You In Danger, Girl

Of all people, I'm among those least well positioned to criticize anyone else for being a pretend person in public. Look, here you are reading words typed by either someone with a meaningless pseudonym crafted in a moment of non-creative panic, or possibly not a person at all, maybe an algorithm compiled to string out words in a manner ape-ing human speech. Like running a smooth, new brain all the way to the complicated human expression stuff, but skipping the actual ape part of the evolution. It's already working for AI-generated art that doesn't know how to make hands, so there's no reason why it couldn't also be fooling you with some "blog" that doesn't know how to make proper dick jokes. In this metaphor of course it's obvious the dick joke serves the same fundamental and crucial function in written communication that human hands do in making believable people pictures.

I haven't criticized this insane "George Santos" weirdo story because I don't really feel like I have a horror-movie-misshapen foot to stand on here. Have I claimed to have gone to a college I never went to? Not as far as you know. Have I claimed to have been a weirdly specific volleyball(?) star at that college, a position insanely easy to check in 2023? No. Have I said my mom died in 9/11 only to have her still be alive through 2016? I will say that, reader, I have not. Have I represented myself under more than one false name to a series of people? OK, yes, we established that is a "yes," stop fucking harping on it. The difference is I'm doing it less to possibly launder Russian oligarch money through the federal campaign finance loopholes (maybe, I've read a lot a headlines and not a lot of full stories, my god, there are too many) and more because I want to do swears without thinking of my mom possibly reading them. Motivation matters here, I think. Sometimes the means justify the ends.

So far just being a fake person has fit right in to the modern GOP establishment. In the post-Trump era, we are well into the new normal of no apologies, no resignations. Every flouting of previous established moral/ethical convention up to and including the actual law is now a sign of being "smarter" than those chumps who play by the rules. As far as I can tell, the argument is that Democrats cheat all the time by doing things like having way more people registered to vote for them and then subsequently having them turn up to vote, so Republican counter-cheating is, gosh darnit, an unfortunate reality just to keep the communists from winning too much.

It won't be the lies or the crimes that threaten George Santos. He's a warm R-shaped body occupying a seat (including now on a couple of committees) in a very narrowly held House of Representatives, so he automatically gets the full backing of the right-wing apparatus... unless he maybe turns out to be a drag queen?

At some point in the last few years, I suspect because "gender fluidity" is scary for a literal, binary mind, the drag queen has become a symbol of the deterioration of the standard gender heteronormativity that was given to us by Jesus and early television. They got some traction with a pushback against gays up through the 2004 general election, but it's been a total collapse of homosexuality as a cultural and legal point of political hay-making since then. So the pivot has been to basically use the exact same arguments, but now with drag queens: if we don't keep the lines between the genders clear, the you will get the degradation of all sexual morality, ending with child sexual abuse.

That's always the endgame, child sexual abuse. Either because a) they actually care about child sexual abuse as a current or looming epidemic or b) it's the one thing they can cling to cynically as a life raft as they drown in the raging current of progress and history. "But what about the children!?" is a punchline because everyone knows it means an intellectual surrender on whatever topic is being agenda-ed, which is certainly almost never actually children. If it were, we definitely wouldn't be worried about the drag queens.

If George Santos goes, it will be because he's been photographed wearing fishnet stockings and a little rouge at some point. Pretty suddenly the dark money Kevin McCarthy and his ilk don't seem too fussed about will almost certainly have come from George Soros and a defenstration will certainly follow.

This is my favorite feature of the modern conspiracy-fueled right wing in America: they are one united force of courageous patriots encouraging each other to stand firm, take action, save the children! Right until one of them does by, say, shooting up a synagogue or a drag bar, after which they are immediately denounced as an ANTIFA false flag agent sent to defame them in the media by doing the thing they keep insisting they are actually trying to do. I'm sure it comes as a shock to all the perpetrators when they find out they are actually socialists in service of the Deep State, but that's the beauty of being violently opposed to a set of circumstances and enemy forces that are entirely made up: a narrative devoid of verifiable information is fluid enough, ironically, to swallow anyone.