Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) denounced “white racism” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Saturday after he caught flak for speaking at a conference whose organizer expressed white nationalist views.
“I denounce when we talk about white racism,” Gosar said Saturday morning. “That’s not appropriate.”
The mea culpa comes a day after Gosar spoke Friday night at an event put together by the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) and spoke about the U.S. immigration system and criticized what he said was censorship by social media platforms.
He was followed by Nicholas Fuentes, a host of the event, who made a slew of controversial comments, including that the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol in January were “patriots” and that if America “loses its white demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ, then this is not America anymore.”
Former Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) also spoke at the Friday night confab. King was removed from his committees in 2019 after he asked why terms such as “white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization” were “offensive.” He later lost his seat in a House GOP primary in 2020, a defeat that was largely credited to backlash over his racist remarks.
The controversy over Gosar’s attendance at the AFPAC event is not the first time the Arizona Republican has faced claims of being tied to racist remarks. Several of his siblings in 2018 endorsed his Democratic opponent, with one of his sisters saying in an ad that “it would be difficult to see my brother as anything but a racist.”
It was also found in 2019 that Gosar followed a number of Twitter accounts that posted racist language or promoted white nationalism.
Gosar was one of former President Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress and backed many of his hard-line immigration policies, including building a wall on the southern border and preventing immigrants brought to the country unlawfully as children from being granted a path to legal status.