Quote by Gosar staff member.
Stop the normalization of violence by radicalized legislators.
- Update 11/11/21: 20 Democratic members of Congress introduced a resolution to censure Rep. Gosar. Not as good as expulsion but it could remove him from his committee seats. Added script!
- Update 11/10/21: Rep. Gosar has removed his tweet! Taxpayer-funded snuff films are still NOT ACCEPTABLE, thanks to alert citizens like you! We have adjusted the scripts accordingly.
- Action #1: Flood House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s phone lines
- Action #2: Email Jack Dorsey of Twitter.
- Action #3: Email Attorney General Merrick Garland.
- NEW!!! Action #4: Call/Email your legislators to join censure action and add committee removal to the mix.
The GOP has a history of telling women to “relax” when violence is done to them. Back in 1990, Texas GOP gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams shared an analogy while preparing for a cattle roundup…”He compared the cold, foggy weather spoiling the event to a rape, telling ranch hands, campaign workers and reporters around a campfire, ”If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” Meanwhile, AOC, the designated villain in a violent anime Gosar’s staff posted on Twitter and Instagram, is already working under near-constant death threats. Says Yale historian, Joanne Freeman, “Threats of violence lead to actual violence. They clear the ground. They cow opposition. They plant the idea. They normalize it. They encourage it. They maim democracy. And run the risk of killing it.”
Action #1: Flood House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s phone lines.
Minimal script: I’m calling as a voter of [California] to to tell Rep. McCarthy, in his role as House Minority Leader, that I do not want my taxpayer dollars used in the creation of violent materials threatening legislative opponents or the President. Not only was Rep. Gosar’s tweet a gross abuse of public funds, making a video depicting the killing of a coworker in any other job in America would result in firing and a call to the police. That the tweet is gone now makes zero difference. Tell Rep. McCarthy that he needs to join House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in calling for an both Ethics Committee and law enforcement investigations into Gosar’s actions. At minimum, he should be removed from his committee assignments, as Rep. Margerie Taylor Greene was, and officially censured. At best, he should be expelled.
More script if you want it: Rep. McCarthy seems unable or unwilling to control the increasingly unhinged behavior of GOP House members. Maybe, it’s time he steps aside for someone who can maintain some semblance of law and order.
Contact: Ring his phone off the hook at 202-225-2915
Action #2: Email Jack Dorsey of Twitter. Ask him to kick Gosar off Twitter
Jack, I understand that it is Twitter’s policy to remove accounts that promote or threaten violence against other people. However, because Rep. Gosar is a congressman, his violent fantasy of killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and threatening President Biden was allowed to stay up for “public interest,” or because it “directly contributes to understanding or discussion of a matter of public concern.”
Nothing showing a man killing a woman is in the “public interest.” Women already know they live surrounded by male violence – their lives are shaped by that reality 24/7. Additionally, prominent congresswomen like AOC have to somehow manage to live and work under the reality of multiple death threats, which now includes the possibility of violent films from fellow legislators, facilitated by platforms like yours. That Gosar’s tweet, which you admit violates your own rules on “hateful conduct” remained easily available for his followers because he is a powerful man, just made it worse for her.
I understand that after a flood of condemnation, Gosar took down his tweet. Apparently, America is not ready to “relax” over taxpayer-funded snuff films. However, I’m asking you to do better, since he is unable to. If you are truly interested in issues of “public concern,” you would permanently ban Rep. Gosar from your platform as the stochastic terrorist that he is.
Contact: jack@twitter.com
Action #3: Email Attorney General Merrick Garland
Minimal script: Typically, threats against the president and sitting Members of Congress are taken seriously and investigated. When comedian Kathy Griffin published a photo in May of 2017, in which she held a bloodied, severed effigy head of Trump, Griffin was investigated by the Secret Service for two months, placed on the “no-fly list,” and was fired from nearly every job she had at the time. With this in mind, I’m asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the apparently taxpayer-funded tweet and instagram post from Rep. Gosar’s office depicting violence against Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and President Biden. No, we realize that Gosar doesn’t fly, and he doesn’t have a sword. But Griffin wasn’t actually going to chop off Trump’s head either.
Gosar’s position as a U.S. congressman should not place him above any other worker in America who makes a violent video depicting the killing of a coworker. In fact, gross abuse of his sworn duty to his office and the use of public funds to make a political snuff film makes his crime even worse.
Contact: https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-justice – Under “Please choose the general top of your message” CLICK ON “Messages to the Attorney General”
Action #4: Call your legislators to support the censure resolution and add committee removal to the mix.
“For a Member of Congress to post a manipulated video on his social media accounts depicting himself killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Biden is a clear cut case for censure. For that Member to post such a video on his official Instagram account and use his official congressional resources in the House of Representatives to further violence against elected officials goes beyond the pale. As the events of January 6thhave shown, such vicious and vulgar messaging can and does foment actual violence. Violence against women in politics is a global phenomenon meant to silence women and discourage them from seeking positions of authority and participating in public life, with women of color disproportionately impacted. Minority Leader McCarthy’s silence is tacit approval and just as dangerous.”
A censure can be done with a simple majority vote. An expulsion requires a 2/3rds majority, and without McCarthy throwing in the towel on this guy, (keep calling him!) it’s not going to happen. However, a censure could remove him from his committee assignments, including,
Check out the list below the script. If your representative is on it, call their office and thank them. If they’re not, use this script.
Minimal script: I’m calling from [zip code] and I want Rep. [____] to join the censure resolution against Rep. Paul Gosar. I also ask that the resolution be officially amended to include the specific request that he be removed from all of his committee seats. His judgement regarding the posting of this offensive film, made with taxpayer funding, along with his recent role in the attempted insurrection, make his continued participation in the important work of these committees untenable.
Current cosigners:
- Congresswoman Jackie Speier (CA-14), co-chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC)
- Representatives Jim Cooper (TN-5);
- Brenda Lawrence (MI-14), co-chair of the DWC;
- Sylva Garcia (TX-29), vice chair of the DWC;
- Veronica Escobar (TX-16), vice chair of the DWC;
- Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fl-23);
- Rashida Tlaib (MI-13);
- Eric Swalwell (CA-15);
- Nikema Williams (GA-5), DWC whip;
- Ayanna Pressley (MA-07);
- Representatives Marcy Kaptur,
- John Yarmuth,
- Eleanor Holmes Norton,
- Debbie Dingell,
- Steve Cohen,
- Jared Huffman,
- Dwight Evans,
- Barbara Lee,
- Zoe Lofgren,
- Jake Auchincloss,
- Katherine Clark,
- Earl Blumenauer,
- Ilhan Omar,
- Nydia M. Velázquez,
- Jerrold Nadler,
- Joaquin Castro,
- Ritchie Torres,
- André Carson,
- Raúl Grijalva.
Contact:
- Rep. Julia Brownley (CA-26): email, DC (202) 225-5811, Oxnard (805) 379-1779, T.O. (805) 379-1779
- or Rep. Salud Carbajal (CA-24): email. DC (202) 225-3601, SB (805) 730-1710 SLO (805) 546-8348
- Who is my representative/senator?:https://whoismyrepresentative.com
More to think on…
“Everybody needs to relax.” “Any anime fans out there?” “It is a symbolic cartoon. It is not real life. Congressman Gosar cannot fly.”
Well, as we noted in our comment to A.G. Merrick Garland, when Kathy Griffin published a photo in May of 2017, in which she held a bloodied, severed effigy head of Trump, nobody took it as a joke, and she was an actual comedian, with no interest in decapitating anybody. She was investigated by the Secret Service for two months, placed on the “no-fly list,” and was fired from nearly every job she had at the time.
White supremacists and White Nationalists routinely hide their words’ true intent, gaslighting us into believing that an offensive tweet was nothing more than a joke that fell flat, and not a coded message to others of their kind. Most people became aware of these toxic games when the OK sign started showing up in photos. Social commenter ContraPoints noted this back in 2017. And Rep. Gosar is treading very closely to the mores and standards of those groups.
Peter Simi, and Kathleen Blee, acting as state experts in white supremacy speech in the Charlottesville, Virginia alt-right trial, show that “the defendants had engaged in coordinated efforts to obscure their real intentions by hiding behind these claims of humor, coded speech, and other rhetorical tricks. The researchers pored over thousands of Discord messages and defendants’ emails to conclude that, yes, white supremacism is a violent racist ideology rooted in antisemitism, hostility toward immigrants, minorities, and feminism; that yes, white supremacism also uses new technologies and coded double-speak, and that white supremacists engage in what they characterize as“front-stage” and “back-stage” behavior. What that means, Simi testified, is that “people present themselves differently when they are seeking to make an impression on others than they do in private.” Perhaps most importantly Simi reported and testified that white supremacy encourages and celebrates violence. Simi testified that white supremacists cultivate plausible deniability by deploying a variety of linguistic winks and tricks. So for instance, the white supremacist publication the Daily Stormer’s “Style Guide” has cautioned:
Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, nonironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor – I am a racist making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.
Is Rep. Gosar a White Supremacist and/or a White Nationalist? Well, he shared neo-Nazi related tweets, and if “you are known by the company you keep”, it’s important to note that he held a fundraising event with White nationalist Nick Fuentes and America First.
There is a tendency on the left to engage in label inflation, collapsing the spectrum of thought on the right by shoving ever greater numbers of conservatives into the “white nationalist” slot. But Fuentes is the genuine article. He is a leader of the “Groypers,” a far-right, anti-Semitic group that could best be described as Nazi-adjacent. Fuentes is known for engaging in Holocaust denial, but in a teasing, “ironic” way that provides a razor-thin sheen of deniability.
“One of the main goals of groypers is to push conservatives in a white nationalist direction, and one way they attempt to do this is to present their views in a mainstream appearance or within mainstream organizations. “
Of course, sometimes politicians or their staff slip up and allow themselves to make contact with some controversial figure whose objectionable views they aren’t aware of. This is not one of those instances. In February, Gosar appeared at an America First Political Action Conference organized by Fuentes. (AFPAC is conceived as an even more right-wing alternative to CPAC — a difficult category to imagine, if you have any sense of how loony CPAC is.)
This event briefly caused an uproar. Gosar formally denounced “white racism,” but then proceeded to explain why he had reached out to Fuentes in the first place. “We thought about it, and we thought: There is a group of young people that are becoming part of the election process, and becoming a bigger force,” Gosar told the Washington Post. “So why not take that energy and listen to what they’ve got to say?”
After his latest outreach to Fuentes was announced last night, Gosar publicly and forcefully defended his rationale. He believes Fuentes and his Nazi fellow travelers are an important part of the party’s coalition, and he can and should work to bring them into the Republican coalition…
Watch what Rep. Gosar says, and more importantly, when he’s forced into denying something. Watch who and what he’s trying to legitimize. The world has seen this sort of man before.
INDIVISIBLE VENTURA 