Stop Going To Colombia For Your Diluted Botox

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

This week, TPM provided you with a peek behind the image that George Santos has painstakingly crafted in recent weeks as a serial fabulist who lied about work at Goldman Sachs, Citi, family who perished in the Holocaust, the link between 9/11 and the death of his mother, and other elements of his past. That’s Santos’ work life, the formal portrait that we, loyal consumers of national political media, receive from on high.

TPM aimed this week to show you the real Santos, the guy behind the scenes. In this case, it took the form of an abortive attempt to decide whether to rescind a job offer to a prospective entry-level staffer named Derek Myers, who was trying to join Santos’ office from a perch as a reporter covering rural Ohio.

The audio shows Santos in a more casual environment, dishing about Botox injections, joking about weight gain, and munching on Brazilian candies. At times, he enters high dudgeon, attempting to project an aura of statesmanlike credibility as he questions Myers about the risks that he poses not to Santos himself, but to Congress, “the institution.”

The audio shows the kinds of personnel disputes and chaos that appear to reign in the Santos office in the aftermath of the series of fabulous lies that got him elected, and may soon prove to be his undoing.

But Myers told TPM some other things, as well. Not only was he enraged and hurt to receive a lecture on integrity from George Santos, Myers himself was attracted to George Santos because, as he put it on the recording, “we are you.” 

Listen to the audio that Myers recorded from within Santos’ office and read our story about the bizarre situation.

More on other news below. Let’s dig in.

— Josh Kovensky

The Attacks Behind The Attack

The attack on Paul Pelosi, reinjected into the national conversation briefly last week with the release of the footage, was not the violent flailing of a lunatic, or a random act of violence. It was the natural, predictable result of years of virulent misogyny hurled at Nancy Pelosi by Republican politicians and Fox News hosts, incubated and sustained online.

Republicans made Pelosi their boogeyman very early on in her career and never stopped. But the criticisms were never restricted to her policy stances, or those of the party she helped lead. Long the most prominent and powerful woman in politics, Pelosi became the subject of misogynistic attacks and character assassinations, conspiracy theories and deep fakes.

While her position has come with unusually high visibility, her experience is not unique: female politicians routinely receive death and rape threats, attacks on their bodies and intelligence, the publishing of their home addresses or kids’ schools.

There was nothing random about the violence meant for Nancy Pelosi, which fell upon her husband. The foundation had already been laid — by Kevin McCarthy joking about hitting her with the Speaker’s gavel, by Marjorie Taylor Greene musing about her assassination, by January 6 insurrectionists giddily texting friends about their wish to find and murder her.

Keep an eye on TPM’s homepage for a deep dive into the attack, and what it says about the costs we have decided are acceptable for women in public to pay.

— Kate Riga

House Republicans Get Their Revenge 

After days of back and forth and uncertainty, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) fulfilled his longtime promise on Thursday and successfully whipped the votes he needed to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Initially a handful of Republicans had indicated that they were undecided or outright against McCarthy’s bid to block Omar. But after the addition of some new language to the resolution — one that would allow Omar to appeal the decision with the House Ethics Committee — the detractors joined the rest of the Republican caucus.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) accused Republicans of seeking “political revenge.” And there’s no question about it.

McCarthy had vowed to oust some Democrats from their seats as retaliation after Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) were stripped of their committee assignments last year for sharing dangerous conspiracy theories and violent posts targeting Democratic lawmakers on their social media accounts. Omar was the third Democrat to get caught up in Republicans’ revenge — McCarthy single handedly blocked Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) from joining the House Intelligence Committee last week.

— Emine Yücel

DeSantis 2024: Make America Anti-Woke Again?

Big week for the eventual DeSantis 2024 campaign: The conservative governor made inroads on his promise to make Florida where “woke goes to die.”

On Tuesday, he announced that he plans to defund diversity, equity and inclusion programs in every public university in the state to further ground the education system in “the history and philosophy of Western Civilization.”

He collected another win on Wednesday when the College Board released the final version of its AP African American Studies course, weeks after the Florida Department of Education loudly and publicly rejected it for imposing a “political agenda” on students. Gone from the course are intellectual powerhouses like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Ta-Nehisi Coates, replaced instead with a shrug towards “Black conservatism.”

The College Board insists that politics had no bearing on their final revisions, and they’re probably not lying about that. In the end, it doesn’t matter. DeSantis still got ahold of the media’s roving spotlight to spread his pre-campaign message: Florida is where woke goes to die, and the rest of America is next.

— Kaila Philo 

“The pin is about sponsoring a gun bill and has nothing to do with whatever blueanon conspiracy theories are being floated on Capitol Hill.”

That’s the response from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) through her spokesperson Edie Heipel when I asked her office why some MAGA Republicans have been wearing AR-15 pins on their lapels this week — in the spot where members of Congress traditionally wear the American flag or congressional seal pins.

The gun bill she mentions appears to be Rep. Andrew Clyde’s (R-GA) Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today (SHORT) Act. SHORT is aimed at preventing a new ATF rule — that would recategorize some firearms with stabilizing braces, requiring them to be registered and subject to taxes — from taking effect.

Oh and if you were wondering what on earth “blueanon” means I’m here to help. Apparently it’s a term coined by MAGA Republicans to go after people they think are pushing “left-wing conspiracy theories.”

— Emine Yücel 

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