By Jenny Braddock
April 26, 2025
At first, George Santos seemed like a one-off — a walking résumé of lies stitched together with dental floss and desperation. A fake Jew, a fake volleyball champion, a fake Wall Street bro, a fake philanthropist, a fake 9/11 orphan, a fake Pulse survivor, a fake landlord, a fake victim of muggings so elaborate even Quentin Tarantino would’ve sent him notes. He moonlighted as a Brazilian drag queen named Kitara Ravache (CNN), swindled a disabled veteran’s dying dog out of cancer treatment money, and then—somehow—got elected to Congress without a single adult in the room checking his paperwork (NBC News).
But George Santos wasn’t an accident.
He was an inevitability.
A glitch in the Matrix? No.
He’s the logical endpoint of a political culture that replaced truth with theater — where storytelling is a survival skill, and reality is just a suggestion.
When every institution decides it’s easier to market fantasy than govern reality, you don’t get statesmen.
You get shapeshifters.
You get Kitara in Congress.
And George Santos wasn’t even the final boss — he was just the beta test.
A proof of concept.
He wasn’t just a liar.
He was the first fully synthetic politician.
A man so hollow, so aggressively performative, that even when he got caught, it barely registered.
Because by then, it wasn’t about facts.
It was about the show.
Welcome to Fantasy Politics:
The game where reality is a nuisance, and belief is the only currency that matters.
And it’s not just the politicians anymore. The air is thick with it.
Joe Rogan mixes astrophysics with paranoid conspiracies and calls it “just asking questions” (NPR).
Newsmax pumps out material with more right spin than Aaron Nola’s curveball in October (Media Matters).
The whole ecosystem has adapted: if the truth doesn’t fit the mood, you just stitch up a new one and throw it into the feed.
If Santos seemed like a glitch, that’s only because he was sloppier than the others.
The next wave has better haircuts, cleaner PR teams, and venture capital backing.
Look around.
RFK Jr. is out there mixing genuine scientific credentials with anti-vax fever dreams (AP News), like some deranged bartender blending cure-alls with cyanide shots.
Joe Rogan is running an open mic night for fantasy merchants — a few sober scientists, a few snake oil salesmen, all mashed together into one big libertarian brain smoothie.
Kari Lake traded in her news anchor smile for a full-time cosplay of “the Real America,” hawking conspiracy theories with the same lacquered professionalism she once reserved for traffic updates.
And of course, Trump — the carnival barker who built an entire political empire on lies so loud they drown out the floor collapsing beneath your feet.
The new class of political influencers doesn’t have to fool everyone.
They just have to keep enough people so confused, so exhausted, so half-believing in half-truths, that reality itself becomes negotiable.
Could Santos have pulled this off twenty or thirty years ago? Probably not.
Back then, you still had local newspapers, party machines, and a public that hadn’t been fully desensitized yet.
You couldn’t just fabricate a whole mythology on Facebook and ride it straight into Congress.
You had to survive scrutiny.
You had to survive editors.
You had to survive reality.
But now?
Now, reality is just another brand — and most of the gatekeepers have traded in their badges for podcast microphones.
Where does it end?
Maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe the truth isn’t just wounded — maybe it’s obsolete.
Maybe the future isn’t a fight over facts, but a battle between competing fantasy franchises, each selling a version of reality like a streaming service sells prestige drama.
Pick your plot.
Choose your heroes.
Vote for your hallucination.
There’s a line in the Bible — John 8:44 — about the devil being “the father of lies and half-truths.”
Maybe the more dangerous villain was never the one who lied outright.
Maybe it was the one who knew how to stitch just enough truth into the costume to make you wear it willingly.
George Santos didn’t break anything.
He just pulled the mask off early.
This week, a federal judge finally handed down the bill: 87 months in prison (NYT).
Seven years, give or take — assuming he serves most of it, which in this country is always a bad bet.
Is that real accountability?
Or just a slapstick finale for the beta test?
Because the mold is already made.
And the next synthetic politician won’t be so sloppy.
The next ones will have better costumes.
Tighter stories.
Cleaner bank accounts.
And a better TikTok strategy.
Filed from a drag show at the Flight Club, where sequins hit the floor faster than the truth, and democracy is staggering home without its shoes.
