For somebody whose favorite Taylor Swift song is “Trouble,” he sure is about to be in a lot of it.
Whether it be semi-motivational speeches (“You always slay, so I want you girls to keep serving it up!”) or musings about the wonders of Botox, New York Republican Former Congressman George Santos has had a lot to say on paid video-sharing website Cameo recently. In fact, so much so that in just under two short weeks, he pocketed more money than he ever did before his “fall from grace”––read: expulsion from the House of Representatives––on December 1st.
On social media, the verdict remains mixed. Some users continue to harbor disdain for Santos in Instagram comment sections, voicing their concern among a sea of semi-ironic praises like “People just hate to see a girlboss winning,” praises that are proliferating so quickly that it is difficult to tell whether the people writing them are actually being genuine. But one thing that is relatively agreed upon is that as a political figure, Santos fundamentally was not.
Despite his career in Congress being merely less than a year, the New York native has racked up quite the reputation: 23 federal charges, campaign funds spent on OnlyFans and Sephora, and lies about his educational credentials, among many other things––and that’s barely scratching the surface. Yet, in spite of his legal woes and habit of pathological lying, he seems to have attracted a cult-like swarm of attention––so much so that it has gotten to the point where you can buy a shirt featuring Santos surrounded by a neon pink heart border that reads “Long Live the Queen!” for 29 dollars.
The phenomenon is not limited to shirts, however. It seems as if much of GenZ has taken up a strange fascination with the former representative, whether that be spending hundreds of dollars on personalized videos to get him to name his favorite Taylor Swift song or uncovering his old singing videos on the karaoke app “Smule.”
What started at the beginning of the year as a vitriolic hatred has later come to embody a parasocial relationship, one littered with a morbid allure––or even, for some internet users, genuine admiration––towards the former representative.
This recent phenomenon is indicative of a general trend in internet users–-especially those of my generation, GenZ––towards admiring “Camp,” which is defined by author Susan Sontag as “a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration.” The same love for irony and excess that has allowed over-the-top movies and certain internet memes to become popularized has allowed George Santos to become viewed as a sort of icon to some, especially since the term has become closely associated with LGBTQ+ culture.
Still, there is a large chance that Santos, like a politician to the core, is keenly aware of his newfound popularity and capitalizing off it: not only in a monetary sense, but a distinctly reputational one. By playing into the caricature of the “fallen diva,” one already artificially curated for him by social media, he can distract the public––and more importantly, his constituents––from the actual crimes that he committed.
What seems to represent the “failed seriousness” of Camp at the surface actually becomes consequential when his actions are unmasked from the demeanor he puts on––especially if Santos plans to use this clout to weave his way into the good graces of the public after his proliferation of lies earlier this year.
George Santos’s next whereabouts are currently unknown. Whether he follows his own wishes to become a US Ambassador, the wishes of Instagram meme pages for him to be a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race, or the wishes of federal prosecutors to go to prison is left for the future to decide. But, if one thing remains certain, it’s that Santos isn’t straying far from internet discourse any time soon, and in his words, we may simply either choose to “put up or shut up.”
Taryn Murphy
Taryn is a current first-year at the University of Chicago studying political science and economics with a minor in data science. Currently, she works with the Chicago Project on Security and Threats and the Paul Douglas Institute, UChicago-based research centers. She is involved with numerous youth-led coalitions such as Encode Justice and Voters of Tomorrow. She is especially passionate about youth civic engagement, foreign relations, and AI policy and hopes to work in either politics or law in the future.
