US congressman's staffer found to be follower of white supremacist Nick Fuentes
Social media accounts, posts on far-right platforms discovered by Talking Points Memo have connected the AZ congressman’s digital director Wade Searle to accounts belonging to a Nick Fuentes follower
A new report links a staffer for Republican US Rep. Paul Gosar to social media accounts belonging to prominent supporters of virulently antisemitic white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Social media accounts and posts on far-right platforms discovered by Talking Points Memo have connected the congressman’s digital director Wade Searle to accounts belonging to a Fuentes follower.
According to the report, which has not been confirmed, the posts appeared both before and after Searle started working as a government employee for the Arizona congressman. They include an account reportedly belonging to Searle pledging his loyalty to Fuentes, the 24-year-old white supremacist and far-right provocateur.
According to congressional records, Searle was hired in November 2021, the same month that Rep. Gosar was censured and removed from his committee assignments for posting a video to his Twitter account that edited himself into an anime killing of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Who are the far-right's Paul Gosar and Nick Fuentes?
Fuentes is a Holocaust denier who first gained prominence after participating in the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and was banned from Twitter in July 2021, amid the platform’s crackdown on far-right extremists, particularly in the wake of the insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He burst back onto the public stage in November, when he and Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, had dinner with former President Donald Trump shortly after Ye embarked on an antisemitic spree on social media and in interviews.
Fuentes founded America First, a far-right organization who has questioned the number of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust and believes that Israel has a malicious influence on US policy.
Gosar, an Arizona Republican congressman known for his fervid support of former President Donald Trump, in 2021 held a campaign fundraiser with Fuentes.
Gosar has a history of promoting conspiracy theories including his 2017 statement the left-leaning Holocaust survivor billionaire George Soros may have secretly organized August’s far-right rally in Charlottesville to slander nationalists.
Gosar proposed the conspiracy theory about the rally — a march that prompted demonstrations against racism, and where a suspected white supremacist killed a counter-demonstrater in a car-ramming incident — in an interview published with Vice News.
“You know George Soros is one of those people that actually helps back these individuals. Who is he? I think he’s from Hungary. I think he was Jewish. And I think he turned in his own people to the Nazis,” Gosar continues. “Better be careful where we go with those.”
Soros was 14 in 1945 when the war in Europe ended.
Philissa Cramer/JTA and Ron Kampeas/JTA contributed to this report.
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