Like a striking number of wingnut candidates, the majority of his own family have warned against electing him, pointing out that he lacks “the intellect, character or maturity to be in that leadership role” and is an “incompetent” “sociopath” who has never been held accountable for his extremist bullshit, and they have paid for ads endorsing his opponents.
Conspiracy theories and quackery
Despite having been a dentist, Gosar currently promotes conspiracy theories about water fluoridation. As a matter of fact, Gosar himself called anti-fluoride conspiracy theorists “disturbing” back when he was practicing dentistry, but anti-fluoride conspiracy theories have been a mainstay of wingnuttery ever since the heydays of the John Birch Society, and Gosar the politician is committed to letting ideology trump facts when choosing what to believe. It’s the same commitment that showed up for instance when Gosar, after the 2022 Uvalde mass shooting, flatly and falsely claimedthat the perpetrator was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien”.
In 2017, he tried to portray the Unite the Right rally as a left-wing conspiracy to make Trump look bad (despite supporting the protestors’ goals) and, in particular, tried to blame it on Soros because that’s pretty much the extent of his intellectual resources. And if you’re wondering whether he, a sitting US congressman, would go where you might expect this kind of deluded conspiracy theorists to go, then yes: In 2023, Gosar pushed an article published by Russian state media decrying the influence of “Jewish warmongers” in Ukraine on Jim Fetzer’s Holocaust-denying website. In 2020, Gosar voted against a resolution to condemn QAnon, after having himself appeared at various QAnon events.
He is, of course, also a climate change denialist and has engaged in much silly theatrics to establish his credentials as a denialist. Back in the days, Gosar moreover supported birther conspiracy theories, because of course he did. And yes, he is, of course, an antivaxxer: In September 2024 he introduced legislation that would allow citizens to sue vaccine manufacturers for “vaccine injuries”, citing the antivaccine myth that vaccine manufacturers cannot be held liable and claiming, completely contrary to reality, that there is a lack of science concerning vaccine safety.
Stop the Steal
In the wake of the 2020 election, Gosar was a steadfast promoter of Stop the Steal conspiracy theories, being one of 27 Republican members of Congress to request that US Attorney General William Barr “appoint a Special Counsel to investigate irregularities in the 2020 election” – not that Gosar really cared for investigations or evidence, of course: in the joint session of Congress to formally count the votes of the Electoral College on January 6, 2021, Gosar promptly pronounced that Arizona’s election was stolen and that “[o]ver 400,000 mail-in ballots were altered, switched from President Trump to Vice President Biden or completely erased from President Trump’s total”. He did, of course, not even try to back up the claim with anything whatsoever or show any awareness that facts or evidence could matter when you make a claim like that. Together with Representative Andy Biggs, a fellow fake-news disseminator, Gosar featured as the star of a video produced by the Arizona Republican Party falsely claiming widespread voter fraud, with Gosar falsely claiming that Arizona’s voting machines were faulty, that Wisconsin intentionally paused counting votes to “dump” 100,000 votes into the count for Biden, and that electoral votes for Biden should not be counted from states that Biden won but Gosar thought Trump should have won.
Gosar was a frequent speaker at subsequent Stop the Steal events, claiming without basis in anything that Biden was an “illegitimate usurper” and that Trump was the victim of an attempted coup. He also likened the efforts of himself and fellow conspiracy theorists to the Battle of the Alamo, and compared his efforts to those of Japanese soldier Teruo Nakamura, who refused to recognize Japan’s surrender in WWII for decades and remained alone on an island – a comparison that is actually kind of apt. Gosar rarely thinks these things through with much care.
His endorsement of Stop the Steal followed the pattern laid out two years before, when Gosar promoted easily debunked conspiracy theories claiming that Martha McSally really won the 2018 Senate election over Kyrsten Sinema.
As expected, Gosar was part of the March for Trump/Save America rally that preceded the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot (at an Arizona rally prior to the event, he had assured his fans that “once we conquer the Hill, Donald Trump is returned to being the president”), posting a photo of the MAGA crowd in front of the Washington Monument prior to the Capitol storming with the comment “Biden should concede. I want his concession on my desk tomorrow morning. Don’t make me come over there.” Indeed, Gosar might have been among the strategists behind the storming, together with Biggs, Mo Brooks and Ali Alexander; at least Alexander tweeted, in December 2020, that these four were planning to organize a “mob” to put “maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting” (and Gosar has been linked to similar plans in his home state). Gosar subsequently described the rioters as “peaceful patriots” who were later being “harassed” by the Department of Justice. He was also the first member of Congress to advance the false conspiracy theory that antifa was to blame for the violence. “Without accurate answers [i.e. the answers he wants], conspiracies continue to form”, lamented Gosar – and he was apparently powerless to stop spreading them. His campaign, meanwhile, sent out a fundraising email in which he accused the FBI of staging the attack.
Association with Nick Fuentes
In 2021, Gosar was a speaker at a white supremacist event organized by neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. He subsequently held a fundraiser with Fuentes, of which he later claimed to have no knowledge despite the very real existence of a flyer featuring both of them and despite having spent plenty of time listening to Fuentes explain how the US would cease to be America without a white majority. Gosar later seems to have given up trying to deny the connection, and in 2022 he promoted a film about Fuentes that portrayed the latter as the “most canceled man in America”; “[t]he persecution against Christians and Conservatives by the Biden Regime brings great dishonor to our country,” wrote Gosar on Twitter and shared a trailer for the film. Since November 2021, Gosar has also employed Wade Searle – currently as his digital director – a self-declared “dedicated acolyte of Nick Fuentes, with the Hitler-loving white supremacist leader going as far as to call him a loyal friend and one of the ‘strongest soldiers of the movement’,” who reportedly runs the white supremacist “ChickenRight” accounts on Twitter and Gab, which posts anti-semitic conspiracy theories about “HOOK-NOSED BANKERS.” Gosar himself has, since 2021, endorsed the memes and buzzwords of the groyper movement, and has regularly retweeted Fuentes and other groyper leaders such as longtime white nationalist Vincent James Foxx. He also has ties to the neo-fascist militia organization the Oath Keepers.
Fuentes, on his side, thinks that Gosar is “weak”.
Miscellaneous
We can’t be bothered to delve much into Gosar’s feeble attempts at violent shitposting and the dizzying number of layers of idiocy they involve. In line with online altright groyper, red-pill and QAnon aesthetics and culture, Gosar is fond of weird insider gifs and memes (and of inserting random promotions of various conspiracy theories in threads about other matters), like this one. He did receive some attention in 2020 for tweeting a doctored photograph showing Obama meeting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, defending it by saying that “No one said this wasn’t photoshopped”.
Then there are things like this one, but there are simply too many of these, and they’re too dumb, to go through them in detail.
Diagnosis: It is, at least, fair to say that Gosar lacks “the intellect, character or maturity to be in that leadership role” and is an “incompetent” “sociopath”, but the descriptions doesn’t seem quite sufficient to characterize this rage-and-confusion-fuelled, groyper-affiliated blabbermouth, gohmert and fake news dispenser. We’ll accept submissions for better characterizations.
The worst part about Gosar is how he keeps getting re-elected. One person who lives in his district said a lot of elderly "snowbirds" live there too, and they are conservative to a fault.
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