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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman try to get to the bottom of the George Santos scandal in which he's lied about everything in his past. They then shift their attention to Ron DeSantis in Florida as he's trying to build an Anti-Woke Coalition, before discussing the travesty that is Southwest Airlines.
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Sexton, opening a seltzer because I'm still a sick boy.
But guess what, everybody?
I'm joined by Nick Halseman, who is also a sick boy now.
Ah, this damn sinus infection.
Snot-nosed kids came to my house rubbing their noses all over every doorknob.
This is what everybody was hoping for, that the Weekender Edition to end 2022 is us being sick.
But you know what, Nick?
It seems appropriate, does it not?
It is.
It is a metaphor.
I don't know.
Is it a metaphor?
Is it a simile?
Metaphor?
Simile?
Anacronym?
You name it.
Anacronym isn't a word.
But I feel a lot better just hanging out and seeing you today.
Well, it's good seeing you!
I'm looking forward to getting to the end of this year.
I don't know about you.
If you had to do a quick retrospect on 2022, how do you feel about it, Nick?
What's your take?
How was the year in totality?
My concern is that I am losing connection with the present, and time is just fleeting by in weird spots, and I don't know what happened yesterday or an hour ago or whatever, and, you know, maybe meditation.
I need to somehow rededicate myself to figuring out how I can be less, you know, what's the word?
Like, it's just sort of not connected to the present in a way that I feel like things are just flying by and I'm missing them.
Presentness, I think, is exactly that's what my therapist would say.
Personally, it's funny you say that.
One of the things that is really interesting me lately is the idea of time being a flat circle and the idea that time is not actually linear and becoming obsessed sort of with that idea and how it works.
So it's interesting that we're both sort of considering time.
Maybe this is an after effect of the COVID era.
I don't know.
Says the guy who has COVID currently.
Right, or are you reading Kurt Vonnegut these days?
I'm not!
I'm not, but the last time I read Slaughterhouse-Five, it really came across to me that it was about trauma, as opposed to necessarily time travel.
It was a really good metaphor, if you will, about that idea.
But yeah, that's really interesting.
The time is what's on your mind.
Oh, yeah, I mean, and I reference that all the time when like, you know, if people are not alive right now, they're alive in plenty of other other era times in the past, we can go visit when you want to.
But I never understood why Billy Pilgrim got on a damn plane when he knew it was gonna crash.
That is something we could examine too.
He knew what was gonna happen.
I guess he knew he was gonna survive it.
So he got on anyway, but that's that would be a bridge too far for me.
Yeah, I'm probably out on that.
You know, whenever I was watching Lost and whenever they got on one of these planes, I was just like, nah, I'm good.
I'll live my broken little sideways life.
That's fine.
Yeah, for sure.
Speaking of broken planes, we have an interesting show today.
We're going to have to talk about Southwest Airlines.
We're going to talk about Ron DeSantis absolutely going crazy down in Florida.
But Nick, I think you and I have been circling this story for a minute.
I think it's the type of thing that piques our interest.
It speaks to where the Republican Party is, where American politics are.
But in a way, this George Santos story, for me, when it first came up on my radar, I kind of momentarily looked away from it.
Because I was just like, I don't know, a corrupt politician, I've been down this road before.
I gotta tell you though, this George Santos, who is about to take his seat in the House of Representatives, he seems like a special case.
Am I wrong?
Well, you know what's fascinating about this whole thing is that it has somehow unlocked the Joe Biden lying that he had done in his past, right?
The whataboutism, both-siderism here.
So before we maybe dig into that, I do want to say I'm old enough to remember the 88th election and when he flamed out.
And it's so funny because how quaint is it that you could Just end your presidential campaign because you used a couple lines from some British guy in a speech you gave.
Basically, it was what derailed him.
How quaint is that?
We were probably having tea and riding horses to work back then.
Is that right?
I remember when I heard about that in 88.
I was a wee lad of 7, and I believe we were reading the newsprint by Kerosene Light, if I'm remembering correctly.
I remember a gotcha moment, and I hope it's not, by the way, it could be as fabricated as Biden's story about going to Afghanistan, but I remember this where they caught him like in line at a supermarket checkout and asking about, and he was like fumbling his way through some way of answering, you know, some little detail about his, his, his, you know, education, whatever.
But here's the thing about that.
It seems to me that Biden, especially the embellishment stuff about the army hero that he put a medal on or didn't put a medal on, that is in service of the American propaganda of our military and patriotism and all that stuff.
That wasn't necessarily in service of him to win an election.
Is that enough of a difference?
I don't even know if there is a difference anymore.
I don't know if anything means anything.
This Santos thing, like, that's the thing when something like this George Santos, and by the way, for anyone who has been staying away from politics and is checking out at The Weekender, this guy, this New York elected guy who got it because nobody was interested in fact-checking him, no one was particularly interested in reporting on him, Uh, the Democratic Party had basically punted away, uh, control within the state.
But, Nick, like, it's... It's not just like he lied about his education, which he did.
It's not just that he lied about his job, which he did.
It's not just that he lied about things that he had done, which he did.
It seems that this man has lied about literally everything in his life.
It's not just that he has a problem with lying, it's that lying seems to be the chief characteristic of his person.
Right.
And it reaches a point where this is going to be a congressman.
He's going to take the oath.
He's not going to step aside.
We talk all the time about there's no shame left anymore, right?
Like nobody's going to walk away.
Truth has been broken.
Period.
The idea of objective reality has been broken.
And I think, going back to our conversation about time, that has become one of the, like, main characteristics of this moment.
The idea that any notion of not just shame but adhering to some sort of a truth or reality is gone.
It's just gone!
And I don't even know...
It feels like you and I are having a conversation that it's almost like a freshman level philosophy class.
Do you know what I mean?
Where you go in and ideas are being thrown around but you can't ever pinpoint them.
It's like trying to drive a nail through a sunny side up egg.
It's become so strange and malleable that I don't even know how we can have a discussion about if there's a line, where's a line, will there ever be a line again?
It has just evaporated into the ether, if it ever existed in the first place.
The solution is robots.
We won't have this problem.
Because again, Herschel Walker is Santos, and Santos is Herschel Walker.
Like, this is the same thing here.
Although, what's really fascinating is, because we've got to go through some of the lies, because I don't know, you didn't even cover them all, Jared.
You listed about five or whatever, but there's more, because do you know that he tried to connect?
You know what?
Maybe that's not fair.
He said his mother died from 9-11.
15 years later, but maybe that's true.
That might be the most true thing.
He's been able to connect because of perhaps long-term effects of being in that ground your ground zero, but like how about this?
He had a go fund me for a using his fake Jewish name to raise money for pets.
or whatever that really I don't think existed at that point.
You mentioned Goldman Sachs and how he really wasn't a finance guy there.
I sense what he said when he described what he did, by the way, to some of my people in my family who are in this business of money managing and whatnot, and they all said, based on what he described, these are English words that you can put in a certain order in a sentence.
It doesn't necessarily mean it makes any sense at all.
And then you'll hear Tulsi Gabbard, when he changed reviews, and he says there's no way he can explain what he did and how that was connected.
But, you know, he said he was Jewish.
Can I read the quote?
Yeah, please!
Okay, because honestly, again, and every now and then, I like to update what I like to call my hall of fame of rhetoric.
These moments where people take human understanding and English language to new places, right?
And shamelessness.
And we've talked about in the past, like one of the gold standards for me was of course the old, I'm not a witch, I'm you.
Which was just one of the greatest moments in American politics, right?
This is Pretty fantastic.
This is George Santos, who got a ton of money and clout and position within the Republican Party and Republican politics by claiming that he was Jewish.
It turns out, Nick, and not just that he was Jewish, but that his family had escaped the Holocaust.
Right?
Which is, I mean, like, it's a story they told.
And now, this is one of the most blatantly disgusting things I've ever read in terms of a quote.
He did this interview to quote-unquote clear things up with the New York Post.
This is great.
Quote, I never claimed to be Jewish, Santos said.
I'm Catholic.
Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background, I said I was Jew-ish.
I gotta, can we go to the Buckrake Podcast Jewish correspondent Nick Halseman?
How does that make you feel?
How's that feel to hear that?
Jared, I knew he wasn't Jewish because he'd never shown up in any of the meetings, okay?
That's how we knew, so that was silly.
But, I mean, of course, he said he went to Horace Mann, an elite private school in New York, of whom I knew people, you know, going to college, who went there, and, you know, it is one of those very Tony schools.
Why?
Why is he lying about that?
You know, so here's what's weird.
Is it a talented Mr. Ripley situation here, where he simply is pathological and should have, you know, shouldn't be anywhere near the Capitol?
Like, he shouldn't let a guy like this do that?
Because here's the thing that I think is what's really going on here.
I think that all of this that we're talking about about his past is just obfuscating the real crime here, which is how he funded the campaign.
So, he all of a sudden goes from making $55,000 a year and losing the congressional race in 2020 to making over a million dollars a year, of which he is now giving like $700,000 of it to his campaign in a few shots, right?
So, you can't donate money from a corporation directly to a campaign.
It has to be your own personal funds.
So this is exactly how you'd set up a completely illegal campaign, where a bunch of guys get together and say, hey, we're going to get this guy in because we're going to fund him up the wazoo.
We're going to make it look like it's his money.
But either A, they were so stupid about it, and they don't have the basic understanding of campaign finance law, which really is an excuse.
I think you'd still go to prison for that.
Or, well, you feel or.
Well, the or is that running a political campaign at this point next to crypto and NFTs is the best way to launder money in the world.
Aha!
Now that's fascinating, because then, yeah, you can redo Breaking Bad, and instead of a car wash, you could have a... Listen, you launder money through campaigns, particularly through dark money.
I mean, the moment, you know, the Citizens United worked out, everybody was just like, we're in the campaigning business, baby!
We're gonna get our beaks wet, we're gonna put it here, we're gonna move it over here.
On top of that, Since politics and culture, because it used to be the downstream relationship, they've all become merged together, thanks Newton Leroy Gingrich.
Everything now in the culture war means that people are going to be giving ungodly amounts of money to every possible political campaign and organization and cause.
You are seeing grifters come out of the woodwork.
You brought up Santos, not only with his money problems, but also, I mean, he's been wanted for bad checks left and right.
The next possible thing is to put on a suit and go out and claim you're Jewish and that you're a Republican shoo-in for Congress.
I mean, it is an open opportunity for grifters left and right.
That's how you get Marjorie Taylor Greene.
That's how you get Madison Cawthorne.
That's how you get Lauren Boebert, and that's how you get George Santos.
And I have to tell you, he's not the only chronic liar in Congress.
He just happens to maybe be the worst.
Yeah, and by the way, he's even trying to explain away his sudden riches by saying he was like some sort of middleman when a very wealthy person who has a yacht, let's say, wants to sell that yacht.
He will go find someone else that wants to buy that yacht, and he had the temerity to say, I can make $400,000 on that transaction.
Now, we know rich people.
That doesn't sound right to me.
If they're going to spend $1.2 million on a yacht, they're not going to give a quarter of that as a finder's fee to some guy named George Sanchez.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
But here's the thing.
Well, let me speak on that real fast, because actually that is a little bit of information our listeners might need to know.
The way that you launder money at a certain level is high priced items right whether it's a yacht or in particular real estate or i don't know uh office space in a place like i don't know i'm just gonna throw out just a random building here uh trump plaza And what do you do?
You pay more money for it than it needs to be paid.
Or you just happen to have a lot of cash lying around that you can go ahead and put in that and then it circulates inside the system.
And guess what?
It doesn't hurt, Nick, when you live in a world that, number one, doesn't regulate any of this.
And number two, depends on the criminal money circulating.
And these people, I have to tell you, somebody like a George Santos, who I have to say, Nick, because we are an upstanding podcast and we don't want to get sued, is only being alleged to do these things.
I'm sure as an upstanding business person, those people, they all of a sudden are seen as fixers.
They're seen as people that can be trusted to carry things out.
It's almost like this is the stuff that, I don't know, Jeffrey Epstein becomes trusted for the ability to move money and goods and people around from place to place.
And as you engage in certain activities with people, Nick, all of a sudden people trust you that you'll go and do things for them in places like Washington, D.C.
It's fascinating that you bring up Epstein, of all people, because we know why they trusted him, right?
They trusted him because he liked pictures, Jared.
They all trusted each other.
We'll say that.
And by trust, I mean that they blackmailed each other incessantly, in circles, over and over, like a washing machine.
Yes.
So, you know, this is what really probably happened.
There's about four or five, these really big, rich donors, of which some are probably connected to Russian oligarchs.
Just throwing it out there.
I don't want to get sued.
I'm shocked right now, Nick.
I'm shocked right now that we have some way or another figured Russian oligarchs are doing this because it's not like they're in the middle of all of it or Saudi.
They really like some, you know, trying to get their money into our political system, no matter what they, how they can try and do it.
They keep trying to do it.
So there's a four or five of these people.
They say, okay, we're going to buy this seat.
That's basically what they're going to do.
And we'll launder some money, whatever, too.
It'll help us this and that, whatever.
Why?
Are they choosing George Santos of all the people?
They could have had a pick of anybody to just run to him and set him up there, right?
This is what doesn't make sense to me.
Now, everybody knew the lies that he was telling in the Republican Party, and they didn't seem to mind.
So I start to wonder if, as my, you know, what's it called, my... Your antenna.
What's it called when you put the thing around the food?
Oh my god, this is COVID rain.
You know, the metal-y looking thing that you put on the casseroles.
Anyway.
You tinfoil?
You tinfoil!
Wow!
Tinfoil gear.
I'm the one with COVID.
That's terrible.
No, it's infected through the airways.
I put my tinfoil hat on and I'm thinking that there must be something related to Santos having something on them.
Oh, Santos doesn't have anything on anybody.
Santos probably has trouble putting his belt on in the morning.
Okay.
I have to remember, there's a reason why they chose him to prop him up into this situation.
They want Stooges!
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