Shocking: The Chinese Communist Party Did Not Try To Kidnap George Santos' Niece
Shocking: The Chinese Communist Party Did Not Try To Kidnap George Santos' Niece
He's just fabulist!
“I literally threw my entire life into the toilet and flushed it to get elected.”
That’s a quote from George Santos, a man who definitely understands what the word “literally” means, from a New York Times profile published this weekend based on a number of occasionally bizarre phone calls the Republican congressman made to reporter Grace Ashford over the last month or so.
Of all of the odd details in the piece, and there are many, one in particular stands out — the tragic story of his niece’s kidnapping by (perhaps) the Chinese Communist Party.
“I’ll give you one, I’ll give you one story that nobody talks about,” he replied, before telling me how his 5-year-old niece disappeared from a playground in Queens, only to be located 40 minutes later on a surveillance camera with two Chinese men.
He said the incident was the subject of an active police investigation, implying heavily that it might have been in retaliation for his vocal stance against the Chinese Communist Party.
“So you think it was China?” I asked, clarifying.
“Look, I don’t want to go into like, conspiracy theory,” he said. “But you know, if the shoe fits, right?”
Indeed! What a terrible, traumatic story.
Just imagine! China — agents at the Ministry of State Security just absolutely seething over the idea of freshman congressman and professed “Hannah Montana” guest star George Santos criticizing their glorious country.
“Oh, the humanity!” One probably said.
“We must exact revenge! No way can we possibly let this stand!” said another, maybe.
“But what do we do?”
“I know! We will kidnap his five-year-old niece! We will lie in wait in Queens, New York, and then one day, when she is out at a playground, we will kidnap her!”
“Should we make sure there are no security cameras around?”
“What? Nah, no need to bother with that.”
“Perfect! Nothing can go wrong!”
“So will it be a ransom situation or what? Do we just say we’ll hold her until he stops talking smack about our country?”
“No need to think further on this at all.”
It definitely seems like a real thing that could have happened in real life. But it didn’t. At least according to police, who have literally no record of this having happened.
A high-ranking police official confirmed that officers had been called and had looked into the incident. But they found no evidence of Chinese Communist Party involvement, or of any kidnapping at all.
“We found nothing at all to suggest it’s true,” the official said. “I’d lean into, ‘he made it up.’”
Just shocking.
Santos probably assumed that Ashford wouldn’t actually check up on his story about the kidnapping, because who wants to be the cynic who doesn’t believe such a horrifying story? But these are the kinds of lies Santos tends to tell. He tells a lot of lies that would make someone look like a huge asshole if they didn’t believe him and they turned out to be true — his mother survived 9/11 (to be fair, she did, but she was also out of the country at the time, not in the World Trade Center as he claimed), or that his grandparents survived the Holocaust (also technically true … but they were Catholic).
He lies to make himself seem fabulous and interesting and important but also tragic. He wants people to think he’s great but to also feel badly enough for him that they won’t ask questions. Well, that and he lies to (allegedly) enrich himself. That’s not terribly surprising from a Republican politician, but with him it seems like a compulsion. Like he knows everyone knows he’s a liar and he just keeps telling these very obvious and easily disprovable lies anyway.
If he were not such a jackass, one might actually feel a little badly for him.
In the HIGHLY unlikely event this isn't a complete fabrication, I imagine it went down more like this: kid wanders away from the playground (maybe wants to get away from her weird family for awhile?) and happens to be discovered by two gentlemen, whose nationalities or ethnicities may or may not involve East Asia.
I had a student sort of like that. He came to my office and asked for two weeks off because his mother had died when he was young, and his aunt raised him. His aunt had just died.
I did not check because who the hell checks that? People do not just lie about the loss of their mom as a child, right?
A year later he mentioned his mom's birthday. I was like, "Oh I thought she had passed for some reason", he was like, "No why would you think that?". Anyway later he was super mad later when I would not write him a recommendation. I did not argued. I just noted that I could say no, and that I was.
Lord knows what he would say in an interview for a good job, if he would lie about his mom and his aunt just to have some time to do whatever.