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Newly Elected GOP Congressman Blames 'The Left' For Disturbing Revelations

Newly Elected GOP Congressman Blames 'The Left' For Disturbing Revelations

George Santos, the subject of a bombshell New York Times investigation that alleges he appears to have made up large parts of his resume, is responding to the paper of record’s report – through his attorney – in a statement that blames “the Left” for apparent false claims about his work history, colleges attended, and even the co-workers whom he claimed died during the Pulse nightclub hate crime mass shooting.

Santos, the first out gay Republican to be elected to Congress, is a MAGA supporter who was endorsed by House GOP Caucus chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY).

The Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this month reported that a “collection of radical right figures including white nationalists and ultranationalist European leaders gathered in Manhattan for the New York Young Republican Club’s (NYYRC) annual gala Saturday night, where that group’s president declared ‘total war’ on perceived enemies.”

Also in attendance? George Santos.

“Republican speakers repeatedly voiced an anti-democracy, authoritarian ideology, and extremists in the audience cheered wildly,” the SPLC reported. “White nationalists such as the Brimelows of VDARE and leaders from extreme far-right European parties like Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), whom German officials placed under surveillance for their ties to extremism, and Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), ate and drank in the same room as newly elected Republican congresspeople, such as Long Island and Queens-based George Santos, Georgia-based Mike Collins and Florida-based Cory Mills.”

In its damning and thorough report, The New York Times reveals that both Citigroup and Goldman Sachs “told The Times they had no record of [Santos] ever working there,” despite Santos’ claims he had been employed by both firms. Santos also claims he graduated from Baruch College in 2010, but officials “could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.”

Santos even claimed to have founded “an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats,” but there is “little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization.”

Shockingly, even Santos' claim that four co-workers died at Pulse came up short. The Times reported its “review of news coverage and obituaries found that none of the 49 victims appear to have worked at the various firms named in his biography.”

The list of apparent discrepancies is much longer, including how Santos went from allegedly owing $12,000 in back rent payments that led to his eviction – twice – to self-funding his congressional campaign.

“Santos failed to disclose any assets or money in his bank accounts on his 2020 PFD, yet loaned his campaign more than $80,000, and has continued to self-fund his 2022 campaign – including a self loan of half a million dollars in the first quarter of 2022,” as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) warned last August.

Late Monday afternoon, Santos posted a statement from his attorney.

“George Santos represents the kind of progress that the Left is so threatened by – a gay, Latino, first generation American and Republican who won a Biden district in overwhelming fashion by showing everyday voters that there is a better option than the broken promises and failed policies of the Democratic Party,” said Joseph Murray, Esq., according to Santos’ tweet.

“After four years in the public eye, and on the verge of being sworn in as a member of the Republican led 118th Congress, the New York Times launches this shotgun blast of attacks. It is no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at the New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations. As Winston Churchill famously stated, ‘You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.'”

Journalist Ben Jacobs throws some irony into the pot. Churchill never said that.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

How Fox News Weaponized ‘Don’t Say Gay’ To Persecute Teachers

How Fox News Weaponized ‘Don’t Say Gay’ To Persecute Teachers

Republicans have long relied on right-wing media’s inflammatory rhetoric to mobilize their voters. But with Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, state Republicans have effectively deputized the most Fox-News-and-Facebook-addicted members of the party’s base to act on frenzied smears that LGBTQ teachers are “grooming” children.

Here’s the key legislative text from Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” law:

Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

Republicans seem to have drafted the law to be deliberately vague. It does not define key terms like “classroom instruction,” “age-appropriate,” or “developmentally appropriate.” While some conservatives have criticized the “Don’t Say Gay” moniker applied to the law by saying it merely bans discussion of “sex and sexuality” or “sexual topics,” there is no prohibition on such content in the text of the bill. In fact, as the bill moved through the Florida legislature, Republicans blocked a Democratic amendment to replace the phrase “sexual orientation or gender identity” with “human sexuality or sexual activity.”

This vagueness in the law’s text means a wide array of topics may or may not be banned, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser noted:

May a gay teacher display a picture of their spouse on their desk? May a straight teacher do so? Suppose that a third grade student asks a teacher who the highest-ranking openly gay official is in the US government. Is the teacher allowed to respond with the correct answer (Pete Buttigieg), or do they have to blow off the question? What if a book taught in a high school English class has a gay character? Or what if the book has no openly gay characters but a parent reads the book and concludes that it has homoerotic undertones? If a second grade student has two mothers, may a teacher casually mention this fact in the same way they might mention any other student’s parents, or is such a thing forbidden?


But it’s the law’s enforcement mechanism, combined with that vague text, that most empowers the GOP’s right-wing-media-loving base – and imperils Florida teachers. The law lets parents respond to purported violations of its strictures by suing their child’s school district when they think that “classroom instruction” on LGBTQ issues has not been “age-appropriate.” As Millhiser notes, this mechanism “effectively turns the most squeamish, anti-LGBTQ parent in any public school into the bill’s enforcer.” And Fox, other right-wing outlets, and social media platforms are currently priming those parents to assume that any discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools constitutes an effort to “groom” children.

The Florida law effectively weaponizes that right-wing media audience against teachers and schools.

Propagandists at Fox and other Trumpist outlets frequently warn their audiences of the apocalyptic threat they claim that progressives pose to the country and to the physical safety of their viewers. Over the last year, a sizable fraction of this demagoguery has revolved around U.S. public schools, with participants assailing the purportedly genocidal teaching of “critical race theory,” then lashing out over school policies for trans students and the teaching of “gender ideology,” and finally suggesting that critics of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill wanted to “sexualize” and “groom” children and slandering LGBTQ teachers as pedophiles.

Fox prime-time hosts Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, two of the most powerful figures at the network, with an outsized influence on both its viewers and the Republican Party, have led this disgusting charge. Ingraham defended Florida’s law by describing public schools as “grooming centers” that are pushing “sexual brainwashing.” Carlson argued that teachers who discuss gender identity with kindergartners have sexually abused them and should be not only arrested, but physically assaulted.

Elsewhere in the right-wing media, the mere existence of LGBTQ people is defined as inappropriate “grooming” behavior.





This narrative is reinforcing the anti-LGBTQ frenzy consuming social media spaces on the right. On Facebook, right-leaning news and politics pages are dominating the debate and garnering millions of interactions while making “groomer” language a key facet of their work. On Twitter, the viral troll account “Libs of TikTok” has become a sort of wire service for Fox hosts to source anti-transgender and homophobic content related to teachers and students. The account recently appended the comment “any teacher who comes out to their students should be fired on the spot” to video of a man who says he told his fifth-grade students that he is gay after they asked.

These baseless accusations that the right’s political opponents are actually pedophiles overlap with – and at times become indistinguishable from – the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that a global cabal of leftists is engaged in large-scale child rape and sex trafficking, and that at some point in the future they will be caught and executed.

QAnon has crept unnervingly close to mainstream Republicanism over the last few years, even electing devotees to Congress. At its most benign, QAnon inspires conservatives to wallow in a rich and hateful alternate reality. At times, its adherents have attempted to fight back against the leftist cabal in real life, through terroristic threats and acts of violence.

Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law gives parents who are drunk on QAnon delusions or enflamed by Fox’s anti-LGBTQ obsessions a way to take action against the leftist “groomers” that Fox and Facebook have told them are threatening their children. And these extremists may soon be unleashed across the country in response to similar legislation in the works in other red states.

Printed with permission from Media Matters.

WATCH Marjorie Taylor Greene Delivers Lunatic Rant Against Gays In Our ’Sick Society’

WATCH: Marjorie Taylor Greene's Homophobic Rant About Our ’Sick Society’

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) delivered an unhinged, massively anti-LGBTQ attack on Friday, in an attempt to rev up her base with the latest far-right-wing outrage du jour. Like many Republicans, Greene has dug up old anti-gay tropes, fear-mongering lies about transgender people, and wrapped it all up in “concern” for the nation and its children.

One of the more stunning claims Greene made was that “Women are murdering and mutilating their own babies through the twin horrors of abortion and transgenderism.”

“Like you, I was shocked when I heard that Fox News had hired Bruce Jenner to be its newest female political contributor,” Greene begins. “We remember Jenner winning an Olympic gold in 1976, and from the front of the Wheaties box, but today, Jenner believes he is a woman. I’d love to know which female contributors were passed over, or perhaps even made redundant to clear space for Fox’s newest star transgender commentator.”

“For many of us it felt like the last day in women’s history,” she claimed.

Greene says she feels “disgust as men have taken over women’s sports, robbing women and girls of their rightful accomplishments,” as she derides swimmer “Lea Thomas’s muscular frame towering over his female competitors,” and she misgenders her.

Greene goes on to blast apparently CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, for allowing “drag queens and transsexuals” to “parade around the halls.”

She uses terms like “transsexuals,” and warns of “gay men with crossdressing fetishes” hosting “drag queen story hour for impressionable young children,” while warning that “cross dressing and gender disruption is one of the hallmarks of a civilization and rapid decline.”

“Our armed forces seem to care more about naming ships after gay pedophiles like Harvey Milk than ensuring our readiness for conflict with China and Russia,” she cried. There is no evidence Milk was a pedophile, and the Navy named a ship after him in 2016 – six years ago.

“Everywhere you look the signs of decadence and decay are consuming our once-great institutions,” she claimed. “Mom and Dad have been replaced by Chasten and Pete Buttigieg and their designer babies. Our society is sick and the symptoms are easy to see,” she lamented, never once looking inward.

Printed with permission from Alternet.

Cartoon: Sexual Straightening In North Carolina

Cartoon: Sexual Straightening In North Carolina