Lawmaker’s 6 siblings endorse foe
They call Arizona brother a racist, back Democrat
Families are complicated, their private tensions and political disagreements often kept under wraps.
That’s not the case with Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., 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 Congressional 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 think my brother has traded a lot of the values we had at our kitchen table,” said sister, Joan.
David Gosar, 57, a lawyer in Jackson, Wyo., said he felt obligated to speak out against his brother because of his views, though 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.
“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 is a fourthterm congressman for a sprawling district in northwestern and central Arizona.
He fired back at his brothers and sisters in a series of twitter posts, calling them disgruntled supporters of Hillary Clinton from out of state who put ideology before family.
“My siblings who chose to film ads against me are all liberal Democrats who hate President Trump,” Paul Gosar said. “Stalin would be proud.”
Paul Gosar, who became a congressman in 2013, has drawn coverage for his extreme rhetoric in recent years.
His siblings previously condemned the congressman's false accusation in 2017 that Democratic donor George Soros was a Nazi collaborator in World War II.
Paul Gosar's comments about Soros came in a television interview with Vice News in which he also suggested a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., might have been a liberal conspiracy.
Brill’s team reached out to the Gosar siblings after seeing some of their criticism on social media.
He faces an uphill battle for the seat; Gosar trounced his Democratic opponent in the deep-red district in 2016, receiving 71.5 percent of the votes. The counties that make up Gosar’s district voted for Donald Trump.