I'm partly joking about him being openly gay and saying,
I don't know if that's actually true.
I don't know what his sexual orientation is, or whatever, but
I say that because now I'm wondering, did he just say that to appear moderate?
[MUSIC]
Bingo, nailed it again.
So that's us congressman George Santos, he's a Republican, and
he's a pathological liar.
And while we were covering the story a couple of days ago, Anna said,
I wonder if he's even gay.
He said he was a gay Republican, and it turns out he might not be, [LAUGH] okay?
Of course, everything they say is a lie.
Everything they say is a lie.
And so we talked about why he might pretend to be a gay Republican.
What an interesting comment on the times that we live in?
And by the way, about the press in American policy.
I'm gonna get back to that cuz that's a really important issue,
and I'm gonna show you the rest of that clip.
But first let me tell you why Anna, and by the way, I'm not saying anything.
But I was also right.
[LAUGH] we'll see that a little bit later.
Did I just say it?
Okay, [LAUGH] but first let me show you what Santos said himself.
He said, I'm openly gay, have never experienced discrimination in
the Republican Party, and I can tell you and
assure you I will always be an advocate for LGBTQ folks, okay?
So he says, don't worry about the Republican Party.
We're all angels, we all love LGBTQ folks.
I'm LGBTQ, and for a decade everybody has been nothing but lovely to me, by the way,
as they were passing over 600 anti-gay bills all across the country, right?
And in fact Santos defended, Don't Say Gay Bill in Florida, and
said it's okay cuz I'm gay, are you?
Let's find out.
So Daily Beast has a story out today, according to court records,
Santos appears to be the subject of a previously unacknowledged
September 2019 divorce with a woman in Queens County, New York.
Say it with me, of course, of course,
of course all they do is lie.
I'm gonna get to why in a second.
But one last thing from [LAUGH] his website, and
they're quoting here from his bio, Daily Beast says Santos has been
living comfortably as an openly gay man for, as he says, more than a decade.
Now, I did the math on 2019, and
it turns out that's not 11 years ago, that's only 3 years ago.
And so look, is it possible that he was married,
but he was gay, and then he broke up with her and
then is living his true life as a gay Republican man in America?
It's possible.
But what is not possible is that he's been out for a decade, and
everybody's been cool with it.
So you already know that's a giant lie, okay?
And then secondly, he then said, I'm now married with a husband,
and they have four dogs, blah blah blah.
Let me just tell you now, and you will see this being confirmed in a couple of days,
already, there are hints of it being confirmed he ain't married, he and
I don't have a husband.
He made that part up too, okay?
And by the way, when they looked into it, it's not definitive yet, but they're like,
the husband is nowhere to be found, okay, cuz the guy is a pathological liar.
Why he did it is super interesting.
But Rayvanna, I wanna pause to get your thoughts on.
>> I mean, I think you can make it work as a decade, Cenk.
You just forgot to factor in Republican math to just carry on, the one,
change some numbers around to make it fit whatever you want it to be.
I'll say there's something really vile,
to me, about co-opting a struggle that you have not been a part of,
to sort of fluff up the Republican Party's platform when it comes to gay issues to
pretend that you have been a proud gay man for decades or a decade or however long.
And that you've never received any sort of discrimination from the right-wing.
That the Republican Party doesn't stand for any kind of bigotry and
just essentially whitewashing all of the radical hate that has been directed
at the gay trans, broader queer community,
particularly the heightened attention on that in the past year or so
with all these anti-gay bills with all these anti-trans bills.
And just pretending that nothing is going on, I'm a part of the community,
I haven't suffered, but all along that was a lie.
>> Yeah, now there's a second angle to this.
Because one is to protect the Republican Party, but remember he's trying to win
a congressional seat here, and he lost in 2020 running as a Trump guy.
In fact, let's go back to that clip from a couple of days ago when Anna and
I were talking about this.
And let's see if we can find out who else was right about perhaps his motivations.
>> I'm partly joking about him being openly gay and saying,
I don't know if that's actually true.
I don't know what his sexual orientation is or whatever, but
I say that because now I'm wondering, did he just say that to appear moderate?
>> Yeah, if you say gay Republican to a mainstream media guy,
they'll be like, that's perfect, moderate republican, love it, right?
>> Right.
>> And this guy is obviously a pathological liar.
So we don't know what's true, what's not true anymore,
including whether he's gay or not.
[MUSIC]
[LAUGH] What?
I haven't said a word.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] Okay, so look guys,
this story is not telling just about George Santos.
And then the first time we did the story, we gave you his long list of lies,
including a pet charity, which he doesn't have, right?
He just lied about every single part of his resume.
And we'll get to some more of his lies in a minute.
But Rayvanna, I think it's very telling that he ran as a Trump Republican in 2020,
lost, then realized, no, I've gotta appear to be a more moderate Republican.
So it looks like he might have lied and said,
I'm a gay republican to appear moderate, and guess what?
That kinda worked.
All these stories came out after the election, but not during the election.
During the election, he was treated as a moderate and won.
>> First I wanna congratulate you and Anna on your vindication with the story.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] But I mean, yeah,
we see that so many times,
Republicans are willing to just adapt to whatever they need to be to win.
This guy is on his Dave Rubin type beat right now to win this election.
But ultimately I feel bad for the people who are his constituents because there's
really no way now to get him out of office except for to wait for the next two years.
So all this came out, like you said, after they already voted.
So now, all that's left is he's got two years, and then they can vote him out.
There's not really a good mechanism for removing him otherwise,
despite the fact that he led a campaign entirely based off of lies about even
the most ridiculous parts of who he is.
So, I mean, it sucks for them.
It really does, it just sucks for them.
>> Yeah, all these investigations should have been done ahead in time.
And look, we joke around about how ha ha we were right, right?
But there's a real point there, which is that if we can accurately guess,
a counterintuitive guess, that he would wanna pretend to be gay,
even though he's a Republican to trick the press into calling him a moderate,
and we were right about that.
Maybe that means we're right about how the press treats politics, and
how they viewed from an identity politics point of view, how they wanna soften up
republicans and make them appear to be more moderate than they actually are.
And I can go on and on.
And by the way, he lied about the college that he went to,
he lied about the top firms that he worked at.
They all say he didn't work at any of those firms.
And then, quickly, I'll tell you the new set of lights that were exposed today.
Santos, who's called himself half Jewish, of course, and
a Latino Jew in media appearances and claimed his material grandfather was
originally from Ukraine and fled to Brazil to escape Nazism.
A heroic story indeed.
Number two, the New York Republican said his grandparents converted to Catholicism
during the rise of Nazism in Belgium after fleeing Joseph Stalin, and
the Soviet Union, so he's the victim of everyone.
He claimed his family changed their name to survive Nazism to Santos.
Now, here's the actual reality.
Records from the holocaust Museum and
International Center on Nazi persecution show no mention of Santos' grandparents.
Family histories from websites, MyHeritage and Genearnet, and
Dutch periodical from the town, the family emigrated from show his material
grandparents, Paulo and Rosalina Devolder were both born in Brazil.
And Santos' ties to Ukraine were only added to his campaign biography sometime
between April 2022 and October 2022.
In other words, every single thing he said was a lie.
And to me, it's not a story about, wow, that's so
different than all the other politicians.
He's just a more extreme case of a fairly regular Republican politician.