The House voted on Wednesday to censure Gosar, who tried to start a white nationalist caucus with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. A doctored video that Gosar shared on social was used to depict the congressman killing other politicians. The final vote was almost unanimous on partisan lines. All but two of the Republicans who voted did so to back Gosar, and all the Democrats voted to censure him. Three Republican members did not vote.
On November 7th, Gosar posted a strange video to social media, consisting of an edited version of the Attack on Titan's opening scene. The altered clip features Gosar killing a giant with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's face and attacking another with Joe Biden's face. The original Japanese words like "murder," "gangs," and "trafficking" are replaced by words like "drugs," "crime," and "poverty." Gosar thanked the creativity of his team after he captioned the post, "Any anime fans out there?" Gosar was called a "creepy member I work with who fundraises for neo-Nazi organizations" who shared a fantasy video of him killing me. Gosar couldn't add two single digits together if he tried.
On Tuesday night, the House Rules Committee proposed a vote to censure Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments. The last representative to be censured was Charlie Rangel.
The House can censure a member if they don't expel him. It is very rare and considered an extremely humiliating punishment. The chamber has censured just 23 of the 11,000 members of the House since the founding of the nation, and those votes are often remembered as the defining moments of their political careers. None of the politicians who were censured will be remembered for their actions.
Gosar was silent and refused to answer questions from reporters ahead of the censure vote, but he issued a statement to media outlets saying that the video was an innocuous depiction of a fight over immigration policy. His digital director told the Post that everyone needs to relax.
Gosar defended himself on the floor, saying he never intended for the video to be seen as a violent threat and comparing himself to Alexander Hamilton. It is done. The secretary of the Treasury was Hamilton at the time of his spat with Congress. The House failed to censure him.
This is not the worst thing Gosar has done, he stands out as particularly extreme even among a Republican caucus that has lurched so far to the right that it is an international outlier and barely put up a peep after Donald Trump incited an angry mob to storm the Capitol. GOP colleagues are standing behind a man who was the keynote speaker at a conference hosted by a white supremacist. Gosar complained about the reaction to his message on the radio show of far-right shock jock Stew Peters, who believes Fox News is staffed by communist propagandists dressed as journalists. They left Gosar's message in the dust years ago, so they don't view it as crossing the line.
Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the GOP in the House, said that Gosar had given sufficient explanation of his actions. McCarthy gave a lengthy speech in which he attacked Democrats and repeated the phrase "rules for thee, not for me" an endless number of times. Andy Biggs, a GOP representative, went on a rant about how he had lived in Japan, spoke Japanese, and that Attack on Titan is just "highly stylized violence." Lauren Boebert, a member of the House's far-right, was cut off while yelling about rumors that a Democratic representative had slept with a Chinese spy.
The Washington Post was told on Monday that the company had placed a public interest notice on the offending message, meaning it could be quoted by other users but not otherwise engaged with. Gosar has deleted his account but refused to apologize.
The New Republic flagged the Attack on Titan video back in 2020 because of its allusions to the Holocaust and Nazism. Both the original Manga and the anime adaptation start with a simple narrative about humans in a walled city living under a military regime and being attacked by a race of giants. As the narrative goes on, the protagonists learn that they are members of a race called the Eldians and that more Eldians live in refugee and concentration camps across the globe that are run by their nation's enemies. The whole thing has been widely interpreted as an anti-fascist and anti-racist allegory, but many online neo-Nazis and white supremacists see it as an example of the oppression of white people by Jews and other supposed racial enemies.
The House stripped Taylor-Green of her committee assignments earlier this year after she came to light with her disturbing beliefs, such as her support of a theory that 9/11 was an inside job.
A member of congress without a committee seat is seen as nothing more than a powerless figurehead with nothing to offer. Taylor-Greene has spent most of her time with sick social media stunts such as harassing the trans child of another representative and embarking on disastrous fundraising tours.
If we hear back from Gosar, we will update this story.
