THE 2023 GOP

But where are the clowns?

There ought to be clowns...

Don’t bother, they’re here.

Yes indeed. The clowns are here, and they are easily able without even breaking a sweat to put those clowns I saw under an actual Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey bigtop when my grandmother took me to a real circus when I was five, to total shame.

I’m sure all the well-informed readers of TC’s Zoo were well aware that Marjorie Traitor Goon was a featured attraction at the gala of the New York Young Republicans, where she declared with regard to January 6 “I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

The crowed applauded and yelled for more.

While her proclamation about insurrection against the government of which she is an elected representative drew media attention, what took a few days to get remarked on was how the whole affair was a showcase for just how nutty and dangerous the GOP has become, how the craziness has not decreased in the aftermath of the midterms and is in fact only getting worse.

Yes, all the prominent election deniers championed by Trump lost those key statewide races and Democrats managed to improve their position in the Senate.

But two weeks from tomorrow, the House of Representatives will be under the control of a majority of House Republicans who are still Trump cultists and are still 2020 election deniers. And many are now even worse than that.

They make no effort to hide all that. Their politics of grievance, hatred, and conspiracy were on display at that NY Young Republicans event, as was reported by two researchers for the Southern Poverty Law Center who pointed out that Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, who each played a crucial role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election - and who are both being talked about at length today in the final presentation of the January 6 Special Committee - were celebrating the future with a guy like Peter Brimelow, the white nationalist founder of VDARE, a leading anti-immigration and white nationalist organization.

This is the same Peter Brimelow who traffics in the “Great Replacement” conspiracist fantasy, and published the “writing” of the terrorist who gunned down 24 people in an El Paso Wal-Mart in 2019. The same Peter Brimelow who was a featured guest at the white supremacist American Renaissance conference last month, a meeting whose host, Jared Taylor, has called Black people subhuman. The same Peter Brimelow who published Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Peter Brimelow are guys who represent views that Republicans I used to know were adamant had no place in their party. But here, they were featured guests.

So was professional ratfucker Roger Stone.

They were welcome because their views are now the mainstream of the 2023 Republican Party.

Josh Hammer, the conservative opinion editor of Newsweek Magazine, shared his table with Jack Posobiec, the nutcase who promoted the insane Pizzagate conspiracist fantasy.

Donald Trump Jr. - who reportedly looked “high as a kite” - was there; he gave a speech in which he said: “The [Republican] party is in a pretty good spot, but America may not be getting it. We have a party right now that is actually delivering for the American people. But what we don’t have [is] our same people in Washington, who can make those things happen.” He followed that up later in the week in an interview on Faux Snooze where he said that lib’ruls in social media are dredging up all these far right people to “discredit the conservative movement.”

‘Scuse me, Junior, we don’t have to do anything but let you loose in a room to do that.

Election denialism, white nationalism, conspiracy-peddling - this is now mainstream Republicanism.

Gavin Wax, the president of the New York Young Republican Club, told the crowd: “We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.”

He was cheered for that.

By doctors and lawyers and businessmen and the rest of the Republican bourgeoisie. Violent rhetoric is now de rigueur in Republican circles. Greene, who is now one of the most influential House Republicans, was cheered and applauded for “joking” about armed insurrection. By people who claim to believe in “law and order.”

And this is what the House Republicans promise to push for the next two years. Assuming they can actually elect a Speaker of the House. They do so despite a recent poll from Suffolk University showing only 5 percent of Americans want them to investigate the Biden administration and that 51 percent of respondents said any investigations into Biden are a political effort to embarrass the Biden administration. Only 38% believe the investigations are an appropriate way to hold Biden accountable. Interestingly, the top end of Republican support in polls is usually 35-38 percent, which suggests that support for investigations is almost all found in the Republican Party.

But the clowns will do this. They can’t stop themselves.

One other “person of interest” was at the Young Republicans shindig: George Santos, Representative in the House of Representatives from New York.

As of this morning, Santos is very definitely “a person of interest” politically. Per the New York Times, which has the story on page 1:

“Mr. Santos’s eight-point victory, in a district in northern Long Island and northeast Queens that previously favored Democrats, was considered a mild upset. He had lost decisively in the same district in 2020 to Tom Suozzi, then the Democratic incumbent, and had seemed to be too wedded to former President Donald J. Trump and his stances to flip his fortunes.

“His appearance earlier this month at a gala in Manhattan attended by white nationalists and right-wing conspiracy theorists underscored his ties to Mr. Trump’s right-wing base.

“George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the ‘full embodiment of the American dream’ and was running to safeguard it for others.”

According to the campaign biography on his website, Santos is the son of Brazilian immigrants, the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, a graduate of a New York City public college who became a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” running a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties, while setting up an animal rescue charity that 2,500 dogs and cats.

The only problem appears to be that every single “fact” in that biography is Compleat Bullshit. (Well, I don’t know about the “gay” part, but if that’s true, what a helluva embarrassment that is.)

Santos claimed he graduated from Baruch College in 2010, but officials there could find no record of anyone - using multiple variations of his first, middle and last names - being a member of the class of 2010. He also claimed to have studied at New York University, though the university found no attendance records matching his name and birth date.

Santos claims to have worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, both of which say they have no record of his ever working for them. Santos claimed that he became “an associate asset manager” in Citigroup’s real estate division after graduating from college in 2010, but a spokeswoman for Citigroup said she was unfamiliar with Mr. Santos’s self-described job title and noted that the company had sold off its asset management operations in 2005.

Santos claimed that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was a tax-exempt organization, but the IRS cannot find any record of a registered charity with that name.

What they did find out was that during the time he claimed to be in school, he was apparently living with his mother in Brazil, who was working as a domestic, and was arrested by Brazilian authorities for stealing the checkbook of one of his mother’s employers and attempting to forge checks for purchases. He was arrested and then released pending trial; the case is still open in Brazil because he never showed up.

Santos submitted financial disclosure forms that suggest he has money, since he lent his campaign $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization. On his campaign website, he once described Devolder as his “family’s firm”and that it managed assets worth $80 million. On his congressional financial disclosure, he describes Devolder as a capital introduction consulting company that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But the disclosures do not reveal any clients. Additionally, Santos has not disclosed, nor could The Times find, records of the properties he claimed to own and manage.

Santos also said in an interview on WNYC that his company “lost four employees” at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016. “But a Times review of news coverage and obituaries found that none of the 49 victims appear to have worked at the various firms named in his biography.”

And surprise surprise, he has boasted that he attended the January 6 rally (but not the riot) in support of Mr. Trump in Washington, and that he had written “a nice check for a law firm” to assist some rioters with their legal bills. These statements are now missing from his website.

“The Times attempted to interview Mr. Santos at the address where he is registered to vote and that was associated with a campaign donation he made in October, but a person at that address said on Sunday that she was not familiar with him.”

Democrats are already reported to be thinking about ways to deny Santos his seat in Congress, based on these lies.

Will Republicans join them in asserting that there are still some standards for elected leaders, and that lying about your entire life is not going to “cut it”? Will Qevin McQarthy give up one of the votes he claims to have in his campaign for Speaker?

I believe those can be listed under “self-answering questions.”

With a four-seat majority and a membership where many members openly hate and disdain others, the House Republicans will not be passing any serious or meaningful legislation, and nothing they do pass will make it onto the floor of the Senate for a vote.

That’s the good news.

But one sentiment unites the crowd at the Young Republicans soiree and Republicans in general: shamelessness. That’s Trump’s one major accomplishment: institutionalizing shamelessness in Republican politics. After watching a verifiable liar like Trump elected to the White House, it isn't exactly surprising to know that other men like Santos believe they can make it too.

As the Young Republicans in New York demonstrate, the “nice people” in the party like what they see when they look in the bathroom mirror in the morning: crazy, bigoted, extremist, laughing about violence, partying with white nationalists.

Subverting democracy.

Spreading paranoia, hatred and division.

And this party ain’t over. The next two years may see world record consumption of popcorn

But we’d damn well better be able to do superior oppo research over the next two years than the clucks in the New York Democratic Party did with Santos - and they had 2020 as well as 2022 to do it. Guys like Santos ARE the Republican Party now.

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