Gosar lies, calls Uvalde shooter a ‘transsexual leftist illegal alien’
Arizona Republican Paul Gosar As the people of Uvalde struggled under the weight of their grief following the massacre Tuesday, May 24, of 19 elementary school students, a teacher and another adult at the hands of an 18-year-old mass shooter using an AR-15-style assault rifle and a handgun, ultra-right-wing Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar took to Twitter today (Wednesday, May 25) to falsely identify the killer as a “transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvatore Ramos.” Gosar’s claim is a flat-out lie and he knew — or at least, should have known — that by the time he posted his vile tweet because the gunman, who was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent who had responded to reports of the shooting, had already been identified as Salvadore Rolando Ramos, a cisgender male. PolitiFact, by The Poynter Institute, notes that there is “no evidence to corroborate claims that Ramos was transgender or a ‘leftist,’ and officials have said he was a U.S.
citizen, not an ‘illegal alien.’” But that didn’t stop Gosar, and it hasn’t stopped the other hate-filled right-wing bigots who continue to spread the lie across Twitter and Reddit, even going so far as to actually include images of transgender people who have absolutely nothing to do with the shooting and identifying those individuals as Ramos. As Queerty reports, Redditor Apprehensive_Ad_995, one of those whose photo was posted and identified as the killer, wrote on Reddit: “It’s not me, I don’t even live in Texas.” Gosar a Trump supporter who has repeatedly aligned himself with white nationalists and earlier this year spoke at Neo-Nazi Nicholas Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference — was apparently responding to someone else’s Twitter post, because his tweet
