By Noah Brasseur
No, seriously, what’s going on with George Santos?
For those who do not know, Santos is a newly-elected member of the House of Representatives from New York. Santos, a Republican, went head-to-head against Robert Zimmerman, making it the first race in congressional history to have two openly gay candidates opposing each other. Santos himself is married.
Santos, beyond being a representative, graduated with a degree in economics and finance from Baruch College in 2010, worked at Wall Street companies Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and made millions at a company he founded himself afterwards.
Santos is a charitable man, too, he ran Friends of Pets United. Which is a charity that would save over 2,500 poor pets in five years, before it dissolved in 2018. His sense of giving and goodness may have stemmed from the tragedy that seems to stick with his family.
Santos’s mother died on 9/11. His grandmother died in the Holocaust. Four of his employees were victims of the Pulse mass shooting in 2016. Santos, himself, has been a victim to an assassination attempt.
Pretty wild life, right? What could possibly be controversial about all of that?
Here is the kicker, everything you just read? It is most likely an outright lie.
Santos may not be married. Nobody has been able to find any marriage record to any man, only a records of a divorce from a woman. He did not attend Baruch College, and both Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have stated they could not find any record of his employment.
His company, Devolder, had no public website or LinkedIn page. He has not given the name of any client he worked with. He has refused to explain where his fortune has come from.
Santos’s pet charity may also not be real, as there are no IRS records or social media pages for it. The closest thing to existence is trace records of a small fundraiser the group threw in 2017.
Even those deaths he listed can be called into question. Records have indicated that Santos’s mother was not in the Twin Towers on 9/11, in fact, she may not have even been in America. Documents indicate she was in Brazil in 2001.
His grandparents were born in Brazil, far away from Hitler’s terror. None of the victims of the Pulse shooting have employment records related to any of Santos’s projects.
Phew. That’s a lot, right? Well, one last thing is his name. People who claim to have known the man as a youth give his name as Anthony, not George. There are records that he has used the name Anthony Devolder in the past.
There might be an urge among some readers to dismiss the whole affair. It’s someone else’s representative, from another state, and they don’t really care for politics anyways. This entire saga is a testament to why this is not a good attitude to have.
Ignorance and apathy from the public allow people like Santos to sneak into positions of power. It’s only an informed populace that can keep the more shady folks away from it.
More on the topic can be found here.
