The Gospel of St. George

How the mythology of George Santos, Washington's Pied-Piper, holds a mirror up to our ruling class and exposes its ignoble lies

In the final scene from Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the insanity of the task in which the British soldiers embarked over the course of the film comes to heel. The soldiers in dutiful submission to the objective, would soon to their great peril find themselves unreflective busybodies on a suicidal task that nobody had even thought to question until it was too late. This leads to the collapse of the bridge and the haunting indictment of it all captured in the film’s final line: “Madness! Madness!”

In many ways, modern America appears to be on an eerily similar trajectory. We are all like cogs pushing this insane machine closer and closer to the cliff. Those who would say “hold up a second!” are immediately chastised as heretics. What, you ask, is their heresy?  It is maybe providing a gentle reminder that at some point the center will not hold and everything will at once come crashing down. That pang of existential recognition, however marginal and fleeting, is, alas, simply too much for our regime apparatchiks to bear, increasingly fragile in their mental, physical, and spiritual constitutions. To be reminded that their lifework – to the extent people engage in true work anymore – is not just a lost cause, but a suicidal pact – indeed, a Faustian pact with the devil himself – is the gravest of all possible sins, in the eyes of the ruling class and its institutional incubators.

And so, enter George Santos.

New York’s freshman congressman has taken Washington by storm and has already achieved a level of notoriety in a matter of weeks that only an elect few obtain over a lifetime in our nation’s capital. To be fair, the overwhelming majority of press coverage to date, save the occasional exposé from an iconoclastic outfit, has been negative. Which is in a certain way appropriate: Santos swindled his way into a congressional seat, after all, by lying about central biographical details of his professional and personal life. Revolver News, as just one example, highlighted but a few of these falsehoods – from fabricating his ethnicity (Santos was not in fact the descendant of Jews who fled the Holocaust, but the son of Brazilian immigrants), to his sexuality (Santos was once married to a woman despite claiming to be gay before outed as straight, only to apparently(?) revert back to being gay), to his work in the private sector (there is no record of his ever being employed by Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, only Dish Network) to maybe the most brazen (and comical) fib of all, his religion (Santos is not Jewish, only “Jew-ish”).

Of course, when placed in the context of the lies told by Washington, DC – a city born of the ignoble lie, and ostensibly each day reaffirms itself as the mortal enemy par excellence of the truth (should it ever devote all its resources in search of truth, it would not know where to start looking), Santos’ lies (which are more like embellishments in DC-parlance) about his backstory seem amateurish, indeed, almost endearingly innocent by comparison. And yet, Washington and its legionnaires in the press have been working overtime to scapegoat Mr. Santos and make him into the sacrificial lamb on the altar of those who dare make a mockery of the sacred Uniparty narrative.

Thankfully, the impetuosity which has carried Mr. Santos all the way to a congressional seat has, with the media backlash, apparently kicked into high gear almost like a survival instinct. When asked whether he would resign, Mr. Santos doubled down on his commitment to serve out his two years, proclaiming in the most steadfast of terms: “I will NOT resign!”

Good for him. It is interesting that many of the calls for Santos’ resignation have come from local Republican leaders – people like Joseph Cairo, chair of the Nassau County Republicans – the county in which Santos’ third congressional district, is located. These are the people who Santos played like a fiddle, who likely in the not-too-distant past bought into the freshman congressman’s fabrications hook, line, and sinker – only to turn around and betray the man when it became expedient to do so. Of course, for these people, nothing short of what little integrity they have is on the line. Santos’ myths, when fleshed out on paper, are so brazen, so obnoxiously ridiculous, that it is a miracle anyone bought into them in the first place, thus making it all the more humiliating for those who did.

But they did. And now at the moment of reckoning, those who look idiotic for being played so thoroughly the fools they are, must relapse into the cozy safeguards of the matrix and try to prop up some dummy hack replacement, one who would never in a million years challenge the system like Santos would, in the best case scenario, if a Republican, and in the worst case (the likelier prospect), guarantee a seamless Democratic victory (and fortify the third congressional district on behalf of the Democratic Party for good).

But Santos’ hijinks (a more appropriate word, given that the brazenness of his lies has been almost elevated to an artform) indict more than just local party bosses, who, as local politicos, in their infinite inadequacy, lord over what precious little clout they possess, immediately rebounding to the Party Line at the slightest instance of adversity. Nay, they indict the entire professional ruling class and its purveyors of regime agitprop – from the universities to the financial institutions on Wall Street to the party leaders in Washington. It is one matter for Santos to have successfully conned some schmuck boss from Long Island, where it is almost an expectation that incompetency will be baked into the cake. It is another matter entirely to pull this chicanery on our august ruling class seated in the Empire’s Capital, wherein serious statesmen and stateswomen attend to serious political matters on the daily. And who, in their unfailing wisdom, are far too intelligent to fall for the cheap ruses of some fraudster from Queens (who may not even have a college degree – an act bordering on apostasy for those select few who patriotically heed the calls of their fellow citizens by following our nation’s forefathers in sacrificially putting their private lives on hold in service to the common good [and never, of course, for personal self-enhancement], and take up the mantle by making the pilgrimage, a la Cincinnatus, to America’s Rome — nobly serving out their term in office).

It is said with greater regularity today that for all its nonstop talk of diversity (itself proof of the concept’s scarcity), our late-stage republic has become paralytically homogenous to the point where now even Sean Hannity extols the diversity of his party as the preponderant virtue of the new Republican House of Representatives (vindicating yet again the conservative movement’s failure to break free from a fundamentally liberal frame of reference). Where in yesteryear America exalted the maverick, the iconoclast, the freethinker who could stand athwart popular opinion, today those types – increasingly few and far between – are labeled de facto enemies of the state, to be quashed out by the hordes of busybody middlemen – themselves, spiritual bureaucrats, lawyerlike in their axiomatic and parochial rule-abidingness, perceiving as a threat he who dares buck, howsoever trivial, the Official Regime Narrative. Of course, nobody deigns to ever pause for a minute and take three steps back and question the insanity of the whole damn thing – whose great accomplishments include the predatory exploitation of schoolchildren with sexual grooming at younger and younger ages; to the suicidal economic policies that have squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on winless foreign expeditions, that money never audited and its patrons never held accountable; to the inability to carry out basic, first order tasks like running a halfway functional rail system, to say nothing of keeping the bloody airplanes in the sky (of course it would be far, far too much – likely deemed racist – to ask they arrive at their destinations on time).

And so, we return to Santos – that somewhat goofy, cartoonish looking fella from Queens – who has managed to beclown the ruling class, not from exhibiting any abundance of preternatural virtue (though his resilience to date is doubtless admirable), but for exposing them with a highly concentrated dosage of their own medicine. In an age in which the bureaucratic personality type is venerated as the highest form of citizenship – in part, because the system is designed to extirpate all individuality root and branch and dissimulate responsibility so that its most grievous trespasses evade judicial inspection; in part, because a critical threshold of the masses has been indoctrinated so thoroughly that they can no longer think freely in any meaningful capacity. A Santos type of character, who otherwise would probably never stand out in another age, now obtains a folkloric status in our own for his comparative individuality. Perhaps owing to his relative lack of education, he has managed to evade, unwittingly, the impressive, indoctrinating forces that make mincemeat of so many of his fellow countrymen today. Hence, to the extent he is criticized in a regime that is radically moralistic but has abdicated any true claim to morality, it can only ever be on the grounds of aesthetics. In composition, Santos’ fabrications, compared to those of the regime, are more brazen (which is to say, innocent). Any evil he committed, insofar as it is evil at all, pales so much to the horrors our ruling class has exacted, that to even try to compare the two soon enough reveals itself as a fool’s errand.

In short, George Santos and the hagiography he created for himself, maybe the closest our degenerative times can get to sainthood, is living testimony to that increasingly rare animal, now on the verge of extinction, which America once revered but seems to no longer have any use for: the individual. Indeed, George may not be the hero we need, but he is certainly the one we deserve. George Santos might not be George Washington coming to save us on horseback, but a noble pebble in the shoes of our ruling class. His mere existence is but a daily reminder of their incompetence and moral reprobation. Even in our times, the individual – however degraded from previous ages – can serve as a prophylactic counterforce. That is a role Santos has to date fulfilled, rather artfully, and quite effectively.

My advice to George: hold the line. Your resilience is virtuous – and despite the current media onslaught, your obstinance will be rewarded, and probably sooner than later. In the United States of Amnesia, attention spans only last as long as the latest news cycle. Your misfortunate was less the result of any real sin, and more the product of a slow news week. Like the litany of Democrats who lied about their backgrounds – from Elizabeth Warren and her phony claims of Native American ancestry, to AOC’s deceits about her impoverished childhood – yours will similarly overtime be relegated to a mere footnote once the initial shock of the myth wears off, and you — like the others — become yet another familiar face absorbed into the system.

For the time being, however, while that novelty endures, you should keep making good use of it: namely, as a reminder of the singular power that an individual, however imperfect, can have to force our government of homogenous talking heads to come to reckon with the ugly truths of their ways, which, like the British soldiers, are likewise on a suicidal trip. And lest we hope more people wake up (and do so quickly), ours will meet a similar fate as the crashing train from the movie — whose catastrophic depths might not even be adequately captured in those lines conveying that momentary pang of self-awareness: Madness! Madness!

Paul Ingrassia is a two-time Claremont Fellow: he was the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation John Marshall Fellow for 2022 and a Publius Fellow in 2020. Mr. Ingrassia graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022. His Twitter handle is: @PaulIngrassia.