Paul Gosar Lies LGBTQ Rights Arizona

Hours After 19 Children Were Murdered in Uvalde, Paul Gosar Told the Country a Lie About the Shooter

"It's a transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvatore Ramos." He had the name wrong, the shooter was a U.S. citizen, and there was no evidence for the rest. The theory started on 4chan, and the photos being passed around included a 20-year-old woman in Georgia who spent the next days proving she was alive.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 08, 2026

Hours After 19 Children Were Murdered in Uvalde, Paul Gosar Told the Country a Lie About the Shooter

On Tuesday, May 24, 2022, a gunman walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed nineteen children and two teachers.

Officials were still taking DNA samples from parents to confirm which children had died. The parents waiting on the lawn of the town's civic center did not yet know which of them had lost a child.

That same day, Paul Gosar told his followers who did it.

"It's a transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvatore Ramos."

Not one element of that sentence held up

The shooter was Salvador Ramos — Gosar got the name wrong — an 18-year-old who was killed at the scene.

"Illegal alien." Ramos was a U.S. citizen. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, confirmed it publicly.
"Transsexual." There was no evidence for it. FactCheck.org examined the claim and found none.
"Leftist." No evidence was offered for that either.

Gosar was not passing along a wire report. He was passing along a theory that started on 4chan.

Where it actually came from

NBC News traced the claim to its source. On the afternoon of the shooting, someone posted to 4chan a photo of a young woman under the words "here's the shooter's reddit," along with a link to her account and a transphobic slur.

The woman is named Sam. She is 20 years old. She lives in Georgia. She had posted the photo on Reddit three months earlier — she had started sharing pictures of herself and her art online to build up her confidence.

By that evening, strangers were telling her that her face was circulating as the face of a man who murdered children.

Trolls built collages pairing her photos with images from an Instagram account believed to have belonged to the shooter. Photos of at least two other transgender women were used the same way. A U.K. group that tracks online threats against trans people reported that all three women had confirmed they were alive.

That same evening, Sam started proving she existed. She posted a picture of herself in front of a transgender pride flag: "It's not me, I don't even live in Texas." She posted another photo of herself holding a piece of paper with the date written on it — the thing you do when you need to prove to the internet that you are a real person, alive, right now.

What she told NBC News:

"This isn't the first time I was harassed, but it is the first time I've been accused of murder."

And, on Reddit:

"I just want to live without being attacked when I leave my house."

She also said this, which is the part that should stop anyone cold: "I'm more worried about the families of the victims of the attack."

She was more worried about them than about the harassment campaign that had her face on it.

A member of Congress made it enormous

The lie was already moving on 4chan. What Gosar added was legitimacy.

He is a United States Representative. When he posted it, it stopped being an anonymous troll's claim and became something a sitting member of Congress had stated as fact. Alex Jones amplified the same falsehood. Candace Owens joined the next day, referencing "cross-dressing" photos. A conservative Facebook page with thousands of followers shared one of Sam's pictures.

Gosar deleted his post. NBC News: "Gosar has not returned a request for comment." FactCheck.org noted that he had since deleted the tweet.

We found no record of an apology. Not to Sam, not to the other two women, not to anyone in Uvalde.

Advocate Charlotte Clymer said at the time that Gosar "owes the public an apology" and called it "pathetic that @DrPaulGosar sought to exploit this horrific tragedy for anti-trans propaganda."

This has a pattern, and the pattern has a purpose

Reporter Katelyn Burns, quoted by NBC News, pointed out that this was not the first time. After a 2018 shooting at YouTube's headquarters, some far-right websites and conservative critics speculated without evidence that the shooter was transgender. After a 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Sen. Ted Cruz repeated an unsubstantiated claim that the shooter was a "transgendered leftist activist, if that's what he is."

The mechanism is always the same, and it runs on a clock. In the first hours after a mass shooting, before facts exist, there is a window in which any claim can travel. The people who fill that window with "the shooter was trans, the shooter was an immigrant, the shooter was a leftist" are not confused. They are converting dead children into an argument, before the argument can be checked.

And the argument they are making is about guns. That spring, Texas had opened investigations into the parents of some transgender children under a directive from its governor. As trans advocate Erin Reed put it: a sitting congressman spread a lie about the shooter to pin it on transgender people, in a state "where they are spending more time banning trans kids than they are spending regulating guns."

What it costs

Nineteen children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary. In the hours when their families were still waiting for confirmation, a congressman from Arizona — a man with no connection to the case and no information anyone else lacked — told the country three baseless things about who killed them.

He deleted the post. We found no correction, and no apology.

This was six months after the House censured him for posting a video of himself killing a colleague — a censure he answered by re-sharing the video within the hour.

There is no version of this where he didn't know what he was doing.