Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

George Santos. Image via Wikipedia CC

LAST December New Yorker Santos entered the US Congress with Jewish support after telling a whole bunch of lies. These including a claim that he was a Jew, and a descendant of Holocaust survivors.

At the time, Jacques Berlinerblau, writing for MSNBC, said that right-wing Jews—”a minority in the Jewish American community, but not an inconsequential one”—might not have been fond of Santos’ Christian Latino surname, but he won their acceptance by ticking off a checklist of extreme right-wing positions.

Among the many other lies Santos told was that his mother survived the terror attack on New Yorks Twin Towers when, in fact she wasn’t even in the country at the time!

Now its been revealed that Santos, known for his hateful homophobic and transphobic views, was pictured a while back in full drag in Brazil, using the moniker Kitara Ravache.

This photo was posted to Twitter by Marisa Kabas, with the words “NEW: I just spoke by phone with Eula Rochard, a Brazilian drag queen who was friends with George Santos when he lived near Rio. She said everyone knew him as Anthony (*never* George), or by his drag name, Kitara, and confirms this photo is from a 2008 drag show at Icaraí Beach.

Santos has expressed support for Florida’s regressive “Don’t Say Gay” law. He also claimed that drag shows are used to groom and abuse children

Berlinerblau wrote:

The Santos debacle demands a rethinking of how we treat religious claims made by political figures. Perhaps we ought to operate under the following rule of civic engagement: If a candidate invokes their faith on the stump, or in public appearances and writings, then, hell yeah, we have every right to query them about how that will impact their public service.

We can ask them hard but fair questions about their theological views and religious identity. With this kind of practice of open interrogation, Santos’ lies might’ve been sniffed out earlier on, or he might’ve been less likely to deceptively use religion as a political asset in the first place.

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