On Wednesday, when the House met to debate a resolution to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and boot him from his committee spots over a violent video that he posted targeting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Gosar himself spoke up in his defense — and embarrassed himself. The original, partly animated video was edited to depict Gosar murdering Ocasio-Cortez. Gosar said that he “voluntarily took the cartoon down, not because it was itself a threat, but because some thought it was,” adding — incredibly — that he acted “out of compassion for those who generally felt offense.” It’s bonkers that he stood up there on the House floor and expected observers to take him seriously in his claims of having acted with “compassion” amid the fallout over a video that went up on his own Twitter account and depicted Gosar himself murdering a colleague.
Bizarrely, Gosar also flat-out misrepresented the nature of a message that Twitter tacked onto his original post, saying that “even Twitter, the Left’s mouthpiece, did not remove the cartoon, noting it was in the public’s interest for it to remain.” In actuality, the notice that Twitter attached to the post also stated that it was in violation of the site’s rules against “hateful conduct.” While that message also included a statement regarding the potential “public interest” inherent in leaving the tweet up, it didn’t mean that the company found the post to be “interesting” or the like — it meant that members of the public might have a need to know about what was going on.
Gosar misrepresents the Twitter warning label on his tweet as some kind of endorsement pic.twitter.com/bsmmbOgID6
— Acyn (@Acyn) November 17, 2021
Ridiculously, Gosar kept going. He claimed that the original video “directly contributes to the understanding and the discussion of the real-life battle resulting from this administration’s open border policies.” First of all, the Biden administration does not have “open border policies,” and claiming otherwise is simply incorrect. It’s not an open question or a matter of debate. Secondly: that has got to be one of the most self-important defenses imaginable for a harebrained social media post depicting violence against a colleague. Gosar, though, remains undeterred — he insisted that he “will continue to speak out against amnesty for illegal aliens, defend the rule of law, and advance the ‘America First’ agenda.”
Check out Gosar’s comments below:
Ocasio-Cortez, who has already spoken out against Gosar over the video, also spoke up once more on Wednesday in the House chamber. She sharply criticized House GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for his seemingly pathological inability to directly condemn Gosar’s video. McCarthy has defended Gosar, claiming that the Arizona Congressman apologized — although he’s never done so.
As Ocasio-Cortez put it:
‘It is a sad day in which a member who leads a political party in the United States of America cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of Congress is wrong, and instead decides to venture off into a tangent about gas prices and inflation. What is so hard about saying that this is wrong? This is not about me. This is not about Representative Gosar. But this is about what we are willing to accept… I have seen other members of this party advance the argument… that what we say and what we do does not matter so long as we claim a lack of meaning. Now this nihilism runs deep, and it conveys a betrayal, a certain contempt for the meaning and importance of our work here.’
She also noted that “as leaders in this country, when we incite violence with depictions against our colleagues, that trickles down into violence in this country, and that is where we must draw the line.” Watch Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks below:
