Network Paying Influencers To Throw Sexual Smears At Harris So Gross Even George Santos Was Like 'Nah I'm Out'

George Santos is sort of the good guy in a story!

Everyone remembers George Santos, right? Astronaut. Supreme Court justice. Michelin five-star chef at some of the world’s most high-end restaurants. Inventor of the shoelace. Hall of Fame outfielder for the Mets. Hall of Fame point guard for the Indiana Pacers. Solver of the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Olympic gold medalist in the men’s clean-and-jerk in both the 89 kg and the 102+ kg categories. Novelist who has won a dozen Edgar Awards. Rabbi. First person to traverse the Panama Canal in a scull while rowing solo across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Holder of the world record for highest skydive. Renowned surgeon who performed the world’s first capybara-to-human heart transplant. The lone conscience opposing spreading baseless sexual smears of Vice President Kamala Harris in a network of influencers being paid to do so.

Wait, that last one is actually true.

Semafor has a wild scoop about a “mysterious network” of paid social media influencers who got together on some video calls to plot pushing out right-wing talking points attacking Harris after she became the Democratic nominee for president in July. Doesn’t seem so unusual in this day and age, except the calls were organized by someone using a pseudonym whose real name has yet to be uncovered. Also, all the calls’ participants kept their cameras off, and no one was identified by name.

Silly, Semafor, all that anonymity is how you know it was on the up-and-up!

The group had been operating prior to Harris’s entry into the race, ginning up run-of-the-mill attacks on Joe Biden for being old and Judge Juan Merchan for presiding over Donald Trump’s felony trial for paying off Stormy Daniels in 2016. The money was reportedly not bad: one person made $20,000 for just a few weeks of boosting some of the messages.

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George Santos Agrees To Take Paycheck For No Work

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Man, have we made poor career choices. We could have been a right-wing asshole instead of a left-wing one, there is so much anonymous money from weird billionaires and Russian cutouts to be made.

The morning after Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, the influencers received an email inviting them to a call to brainstorm bullshit attacks on the new nominee:

The influencers’ marching orders were clear: make a series of lurid sexual jibes aimed at Harris, the least crude of which was comparing her to Haliey Welch, the “Hawk Tuah girl” who became a viral sensation over a video of her discussing oral sex.

That was the point where the conscience of George Santos – George Santos – kicked in. The former congressman and future guest of the United States penitentiary system reportedly told the group he disapproved of such messaging and left the call. And you have to figure he could use the money to pay all his criminal defense attorneys, so the messaging must have been really bad.

Two days after the call, Santos posted this on Twitter:

The calls were organized by someone who used the name James Bacon. He did not respond to emails from Semafor at his gmail address, and the phone number he used was disconnected after a reporter called it to ask questions.

Also this:

Organizers told participants that the money was connected to a wealthy American, who they named — but a political operation that figure is connected to heatedly denied any connection to the influencer operation, and there’s no evidence to link them.

Other right-wing influencers apparently said they had never heard of the operation, even though they were posting similar sexually-themed smears at the same time. (We should note that a guest on Fox News did indeed refer to Harris as “the original Hawk Tuah girl.” Don’t know if that’s at all connected or if these people are just all gross.)

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2023, The Year George Santos Truly Became President

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This story comes on the heels of last week’s big reveal that the Russian government was secretly funneling tons of cash to some of the dumbest shitheads on the right to boost wingnut talking points. It reminds us that while there are certainly left-wing influencers who get paid to push Democratic propaganda, there is an entire ecosystem on the right that is just awash in seemingly unlimited amounts of money that is used to smear political opponents with made-up garbage.

Congrats to George Santos. After years of bullshitting and scamming everyone he could, he finally gets to be the very, very, very marginal good guy in a story. We are as weirded out about it as you are.

[Semafor]

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