An alleged announcement of a fundraiser for Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) with a person with a history of antisemitic and white nationalist comments has caused an uproar across the political spectrum.
The document, with the appearance of a campaign flyer from Gosar’s reelection campaign, shows an image of the congressman and a man named Nick Fuentes. “Please join us for a fundraiser event with Paul Gosar, representing Arizona’s 4th district,” the flyer reads.
“Please join Nick Fuentes and America First for a Fundraiser Event with Congressman Paul Gosar,” the flyer continues. “Date, time, and location to be announced July 1st.”
The bottom right of the flyer includes an official logo of Gosar’s campaign and a campaign email address. The bottom left of the flyer notes that cash or check would be accepted at the event and the maximum donation allowable by federal law would be $2,900 for the election cycle. The bottom left of the flyer also includes a WinRed website platform link for people to donate to Gosar for the fundraiser and then says the flyer was “paid for by Nicholas Fuentes and authorized by Gosar for Congress Committee.”
Gosar, in a statement to Breitbart News on Tuesday evening, said he has no fundraiser scheduled with Fuentes.
“I do not have a fundraising event scheduled and it was not confirmed by me,” Gosar said. “The people who support me know my views on Israel and presumably share those views.”
The alleged announcement, which first appeared online late Monday evening, sparked uproar and backlash from conservatives and establishment media figures alike citing the history of antisemitic and white nationalist statements made by Fuentes. The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), for instance, in a tweet called the plans for a fundraiser “reprehensible” and called on Gosar to “immediately cancel this event, apologize, and denounce antisemite and Holocaust-denier, Nick Fuentes.”
Former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) — who, despite backing last year from former President Donald Trump, lost reelection at the GOP convention to primary challenger and now Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) — also ripped Gosar for it, saying it is a “dangerous time.” Riggleman has been a Trump critic since losing his congressional race.
When CNN reporter Manu Raju asked Gosar about this on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, he denied any knowledge of it.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Gosar said when asked about it by Raju. “There’s no fundraiser that I know of on Friday.”
Raju also said he asked Gosar if he would appear at all with Fuentes regardless of the date, and Raju said that Gosar did not answer directly.
Previously, Gosar seemingly defended the implication on Monday evening that he would be hosting a fundraiser with Fuentes.
“Not sure why anyone is freaking out,” Gosar said in a Monday evening tweet seemingly in response to early criticisms of the Fuentes announcement. “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.”
Gosar’s office issued a statement from the congressman to Breitbart News on Tuesday evening defending the congressman’s record on Israel and disavowing white supremacism.
“I have the best record in Congress supporting America First, and Israel as our greatest ally abroad,” Gosar said. “Our country is being divided by critical race theory/anti-white propaganda. We have a leading conservative voice, Tucker Carlson, being spied on by the administration, our President removed from the internet, unconstitutional watch lists, no-fly lists, debanking, concerns about election integrity, rampant inflation, open borders, unsustainable debt, bombing in the Middle East, saber rattling with Russia, the China virus, and a regime that holds the country hostage. These are the issues that matter. I continue to condemn racial supremacy, ethnic nationalism, and antisemitism and I do not accept them as part of America First. Such talk is nonsense and my record is clear on this.”
The congressman and his office have not answered when asked in follow-up questions if he disavows Fuentes and if he will ever appear with Fuentes at any fundraiser or event in the future.
Gosar’s office’s statement comes as he also late Tuesday evening sent a series of messages on Twitter that defended himself from any charges he is antisemitic:
In this four-tweet series, Gosar also — like in his previous statements — seems to cast himself as a victim of the left and the Democrats and establishment media. But it is not just Democrats and the left and establishment media who have been calling Fuentes out for years. Top conservatives have as well.
In fact, when Fox News published a story on this matter earlier on Tuesday, Fuentes fired back on his own Twitter account attacking the network:
Fuentes also claimed he is being lied about publicly:
But Fuentes is someone who has repeatedly espoused antisemitic and white nationalist views. For instance, in 2019, a clip emerged of him denying the Holocaust.
Reading a viewer question on his show, Fuentes said:
Mack says, “If I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and cookie monster has 15 ovens, working 24 hours a day every day for five years, how long does it take cookie monster to make six million batches of cookies?” I don’t know, that’s a good question. It’s certainly, no no no. It doesn’t really sound correct to me. Wait a second — it takes one hour to cook a batch of cookies, and you have 15 ovens probably in four different kitchens right? Doing 24 hours a day every day for five years how long would it take you to make six million? Hmmm. I don’t know. It certainly wouldn’t be five years, right? The math doesn’t seem to add up there. The math doesn’t quite seem to add up there.
I don’t think you would get to six million. Maybe 200 to 300 thousand cookies? Maybe the red cookie association said something like that, maybe 200,000 to 300,000 cookies baked probably? In addition, you know, in this hypothetical, I imagine if you took aerial photographs over the kitchens, you would need to see certain smoke stacks to release the smoke from baking the cookies and the smoke stacks would project certain shadows, but I guess they’re not visible in the aerial photographs taken over the kitchens.
Moreover, if you look at the soil texture it’s really not deep enough for mass cookie storage underground, and so there’s a lot of things. You know, in the cookie kitchen, they say that the ovens are wooden and they have windows on them and they’re not totally secure. And the ovens that they use — they actually did sort of an ad hoc use of that particular kind of an oven even though they made a perfectly good kind of ovens for a different purpose for delousing. I mean, you know, for something else. So none of it really adds up. It just kind of doesn’t really make sense, this crazy cookie analogy. You have to really be — that’s sort of an esoteric story, that’s from cookie right — you wouldn’t understand that if you’re sort of just passing through, if you’re just a normie. So, six million cookies, uh-uh. I don’t buy it.
Fuentes later told the Washington Post that the cookie comments denying the Holocaust were meant to be a “lampoon.”
“I’ve never denied the Holocaust,” he told the newspaper.
Fuentes has also made blatantly racist comments. A clip that surfaced in 2019 showed him saying Jim Crow was “better for” white people and black people. “Enough with the Jim Crow stuff,” Fuentes said. “Who cares? ‘Oh I had to drink out of a different water fountain. Big f—ing deal. Oh no, they had to go to a different school. Their water fountain in that famous picture was worse. Oh no. Who cares? Grow up. Drink out of the different water fountain. It’s just water. It’s the same. Even if it was bad, who cares? Who cares? It was better in general. We all agree — it was better for them, it was better for us — better in general.”
In response to the El Paso shooter in 2019, Fuentes also said people disavowing white supremacy is “very cucked and blue pilled.”
“Totally wrong and a big mistake,” Fuentes said in response to then-President Donald Trump denouncing white supremacy in the wake of the shooting:
I get that there’s a lot of pressure on him right now, a lot of calls for him to disavow this stuff even from his own side. People like, what’s this guy, Scott — Tim Scott — who earlier today was like duh duh duh oh, “white nationalism is antithetical to the American creed.” Well, what do you know about the American creed? Or Dinesh D’Souza — “President Trump should make a speech talking about the roots of white nationalism and white supremacy.” When the f— did you get here? 1990? Dinesh D’Souza? I’m sorry — did anybody who sounds like Dinesh D’Souza sign the Constitution of the United States or the Declaration of Independence? I don’t remember that … Dinesh D’Souza is going to roll up to our shore from India, from smelly open-defecation India, and he’s going to tell us that Robert E. Lee was a racist and, oh, our ancestors were villains. Oh well, as long as they were Democrats. So, Dinesh D’Souza can go to hell, and all these people can.
In 2018, according to the Jerusalem Post, Fuentes even admitted he avoids the term “white nationalist” as a descriptor for himself for purely tactical reasons.
“The reason I wouldn’t call myself a white nationalist — it’s not because I don’t see the necessity for white people to have a homeland and for white people to have a country,” Fuentes said. “It’s because I think that kind of terminology is used almost exclusively by the left to defame and I think the terminology and the labels that we use — I don’t think that we can look at them outside of the context of their connotations in America.”
Rebecca Mansour contributed reporting for this article.