The problem with George Santos’s soaring internet fandom
His Cameo spectacle also reveals an unsettling aspect of internet culture that also erodes the fraying fabric of our democracy.

👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill, a new independent and in-depth publication about Congress, campaigns, politics and more. Happy Hanukkah to those celebrating starting tonight. May your candles burn bright this season.
This is the first paid edition of the newsletter (!!!) with fresh reporting on George Santos’s problematic next act, the status of the border security talks and what it means for the billions of dollars in international aid President Joe Biden requested from Congress, and Senate Democrats’ failed effort to pass meaningful gun safety measures in the wake of two more mass shootings this week.
But first, catch up on the headlines, highlights and happenings from the week that was.
The Ticker
425. The number of servicemembers who finally received their military promotions after Sen. Tommy Tuberville lifted his months-long hold in protest of a Pentagon abortion travel policy. Tuberville is still blocking 11 promotions, but the Senate plans to bring them up for floor votes soon. “I hope no one forgets what he did,” President Biden said in a scathing statement. “Those who serve this nation deserve better.” Related: “Tommy Tuberville just proved again that he’s the stupidest senator” by Tori Otten
Retirement watch, part I. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced he would leave Congress at the end of the year, marking the end of a dramatic fall from grace for the first speaker to be removed from office. His departure will shrink the House Republican majority from four to three following the expulsion of George Santos last week.
Retirement watch, part Ii. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee who served as temporary speaker after McCarthy’s ouster, announced he won’t seek reelection and will leave Congress at the end of his current term. “He has run this Committee in a way that respects the importance of debate, although our side has sometimes used the rules to extend that debate, and has ensured that all Members, Democratic and Republican, have a chance to share their views,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the top Financial Services Democrat said in a statement.
Voting rights. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) introduced a bill to guarantee the right to vote to the approximately 4.6 million Americans denied the opportunity due to criminal convictions. Read my weekly Courier column to discover why America may be unprepared for a Trump-led assault on voting rights.
Book bans. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.) introduced a bill to provide $15 million over five years to help school boards and districts cover the expenses they incur while pushing back against book bans.
15 days. The number of days before a new New Hampshire state proposal would ban abortion, making it one of the most extreme in the country. “I was surprised,” Rep. Annie Kuster, a Democrat from the Granite State, told me. “The truth of the matter is New Hampshire voters are believe in less government interference in people's private and personal lives.”
Sammy’s Law. A bipartisan group of House members introduced a bill that would create a parental right to know about dangerous or concerning interactions children under 17 may have online. The legislation is named for Sammy Chapman, a 16-year-old who lost his life to a lethal dose of fentanyl he purchased from an online seller in 2016. Read a one-page bill summary.
Child tax credit. The New Democrat Coalition endorsed 10 tax bills, including one that would make the expanded Child Tax Credit congressional Democrats passed in the American Rescue Plan in 2021 permanent. The provision, which sent direct cash payments to most families with kids 17 and under, reduced child poverty by nearly half. Read more about the endorsed legislation.
College Football Playoff. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) sent a letter to CFP Chairman Boo Corrigan demanding answers and transparency from the Selection Committee after Florida State University was excluded from the four teams picked to compete for a national championship next month. Read the full letter.
$4.8 billion. The amount of student debt relief the Biden administration approved for more than 80,000 borrowers this week due to a fix to the Public Loan Forgiveness Program. The administration says it has approved $132 billion for 3.6 million Americans to date. President Biden’s statement on the announcement
68. The number of colleges and universities represented at a discussion with Vice President Harris on Tuesday about birth control for college students. The school leaders, spanning 32 states, spoke about the strides their institutions are making to expand, improve and protect student access.
Legal aid. Second Gentleman Emhoff on Wednesday spoke about the White House’s work to expand access to justice by simplifying federal forms and expanding legal support at a roundtable led by Attorney General Merrick Garland and White House Counsel Ed Siskel. Emhoff said the roundtable’s work is “changing lives and in some cases saving lives.”
Menorah. The second gentleman also spoke at the annual lighting ceremony of the National Menorah. Emhoff is the first Jewish spouse of a vice president.
Black voter outreach. The Biden campaign launched a new ad in Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee and on several Black-owned TV and digital outlets to promote the administration’s investments in the Black community. Watch the ad.
Taylor Swift. She’s TIME’s Person of the Year. She discussed Beyoncé, Travis Kelce and creative ownership in a wide-ranging interview.
Rizz. It’s the Gen-Z-beloved Oxford word of the year. Here’s a helpful explainer of the evolution of the word
Santos “shows the power that an internet dunk seems to have overall motivations and brains”
Rather than slip into obscurity after his expulsion from Congress, George Santos emerged on the internet on Monday with a new gig: Sending personalized video messages to fans—and, as you’ll read below, foes—on the app Cameo.
At press time, Santos has increased his rate-per-video by more than five-fold. He has already raked in more than his $174,000 congressional salary with short, I guess you can call them pep talks, that encourage recipients to ignore the haters and embrace their individuality.
Of course, the ethics of Santos leveraging his infamy for a quick coin were immediately called into question.
“There's nothing appropriate about George Santos. He cannot help but be inappropriate because he's a snake oil salesman,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), one of a handful of members who led the push to expel Santos, said in an interview. “He’s gonna seize every opportunity to profit from his political career and his post-political career. But the institution is better without him.”
The Santos-Cameo spectacle also reveals an unsettling aspect of internet culture that also erodes the fraying fabric of our democracy.
This is especially dangerous, Kate Lindsay—author of Embedded, a newsletter about what’s good on the internet, explained to me over the phone—for internet consumers whose values are inconsistent with Santos’s conservative beliefs and voting record.
“It has a lot to do with how we consume news now over the internet, the fandomization of news where news is now digested like entertainment,” she said. “When you're bringing an internet lens to these things, the way the internet processes stuff is through humor and memes. I think the George Santos stuff started as a way of being the memes of his behavior and the strange demeanor he has in the way he delivers his lines sort of as a way of being like, we don't take this person seriously. But as we've seen with Trump, the idea of memeing someone because we don't take them seriously can actually make them a very serious cultural phenomenon.”
In an unexpected plot twist, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) purchased a Cameo from Santos to troll Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who was indicted in September on federal corruption charges that he aided and provided sensitive information to the government of Egypt. The video cost $343.20 and was delivered to Fetterman’s team in under $20 minutes.
“I don’t think Mr. Clickbait’s donors will appreciate him enriching George Santos, because I understand he paid for it,” Menendez said. “And I'm amazed he didn’t ask his mom and dad for the money,” a dig at Fetterman’s self-described comfortable upbringing.
“It shows the power that an internet dunk seems to have over our motivations and brains,” Lindsay said of the Fetterman incident. “Scoring social media points outweighs like morals, where you think, ‘Oh, this would be funny versus what it actually means.’”
Lindsay said these antics not only elevate those mired in scandals, but in Santos’s case, they downplay his anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ views.
“You've made it a joke that he thinks these things, but these are not like fringe views,” she added. “These are like things that people are actively battling, and so this is adding ammunition to pretend that someone with those views is funny and a slay.”
But since no one wants to be a digital buzzkill, I was curious to know if using the internet to advance a worthy cause without sacrificing its light-heartedness is possible.
“There is precedent for sort of the spirit of the Internet to be used more productively,” Lindsay said. “There are ways you can use memes and the pursuit of wanting to contribute your own piece of content to the discourse as a form of disruption is both funny and powerful.”
It’s also helpful to know when the ship has sailed too.
“With the thing of George Santos—okay, it's funny, [but] you got the job done. He was expelled and now you kind of need to drop it, which is a hard thing for the internet to do,” she said. “Because if you keep going now, you're actually going to inadvertently contribute to his rise again.”
Ukraine aid in peril of slipping to jam-packed January
The Senate failed to reach a deal this week on a border security package that would unlock billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, Israel, US allies in the Indo-Pacific, and for humanitarian assistance in Gaza that the Biden administration requested from Congress in October.
While the impasse has cast doubt that an agreement can fall in place before lawmakers are scheduled to go home for the holidays next week, the top two negotiators—Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) indicated a willingness to continue talks through the weekend.
“As every day goes by, I’m more angry about the fact that Republicans are playing games with funding for Ukraine,” Murphy told a group of reporters on Tuesday. “I am very hopeful that they will come to the table with some proposals that can actually pass, not just proposals dreamed up by some right-wing immigration group.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) attempted to jumpstart discussions by forcing a procedural vote to begin debate on the bill. Senate Republicans unanimously opposed the motion, as did Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who disapproves of providing additional funding for Israel in its war against Hamas.
The tension between Senate Republicans and Democrats reached a boiling point during a classified briefing on Tuesday with top national security officials from the White House that was supposed to be about Ukraine but deteriorated into a war of words about the southern border.
President Voloydymr Zelenskyy of Ukraine was scheduled to join the call via a secure video feed but canceled at the last minute. Senators emerged from the chaos, pointing fingers at each other. Ah, don’t you love the legislative process?
Without a deal, the White House said funding to Ukraine would lapse for the first time during the European country’s almost two-year conflict with Russia.
“There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment,” White House budget chief Shalanda Young said in a letter on Monday to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). “We are out of money—and nearly out of time.”
This sentiment was echoed by the president, who signaled in brief remarks to reporters on Wednesday his willingness to make significant compromises with Republicans to get to yes.
Senators, including Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), expressed a desire for Biden to join the talks directly, but the White House has said the president has made his position clear and that it’s up to Congress to do its job.
Murphy told reporters that he didn’t think it was outside the realm of possibility that Putin would invade a NATO country if the US failed to support Ukraine’s fight, which would force American troops onto the battlefield.
“If the United States decides to give Putin Ukraine, Putin will come to the conclusion that the United States would give him Poland, and we’ll give him Latvia, and we’ll give him Lithuania,” he said. “All he has to do is invade Poland, be there for a year and a half and the United States will give it away. That’s US troops dying.”
Even if the Senate were to come to terms, Speaker Johnson has indicated he wouldn’t keep members in town to vote on the measure before they start their holiday recess. This would effectively punt the bill into next year.
There’s also simmering frustration among Senate Republicans at the red line Johnson has drawn that demands any border security agreement must include fundamental provisions from a GOP bill that received zero Democratic votes in the House and has been stalled in the Senate since.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters on Thursday morning that it would be unacceptable not to take up the bill if the Senate reached an agreement his members could support.
“We have to stand with our allies across the world,” he said. “It would be irresponsible legislatively for our Republican colleagues to decide that they’re going to go home to celebrate the holidays when our allies continue to be involved in existential fights that relate directly to American national security.”
Another legislative casualty of the drawn-out negotiations: Consideration of a separate White House request for $16 billion to address the child care crisis and replenish funding to subsidize affordable broadband internet service for underserved and low-income families.
Jeffries and House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) joined advocates on Wednesday to demand congressional action. But Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told me on Tuesday that there were no updates to share.
“I wish,” she added.
House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told me that child care affordability comes up in members’ districts and is important to their communities.
“A lot of DC energy has been about the national security side,” he said. “But we hope that the domestic side also receives due consideration and support.”
“It’s the guns”: Senate Dems renew futile push gun safety reforms
Moments after Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a unanimous consent request to restore the assault weapons ban and other gun safety measures, four people were killed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, including the suspect, who had unsuccessfully pursued a job at the school, according to law enforcement.
Another person was injured during the shooting, which took place miles from the deadliest shooting in modern US history in October 2017, when a shooter killed 60 people and injured more than 400 from the window of a casino on the Las Vegas strip.
This week, the US broke the record for most mass shootings in a single year.
In Texas, a gunman on Tuesday killed six people and injured three more mere miles away from the shootings in Uvalde in 2022 and Sutherland Springs in 2017.
Before the UC request, three Senate Democrats—Mark Heinrich of New Mexico, Michael Bennet of Colorado, and Mark Kelly of Arizona—introduced a bill that would regulate guns based on the lethality of their internal mechanisms instead of their cosmetic features, which the lawmakers say gun manufacturers can easily modify.
Critics of gun safety measures like the Gas-Operated Semi-Automatic Firearms Exclusion (GOSAFE) Act argue that federal resources are better invested in hardening the soft targets that often become the scenes of their senseless tragedies.
But Heinrich disputed the claim.
“It’s the guns. And it’s specifically these kinds of guns,” he told me. “I think it’s interesting that we don’t hear from the students in those schools, saying what we really need is just to harden the schools. I think that says a lot.”
Bennet rejected the common refrain from the right that mass shootings are the price of freedom.
“What we have to understand about this is the freedoms that our young people are giving up every single day they walk across the threshold of their school, terrified of what’s going to happen to them,” he told me. “I think what we’re standing up for today is the freedom for young people not to have to live their lives that way. And we have an obligation. We have a responsibility to them. And that’s what we’re here to do today.”
Schumer announced Monday evening that he would attempt to fast-track the gun safety bills this week. Any one senator can prevent legislation from quickly clearing the chamber. If unanimous-consent requests fail, senators can attempt to expedite the process with a motion that requires 60 votes, which Democrats lack for any meaningful gun regulations.
Progress on the issue isn’t just stalled in the Senate. Democratic Leader Jeffries admonished his House GOP colleagues for what he characterized as their disinterest in addressing the gun violence epidemic.
“It is unacceptable, it is un-American and it is unconscionable that everyday Americans continue to be gunned down by individuals as was the case in Las Vegas yesterday who should not have access to weapons of war,” he told reporters on Thursday morning. “They are not used to hunt deer. They are used to hunt human beings, young people and far too often children.”
President Biden lamented the congressional inaction on the issue too.
“For all the action we have taken since I’ve been president, the epidemic of gun violence we face demands that we do even more,” he said in a statement. “But we cannot do more without Congress.”
Vice President Harris said in a separate statement that Americans should have the freedom to live safe from gun violence.
“It does not have to be this way. Solutions do exist,” she added. “There is not a moment to spare, nor a life to spare.”
Second Gentleman Emhoff spoke Wednesday night at a vigil hosted by the Newtown Action Alliance Foundation.
“Thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he said. “We need action.”
NBA superstar LeBron James was in Las Vegas preparing to compete for the Los Angeles Lakers in the inaugural in-season tournament semifinals when he learned about the UNLV shooting.
“It makes no sense that we continue to lose innocent lives, on campuses, schools, at shopping markets and movie theaters and all type of stuff,” James said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Read All About It
“More schools are sending kids in handcuffs to ER for misbehavior” by Annie Ma and Meredith Kolodner: “Last year, schools in one Maryland county … “Why we’re stuck in a constant cycle of drug shortages” by Emily Tucker: “Here’s why it keeps happening.” … “How nations are losing a global race to tackle AI’s harms” by Adam Satariano and Cecilia Kang: “Alarmed by the power of artificial intelligence, Europe, the United States and others are trying to respond—but the technology is evolving more rapidly than their policies.” … “Podcasters took up her sister’s murder investigation. Then they turned on her.” by Sarah Viren: “‘True crime’ has become a big business—and an emotional minefield for victims’ families.” … “Important people are noticing how terrible CLEAR is for airports” by David Zipper: “A profit-seeking entity has no place in a federally mandated process. Nothing hazy about that.” … “The uncertain loneliness of ambivalence on motherhood” by Jill Filipovic: “I thought by now I would have decided, but this amorphous deadline keeps getting pushed back.” … “San Francisco’s housing crisis is breaking public education” by Ned Resnikoff: “The city’s plummeting under-18 population is an existential crisis for the public school system. The fancy private schools, meanwhile, are doing just fine.” … “How to win friends and de-fluence people” by Kate Lindsay: “‘Once you have those magic glasses, you can’t unsee it,’ author Jessica Elefante says.” … “America promises equality for disabled students. It’s failing.” by Summer Sewell: “There are 7.2 million students with disabilities in the United States. They are among the most underserved students in the country.” … “The border where different rules apply” by Seth Freed Wessler: “When detained by the US Coast Guard at sea, even children fleeing violence have no right to asylum—and often face an uncertain fate.”
[Editor’s note: In celebration of Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, I added a few Bey-themed links for your reading pleasure to this week’s list.]
“Beyoncé. Amen.” by Michael Eric Dyson: “[Her] concerts and her new film are the religious experiences we need.” … “Beyoncé finally comes down to Earth” by Nadira Goffe: “In her new concert film Renaissance, the megastar embraces her imperfections.” … “Renaissance isn’t a deification of Beyoncé. It is a reminder she’s human.” by Alex Abad-Santos: “The concert documentary shows some people still try to say no to Beyoncé! Weird!”
Thanks for reading Once Upon a Hill! That’s all for now. Send me your tips, ideas and feedback: michael@onceuponahill.com. See you on Monday morning.