George Santos is the Zodiac*
Plus Kennedy, Koresh, and the Oscars
the true crime that's worth your time
*he isn’t
…But saying that he is, or that he’s the shooter on the grassy knoll, or helped bury Jimmy Hoffa, or knows who killed JonBenét is the shiny silver lining to Santos’s dumb-dumb cloud of fabulism. I don’t think we can even call it a con anymore — the only “confidence” here, I would posit, is Santos’s that Republican leadership needs his vote too badly to get rid of him — but it’s still fascinating to me.
A couple of the latest Santos knee-slappers:
A Brazilian podcast, recorded in December, filled with Santos’s trademark wild and easily disprovable claims [Vanity Fair] // Bess Levin breaks down the smorgasbord of BS, including the myriad daily drag shows in NYC schools and Santos’s assertions re: multiple muggings.
Living with George Santos [Curbed] // The URL really says it all. Per a former roommate of Santos’s from a decade ago, Santos back then was passing himself off as a reporter for a Brazilian paper.
How Santos’s Harbor City Ponzi scheme worked [WaPo] // Nothing terribly instructive here, but as always with Santos, the sheer volume of “denies knowledge of” and “has no record of” phrasings is striking.
National bobblehead museum to offer Santos bobble with Pinocchio nose [The Hill] // The highlight here IMO is that there is a national bobblehead museum — it’s in Wisconsin, which is also the home of a mustard museum; keep it weird, cheeseheads! — but just as pleasing is that a portion of the proceeds from each $30 pre-order will go to “dog-related GoFundMe campaigns.” — SDB
George Santos is also nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short! …He isn’t. I know this because he’s not on the list of nominees at Oscars.org. Of what is on the list, I’ve seen and reviewed Stranger At The Gate and am pleased to see it nominated; and I’ve had The Martha Mitchell Effect on my B.E. to-do list for some weeks now, so here’s a trailer in case we haven’t posted it already,
and you’ll see a review of that in an upcoming issue.
Only a couple of genre-relevant entries among the feature-length nominees: Navalny, which is available on HBO Max; and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which is still in theaters, and which may constitute a neighborhood play as far as its true-crime-ishness, but as most descriptions include “the downfall of the Sackler family,” I choose to count it.
Any true-crime docs from the short list that you thought should have gotten Oscar nods and didn’t? I’m disappointed The Janes didn’t make it. (Saint Omer, a docudrama directed by a documentarian, didn’t make it off the short list for international-feature nominees.) — SDB
George Santos liked the Assassination Records Review Board before it was cool! …Nope! But our valued reader Joelle likes us, so she sent over a Defector longread on the JFK assassination. Joelle had some caveats about Noah Kulwin’s “Decades Later, The JFK Assassination Still Keeps Some Secrets” — “a fair bit of table-setting”; Kulwin not making his overall point apparent to a Canadian — and while I found the piece worth my time, it’s more on an instructive basis than an entertainment one.
“Decades Later” is the debut of Kulwin’s regular column for Defector; The American Friend will ordinarily cover “people and events beyond the borders” of the U.S. going forward. Why it’s tackling a quintessentially American preoccupation up top is probably easily enough explained by the subject’s clickiness, but Kulwin’s rationale (…I think?) is the CIA/Cuba connections in the case, but that’s a tricky starting point. For this reader and no doubt many others, the phrase “the CIA/Cuba connections” is a wrap on reading any further, for two reasons. One, said connections seem to consist largely of “informants,” secondhand journalist recollections from the mid-seventies, and people’s cousins overhearing conversations in Mob-run hotel bars, blah blah blah fishcakes — “exhibits” as gossamer as they are myriad.
I don’t buy Ruby’s initial story about why he murdered Oswald, and I wouldn’t buy the CIA’s story about anything tbqh, but…you know. That Ruby had ties to organized crime does not mean this crime was organized by or near him.
Two, theorists trying to convince an audience of the fitness of a CIA/Cuba hypothesis…tend to struggle with controlling the flow of their own information, let’s put it that gentle-ish way. Often the postulator has spent years amassing cubic yards of files and books, and may have waited just as long for the opportunity to offer a guided tour of their crazy wall. The result is an overeager whitewater wash of unsorted fact chunks and desperate caps-locking that mistakes “can’t get a word in edgewise” for buy-in.
I find this very sympathetic and relatable! Ask anyone at a recent family gathering who made the mistake of asking me about sales trends at the bookshop! And Kulwin has better command than most of the material, or is able to bridle it longer.
Not indefinitely, though.
It is easy to see why, from the 1970s until the 2010s, an outright majority of Americans rejected the Warren Report’s findings and believed that some conspiracy beyond Oswald had killed Kennedy.
This year, for the first time, that majority became a mere plurality, falling to 50 percent, according to a reputable pollster sympathetic to JFK assassination researchers. Rather than vindicating proud defenders of the Warren Report, most notably the journalist Gerald Posner, this survey represents the mighty power of a government narrative that is supported both informally and (as credibly alleged by Alec Baldwin, among others) doctrinally across establishment media. Once held up as a potential antidote to this kind of brute force historical record entrenchment, digital tools have repeatedly proven every bit as capable of reinforcing state control as they are at weakening it. What is to be done, then, is to crash this dialectic and explain the JFK assassination as a historical phenomenon, rather than as mere violation of liberal virtue, or a Red plot, or the outgrowth of various emotional derangements, and thereby give us something useful to say about the here and now.
I did have to read this several times, including once out loud, subtracting various distracting bits (the phrase “as credibly alleged by Alec Baldwin” is not helpful; I don’t think “dialectic” is the word Kulwin wants) — in the same way that JFK conspiracists often throw out inconvenient testimony, now that I think about it — but I believe Kulwin wants us to think about Kennedy’s murder as one large knot in a broader fabric. Sure, great! But Kulwin loses that plot in the very next section, plunging us into an opaque froth of Mob connections, lesser assassination plots, minor interviews by Allan Dulles, etc. and so on, and by the time he comes back to the idea that the Cold War and organized crime served as multipliers on each other’s extra-legal secrecy and paranoia (…again: I think?), he’s undercut his own authority.
Then it’s on to “legitimate” moguls’ connections to the underworld, the implication of various landmark hotels in a vast network of off-the-books money…and here’s the thing: any one of Kulwin’s allegations is an interesting article of its own. The malarial baseline of corruption in the corridors of twentieth-century power is worth exploring. The process by which LCN became a designated stooge, and the tax they may have levied on that designation, is worth exploring. The Bobby Baker saga is…well, that’s why God invented Robert Caro. The idea that various figures — LBJ; New Orleans gangsters; FBI or State Department poobahs with unrelated grudges against Bobby Kennedy — preferred to advance a tidy lone-gunman narrative because it would avert attention from other conspiracies that did exist makes a lot of sense, and doesn’t require laying many miles of Belzerian groundwork; I don’t think Kulwin is crazy, or a bad writer.
But I don’t know if I recommend “Decades Later” as a per se read on the JFK case. I’d like to hear what you guys think of it and whether you agree that it’s chiefly useful as an illustration of perhaps how not to argue a grand unifying JFK theory.
I’m looking forward to future columns from Kulwin, and I like that he and the Defector edit board tried it with this. But if you really want to move me off the Mortal Error theory, you gotta take smaller bites. — SDB
George Santos was in a cult. jk, he’s still in it, and if Jeff Guinn wrote a book about it/Santos, I would read it — but Guinn’s third doorstop-size investigation into cultish men and their groups dropped earlier this week, so he probably just wants to rest. Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage leads off my round-up of other reads…
“Jones, Manson, and Now Koresh: Writer Jeff Guinn Has Completed His Unholy Trinity” [Texas Monthly] // Turns out David Koresh was a messianic plagiarist on top of everything else.
“‘Pharma Bro’ Shkreli Violated Lifetime Ban And Should Be Sanctioned, FTC Says” [Forbes] // Everyone’s least favorite price-gouging weasel 1) founded a pharmaceutical-adjacent company, which a judge barred him from doing and 2) has paid not a penny of the $64.6M fine assessed.
“The Fitbit Done Him In” [Air Mail] // Richard Dabate’s mistress got pregnant; his solution was to murder his wife, then blame it on a camo-clad intruder who sounded like Vin Diesel. (ikr?) Air Mail’s Rich Cohen does what any writer must with the Fitbit detail, but it was as much Dabate’s stupid “plan” and even stupider decision to tell his cockamamie story to the cops for like six hours that did him in. #justgetadivorce, idiots, dang.
“What the Jan. 6 probe found out about social media, but didn’t report” [WaPo] // The committee found plenty of evidence indicting social-media companies for failing to intervene in insurrectionist plotting; most of what they found didn’t make it into the final report. Why? Committee leaders were “reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies” — specifically, leaders like Rep. Zoe Lofgren of “Northern California” (…geddit??), who allegedly preferred the investigation to focus “almost exclusively on Trump’s actions that day and in the weeks just before.”
And if you haven’t settled on a weekend read yet, good news: all #compendia and #majorcase are 15% off at Exhibit B. through the end of the month. — SDB
Tomorrow on Best Evidence: Holmes follow-ups, criminal trash, and more.
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