PHOENIX, AZ — Several of Republican Congressman Paul Gosar’s siblings aren’t leaving any doubt about how they feel about their often controversial brother’s politics in a new ad campaign telling 4th District voters they should vote for the Democrat in the race, David Brill.
Gosar, a Tea Party Republican first elected to the U.S. House in 2011, is most known for his hardline view on immigration and is one of the staunchest opponents in Congress of legal rights for undocumented “Dreamers” who came to the United States as children. His positions on Social Security, health care, water policy and other issues are also out of touch with the needs of most Arizonans, six of his siblings said in an ad released Friday.
More infamously, Gosar promoted the widely debunked conspiracy theory that Democratic mega-donor George Soros organized a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year and accused Soros of turning in “his own people to the Nazis.” A birther, Gosar also has helped spread the theory that former President Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim.
Siblings Grace, David, Jennifer, Tim, Joan and Gaston have agreed to appear in at least four ads, the first of which, “Paul Gosar Is Not Working For You,” was released Friday.
“It’s intervention time,” Tim Gosar says in the ad, endorsing Brill. “And intervention time means that you go to vote, and you go to vote Paul out.”
On Twitter, the four-term congressman said his siblings are disgruntled “liberal Democrats who hate President Trump.”
“These disgruntled Hillary [supporters] are related by blood to me but like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family,” he wrote in the tweet. “Stalin would be proud.”
In another tweet, he wrote: “You can’t pick your family. We all have crazy aunts and relatives etc and my family is no different. I hope they find peace in their hearts and let go all the hate. To the six angry Democrat Gosars — see you at Mom and Dad’s house!”
“Mama Goser,” as he called Bernadette Gosar, 85, on Twitter, is taking his side in the Gosar family feud.
She told The New York Times she was “shocked” and “crushed” that six of her children were teaming up against their brother. “I share the same philosophy and policies that Paul does,” she told the newspaper. “He’s done a hell of a job for Arizona, and they love him.”
Gosar is a favorite in the race, made up of mostly rural western Arizona. He won by re-election by a 40-point landslide in 2016, and Trump won there by 39 points. The 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, carried the solid Republican district by 36 points, CNN reported.
The ads by Gosar’s siblings were unveiled Thursday at a fundraiser in Phoenix. In a not-yet public spot, Grace Goser says “it would be difficult to see my brother as anything but a racist,” according to the Phoenix New Times.
BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER IN WISCONSIN
This isn’t the only race to strain family harmony.
In another family snub earlierr this month, James Bryce, the brother of Democratic House candidate Randy Bryce endorsed his brother’s Republican opponent, Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin House race to replace retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan. The Congressional Leadership Fund paid for that spot and one other in a $1.5 million ad buy.
In the ad, James Bryce, a police officer, cited FBI statistics and blamed an uptick in assaults against law enforcement officials over the past few years on “cop-hating rhetoric.”
“When people refer to police officers as terrorists, that hits a little close to home,” he says in the ad, as one of his brother’s 2012 tweets making the reference flashes across the screen.
“This ad summarizes everything you need to know about this race,” Corry Bliss, CLF’s executive director, said in a statement. “Randy Bryce is unfit to serve and will not win this race.”
A spokeswoman for Randy Bryce’s campaign told Roll Call the ad resorts to “divisive, dirty politics that people are fed up with.”
“Randy is the proud son of a police officer and has a deep respect for law enforcement officers, including his brother, even when they have political disagreements,” spokeswoman Julia Savel said.
DAUGHTER’S ALLEGATIONS END DAD’S CAMPAIGN
And in Minnesota, state Rep. Jim Knoblach suspended his campaign for a ninth term last week ahead of a report by Minnesota Public Radio detailing accusations by his daughter of inappropriate sexual behavior that dated back to her childhood.
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Laura Knoblach, 23, decided to tell her story to MPR News after she exhausted all other means of holding her father accountable, including a 2017 police investigation. She said her father began inappropriately touching and kissing her when she was 9 and the behavior continued until she was 21, and became a defining part of her relationship with her father. She said that when she was 20, her father pinned her against a car and licked and kissed her neck.
Throughout her childhood, she said, “he would put his arm around me and not let me get up or get away and he would lick my neck or bite my ear.”
The state representative’s attorney, Susan Gaerner, said that although her client denies the allegations, he “does not want to drag his family through six weeks of hell.”
She suggested Laura Knoblach’s differences with her father are politically motivated.
“There have been family conflicts, as is true of any family, some of them have been quite difficult,” Gaertner told MPR News. “You add a layer of family conflicts to politics, and that makes the situation even more difficult.”
Image: Siblings of U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, say in a new campaign ad he shouldn’t be re-elected. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)