This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
Just when we thought we were safely coasting into the new year with the last 12 months of aggravations in the rear view mirror, George Santos, as is his wont, has careened into our path, forcing us to take one last emergency detour into annoyance and disgust.
This time, however, it’s not entirely his fault.
We’re a community of Dr. Frankensteins, and he is our media monster. But here’s the thing: We don’t have to nurture him. He doesn’t have to thrive. We can ignore him, starve him of the attention he craves, and allow him to wither away. So why don’t we?
The most annoying part of pop culture passing off the disgraced congressman—who defrauded constituents, broke laws, and is facing federal charges—like a cheeky little bugger who we can’t just quit is that we asked for it. Santos’ interview this week with Ziwe, the internet personality whose talk show ran on Showtime for two seasons and who is known for interviewing menaces of the zeitgeist, exists because we willed it to. Following Santos’ expulsion from Congress, people on social media posted their desire for this interview to happen, prompting an entire production to manifest; this was not a pre-existing show that merely booked Santos as a guest. My response to that is: Why???
Platforming crooks and the most despicable of political attention whores has become a bit of an obsession of ours as a society, with letting them do a cha-cha-cha on Dancing With the Stars being the quickest and most reliable path to a lucrative talking head contract on cable news. But I’m surprised that we’ve devised new routes to that morally corrupt career trajectory with Santos, who went viral because people thought it would be hilarious to book him for Cameo videos—in which he’s paid to send personalized messages—and has had people suggesting he’d make for an iconic Bravo reality star.
We’ve normalized a perverted impulse—a fetish, really—for turning tyrannists into court jesters. Yet even that implies the people cheering on the “naughty” entertainment value derived from these moral-less crooks are celebrating from any high court of substance. Instead, they’re social media lemmings cooing “yaaas” affirmations at content being served to them. Clips like this video capitalize on the assumption that we don’t care about any responsible ramifications for anointing a person like Santos as a pop-culture guilty pleasure.
Moments from the Ziwe interview were clipped, memed, and spread across social media in the same fashion that the biggest moments from our favorite TV shows are. Ziwe is good at her job of antagonizing and trapping her guests. I just fail to find amusement in the obviousness of Santos being the target, nor in his volleying with her; you can see his self-satisfaction, fully aware that he’s creating content that people online will lap up and praise him for.
Take the sequence in which we learn that Santos, who exhibits no shame, claims he doesn’t know who queer civil rights activists Martha P. Johnson, James Baldwin, and Harvey Milk are. In what way is this an own? Who are the people who are wildly entertained by the “surprise” that *George Santos* is uneducated about these historical figures? In other moments, he tosses off one liners with confidence, like he fully prepared for this. I don’t just hate that he is being passed off as entertainment; I loathe that he even comes off as shrewd. This was a platform. This was an audition reel, provided by the producers of this video. And Santos booked the part.
He’s not exposed in any way as the corrupt dipshit we already know him to be, thanks to actual journalism and reporting. This is exposure, the on ramp to what will depressingly be a lucrative career as a media personality. Why are we all so eager to be complicit in gifting that to him? That’s what is especially upsetting about this. It’s not like Santos hired a team that worked doggedly to get him access to publicity. He was barely out of office before people on social media asked for this interview to happen. We begged for this.
That’s the most damning part, and the point in which the interview revealed itself as a failure. Ziwe, I guess provocatively, asks Santos what we can do to get him to go away. He lights up. “Stop inviting me to your gigs,” he says. “The lesson is to stop inviting you places,” she responds, to which he says, “But you can’t. Because people want the content.”
His eyes radiated evil as he said it. It was unsettling, as if he had summoned the spirits of every movie villain as he said it. Only this isn’t a movie. It’s real life, at a time when we’ve not just allowed but encouraged narcissistic depravity from the people who are supposed to be in service of justice, our future, and our safety. People like Santos know that they have the safety net of fame, notoriety, and a booming media career as a reward for their so-called entertaining failure. They’ve seen it happen to others before them plenty of times.
I beg for this to end in the New Year, yet I suspect the costume designers at The Masked Singer are already deciding what to dress Santos up as, while CNN and Fox News’ producers are competing to offer him contracts.
