So You’ve Got a Crank Politician in the Family
How the kinsfolk of RFK Jr. and Paul Gosar are trying to save themselves and America.
BEFORE THERE WAS ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., there was Paul Gosar.
Both men started out as professionals grounded in science, Kennedy a well-respected environmental lawyer and Gosar a much loved dentist. Both drifted away from those moorings, toward fringe conspiracies and alternative realities. Both are now leading public voices in the misinformation universe—Gosar as a far-right headline machine and Stop the Steal figure who tried to keep President Donald Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election, Kennedy as a prominent anti-vaccine activist whose third-party White House bid could end up restoring Trump to power.
And both have families struggling to cope with their transformations.
What would you do if your brother or sister or cousin went off the rails in a way that conflicted with your values and undercut the trust you needed to do your own job? That threatened your family’s legacy and maybe even your nation’s future? And did it from public platforms that can’t be ignored?
Kerry Kennedy, president of the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, has tried multiple times to establish distance from her older brother. When he entered the presidential race a year ago, she said she did not “share or endorse” his opinions on “the COVID pandemic, vaccinations, and the role of social media platforms in policing false information.” She added that the human rights group named for their father and his priorities does not reflect “Bobby’s views,” nor do his views influence its mission or work.
Jennifer Gosar has been there—starting fifteen years ago, when her older brother Paul ran for Congress on an anti-immigrant platform. It was personal to her. Their parents’ families came from Slovenia and the French Basque Country, she told me, and at the time she was a medical interpreter for Spanish speakers, entrusted to convey in English the most intimate details of their lives and health. “He knew what my work was dedicated to,” she said. “I spent five days a week, eight hours a day sitting next to people who were targets of all the hate.”
The disinformation phase took off a few years later. Jennifer pegged September 2015 as “the biggest first indication” of her brother’s move away from science. That’s when he announced he would boycott a papal address to Congress because Pope Francis reportedly planned to discuss “leftist” policies to fight climate change. “To promote questionable science as Catholic dogma is ridiculous,” Gosar, himself a Roman Catholic, wrote for the conservative website Townhall. “When the pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one.” He skipped the speech.
Jennifer, 50, was not the only Gosar sibling upset by the turn her brother had taken as a politician, in his far-right views and his embrace of junk science and conspiracy theories. At 65, Paul Gosar is the eldest of ten children who grew up in Pinedale, Wyoming. His brothers and sisters include two lawyers, a doctor, an engineer, an investigator, a financial adviser, a former pilot, a free clinic director and Albany County commissioner who once ran for Wyoming governor as a Democrat, and a bilingual community therapist (Jennifer’s current occupation).
The Kennedy family is similarly accomplished, much more famous, and just as shocked and disturbed by RFK Jr.’s candidacy. The family’s reach, image, and celebrity, on top of Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s own name, make him a wild card in a frighteningly close race with equally frightening stakes, from democracy at home and abroad to abortion access and other health care.
Last July, after RFK Jr. floated a dangerous, unfounded conspiracy theory that COVID was a bioweapon “targeted” to attack white and black people while sparing Jewish and Chinese people, Kerry Kennedy quickly disavowed his words. “I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” she said, adding the RFK Jr. Human Rights nonprofit she leads has a “50+-year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination.”
Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s grandson, endorsed Biden on Instagram that same month and scored RFK Jr. for running against a president who has delivered on jobs, judges, infrastructure, and green energy, and “ended” the war in Afghanistan, the COVID pandemic, and Donald Trump. “If my cousin Bobby Kennedy Jr. cared about any of them, he would support Joe Biden, too. Instead, he’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories, and conflict for personal fame and gain. I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president.”
Who is further out on the edge?
OTHERS MAY DIFFER, but I would judge an off-the-rails contest between Kennedy and Gosar as a virtual tie on substance—and by that I mean false claims, wacky ideas, and extremist or questionable employees and associates. RFK Jr. blames vaccines for autism, wifi for cancer, antidepressants for school shootings, and 5G networks for spying on us. In a 2020 study, London-based Tortoise Media identified 156 superspreaders of medical misinformation on social media and ranked RFK Jr. as No. 1. In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate named him one of the Disinformation Dozen. A few days ago, when the Centers for Disease Control said measles elimination is under “renewed threat,” Never Trump democracy advocate Reed Galen told RFK Jr., “This is on you.”
Bobby Jr. wins hands-down on size of megaphone. But Gosar, while not an international disinformation superstar, has a preternatural gift for attracting controversy and headlines. His sister Jennifer still remembers his demand that Capitol Police arrest two dozen Dreamers—undocumented young people brought to America by their parents—who had been invited by lawmakers to then-President Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address.
Since then he’s been named as one of three lawmakers involved in planning a Stop the Steal attempt to put “maximum pressure” on Congress to derail Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021; censured by the House for posting an animated video showing him killing progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; subpoenaed by Arizona authorities investigating the state’s 2020 fake Trump elector scheme; and criticized for falsely claiming that Ivermectin “WORKED” as a COVID treatment.
Paul is also circulating debunked claims that fluoridated water causes brain damage after promoting it as a valuable cavity-prevention tool, especially for poor kids who might not have access to regular care. “For years he told us how these nuts were opposing fluoride in the water. Now he’s against fluoride in the water,” David Gosar, 62, a lawyer in Jackson, said in an interview. “He was a great dentist. He should have stayed a dentist.”
The Gosars try for a moonshot
SOME OF THE GOSAR SIBLINGS considered writing a rebuttal to Paul’s 2015 op-ed about Pope Francis and climate science. They knew it would be a painful break and decided it was not the right time. But their brother’s trajectory forced them to start responding.
By 2017, Gosar was falsely suggesting that liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros may have collaborated with the Nazis in his native Hungary (Soros was a child at that time) and funded neo-Nazis and other white nationalists who participated in the Charlottesville, Virginia “Unite the Right” protest—fantastical conspiracy theories that a Soros spokesman called baseless and insulting.
At that point six of Gosar’s nine siblings—Jennifer and David among them—publicly demanded that he apologize to Soros. “Those aren’t our family values or the values of the small Wyoming town we grew up in. Character assassination wasn’t revered,” they wrote in a letter to the Kingman, Arizona, Daily Miner. “It is extremely upsetting to have to call you out on this, Paul, but you’ve forced our hand with your deceit and anti-semitic dog whistle.”
In 2018, the same six did not hesitate when Democrat David Brill’s team approached them about publicly endorsing Brill, their brother’s opponent that year in Arizona’s 4th Congressional District. In what Politico called the “most brutal” ad of the cycle, the siblings said their brother was not working for the good of his rural district and they “wholeheartedly” endorsed Brill. The spot went viral, and so did their family crisis:
Gosar, who said “Stalin would be proud” of his “crazy” and “angry” leftist relatives, won his deep red district that year by 38 percentage points and by 39 points two years later. In 2022, three Gosar siblings reprised their plea to voters to reject Paul—this time in an ad for a rival Republican in the primary. That year “the debate was within the GOP. That’s where the argument was,” Jennifer Gosar said.
Their brother not only won the nomination but in the general election he scored 97.8 percent of the vote against two write-in Democrats. That was 10 points more than President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian-sized haul in Russian elections last month—“the highest ever result in Russia’s post-Soviet history,” one poll found.
The Gosars viewed their anti-Paul activism as a moonshot, as Jennifer put it, but that didn’t stop them. “We’re politically savvy. We grew up discussing politics,” David told me. “There’s not much that goes on that we don’t absorb. So we knew that we weren’t going to make a change in terms of the actual election. But you have a duty to speak out.”
The Kennedys could make a difference
THE RECKONING FOR THE KENNEDY FAMILY came last October, when Bobby Jr. announced he was dropping out of the Democratic primary and would wage an independent campaign for the presidency. Overnight he went from a nuisance candidate at odds with the family legacy to a Trump enabler who posed a clear danger to democracy and the policies championed by Kennedys for generations.
Four of RFK Jr.’s siblings—Kerry, documentarian Rory, former congressman Joseph II, and former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen—issued a joint statement condemning his “dangerous” decision:
Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today’s announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.
More Kennedys—several dozen of them—amassed at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day and posed with Biden for a Rose Garden photo that some of them later put up on social media. “President Biden, you make the world better,” Kerry Kennedy tweeted. On LinkedIn, in what he called his first ever social media post, Stephen Kennedy Smith said that “although we love our relative Robert F Kennedy Jr on a personal level, we emphatically oppose his unwise and dangerous candidacy.” Smith, son of JFK’s youngest sister, Jean, said his cousin’s White House bid “is currently the greatest risk to re- elect Donald Trump.”
He’s not wrong. Jill Stein and Cornel West are also running third-party campaigns this year, but polls show RFK Jr. is the one with the most support and potential to skew the race. His name attracts Democrats who don’t know much about him and his Fox News-adjacent claims and fame are a draw for Trump types.
There’s also the indisputable fact that, as a woman in a recent Pennsylvania focus group put it, “He’s not Trump or Biden.” The eleven voters in the group had gone for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Six of them, more than half, said they’t take RFK Jr. in a five-way 2024 race. They wanted somebody new. They wanted to roll the dice.
The most potent argument for Biden could be that a protest vote puts abortion access at risk. The RFK Jr. voters agreed that a new Biden ad about a woman who nearly died after being denied an abortion was powerful. But they didn’t budge until moderator Rich Thau asked what they’d do if Biden told them, “If you care about abortion rights, then you need to vote for me and not vote for RFK Jr. as a protest against me and Trump.” Several said that might tilt them to Biden.
Thau also played a clip of Trump saying he supported letting states and women decide their own directions on abortion. Ten of the eleven in the group had problems with Trump’s approach for reasons that included unfairness to women, travel and cost burdens, instability due to state political shifts, and state restrictions on individuals to do what they think is right.
The Kennedys plan to ramp up their efforts on behalf of Biden, NBC reports. Will they have an impact? RFK Jr. dismissed the White House photo as “a very small percentage” of his family. Other family members are supporting him, he told Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, and as for the others, “We can disagree with each other in a friendly way and still love each other.”
Jennifer and David Gosar have thoughts for concerned Kennedys, starting with get your numbers up. “Get them all on board. Make sure everybody’s weighing in,” says David. “I don’t know how far that goes, the family’s enormous, but make it as broad as possible”—because, he says, you never know what a united front of family pressure could accomplish.
That’s especially true in the case of the Kennedys, who are trying to influence a jumpball national race. “I applaud them for speaking out,” Jennifer told me. “I wish them well, because it’s hard. There’s grief that comes from it, and they’ve already suffered a lot.”
The dissident Gosars started with six siblings out of nine, and that fell to three in 2022. Beyond that, their 90-year-old mother is a fan of both Fox News and Paul. His district is as conservative as ever, and the family, David says, is more divided than ever.
But the Gosars have not abandoned the field. Jennifer, based in the Pacific Northwest, is in touch with activists and organizers in her brother’s district and, despite the odds, hasn’t ruled out getting involved again this year. It’s not about winning or being effective, she says, and it’s not about ideology, either: “It’s about human decency.”
“How can we tolerate him sitting there spouting antisemitic nonsense?” David asks, recalling his brother’s comments on Soros. Whether they succeed or fail, he says, the Kennedys are doing the right thing: “You have to speak out. You’re not doing your family member any favors by sitting there and letting them make a complete ass of themselves.”
The long odds don’t daunt either of them. “My integrity is worth every bit of the effort and grief. I would do it all again without reservation,” Jennifer says—and adds, referring to her job as a therapist: “I get to show up for kids. That’s a deeply magical position to be in.”
Magic seems like the only way Paul Gosar could be dislodged from Congress. But hard work and smart strategy may turn out to be the only magic the Kennedys need to help save America from Trump, Gosar, and their brother.
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