• Muad'DibberOPMA
    link
    61 year ago

    The stuff about his mother is deeply sad, and shows the depths of opportunism and class guilt:

    On his campaign website, Santos wrote that his mother was “the first female executive at a major financial institution” and that she worked in the South Tower of the World Trade Center and died “a few years later” after surviving the September 11, 2001 attacks.[92] On his mother’s 2003 visa application to return to the U.S. from Brazil, however, she stated that she had not been in the U.S. since 1999.[93] His mother’s actual occupation has been described as domestic worker[9] or home care nurse;[94] she described herself that way on her 2003 visa application.[95] Upon her death, a Brazilian community newspaper described her as a cook. Santos’s former roommates and friends said she spoke no English.[14] In July 2021, Santos wrote on Twitter that “9/11 claimed my mothers [sic] life”; in an October 2021 interview, he said his mother was “caught up in the ash cloud” during 9/11 but “never applied for relief” because the family could afford the medical bills; in December 2021, he wrote on Twitter that his mother had died five years earlier; in December 2022, he claimed that both of his parents survived being “down there” at the World Trade Center during 9/11.[96][97] A priest at the family’s Catholic church reported that Santos had told him the family could not afford a funeral when Santos’s mother died in 2016. The priest recalled that a collection at a memorial Mass raised a “significant” amount for the family, which he gave to Santos;[92] he also had a friend set up a GoFundMe.[98]