m sure lots of things like this go uncovered in a timely fashion.
Like it or not, allowing politicians to lie is the least worst option. The solution is for voters and the free press to hold them accountable, rather than in essence expecting government to police itself.
There is, however, an objective truth that can be verified independently of whatever "narrative" is being pushed.
And don't forget once that "narrative" being pushed is verified false, it also becomes a misrepresentation of facts.
> Material omissions or misrepresentations on personal financial disclosures are considered a federal crime under the False Statements Act, which carries a maximum penalty of $250,000 and five years in prison. But the bar for these cases is high, given that the statute requires violations to be “knowing and willful.”
Note that this does not apply to things like lying about college or previous employers, only to financial disclosures.
House of Representatives ethics penalties may also apply. FTA:
> The House of Representatives has several internal mechanisms for investigating ethics violations, issuing civil or administrative penalties when it does. Those bodies tend to act largely in egregious cases, particularly if the behavior took place before the member was inaugurated.
Not to mention there were quite prominent journalists like Josh Marshall raising red flags about this guy all last year. https://twitter.com/joshtpm
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/11/10/congress_midterm_ele...
Parties in states where the elections are routinely more contested tend to spend more effort vetting their candidates and running candidates that aren't trash.
Word is that state party officials tried to get press to investigate, but no one was interested at the time.
Seriously though, this is the status quo until someone starts to hold such people accountable for their lies. This does not happen nearly enough. If our leaders cannot be bothered to tell the truth, what effect do you think that has on society?
Personally, I have seen a huge rise in dishonest behavior in my lifetime, and I blame the lack of integrity from the leaders in government, business, sports, and pretty much everything everywhere.
If the fish rots from the head, then we should be taking a page from the French Revolution: off with their heads!
I think humans have been pretty crooked forever. Just easier to hear about it now.
However, we are historically at the highest population in history, which means that - if the number of sociopaths is a relatively fixed percentage of the population - that there are many many more in terms of absolute numbers. There is much more competition for the top slots, which have not grown at a similar rate as our population.
In other words, I also think their effect on society has been getting worse over time.
At this point, I may not mind living under a competent king instead of a democratic clownfest.
I lived in Italy for a number of years, and the cynicism there about politicians was something I really disliked. It makes you look like you're wise and "in the know", but it sets the bar really low for a job that's pretty important to get right, and where we ought to expect better.
But that is a simple law. If there are not heavy (legal, cultural) constraints and scummy behavior can get more power rewards than honest behavior (which is often the case, especially for quick power grabs), then rather reasonably any honest politician will be displaced by a dishonest one.
The only limits are cultural. And even them are based on the fact that in our time a country with a functioning legal system and democratic rulers tends to thrive more than a dark tyrannical regime so the cake itself is bigger.
When the concern is only about the team, faults are easily glossed over.
Changing it into a game, allows game theory to take over people's minds and suddenly there is no behavior too outrageous because the belief becomes that the other guys would have done it if they had thought of it first.
Then very quickly the politicians that hold themselves accountable have been replaced with those who do not and a new norm is formed.
But that's a quick pivot, and not how politics works at all.
The internet predates both Iraq wars.
This is really bad. Whoever voted for him deserves a chance to have an informed vote - because democracy only works with a well informed electorate.
The "politicians lie" truism is meant to apply to campaign promises that candidates make knowing that they can't or won't even try to accomplish them. This manufacture of wholesale fictions by con artists and wanna be dictators is not the same thing, and is not actually at all common among politicians in the US historically or currently.
Claims that these people are not so bad because they are just like any other politician are inaccurate and toxic. They are critical to the con succeeding.