Paul Gosar Showed His True Colors Months Ago

Late Monday night, a flyer began circulating on Twitter that advertised an upcoming fundraiser hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, a vile racist and anti-Semite, for Republican congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona. “He is really, honestly, hands down the best congressman in America,” Fuentes said of Gosar in a livestream that same night.

A few hours after the flyer for the fundraiser — which Fuentes has reportedly confirmed he is hosting — began to circulate, Gosar responded on Twitter. “Not sure why anyone is freaking out,” he wrote. “I’ll say this: there are millions of Gen Z, Y and X conservatives. They believe in America First. They will not agree 100% on every issue. No group does. We will not let the left dictate our strategy, alliances and efforts. Ignore the left.”

The implication of Gosar’s tweet was clear: He was treating Fuentes’s vicious anti-Semitism and racism as one might treat disagreements over tax policy, and dismissing anyone who would question their association.

On Tuesday afternoon, amid the uproar that had by then ensued, Gosar tried to cast doubt on whether he was attending a fundraiser with Fuentes at all. “I have no idea what’s going on,” Gosar told CNN’s Manu Raju. “There’s no fundraiser that I know of on Friday.” He reportedly declined to say whether he’d appear with Fuentes when pressed on the matter.

Gosar may have been quibbling: The online advertisement said the date of the fundraiser would be “announced” on Friday, not that the fundraiser would be held on Friday. The advertisement also said it was “Paid for by Nicholas Fuentes and authorized by Gosar for Congress Committee.” The Gosar campaign has not responded to messages from National Review asking if the campaign did in fact authorize the fundraiser.

But the details of the fundraiser are in some sense beside the point. Because even before this latest controversy, Gosar had made perfectly clear that he had no problem allying with — and thereby elevating — Fuentes, despite the latter’s open racism and anti-Semitism: He was the only elected member of Congress to speak at a conference organized by Fuentes in February.

The media and the Left frequently cry wolf about bigotry, but there should be no doubt about Fuentes. He once called a writer a “race traitor” because he “work[s] for Jews.” He opposes interracial marriage and has praised segregation.

“Enough with the Jim Crow stuff. Who cares? Oh, they had to drink out of a different water fountain, big f***ing deal. Oh no, they had to go to a different school,” Fuentes said in one video. “It’s better for them, it’s better for us.”

“I’m getting really sick of world Jewry — that’s what it is! what it is! — running the show, and we can’t talk about it,” he said in another video.

In yet another video, he joyfully promoted grotesque claims denying that millions of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Smirking and laughing, he read a question from a viewer who was obviously comparing murdered Jews to cookies and Adolph Hitler to Cookie Monster: “If I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies, and Cookie Monster has fifteen hours working every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make six million batches of cookies?”

“The math doesn’t seem to add up there,” Fuentes says. “Maybe two-hundred to three-hundred thousand cookies,” he adds before making several more references to bits of propaganda cited by Holocaust deniers.

Fuentes attended the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. The night before the rally, white nationalists and neo-Nazis carrying torches chanted “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” During the rally itself, a white-nationalist terrorist murdered a counterprotester named Heather Heyer with his car.

Hours after the terrorist attack had occurred, Fuentes wrote on Facebook that the Unite the Right rally was “incredible.” “You will not replace us,” he said. “The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”

Fuentes, who dropped out of Boston University after the Unite the Right rally, is only 22 years old. But he’s such a notorious anti-Semite and racist that in November 2019, the conservative Young America’s Foundation fired Michelle Malkin for choosing to speak and promote her appearance at his first “America First” convention. “There is no room in mainstream conservatism or at YAF for holocaust deniers, white nationalists, street brawlers, or racists,” YAF said in a statement.

Just a few weeks before Gosar attended Fuentes’s conference in February, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy suggested that the only reason the House GOP conference did not punish Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene for her promotion of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was because it had happened before she was elected.

“Now that you’re a member of Congress, now it’s the responsibility of our conference to hold people accountable,” McCarthy said at a February 3 press conference. “We removed Steve King when he made comments as a member of Congress.”

Why hasn’t the same standard been applied to Gosar, who as of now remains a member in good standing of the House GOP and retains his committee assignments? National Review reached out to McCarthy’s office for comment on Gosar’s relationship with Fuentes, but has not received a response.