Paul Gosar Racist Controversy Arizona

Mitch McConnell Said There's No Place in the GOP for White Supremacists. Paul Gosar Spoke at Nick Fuentes's Conference Two Years Running.

He addressed AFPAC in person in 2021 and by video in 2022 — the second time right after Fuentes praised Hitler from the same stage. He wrote the FBI on congressional letterhead defending Fuentes. His own digital director was traced to a Groyper account.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 08, 2026

Mitch McConnell Said There's No Place in the GOP for White Supremacists. Paul Gosar Spoke at Nick Fuentes's Conference Two Years Running.

Most politicians who get caught near a white nationalist movement do the same three things: express surprise, claim they didn't know who was involved, and never go back.

Paul Gosar has done none of that. He went back.

The conference

The America First Political Action Conference is organized by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who, as NBC News put it, "gained national prominence after he attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville."

Gosar attended AFPAC in person in 2021. He addressed it again in 2022 by recorded video.

At that 2022 event in Orlando, from the same stage, Fuentes appeared to praise Adolf Hitler — responding to comparisons between Vladimir Putin and Hitler by telling the crowd, "Now they're going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler — they say that's not a good thing." He then urged the room to back Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The crowd chanted "Putin! Putin!"

What his own party said about it

This is not a case where Republicans looked away. They said it out loud, on the record, by name.

Mitch McConnell, then Senate Republican leader: "There's no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or anti-Semitism."

Kevin McCarthy, then House Republican leader, called it "appalling and wrong," and added: "There's no place in our party for any of this. … The party should not be associated any time, any place with somebody who is antisemitic. This is unacceptable."

Mitt Romney called Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene "morons" on CNN.

Liz Cheney said her colleagues were promoting antisemitism and white supremacy that is "a toxin in the bloodstream."

Jim Banks, then chairman of the Republican Study Committee: "It's unbecoming for a member of Congress to speak at an event that's promoted by anyone who espouses those views. This is an event that no Republican should attend."

Greene at least offered a defense — she told a CBS reporter she didn't know who Fuentes was, had never heard him speak, had never seen a video.

Gosar offered nothing. NBC News reported flatly: "Gosar has been silent about the controversy. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment."

Nobody in that party lost a committee seat over it. McCarthy said he planned to discuss the matter with them.

He used congressional letterhead to defend Fuentes to the FBI

The AFPAC appearances could, at a stretch, be filed under bad judgment about a speaking invitation.

This cannot. In July 2021, according to Talking Points Memo, Gosar wrote to the FBI on congressional letterhead criticizing Fuentes's placement on the no-fly list as an abuse of power.

That is a sitting member of Congress spending the authority of his office to advocate for a white nationalist activist, with a federal law enforcement agency, in writing.

And then there was his digital director

In May 2023, TPM published an investigation into Wade Searle, Gosar's digital director — a staffer who had "served as the main contact on official press releases and represented the congressman at events," and who began working for Gosar in November 2021, months after graduating high school.

TPM found "an extensive digital trail of interconnected Groyper social media pages using variations of the 'ChickenRight' and 'Chikken' handles that can be linked to Wade Searle" — including accounts placing him at Fuentes rallies and archived posts from 2020 and 2021.

What those accounts posted was, in TPM's description, "extremist, anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-vaccine content" — including that trans people are "pedophiles," that LGBTQ people engage in "sin," and a reference to "HOOK-NOSED BANKERS."

Fuentes himself praised the account. He called "Chikken" one of the "strongest soldiers of the movement," and after a $150 donation described "Chikkenright" as "one of the best."

TPM's note on the response: "Gosar, his chief of staff, his press secretary, and Searle have not responded to multiple detailed requests for comment."

That is the same answer he gave about AFPAC. Silence is his position.

This goes back further than Fuentes

The pattern predates the Groypers by years.

In October 2017, two months after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended with a woman dead, Gosar told VICE News that the rally may have been a false flag — organized by an "Obama sympathizer" and funded by George Soros.

He went further. He accused Soros of having "turned in his own people to the Nazis."

George Soros was born in Hungary in 1930. He was 14 years old in 1944, and he survived the Nazi occupation because his father arranged for him to pass as Christian. The claim Gosar repeated is a well-worn antisemitic conspiracy theory, and it is false. His Open Society Foundations told VICE: "George Soros survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary, and he has spent his life supporting efforts to ensure that such terrifying authoritarianism never takes root again."

VICE also noted the obvious problem with the "Obama sympathizer" claim: Jason Kessler, who organized the Charlottesville rally, has written for an anti-immigration website about his fear that America will face "white genocide."

The people who know him best

In 2018, the year after the Soros comments, six of Paul Gosar's nine siblings appeared in campaign advertisements for his Democratic opponent, identifying themselves on camera one by one — a rural physician, a lawyer, a medical interpreter, a private investigator — and telling voters in his district to reject him.

The Guardian reported that the falling-out traced directly to the Soros conspiracy theory and to Charlottesville. After the rally, his siblings wrote to an Arizona newspaper: "We are aghast that Paul has sunk so low." His sister Joan said in one of the ads that she believed her brother had traded away the values they were raised with.

Gosar's public answer to his own family was to call them "disgruntled Hillary supporters" who "put political ideology before family," and to add: "Stalin would be proud."

Then, as now, it changed nothing.

The through-line

We have written before about a Senate candidate whose own son-in-law is a white nationalist influencer posting Nazi imagery and about a governor candidate who went on a podcast whose host praised Hitler. The usual defense in these stories is that the member didn't know.

Gosar cannot use that defense, and to his credit he has never really tried. He spoke at the conference. He went back the next year. He wrote the FBI on House letterhead in Fuentes's defense. He hired a digital director whose online trail led into the same movement, and said nothing when reporters asked.

His party's leader said there is no place in the Republican Party for this. Gosar is still in it, still on a committee, still on the ballot.