This may be your first day back to work in 2023. I want to tie together two, seemingly unrelated stories from the end of 2022.
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The first is our friend from Royal Island, George Santos.
Josh Marshall has summed up all the lies Santos has told, and all the trouble he may really be in. It is unclear whether Santos is even a United States citizen, which would make him ineligible for Congress. Swearing in is Tuesday, so we better find out stat whether he actually is eligible. For now, he really is an amazing headache for Republicans; they desperately need his vote, but keeping him around incurs an extremely high cost to their already damaged brand. No, I want to wind the clock back a couple of months, to the fall campaign.
Murc’s Law dictates that as soon as the news of George Santos broke, Democrats should be blamed. How could the Democrats have let this happen? For example:
The truth is, opposition research(1) did uncover Santos’ lies. And so did the local paper. There was no one left to report it, and no one in the National Media (right next door) was listening.
For those not from here, Santos’s district, NY-3, includes parts of the New York Time’s home turf. A small part, but still a part. And thus the claim by the Times is especially ludicrous.
Newsday, for what it’s worth, is a shadow of its former self. George Santos is one of the biggest stories of 2022, with National implications.
Buta story on Santos lying conflicted with the New York Times National narrative of a red wave, so they ignored it. Local papers have been so decimated(2), and the out of touch National political media is so blinkered, the local media outlets and the Democratic campaign were left to scream into the void.
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And that brings us to the second (seemingly unrelated) story from the end of 2022: Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. I had wrote about why Musk purchased Twitter a few weeks back. Since then:
You think Elon (and his investors(3)) would be mad about losing money. There’s a quote from the movie Tenet (2020)
People who've amassed fortunes like your husband generally are not OK with being cheated out of any of it.
No, this is money well spent, according to Elon and those who helped finance the purchase of Twitter. Elon Musk’s net worth collapse was driven by a collapse in Tesla’s stock price. People own those stocks. Rich people own lots of them.
You’d think those shareholders would be mad? Mad enough to, you know, replace Elon Musk as CEO? That’s something readily within their power. Or at least get Elon to stop being Elon? The fact that they won’t is a testament to their tacit approval. You see, these wealthy people are happy spending money for Elon to keep undermining liberal democracy. The destruction of Twitter was, as I noted, ultimately about destroying the main means of communication for liberal democracy. Now Elon wants to purchase Substack. Already, most major media is all owned by oligarchs, and exclusively liberal media is being increasingly paywalled by them.
And that is their plan for Democracy: for it to die in darkness.
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George Santos is a clown. But the fascist that does us in won’t be. And when that fascist comes for us, their plan is for there to be no accessible, liberal media left to report on it.
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(1) Santos’s Democratic opponent, and the New York State Democratic Party, are not blameless here.
(2) At the time the Santos story was breaking, Josh Marshall wrote this article on the Providence Journal.
(3) His investors are in the photo with him, above. None of them are good people who love Democracy.
