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Paul Gosar

Paul Gosar Uses House Newsletter To Promotes Hitler-Loving Website

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) used his House.gov newsletter to direct people to a story posted on a Holocaust-denier website that praised him for attacking “Jewish warmongers” for their support of Ukraine. Gosar was promoting Veterans Today, an antisemitic website that has called the Holocaust a “lie” and a “hoax” and praised Hitler as a “great man” and “a man of valor.”

Gosar’s promotion of Veterans Today is another chapter in his extensive book of antisemitic associations. He has embraced Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes; praised Holocaust denier Vincent James Foxx and promoted his work (including in his newsletter); and defended and praised social media platform Gab and its CEO, Andrew Torba.

Gosar releases a weekly newsletter which includes a section about “Gosar in the News and Other Must-Read Stories.” His April 16 newsletter included a link to a February 26 Veterans Today post by senior editor Jonas E. Alexis that has the headline “Congressman: Jewish warmongers Nuland & Blinken ‘Are Dangerous Fools Who Can Get Us All Killed.’” (Gosar’s newsletter omitted the word “Jewish" before warmongers from its link description.) The Veterans Today article is actually a repost of an article by the Kremlin-funded Sputnik that did not carry the “Jewish warmongers” descriptor.

Gosar is sending readers to an antisemiticsite that frequently publishes content denying the Holocaust. For instance, Veterans Today posted an article titled “Who Really Wanted the Holocaust? (Not the Nazis!)” which claimed to “document why it was that the Nazis did not want the Holocaust and why, instead, Jewish Zionists did” and another piece -- since deleted -- which claimed that “the Holocaust was in fact a (Big Zionist) Jew on (Little non-Zionist) Jew False Flag operation.” It also reposted a piece by neo-NaziAndrew Anglin with the headline “Malignant Jew Goofball Dennis Prager Says You’re Going to Hell If You Don’t Believe His Ridiculous Gas Chamber Hoax.”

Veterans Today has published pro-Hitler propaganda. One piece (“A Defense of Hitler as a Heroic War Veteran?”) called Hitler “a man of valor” and “a great man.” Another stated that while Hitler “intended to save humankind, instead, he has been vilified with the epithet of being the most hated man—and most evil ruler—in human history.“

Jonas E. Alexis, whose byline is on the post that Gosar promoted, has a history of antisemitism. His prior articles include:

In 2017, Politicoreported that Veterans Today is connected to Kremlin propaganda and that “the site has consistently published articles that push the Kremlin party line.”

House Republicans reinstated Gosar to committee assignments after he was removed in the prior Congress for posting an anime video that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Just Another Day With Anti-Semites At The Former President's House

Just Another Day With Anti-Semites At The Former President's House

As we all certainly know by now, Donald Trump had some guests over for dinner last week at his home, the resort/hotel/club Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump claims he had invited his good friend Ye, formerly known as Kayne West, and was surprised when a well-known white supremacist, anti-Semite and public supporter of his, Nick Fuentes showed up as well. That Trump would be having dinner a couple of weeks after he announced his campaign for the presidency in 2024 with two notorious racists and anti-Semites is perhaps less surprising than the reaction to the fact of it.

You could have heard the collective gasp from the media sphere if you were at the bottom of a coal mine in Siberia. The horror! The outrage! The whole un-thinkable-ness of it! The story was beaten to death. How could it have happened? Could Ye/Kayne West really have sashayed past the Secret Service-protected gates of Mar-a-Lago with Fuentes in tow? Reports of the dinner by “sources” say that Trump’s reaction to Fuentes was as predictable as it was yawn-inducing: “I really like this guy,” Trump told his friend Ye/Kayne West. “He gets me.”

You would have had to have been at the bottom of the aforesaid coal mine for the past six years not to know that a little fawning goes a long way with our former president.

And then came the reports of the mainstreaming of Fuentes that has gone on since he made an appearance at the so-called “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Here is our boy Nick in the company of current members of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar and right-wing babbler Michele Malkin and former Rep. Steve King at something called the “America First Political Action Conference,” (AFPAC) which advertises itself as even further to the right than the “Conservative Political Action Conference,” (CPAC). Fuentes, it was reported, led cheers of “Russia! Russia! Russia!” and “Putin! Putin! Putin!” at the gathering, because…of course he did. The next day, he was roundly denounced – in a Tweet, naturally – by soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney, because…of course she did: “All Americans should renounce this garbage and reject the Putin wing of the GOP now. The silence by Republican Party leaders is deafening and enabling,” because…of course it is.

Are you beginning to pick up on the fact that there is nothing new here, folks? Just another day at Mar-a-Lago, just another moment in the continuing saga of the descent of Republicans into less a political party than a herd of Brownshirts thundering through the media-scape without raising hardly a ripple? I mean, what has to happen in this country to rouse the decent against the dastardly? An election that was nearly stolen from the American people in front of their eyes didn’t manage to do it. A violent coup against the seat of our government, the Capitol, didn’t do it. Somewhere in the vicinity of 40,000 overt lies told by our former president while in office had no discernible effect.

And now we’ve got the same former president and current candidate dining in public at his resort/hotel/club with two out-of-control and out-of-their minds anti-semites, and all we’ve heard have been squeaks and chirps from the liberal media establishment about how terrible it is, and of course dead silence from the Republican Party, with the exception of a few brave souls like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (!) who found enough backbone remaining in his normally gelatinous spine that he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “Racism, anti-semitism, and denial of the Holocaust have no place in the Republican Party and are completely un-American.”

Wow, you’d go that far, Brian? That’s taking a pretty big risk isn’t it, pal, given the political climate in your own so-called party. I guess we should consider it a story when a climate-change-denying, voter suppressing flat-earther like Kemp appears to come to his senses…but noooooo! In the next breath, he made a bunch of ads for his Texas-based Senate candidate Herschel Walker, and all was right with the world once again.

But the problem here isn’t that Trump refused to denounce Fuentes once he was caught consorting with him, because of course he didn’t. The problem isn’t that the “leadership” of the Republican Party has stayed silent, because of course they have. The problem isn’t the matter of fact-ness of Trump dining with these monsters. The problem is that 80 years after the Holocaust, we are still dealing with people like this piece of scum, Nick Fuentes, who deny that it happened and get attention for their criminal lies. Holocaust denial just never goes away. The anti-semitism of “Jews will not replace us” chants at the torch-lit Charlottesville rally of buttoned-down and khaki pants-wearing white boys just never goes away. The age-old lies that Jews somehow control the world’s banks and stage-manage economic inequality to their own benefit just never goes away.

But it’s the denial of the Holocaust that is the worst of it. The systematic murder of millions of Jews and Gypsies and gay people and political opponents of Nazism and intellectuals is something that not only happened decades ago but keeps getting repeated again and again and again. Nearly an entire people, Native Americans, were massacred during this nation’s founding. Certainly that was a genocide. It is unknown how many Black Americans were lynched and murdered during slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, but certainly that was a genocide as well. Nearly a million were murdered during the Rwandan massacre in 1994, another genocide. The violence and destruction and starvation in Darfur killed 400,000 in 2003, another genocide. In Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, some 200,000 Muslim civilians were systematically murdered, and nearly two million became refugees at the hands of the Serbs, yet another genocide.

And now it’s happening again in Ukraine, where thousands of civilians are thought to have been murdered by the Russian army since February of this year. They are still digging up mass graves and single graves in Kherson after the Russians were driven out recently. There won’t be an authoritative total of the murders for months, even years, but it is clear already that the killings have been planned, sanctioned, and carried out by the Russian army.

History repeats itself because it is denied and swept under the rug and is unstudied and forgotten. Donald Trump and Nick Fuentes and before them David Duke and his ilk are not just propagandists for a lie. They are facilitators of modern genocides. Lies beget murders which beget more lies which beget more murders.

As a species, we seem unable to stop the ongoing Holocaust that is humanity. But we can fight against it by teaching and learning and remembering.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this column is reprinted with permission.

Why Don't Republicans Act Against Their Party's Neo-Nazi Infestation?

Why Don't Republicans Act Against Their Party's Neo-Nazi Infestation?

As the Republican Party gives off an increasingly strong stench of fascism — with the anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic attitudes inherent in that ideology — the party establishment looks more and more like the "Junker" conservatives of Germany in the 1930s. While those monarchists and militarists felt distaste for Hitler and his Nazi thugs, many of them nevertheless abetted his rise to power.

A disturbingly similar scenario is now visible in what was once the party of Lincoln, where the spineless Rep. Kevin McCarthy, conniving Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and sundry other "leaders" say little or nothing as fascists openly conspire to take over. Rather than confront the repeated provocations by their Nazi-adjacent colleagues over the past year, those timid figures are instead allowing the authoritarian cancer to grow out of control. Both McCarthy and McConnell know what's happening in the GOP, but their weak character will likely prevent them from acting with any resolve until it is far too late, if ever.

Instead, the scandalous connections continue to metastasize between far-right Republican officials and a motley assortment of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and fascist thugs.

In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, an election-denying insurrectionist and Christian nationalist, won the party's gubernatorial primary last spring. Mastriano, a state senator, then proceeded to bring a vocal and aggressive anti-Semite named Andrew Torba into his campaign, along with Torba's followers. Torba operates Gab, the tiny social media site that serves as a headquarters for unsavory rightists — notably including the maniac who murdered 11 people at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue just after posting a diatribe on the website.

To save face, Torba denounced that massacre and insisted he opposes violence. But he isn't shy about expressing his desire for a nation free of Jews, which he frames in furious terms. He promotes violently anti-Semitic material, and recently opined that Jews can no longer be accepted as conservatives.

In this appalling saga's latest development, Mastriano declared that he opposes anti-Semitism and that Torba "doesn't speak for me or my campaign." But a few weeks ago, Mastriano, who rarely speaks to mainstream outlets, sat down for an interview with Torba and gushed: "Thank God for what you've done."

Reacting to the erupting controversy, Torba denied being a Mastriano consultant and — in a revealing remark — explained that the Republican was merely buying advertising on Gab. "The campaign paid Gab as a business for advertising during the primary," he wrote. "The campaign posts on Gab, as do 50-plus other campaigns from around the country."

So more than 50 Republican candidates are buying ads to entice the troglodytic Nazi subscribers on Gab — and providing many thousands of dollars in revenue to its obnoxious proprietor.

The official Republican response to this filthy tableau has been feeble indeed. The Republican Jewish Coalition, such as it is, tweeted its pathetic "hope" that Mastriano would reject Gab. Of all Mastriano's GOP colleagues in the state legislature, exactly one has spoken up to condemn Torba and demand his "total rejection" by Mastriano, which isn't happening. The Republican Governors Association, the Republican National Committee, the GOP congressional leaders, and the entire party apparatus evidently see no cause for alarm.

Sadly, it would be foolish to expect anything better from the Republican Party, because its Dear Leader Donald Trump has created a permission structure for fascism and even anti-Semitism, despite the fact that his oldest daughter and a couple of his grandchildren are Jews. Trump's own anti-Semitic emissions long ago became notorious, along with his coddling of neo-Nazis.

Why? Principally because those scum constantly praise his bigotry and bullying, so he sees nothing wrong with them. It's always and only about him — and the Nazi sympathizers are his most faithful fans, dating back to Richard Spencer's "Heil Trump" salute during the 2016 Republican convention.

But the white nationalist disease within the GOP now extends far beyond Trump and will surely outlast him. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) talks about Jewish space lasers and repeats anti-Semitic slurs about George Soros, as do so many of her colleagues. She and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) both spoke before the neo-Nazi America First Political Action Committee, an outfit run by Holocaust denier Nicholas Fuentes. So did Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, another raving Republican anti-Semite who called Fuentes "the most persecuted man in America."

The list of anti-Jewish and racist offenders in the GOP could take up many more pages, ad nauseam. There are less blatant but equally dangerous figures closer to the party's power centers, such as billionaire Peter Thiel, the would-be kingmaker who has courted a white nationalist leader and revealed his disdain for democracy — and is now financing U.S. Senate candidates in Arizona and Ohio.

The question remains whether decent Republicans, of whom there must still be many, intend to save their once-great party from slime and shame. So far, they've only demonstrated blindness and cowardice. And they seem fated to end like the Junkers, who waited until 1944 to act against Hitler — and ended up on the gallows.

They can't say nobody warned them.

Joe Conason is editor-in-chief of The National Memo and editor-at-large of Type Investigations. To find out more about him and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Greene Joins Extremists Pushing 'Transsexual' Lies About Uvalde Killer

Greene Joins Extremists Pushing 'Transsexual' Lies About Uvalde Killer

Emboldened by her successive victories in court and the GOP primary in Georgia, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has joined the list of House Republicans deploying shockingly baseless conspiracy theory that the Uvalde gunman was transgender in a bid to deflect public attention elsewhere and stunt the growing calls for common-sense gun reforms.

On Sunday, Greene, a known far-right conspiracy theorist, started a Facebook Live — which she titled “Something doesn’t add up” — before 9:30 pm and quickly began pushing an utterly unfounded rumor, without evidence, that Texas school shooter Salvador Ramos “clearly had a lot of mental issues going on, as was shown with him wearing eyeliner, cross-dressing, a lot of his language, being a loner.”

Since the massacre, new details have continued to emerge about Ramos, but there’s been nothing to suggest that the gunman was transgender or had been crossdressing, as Greene had claimed, without evidence. According to the Independent, the rumor appeared to have originated on 4chan, a hotbed of right-wing conspiracies, where extremist netizens falsely blamed a transgender woman for the shooting. However, the woman whom the 4chan users accused did not live in Texas and did not bear any significant resemblance to Ramos.

Greene isn’t the only Republican spreading false rumors about the deceased 18-year-old suspect’s identity. MAGA fanatic and anti-vaxxer Candace Owens and Republican Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Pete Sessions (R-TX) have disseminated variants of the same rumor on social media and in interviews.

However, Greene went further down the conspiratorial rabbit hole than the others did, as is her style. She claimed — without evidence, of course — that Ramos had been in the same Discord server as Payton Gendron, the teen charged in connection with the recent massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo, a majo black neighborhood.

Eventually Greene issued a disclaimer on her live stream, stating that she had been unable to verify the information she was peddling on air.

The Georgian congresswoman didn’t stop there, though. She pushed the misinformation still further, claiming that an unidentified party was “grooming” young men into mass shooters, inching towards a conspiracy that QAnon is founded on — that former President Trump, a hero, is facing down a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government. The conspiracy theory is a staple used by conservatives to slander the LGBTQ community, as well.

Just hours after the shooting, in response to a tweet that claimed Ramos supported right-wing House members, Gosar wrote, and later deleted, a tweet claiming the shooter was a “transsexual” illegal immigrant.

"We know already fool. It's a transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvatore Ramos. It's apparently your kind of trash," Gosar tweeted.

The Arizonian would later delete his tweet, but it’s not his first social media attack on Democrats or left-leaning Americans. "The Democratic party is the party of hatred. They hate America, they hate people who love America, and they hate the religion and the descendants of the people who built America," Gosar tweeted on Monday.

Another Arizona Republican, Josh Barnette, who is challenging incumbent Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) for his House seat, publicly questioned whether or not Ramos was in the United States legally, but Texas Governor Greg Abbott stated that the gunman was a citizen of the United States.