Opinion | George Santos and the age of the scam

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George Santos isn’t sorry — not really, anyway. Everyone lies these days, after all.

The Long Island Republican who won a key election by vaunting his biography as the deep-pocketed biracial grandson of Holocaust survivors might not be the grandson of Holocaust survivors … or biracial … or deep-pocketed. Yet he is likely soon to be sworn in, admitting only to the peccadillo of “résumé embellishment” when really what he seems to have done is “made up almost everything about his biography.”

The thing about Santos is that nothing about him can be trusted, from where he went to high school (not New York’s famed Horace Mann) to where he went to college (nowhere) to where he got the nearly $1 million he lent to his campaign (who knows?!?) to when his mother died (on a day other than 9/11).

Alexandra Petri: I am George Santos, and I would never lie to you

All this is shocking but not surprising — a phrase that has achieved meme status in recent years for a reason: We’re living in the age of the scam.

Sam Bankman-Fried never lied about who he was, but of course he didn’t have to. The guy was born on Stanford University’s campus; he went to college at MIT; along the way he attended something called Canada/USA Mathcamp.

His whole shtick wasn’t pretending to be someone else so much as it was performing the most exaggerated version of himself: T-shirt and cargo shorts with gym socks, sleeping on…

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