Gosar's Video No Joke; Displays the Violent Impulses in the GOP

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona has spent more than a week defending an anime video he tweeted that depicts him killing New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He says she “is representative of the plague of illegal immigration.”

The video contains altered scenes from the Japanese anime series “Attack on Titan” — in which humans live behind border walls that protect them from evil colossi – alongside images of immigrants and Border Patrol. Gosar appears as the hero assassinating a giant with Ocasio-Cortez’s face. He also leaps wielding swords at an image of President Biden.

Gosar has called the video a “symbolic portrayal of a fight over immigration policy.” Now, as the House moves to censure him and strip his committee assignments for the video he attributes to his staff, the open sympathizer of white nationalists is playing victim on far-right news outlets, saying he was just “trying to reach out to the newer generation that likes these anime, these cartoons.”

But Gosar is no victim. His video — and his party’s refusal to rebuke it — reflects a new GOP that is Trumpier than Trump. It embodies the ugliness at the heart of the radicalized Republican Party, which cannot bring itself to condemn white male violence, but rather doubles down on condoning and even cultivating it.

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But Gosar’s video is not a joke and its message is crystal clear. “It’s legitimating political violence explicitly by saying America is under mortal threat,” Jason Stanley, a Yale University philosophy professor and author of “How Fascism Works,” told me. “He places killing AOC in a framework that legitimates killing her. She’s an enemy officer of an invading army. And white America is what’s being invaded.”