Matt Gaetz is a Certified Creep

In other news, this water is super watery.

Dec 24, 2024

In 2006, the Arizona Cardinals lost a regular season game to the Chicago Bears. It was close. 24-23. At the post-game press conference, the Cardinals head coach, a clearly annoyed Dennis Green, was in no mood to parse X’s and O’s. Coach Green was not only frustrated that his team lost. He was frustrated that his team lost to a team that Coach Green felt like the Cardinals had completely figured out. When a member of the media asked for the traditional post game gab, Green lost it and gave a short but legendary rant. That rant ended with the killer line. “THEY ARE WHO WE THOUGHT THEY WERE!”

The quote has remained an NFL and sports staple to this day. It said so much, so succinctly. Green was saying I knew exactly what these clowns were gonna do. I knew exactly how to beat them. They did exactly what I expected. And I still lost! The best part was that Green was clearly more upset with himself and his team than he was with his opponent. Green had let himself down by not handling what he knew was an entirely predictable situation.

This classic panel is proof that a picture is now worth 1300 words. Inflation.

That quote came to my mind yesterday when I learned of the details that emerged from the Congressional Ethics Committee report on ex-Representative Matt Gaetz. In the report, the House found evidence that Gaetz is exactly who we thought he was. According to their findings, Gaetz paid twelve women more than $90,000 for sex. Gaetz was a regular customer of independent pharmacists. He regularly bought cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. This was the fuel for his gogo party lifestyle. Most damningly, Gaetz had sexual relations with a 17 year old girl. For the record, that’s statutory rape. And boy, I hope it ends up on his record. Apparently he gave $400 for the deed, and she was on ecstasy.

In the immortal words of Coach Dennis Green…

MATT GAETZ IS WHO WE THOUGHT HE WAS!

If you know who Matt Gaetz is – or if you have ever even seen a photo of Matt Gaetz – then you aren’t surprised by any of this information. And none of us will be surprised if more information like this about him comes out. It is all extremely on brand for him.

Way back in the ‘90s, pioneering sports journalist Bob Costas said that even if you didn’t know who Michael Jordan was, if he walked into a room you were in, you would immediately know that he was somebody special. Costas recognized that Jordan carried himself in such a way that his cultural icon status was palpable, whether you knew who he was or not. As my Gen Alpha daughters would hate me to hear me say, Jordan had rizz. Jordan had aura.

Well, Matt Gaetz has the opposite of that. Matt Gaetz has reverse rizz. Gaetz has negative aura. If Gaetz walks into a room that you are in and you didn’t know who he was, you would still cover your drink and look around to make sure that your friends were all accounted for. Matt Gaetz looks like the real life version of a police sketch. When Matt Gaetz talks he sounds like a guy who just did something awful in the other room, but he’s also proud of himself. Matt Gaetz would be a great villain in one of those ‘80s "college sex romp” comedy films that you can’t watch today because they are too problematic. One of those comedies where if you describe the big-laugh-out-loud scene to your female friend under forty, she says, “Ummm… That’s rape.”

Matt Gaetz has the unmitigated audacity to be against gender affirming care but still look like this.

This version of Matt Gaetz would come in 5th in a Matt Gaetz lookalike contest.

Matt Gaetz looks like he smells like old beer and KY Jelly, covered with whatever cologne is 2-for-1 at Walgreens. Matt Gaetz is like the first draft of Jonah Ryan from HBO’s Veep, before they realized they needed to put at least a little bit of humanity in him. Matt Gaetz is the uncool guy in the frat house, who even the frat bros hate, but they have to hang out with him, because Matt’s dad pays for all their beer and GHB.

Matt is the worst elements of humanity all piled up on top of each other, and then filled with testosterone, botox, and gas station boner pills. He’d rather burn all the books than read one. He is both evil and weak. He is eagerly uneducated, hideously uncouth, proudly uncivilized, and gleefully unbearable, And if he wasn’t a cisgender, white man, born into a powerful family he would be completely unemployable and without use to society. Unless, is “human urinal” a job?

To put it bluntly, Matt is, on your very first glance, clearly a creep. No evidence needed. But then once you get the evidence, you are only confirming what you already knew. You can sense this level of creep when he is around the corner. He is Stranger Danger. And he done been that way.

In 2008, Florida police gave a clearly drunk Matt a DUI, because he refused the breathalyzer test. But there were no consequences for Matty, because Matty’s daddy is a powerful Florida politician. It all got swept under the rug. In fact, Matty is such a daddy’s boy that when Matt first became a politician, his nickname was “Baby Gaetz.” Even his nickname is creepy. I would die before I told anybody that was my nickname.

Matt Gaetz’s 2008 mug shot. He was creeeeepin’ even then.

In 2020, out of nowhere, Matty announced that he had a son. At the time Matt was 38 and his son was 19, and this was the first time that most people had heard of this son. Matt “cleared things up” in a People Magazine interview:

I’m all for adoption and for family being how you define it, but this ain’t that. Matt’s explanation sounds like an early version of ChatGPT.

Ummm… Lemme get this straight, Matt. You have a 19 year old man living in your house, that you call your son, even though there is no legal paperwork, and you don’t want to go into the details. Cool. Cool. Cool. What am I doing? I’m just calling my friend, 911. He loves a good story.

And in 2021, a news story came out that Matt regularly showed naked photos of women that he had had sex with to his colleagues in Congress. Smell that? That’s the smell of he is who we thought he was.

So while it would be easy to aim all our anger towards Matt — and I have been enjoying doing that for years — let's save some of our anger for us. We live in a system that lets a creep creep in public with no consequences. And our system lets that creep rise to the highest levels of government. And that creep thinks he has the right to tell us all how to live. Let’s also remember this creep could have been our ATTORNEY GENERAL?!?!?!

Let’s also save a little anger for all the politicians and surrogates who let Matt gaetz* all over the place.

Our political system, our criminal justice system, our system of white nepotism all knew who Matt Gaetz was. And unsurprisingly, when Matt was a Congressman most of his colleagues in The House hated him. But they accepted him because he has the same hateful politics that they all have. Which means even though Matt is who they thought he was – a disgusting, boorish, baby-man – the people in the Congress who were indifferent to his crimes might actually be worse.

Rest in peace, Dennis Green. Thank you for your wisdom.

* Yes, I’m using “gaetz” as a verb. It means when someone is acting as an obvious and open creep and getting away with it.

Check out the latest episode of At Liberty

When we recorded this episode of the ACLU’s podcast At Liberty, last week, we were advocating for President Biden to commute the sentences of the 40 inmates on federal death row. Yesterday, he commuted 37 of the sentences. The three he left on death row are Robert Bowers, (convicted for the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue), Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (convicted for the Boston Marathon bombing), and Dylann Roof (who massacred 9 Black people who invited him to Bible study at South Carolina’s Mother Emmanuel Church).

On the podcast I talk to Herman Lindsey of the non-profit Witness to Innocence who was the 135th person to be exonerated from death row since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S.

I also talked to Cassy Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts! Or at ACLU.org/podcast

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