A white nationalist “groyper” has been working on Capitol Hill as hard-right Republican congressman Paul Gosar’s digital director since last year, according to a report by Talking Points Memo.
Wade Searle has been a groyper — the name for shitposting, racist acolytes of white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes—since at least 2020, and joined Gosar’s team as a temporary employee in Nov. 2021, according to a trove of evidence laid out by Talking Point Memo’s Hunter Walker. Last year, Searle was promoted to digital director. (Searle did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment).
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Gosar, a far-right congressman from Arizona, is yet to respond to the allegations. However, there are growing calls from extremism watchdogs like the ADL for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to investigate Gosar and Searle. (Neither Gosar nor McCarthy’s office responded to VICE News’ requests for comment).
This isn’t the first time that Gosar has faced criticism for fraternizing with extremists.
His ties to groyper-world go back to at least Feb. 2021, when he was a keynote speaker at Fuentes’ AFPAC conference. After his speaking appearance, Fuentes shared a photo on social media of himself and Gosar meeting for coffee.
The public flirtation between Gosar and Fuentes only continued from there. Gosar regularly promoted Fuentes’ posts on social media, including the fringe Christian nationalist platform Gab. And when Fuentes was slapped with a Jan. 6 subpoena, Gosar accused the DOJ of persecuting “young conservative Christians like Nick Fuentes.”
In Oct. 2021, one month before Searle reportedly joined Gosar’s team, the Arizona congressman landed in hot water for sharing a bizarre, violent, 90-second anime-style video on Twitter that fueled speculation about extremist influences in his office.
The video began with blood-spattered images of migrants, followed by images of Border Patrol, and then showed Gosar as a cartoon superhero flying around, attacking President Joe Biden with swords and then slaying a giant with the face of Democrat Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. The House censured Gosar over the video and stripped him of his committee assignments.
The following year, Gosar agreed again to speak at Fuentes’ AFPAC conference, this time via video. (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke in person, but later claimed she had no idea who Fuentes was).
But as Fuentes made deeper inroads into the GOP, he became increasingly emboldened in his rhetoric — and seemed to forget his mission of cultivating a more “respectable” face of white nationalism through his “America First” organization. “They compare Putin to Hitler, like that’s a bad thing,” Fuentes quipped in his 2022 AFPAC keynote speech.
In April 2022, Gosar publicly disavowed Fuentes—seemingly because of his tendencies to say the quiet part out loud. “I’ve given up on dealing with Nick,” said Gosar. “Nick’s got a problem with his mouth.”
From there, Fuentes’ grip on the GOP fringes slipped further. He formed an alliance with disgraced rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) over their shared antisemitism, and joined his longshot presidential campaign. The two men then participated in a series of disastrous media appearances where Fuentes was seen snickering as Ye talked about how much he loved Hitler.
But although Fuentes has become somewhat of a pariah as far as elected officials are concerned, his army of clean-cut, shit-posting, college-aged followers take pains to remain anonymous, hiding behind aliases. Talking Points Memo said that Searle was hiding behind the alias “chikken” or “chikken right.”
This is part of a broader strategy articulated by Fuentes on a webcast back in 2019. At that time, Fuentes wanted to distance himself and his movement from the violence and brazen display of white supremacy seen in Charlottesville with the ultimate goal of infiltrating the GOP. “We have to start changing our look and aesthetic to blend in,” he said on that webcast, according to reporter Ben Lorber for Political Research Associates. ““If enough people get in there, introduce the talking points, infiltrate, start converting people, and build bridges… Bit by bit we start to break down these walls and we start to get in… and then one day we become the mainstream.”
