On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, as well as 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted profiles of profiled the current U.S. House Representative from Arizona's 4th District, Paul Gosar, who every time we profile him, gets more hyper-conservative, partisan, and frankly, white nationalist-y. We noted in our original profile that he has consistently had one of the worst voting records on issues that impact women, and not just on abortion, because Gosar not only has voted against the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, but also voted against legislation that would allow female victims of sexual assault within our military to decide who determines their case, a military trial or a civilian one. He also not only voted for the 2013 Government Shutdown, but when the time came to reopen the government, he voted to keep it closed. During the standoff between the Bureau of Land Management and Cliven Bundy in 2014, Gosar actually traveled to Nevada to show support for Bundy, stopping to take photos with him, his first but certainly not last flirtation with domestic terrorists. Gosar's also a conspiracy theorist, having called for the impeachment of Attorney General Eric Holder over Benghazi, immigration, Fast & Furious, Guantanamo Bay and “violating criminal smuggling laws”. In September 2015, as the nation excitedly awaiting a visit from Pope Francis to come speak before the United States Congress, Paul Gosar, a Catholic in a district full of them, announced that he would be boycotting the pontiff’s speech because he refused to listen to the Holy Father’s talk of climate change, instead insisting writing an op-ed where he said he didn’t want to hear “leftist talking points”, and saying that climate has been changing since “first created in Genesis”.
By 2017, Paul Gosar was “all in” on Donald Trump’s white nationalist agenda for the country, including defending him by stirring up right-wing conspiracies regarding California Congressman Devin Nunes’ dud of a memo regarding Carter Page’s FISA warrant, claiming that its contents “constitutes treason” by the FBI like he did back in early 2018. In October of 2017, Rep. Gosar was immediately trying to revise history regarding the terrorist attack carried out by a Neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2016. Heather Heyer’s death is something Gosar couldn’t have Neo-Nazis left hanging on their spotless record as American protesters, so in the middle of an interview on CNN, he started pushing the conspiracy theory that the entire weekend of terror carried out by White Nationalists was actually orchestrated by George Soros (similar to how after 1/6/21, he would try to blame the attack on the Capitol on “Antifa”).vHe wasn’t done slandering Soros, though, as he also claimed while he was fleeing the Nazis in Hungary eight decades ago that he was turning in other Jews to the Nazis.
This entire narrative was so insane and bizarre that all six, yes SIX of Gosar’s siblings wrote a letter to publicly distance themselves from him, and in every election since 2018, they have endorsed his opponents. Gosar blew them off as “disgruntled Hilary supporters”, and said that “Stalin would be proud” of them, and then a few weeks later, blamed Barack Obama on their rejection of him, because he’s a partisan lunatic.
We can’t underline how explicitly true that is, as he chose to use his time in the House Oversight Committee in 2019 during the testimony of Michael Cohen to quite constructively taunt Cohen with the not-at-all-childish rhyme, “LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE!” Not being content to simply do it out loud, he had in intern present a giant poster of Cohen’s face with the taunt, as well. Sane pundits, including Republican ones, were embarrassed of their party’s performance that day, as they looked like incompetent flacks for Donald Trump, grasping at straws, who failed to refute any of Cohen’s claims.
Because Arizona’s 4th Congressional District had a +20 Republican lean according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index for years, won re-election to a sixth term in office in 2020 with 70% of the vote, even though he shared anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that made his own family turn their backs on him. Then, he cranked the crazy up to 11 (He’s currently at like a 13, at least). In November of 2019, he put out a series of posts on Twitter whose first letter all spelled out “Epstein didn’t kill himself”, and referenced a story from the conspiracy site Project Veritas to the same. He followed that up by posting about Area 51.
A few weeks later, on January 6th, 2020, Rep. Gosar got on Twitter to post a fake photo of former President Barack Obama smiling and shaking hands with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, writing, “The world is a better place without these guys in power.” The two have never actually met, and Rouhani is still in power. (CNN did the research and determined the original photo of Obama was from his meeting with India’s former Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.) He then spent some time making baseless accusations about the University of Arizona’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, because why not try and stoke the fires of Islamophobia with more lies, to see if you can get someone disturbed and paranoid enough to go and attack a professor for daring to educate people?
Paul Gosar’s extremist has advanced to new lows, and hopefully he has hit the bottom (although he keeps finding ways). There have been multiple reports since Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to subvert our democracy on January 6th, 2021, that certain members of Congress were helping those who carried out the attack in planning it prior to that date. The organizer of “Stop the Steal”, Ali Alexander, himself gave credit to three for helping. They were Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks, as well as Arizona Congressmen Andy Biggs and… Paul Gosar.Now, once you’re on the FBI’s radar for potentially criminally aiding an attack by domestic terrorists on the Vice-President and entire legislative branch of the government, you’d think you might want to keep a low profile and finally cease your bulls***, right?NOT PAUL GOSAR. He’s cranked it up into even higher gear, like we said earlier, blaming the failed coup we watched unfold live on cable news on “Antifa”, to gaslight all Americans. And then, rather than vote to get us much needed help from the government in the form of Covid-19 stimulus, he prioritized attending a political conferen- you know what, we’re not even going to mince words… the bigoted goon went to give a speech at a white nationalist conference where all the racist bastards in attendance were chanting his name like the white nationalist cult members they are.
We’ll review just the past four years...
If the Republican Party is serious about addressing its current identity as a white nationalist party, they’re going to need to find a primary challenger to Paul Gosar and seriously push that person to replace him. Because he’s not chilling out anytime soon, as evidenced how last week Gosar shared a cartoon meme of a sex worker propositioning a man to do anything he wants for $50 and he asks that she declare “AMERICA FIRST IS INEVITIBLE.” (This is a member of Congress. Seriously.) Considering how quick the GOP were to act against Steve King (as in letting be a complete bigot for decades and then just taking his committee assignments away), we wouldn’t hold our breath. It’s much more likely than he’s arrested by the FBI for any assistance he may have given to domestic terrorists that qualifies as sedition than they develop the will to expel one of their own. But House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is a coward, and has done nothing about the growing ranks of white nationalists’ in his caucus, which only has emboldened Gosar to keep attending such conferences, and with him getting away with it, others are following suit.
In a sane world Paul Gosar would have resigned in disgrace, or been primaried years ago. Alas, Republican voters insist that we’re not allowed to live in a sane world, and keep this idiot around to file attempts to impeach Joe Biden that are doomed to fail advancing out of the House, let alone getting anywhere in the Senate. But he'll continue being a blight on our national discourse, now after redistricting in the new version of Arizona's 9th Congressional District, which has a +16 Republican lean. We really hope his career ends up with him being arrested for his role in January 6th. The sooner, the better.