George Santos is not qualified to be in the U.S. Congress and Kevin McCarthy knows it!

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Nicholas Goldberg:

George Santos lies and he must resign from Congress!

In Shakespeare’s plays or, say, the Victorian novels of Charles Dickens, Trollope and Jane Austen, there are often at least two plots moving forward at any moment: a serious dramatic story involving the work’s main heroes and villains and a comic subplot peopled by absurd characters.

In the real world, we have comic subplots as well. Take the liar Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.), who — while American democracy has spun out of control, the U.S. Capitol was overrun and Donald Trump became a serious contender for reelection — wanders on and off the national stage like a ditzy clown  🤡keeping the audience amused.

Santos has been a recurring joke in the midst of our otherwise terrifying and riveting political drama — a somewhat doughy, somewhat hapless Mr. Magoo-turned-con man in a blazer, sweater and chinos. He is a fraudster who told lie after ridiculous lie, ad absurdum, about his family background, education and job experience and, though caught in the act, steadfastly refused to be held accountable.

His free ride, though, could be coming to an end. Federal prosecutors in New York announced Wednesday that the 34-year-old freshman congressman has been charged with a wide range of not-so-funny crimes, including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and making false statements to Congress. In short, they allege, he deceived and defrauded campaign donors and the U.S. government.


Santos turned himself in to federal authorities on Long Island on Wednesday morning and pleaded not guilty to the charges. He said he would not resign and that he’s been subjected to a — you guessed it! — “witch hunt.”

As my mom used to say, it’s all fun and games until it’s not. Santos has been a national punchline in one of the weirdest scandals in U.S. congressional history (and we’re talking about a governmental body that was once home to Anthony Wiener!). But now he may be written out of the story altogether. The U.S. attorney’s office says he could face up to 20 years in prison on the top counts.

The absurdity of the Santos situation first became clear to me when I watched a video of him trying to find his way through the House office buildings, lost but perpetually moving because he was being trailed and hounded at every step by a scrum of bloodthirsty reporters. He tried to pretend they weren’t there; they had a great time at his expense.

He was barraged with questions like, “Hey George, what’s your name today?” He tried to look dignified, talking oh-so-seriously into his phone as he walked, though I highly doubt anyone was on the other end.



Santos quickly became the butt of the late-night shows.

“I don’t consider the things I’ve said to be lies,” said a straight-faced Jon Lovitz, impersonating Santos on Jimmy Fallon’s show. “They’re what my great-grandfather, Winston Churchill, would call ‘embellishments.’”

At the heart of the joke was the fact that his lies were so brazen and so egregious — and yet so mundane at the same time. So checkable and disprovable — yet so insignificant. Like when he said he had been a “star” on the volleyball team at Baruch College. I mean, who would lie about that?

It turns out he wasn’t on the volleyball team. And didn’t graduate from Baruch College at all. Nor did he attend the Horace Mann School, as he claimed. Nor did he work at Goldman Sachs or Citigroup.

He is not Jewish, as he repeatedly claimed to be. Or of Jewish descent. Or “Jew-ish,” as he later said he’d said.

Santos did not have grandparents that fled Hitler.

His mother was not in the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks. She wasn’t in the country at all.

Santos’ behavior was laughable, for sure, but also it was wrong, not to mention creepy. It was Jon Stewart, in the end, who pointed out the obvious: “We cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger,” he said. “Absurdity always makes you think something is more benign than it is.”

And it’s true: The endless fabrications are obviously not funny to Santos’ constituents on Long Island, who now, six months after the 2022 election, are still represented in Congress by a serial liar. Or to those who donated money for his election (some portion of which was spent, prosecutors say, on personal expenses including “luxury designer clothing”).

But Stewart meant more than just that. He was referring to how so many people — himself included — had failed to take Donald Trump seriously at first, seeing him as a harmless clown like Santos.

Trump did seem like a joke in those early days. He said outrageous things, told endless lies, pushed kooky conspiracy theories and seemed to have little argument for why Americans should vote for him other than that he was a flashy, rich, irreverent TV star.

Anyone who doesn’t remember how improbable it all seemed should watch the clip (which I saw recently courtesy of journalist Peter Beinart‘s newsletter) of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos and a panel of so-called political experts in July 2015.

In it, Ellison says that people who oppose Trump ought to get active, get involved and vote.

“This man has got some momentum and we’d better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket,” says Ellison.

At that point everyone on the show bursts into laughter. Peals of laughter, really. Stephanopoulos, grinning, says — and I don’t really blame him for this error of enormous historical magnitude, because I probably would have felt the same way — “I know you don’t believe that.”

Ellison doesn’t join in the laughter. He says: “Stranger things have happened.”

President Santos anyone?

A sobering review of political violence in America

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-08/political-violence-united-states-paul-pelosi-salman-rushdie

Echo Nicholas Goldberg Column published in the Los Angeles Times: Don’t turn away from the rising tide of political violence in America.

Political violence in America reviewed

On the Friday in October when (a deranged!) David DePape burst into the San Francisco house where 82-year-old Paul Pelosi was sleeping and allegedly beat him with a hammer, fracturing his skull, most Americans were shocked, horrified and disgusted.

Pelosi was brutally assaulted in what prosecutors have called a politically motivated attempt to capture, kidnap and torture his wife, Nancy, then the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

But should we have been shocked? I don’t think so. It was entirely in keeping with our current political climate, the bitter, polarized culture that has been teetering on the tense edge of violence for years. And it was far from unprecedented.

Only a few months earlier, in August, the novelist Salman Rushdie was violently attacked, not in Iran or Pakistan, but in upstate New York. A 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar stormed the stage where Rushdie was to speak and allegedly stabbed the 75-year-old author more than a dozen times in front of the audience, presumably as punishment for what Rushdie has written about Islam.

The attack left Rushdie blind in one eye, unable to use one of his hands and wounded in his neck, chest and torso.

Before that, in June, an armed man was arrested outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house in Maryland. He was charged with “attempts to kidnap or murder” the justice.

Salman Rushdie and the Price of Free Speech

As usual with the fast-moving American news cycle, these three unrelated incidents captured our attention for a few days. Then the world moved on.

But they shouldn’t be allowed to fade so quickly. Because they aren’t merely the isolated acts of deranged individuals. They’re part of a wave of political violence that has been spreading through the country. That’s something we have to face up to as we take stock of the year that just ended.

And it‘s not like it just appeared out of nowhere in 2022. 

In fact, the Anti-Defamation League said last February that 443 people had been killed by extremists in the U.S. over the previous 10 years. That doesn’t count mob violence, death threats, kidnapping plots or individual acts of less-than-lethal assault. There were 10 times as many threats against members of Congress in 2021 as there were in 2016. Local public officials increasingly say they fear for their safety.

Of course, we’ve always had political violence in America. It goes back to the anti-tax mobs of the Whiskey Rebellion during George Washington’s presidency, the assassination of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth in 1865, and the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist in 1901.

Over the years, America has experienced violence related to slavery, immigration, the military draft and anti-Catholic sentiment. The country was particularly scarred by the scourge of anti-Black lynching.

More recently, in the tumultuous 1960s, the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, as well as of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, shocked the nation, as did violence from militant groups on the left such as the Weather Underground in the early 1970s.

In 1995, 168 people were killed in Oklahoma City, when a right-wing, antigovernmental bomber planted a powerful explosive in a federal office building.

Of course, we’ve always had political violence in America. It goes back to the anti-tax mobs of the Whiskey Rebellion during George Washington’s presidency, the assassination of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth in 1865 and the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist in 1901.

Over the years, America has experienced violence related to slavery, immigration, the military draft and anti-Catholic sentiment. The country was particularly scarred by the scourge of anti-Black lynching. 


More recently, in the tumultuous 1960s, the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, as well as of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, shocked the nation, as did violence from militant groups on the left such as the Weather Underground in the early 1970s.

In 1995, 168 people were killed in Oklahoma City, when a right-wing, antigovernmental bomber planted a powerful explosive in a federal office building.

So political violence is hardly unheard-of, and American democracy won’t necessarily come crashing down because a subset of extremists believe it’s time to take matters into their own hands. We’ve survived it before.

But if we’re to do so again, it cannot be sloughed off with the shifting news cycle.

This time, the violence is coming mostly from the far right. According to the ADL, 75% of those killed by extremists in the decade ending in December 2021, were killed by right-wing extremists. (Although there are certainly exceptions, including the shooting of GOP Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana at a baseball game in 2017 by a man with a grudge against Republicans.)

Many people who support violence seem to be fueled by grievance and economic anxiety, white supremacist ideologies and crazy conspiracy theories like those associated with QAnon. Social media has an irresponsible magnifying effect, sometimes provoking or normalizing violence. The danger is increased by easy access to guns.

It has also been fueled in recent years by President Trump.

Some analysts date the latest wave of violence to the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where one person died and Trump praised the “very fine people on both sides.” (❗ ) 

In 2021, Trump’s false allegations of election fraud “provoked his supporters to violence” at the U.S. Capitol, according to the recent report of the House committee investigating the events of January 6.

What else is driving this? Polls show that about one-fifth of Americans say violence can be justified to “advance an important political objective.” In 2017, and 2018, professors Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason found that about 40% of Democrats and Republicans agreed that the adherents of the opposing party were “not just worse for politics, but downright evil.”

(Delusional)....DePape said that in targeting Nancy Pelosi, he was “fighting tyranny.”

On the positive side for a moment, violence that had been predicted to coincide with the 2022, midterm elections didn’t come to pass.

When the results didn’t go exactly as the right had hoped, there was no new “Stop the Steal” movement to speak of, no riots at the Capitol, no extremist explosion.

Trumpziism "Stop the steal" is fake news!

Trump meanwhile, is declining in popularity. Many Republicans seem prepared to move on from him.

But the underlying threat isn’t gone. Even if Trump fades from the scene, the bitterness and sense of grievance that helped propel him to power continue to exist.

We count and categorize episodes of serious political violence to study the phenomenon and to buttress attempts to combat it. Now, as 2023 gets underway, we need to acknowledge the deep problems they reflect in our society, problems that must be reversed, not exacerbated.

@Nick_Goldberg

Nicholas Goldberg served 11 years as editor of the editorial page and is a former editor of the Op-Ed page and Sunday Opinion section.

Fascism and right wing Trumpist extremism

"Fascism is identified most commonly with Benito Mussolini’s Italy. It is also used to describe Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain, among others.  (Fascism is threatening American democracy!)

Maine Writer: In my opinion Trupziism=Fascism.

It is characterized by militarism and nationalism, usually with a strong dictatorial leader benefiting from a cult of personality. Fascist regimes are often prejudiced against marginalized groups. Their leaders reject liberal democracy, tend to emphasize social and economic control and are generally not averse to the use of violence," Nicholas Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times.

"Fascism does not merely condone violence, it is violence," George Will in The Washington Post. 

"The Republican Party has embraced American fascism, an anti-democratic ideology that is unique to the US and is engrained deeper in Americans' collective consciousness and history than most of us have been taught," Linette Lopez in Business Insider

Two opinion echo letters published in the Los Angeles Times: 

To the editor: Nicholas Goldberg defined fascism as “a terrifying totalitarian movement that plunged the world into an era of near-cataclysmic violence.” Isn’t the sordid spectacle of the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)- held in  a disconcerting sign of what our future holds? Thousands of predominantly white Republican Christian nationalists worshiping a golden idol in rhapsodic frenzy was not simply “un-American” — this was the U.S. version of the Nuremberg rallies.

From Melissa Verdugo, Rancho Palos Verdes, California

To the editor: My understanding of fascism, as associated with Mussolini’s regime, was a nationalist economic philosophy where the benefits of government, industrial complex and military were aligned to the detriment of the individual. I believe President Eisenhower was trying to warn us about this in his farewell speech.

Since dictators Mussolini and Hitler were the “face” of fascism, their despicable authoritarian policies, racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism overshadowed the economics and became the connotation for “fascist” — in particular to those born after 1945, who only know of World War II from history books.

Gilbert H. Skopp, Calabasas California