On Friday, June 5, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar [R-District 4] visited Cottonwood for a ceremony at the Cottonwood Public Safety facility, giving an award to Sgt. Chad Sinn of the Cottonwood Police Department. Gosar also met with Matthew Strickland and Corby Rice, two CPD officers who were shot at — and hit, in the case of Strickland — by a suspect in an incident on May 6.
While he was there, Gosar addressed the ongoing protests and riots over police violence that have spread throughout America in recent weeks. Before an audience of mostly police officers, Gosar called the protests “aggravated assault of anarchy against the bedrock of this country.” He defended police by saying that “every bushel has a bad apple” and argued that officers like those who killed George Floyd were “the exception.”
“It’s absolutely sick what’s going on,” Gosar said. “Everybody has the right to protest, but nobody has the right for destruction of property and bodily harm.”
Gosar continued by claiming that the riots that have erupted have been instigated by sinister forces, not organic reactions to police violence.
“When this all unfolds you’re going to see that there’s a group behind this that’s just feeling this process,” Gosar said. “Eyes wide open, folks. Eyes wide open. This is a biggest critical point in our republic’s history. We just went through a whole process of social engineering with this COVID virus. We saw the social makeup of socialism, communism, where our government tells you what you can do and what you can’t do, and when you can do it.”
Gosar is running this year for his sixth term in Congress, after having been first elected in 2010 as part of the Tea Party wave. In the time since then he has gotten a reputation as a staunch conservative who is no stranger to controversy.
He has attracted attention for associations with fringe far-right figures in Europe such as Filip Dewinter and Tommy Robinson, and after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, told Vice News that the rally was “started by the left” and that he believed that the Jewish Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros had paid the organizers. Gosar was subsequently denounced by members of his family in a viral campaign ad. In 2018, a resolution in Congress to reprimand Gosar failed after he pressured the Capitol Police on Twitter to arrest Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients who had been invited to the State of the Union address as guests of Democratic legislators.
In 2019, a series of 23 tweets in a row by Gosar had first letters that spelled out “E-P-S-T-E-I-N-D-I-D-N-T- K-I-L-L-H-I-M-S-E-L-F,” a sentence Gosar confirmed was in reference to financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died of an apparent suicide last August while in federal custody for charges related to an alleged sex trafficking ring of underage girls.
“There’s a lot of things that don’t match up,” Gosar said of the case. He called for a fuller investigation of the case and the Department of Justice’s handling of Epstein while in federal prison, and said that doing so continued to get him attention from individuals all over the political spectrum. “That [Twitter thread] got over 24 million hits. I get out of cabs, [and hear people say], ‘Hey you’re the guy who did ‘Epstein didn’t kill himself.’”
But despite his firebrand reputation, Gosar said he has positioned himself as a competent and sober-minded legislator who is able to get things done. In addition to facing a Democratic nominee in the general election, Gosar has this year pulled in a primary challenger in the form of Prescott Valley resident Anne-Marie Ward.
Gosar touted himself as the right choice for Republicans by saying that he had been uniquely productive as a legislator in the minority. He pointed to his 2019 Report Card from the nonpartisan organization GovTrack, which found him to be a uniquely productive member in getting amendments and other bills passed, even while in the minority, as well as a letter praising him from U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern [D-Mass.].
Gosar stated that his work in getting Resolution Copper in Pinal County approved for mining despite objections from environmental groups and American Indian tribes was his proudest promise delivered upon. He said that if he was elected to another term, he would seek to focus on changing laws regarding anti-trust protections in the health care industry that go back to 1945.
Gosar pointed to the recent strong jobs numbers from the month of May as reason to not support additional stimulus funding to help the country deal with the economic fallout of COVID-19, though even after the 2.5 million new jobs added in May, nearly 20 million people are estimated to remain out of work due to losses since the crisis began.
Gosar argued that Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey still had money from the federal government to allocate and that expanded unemployment benefits passed as part of the CARES Act were preventing people from going back to work. He said that his top priority in responding to COVID-19 would be passing a liability shield for employers, preventing companies from being sued if their employees got sick while working for them.
For Gosar, walking the line between outspoken, some- times fringe fire-brand, and wonky legislator is part of his own view of himself as a member of Congress.
“I am a dentist, impersonating a politician,” the 10-year incumbent said of himself.
