Gosar allies with racists, making it hard to take his ‘white racism’ denunciation seriously

Congressman Paul Gosar is no stranger to palling around with bigots and racists, making it hard to place much stock in his denunciations of “white racism” after he gave the headline speech at a white nationalist conference and sat through a blatantly racist speech given by the organizer.

In 2018, he traveled to London to speak at a rally urging the release of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, a British anti-Muslim activist who was jailed for disrupting a trial. Gosar gave a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives accusing the British government of covering up for “Muslim gangs who are raping British girls, almost with impunity.”

Gosar took $10,000 to attend that rally. That trip was arranged and paid for by the Philadelphia-based anti-Muslim nonprofit that organized it, the Middle East Forum. 

And while he was in London, he broke bread with a collection of European right-wing activists and anti-immigrant political leaders at a dinner organized by Steve Bannon.

Then there was the time when Gosar said the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., was organized by an “Obama sympathizer” and was paid for by George Soros. He then went on to falsely accuse Soros, a Holocaust survivor, of turning his fellow Jews over to the Nazis. And he backed anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer’s failed congressional bid.

All of which is to say it wasn’t too surprising that he showed up at a white nationalist conference in Florida. Or that he was the only member of Congress who was willing to show his face there.

And it strains credulity that Gosar would denounce “white racism” after basking in the adulation of people who believe America is being destroyed by non-white people achieving political power.

Take the founder of the America First PAC, Nick Fuentes. He really doesn’t like being called a white nationalist, but he also makes no bones about being one. 

“I would say I’m a white person, I’m conscious of my white identity, conscious of nationalism, but I think in a way it’s almost redundant that you’re a ‘white’ nationalist. We know that the word ‘nation’ almost implicitly talks about ethnicity and biology,” Fuentes said on a podcast in 2018. “So I think if I call myself a nationalist, it’s almost implicit in that word that it’s, ‘Well, America does have a heritage of being a European country.’”

Gosar made his denunciation of “white racism” not because he was horrified by the speech Fuentes gave after his at last month’s conference — a speech in which Fuentes said liberals want “a new racial caste system in this country, with whites at the bottom” and that the country would cease to be America “if it loses its white demographic core” — but because reporters took note of his speech.

And Gosar certainly hasn’t distanced himself from Fuentes or his organization. To wit, after the conference, Fuentes tweeted a picture of Gosar and other speakers with the slogan “America First is inevitable!” This week, Gosar parroted the same slogan by tweeting a weird meme that depicted an animated sex worker propositioning a man in a car.