Six siblings of a congressman just endorsed his opponent
Families are complicated, their private tensions and political disagreements often kept under wraps.
That’s not the case with Rep. Paul Gosar, Rariz., whose opponent in the midterm election just got a boost from Gosar’s siblings. Six of them.
The brothers and sisters — Tim, Jennifer, Gaston, Joan, Grace and David — appeared in campaign advertisements for David Brill, the Democrat hoping to unseat Gosar in Arizona’s 4th District in the upcoming midterm election.
The Gosar siblings framed their endorsement of Brill as a matter of values, saying their brother, who has long drawn headlines for his farright views, and his politics were simply too much for them to stomach.
“We gotta stand up for our good name,” said brother David Gosar in the advertisement. “This is not who we are.”
“I couldn’t be quiet any longer, nor should any of us be,” said sister Grace Gosar.
“I think my brother has traded a lot of the values we had at our kitchen table,” said another sister, Joan.
In an interview with The Washington Post, David Gosar, 57, a lawyer in Jackson, Wyo., said he felt obligated to speak out against his brother because of his views, although he wished it weren’t the case.
“There isn’t a kooky, crazy, nutty thing that he isn’t a part of,” he said. “What are we supposed to do?”
David said he doesn’t talk to his brother much anymore. The split came around the time of his congressional run, when, David said, his brother told him he believed the “birther” theory that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fake. (A 2010 clip from Politico quotes Paul Gosar as declining to say whether he believed Obama was born in the United States, saying it was “for the courts and for other people to decide.”)
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you have to be kidding me,’ and then he went and got elected,” David Gosar said. “I’m not going to break bread with a racist.”
Paul Gosar did not respond to a request for comment sent to his spokeswoman.
Gosar, who became a congressman in 2013, has drawn coverage for his extreme rhetoric in recent years.
In January, he drew bipartisan rebukes after he said that he asked the Capitol police and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to check IDS at the State of the Union and to arrest and deport any undocumented immigrants in attendance.
At least one senator, Dick Durbin, Dill., planned to bring an undocumented “Dreamer” to the speech as a guest.
The next month, Gosar said FBI and Department of Justice officials such as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, and former FBI Director James Comey should face “treason” charges because of developments in the Russia investigation.
This summer, he spoke at a rally in London for one of Great Britain’s most notorious antimuslim campaigners, Tommy Robinson, drawing rebukes from American Muslim groups.
But perhaps his most notorious moment came in 2017 in an interview with Vice News, when he spread a baseless conspiracy theory that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that summer had been “created by the left.”
He also brought up the common rightwing falsehood that liberal philanthropist and financier George Soros, who survived the Holocaust, had collaborated with Nazis.
Seven siblings — there are 10 in total, including Paul — responded at the time by writing a letter to the Kingman Daily Miner, a newspaper in Gosar’s district, decrying his comments in blunt terms.
“We are aghast that Paul has sunk so low that he now spews the most despicable slander against an 87yearold man without a shred of proof,” the letter said. “Those aren’t our family values or the values of the small Wyoming town we grew up in . ... It is extremely upsetting to have to call you out on this, Paul, but you’ve forced our hand with your deceit and antisemitic dog whistle.”
Pete Gosar, who was the seventh signee of the letter, ran for governor of Wyoming as a Democrat in 2014.
Brill’s ads, of which there are at least three, were filmed in Jackson and Laramie. Brill’s team reached out to the Gosar siblings af ter seeing some of their criticism on social media, according to the Phoenix New Times.
A doctor and a businessman before he decided to run for office, Brill has campaigned on a public health option like Medicare available to all and a platform of lowering the national debt, according to the Arizona Republic.
He faces an uphill battle for the seat: Gosar trounced his Democratic opponent in the deepred district in 2016, receiving 71.5 percent of the votes. The counties that make up Gosar’s district voted heavily for Donald Trump.
Family members who split with their political kin tend to draw attention and media coverage and are often sought by opposing campaigns.
In the recent election cycle, the son of retiring Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia made waves when he endorsed the Democrat running to replace him in August. In the Wisconsin race to replace Paul Ryan, the brother of Democrat Randy Bryce endorsed his Republican opponent in an advertisement by a conservative group.
David Gosar said that Paul Gosar’s politics have caused a strain in the family, which hails from the small town of Pinedale, Wyo.
In one of the ads, Grace Gosar, a doctor, says, “It would be difficult to see my brother as anything but a racist.” David Gosar said that their parents, who are in their 80s, are Republicans and support his brother. And David says he’s disappointed in the other three siblings who didn’t stand with them for the advertisement.
He said he’s also upset by people who tell him that there’s something wrong with breaking with his family or who make the situation into a joke.