This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

Earlier this month, Talking Points Memo identified a chain of evidence that strongly suggested Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-AZ) digital director, Wade Searle, was involved with an interlinked group of social media profiles that were deeply enmeshed with white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes’ viciously antisemitic “Groyper” movement. Details highlighted the accounts’ professed loyalty to the hierarchical hate group and their dedication to Fuentes, who referred to the accounts’ administrator as one of the “strongest soldiers” in his “movement.” The news had some impact: Gosar faced condemnation from President Joe Biden, Congressional Black Caucus chairman Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), and multiple Jewish advocacy groups, including the Republican Jewish Coalition. Some have called for an investigation into the report, though Gosar remains, perhaps predictably, silent. 

I was a source for TPM on the story, contributing research that I’ve independently collected over years of tracking the far-right in Arizona. And while the revelations in the story were significant, they weren’t necessarily surprising. The Groypers are deeply hateful and grotesque, but Gosar has never been shy in his flirtation with various factions of the fascist far-right, including the Groypers’ leader, Fuentes.

Or, as Gosar himself has bragged in the past: “I’m considered the most dangerous man in Congress.” 

A large swath of the far-right has, in turn, taken notice, with Gosar becoming a sort of hero in some corners.

In 2011, the dentist-turned-legislator arrived in the House after a relatively narrow victory in his election amid the Tea Party wave. His win was partially thanks to a Sarah Palin endorsement — he was the only candidate she campaigned for — and the support of the American Dental Association (ADA), where he once served as the chairman of the Council on Government Affairs. Now, Gosar runs in a safe, very red district; his hateful antics over the years have left him without the support of the ADA, which in 2001 had dubbed him “dentist of the year.” 

Over the last decade, Gosar has curated a national and international constituency that goes beyond the residents of his western Arizona district: the vanguard of the national and international far right. He has spent his time in office traversing the country and the globe, offering his support to fringe movements. In 2014, he caravaned down to Bunkerville, Nevada in support of Cliven Bundy and his armed militia wannabes as they took on the federal government for their “right” to illegally graze where they chose in a modern “war for the West.” In 2018, he flew out to London to stand in solidarity with Islamophobic bigot and English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon). In his speech, which was condemned by the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Gosar vilified Muslim immigrants as rapists and “disgusting and depraved individuals.”

Earlier this month, Gosar was a speaker at a CPAC Hungary event titled “Nations First,” appearing alongside the chairman of the Freedom Party of Austria, a party founded by Nazi SS officers. In his speech, Gosar praised authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as a “beacon in the West” for its strict anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ laws. The nationalist rhetoric continues in Gosar’s own office as he calls for a total ban on all immigration to the United States and demands widespread militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Gosar has lent his support to a broad coalition of far-right bigots and Christian supremacists: from the shitposting Groyper neo-Nazis to the camo-clad LARPers and hate groups to the suit-wearing, ultranationalist political elites at home and abroad. He’ll rile up the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers, telling them that the United States is already in a Civil War, “we just haven’t started shooting yet,” then repeat the same line in an interview with a well-documented neo-Nazi. He’ll even associate with the conspiratorial (and often ridiculous) QAnon movement, tweeting out references to Q-drops (Gosar later said the tweet was sarcastic, though the tweet remains up to this day) and appearing at Q-friendly rallies.

This all reached a boiling point during the “Stop the Steal” era and leading up to the January 6 insurrection when the many factions of the paranoid, conspiratorial and violent far-right came together to rally around Donald Trump and against American democracy. Gosar was, of course, in the center of it all. 

By the night after the 2020 election, Gosar was already rallying alongside armed Trump voters and Mike “Pizzagate” Cernovich to question the legitimacy of the votes. He’d continue to appear at Stop the Steal rallies throughout Arizona to prepare the angry base for what was coming. After the insurrection, he was among the very first elected officials to lie about “Antifa” causing the chaos of January 6, and soon joined insurrection apologists in lionizing Ashli Babbitt and J6 arrestees as martyrs.

It was not long after the insurrection that Gosar also began courting Nick Fuentes and the Groypers.

Fuentes and his following are particularly repulsive. He regularly streams his misogynistic, racist and antisemitic rants on his network, where parasocial Groypers toss out slurs in his live chat and donate to their dear leader. On occasion, Fuentes asks his followers to pledge their loyalty to the himself, “the white race,” and Jesus Christ while also asking them to “rape, kill, and die for Nick Fuentes.” He has denied the Holocaust while simultaneously calling Adolf Hitler “really fucking cool.” Only days after TPM’s report, in which Gosar’s digital director Searle was linked to the influential Groyper accounts, Fuentes made news again after openly fantasizing about marrying an underage bride.  

In one recent, representative rant complaining about abortion, homosexuality, feminism, contraceptives, and sex, Fuentes explained that a lot of things he hates are “popular” and placed the blame (as usual) on “the Jewish media.” 

“‘Popular’ means that people support it, which they do,” Fuentes said. “And it sucks, and it is what it is, but that’s why we need a dictatorship. That’s unironically why we need to get rid of all that. We need to take control of the media, take control of the government, and force the people to believe what we believe, or force them to play by our rules.”

There may have been a time when it would have been obscene for a politician to affiliate so openly with a predatory neo-Nazi like Fuentes, but Gosar has provided Fuentes’ Christofascist youth movement with more political credibility than any other elected official.

“As the Right continues to radicalize, figures like Gosar may calculate they have more to gain from keeping these movements like the Groypers at hand rather than pushing them aside,” explained Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst for Political Research Associates with a focus on Fuentes and the Groypers. “Doing so would alienate the Gen-Z white nationalist base that provides him ground support in Arizona, and loyal praise online.”

In February 2021, Gosar surprised Fuentes’ mostly young, mostly male audience as the keynote speaker at the second America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC). The next year, Gosar would appear by video at the third AFPAC alongside his fellow far-right Arizonans, including former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio and state senator Wendy Rogers. Gosar’s Freedom Caucus colleague, Marjorie Taylor Greene, also made a surprise in-person appearance at the same white supremacist rally, where Fuentes praised the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the January 6 insurrection, and Adolf Hilter.

Gosar’s willingness to appear at AFPAC highlights his comfort with some of the most extreme bigots in the American political scene. At AFPAC, Fuentes fanboys pack the crowd alongside other Groyper influencers and old-school white nationalist propagandists. Featured guests at AFPAC III included fellow streamers on Fuentes’ platform like Vincent James Foxx, who has expressed his desire for a Christian theocracy where gay people are criminalized via execution, and Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet, who has faced criminal charges for storming the Capitol on January 6 and his defacement of a Hanukkah display in Phoenix, AZ (all of which he live streamed, of course). Elder white nationalists in attendance included disgraced former congressman Steve King and Jared Taylor, who has long organized Klansmen, alt-right figures, and other white supremacists at his own biannual event.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tepidly condemned Greene and Gosar following their AFPAC appearance, and Sen. Wendy Rogers was censured back in Arizona for the violent calls made in her speech. Gosar blamed his second appearance on a miscommunication with a staffer (wonder which one), but the slap on the wrist failed to stop Gosar’s  pandering. Only months after being lectured by McCarthy, Gosar was back to making headlines for being listed as a guest with another Groyperesque organization, American Populist Union, holding an event on Hitler’s birthday. Gosar denied his involvement, saying he was booked that day, though he had promoted the gathering on social media.

To further highlight Gosar’s comfort in these circles, Gosar has promoted Foxx’s social media and his fringe white nationalist blog over a dozen times. In “The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th” — written by former U.S. Representative Denver Riggleman and TPM reporter Hunter Walker — Riggleman recalled a 2019 Freedom Caucus trip to the southern border during which Gosar and then-Representative King “dove into a conversation about how they felt white people had really created superior civilizations.”

These ongoing flirtations with the far-right are not uncommon in today’s Republican Party, but there’s something noteworthy about Gosar. Jerod MacDonald-Evoy, an Arizona journalist with a focus on far-right extremism, considers Gosar to be “unique among his caucus.” Unlike Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who often generate controversy due to their loud and overly abhorrent comments and behavior, Gosar carefully “signals to those in the extreme,” MacDonald-Evoy explained.

Gosar’s social media output also continues to be littered with “America First” nods and propaganda. (As of right now, his Twitter bio’s location is set to “America First.”) These dog whistles may be innocuous or incoherent to some, but are clear nods to Fuentes fanboys and Groyper shitposters. Gosar’s minor criticism of Fuentes for “having a problem with his mouth,” made headlines, and he seems to have realized the optics of appearing directly alongside Fuentes, but he’s continued to show the movement that he’s engaged.

“His use of internet culture has given him a boost among groups like the Groypers and Patriot Front, which are made up largely of young men who are constantly online,” said MacDonald-Evoy. “Speaking in the right language shows an ‘in-the-know’ and not ‘co-opting’ of the language that I think the extreme parts of the right appreciate and some might not notice.”

These dog whistles are heard loud and clear among members of the far-right. Those activists, including the Groypers, have come to see Gosar as one of their own. After all, the congressman has no reason, besides an ideological one, to continue rubbing shoulders with, giving speeches to, and emboldening such a hateful faction of the right. Gosar repeatedly brushes off these controversies because, they reason, this must be who he is and what he believes. His apparent refusal to distance himself from Searle, or even acknowledge the report about his staffer, can be understood as another of these dog whistles. He sticks by Fuentes to further mainstream his movement’s vile politics within the already vile Republican Party — which is, at best, indifferent to Gosar’s white nationalist friends.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared on our publisher Joe Ragazzo’s newsletter, Rhapsody. 

There’s a term floating around called “greedflation,” which refers to the possibility that corporations may be using the specter of inflation to raise prices and then blame inflation. It’s controversial. Some say it’s a conspiracy theory, and the increase in prices is really just a question of supply and demand: More money chasing fewer goods after rounds of government spending and a pandemic that disrupted supply chains, which increased the price of “input” goods, or the cost of items producers have to buy to create what consumers ultimately purchase.

But recently, the idea of greedflation has taken hold with what you might call “serious people” — central bankers pointing out that price increases for consumers are larger than price increases for inputs. Maybe, they say now, corporations are in fact exacerbating inflation. Bloomberg News — not exactly a scion of bastion of communist economic rhetoric — published this headline on August 25th, 2022: “US Corporate Profits Soar With Margins at Widest Since 1950.” It included these sentences: “The data show that companies overall have comfortably been able to pass on their rising cost of materials and labor to consumers. With household budgets squeezed by the rising cost of living, some firms have been able to offset any slip in demand by charging more to the customers they’ve retained — though others like Target Corp. saw their inventories swell and were forced to discount prices in order to clear them.” 

Despite this, the idea of rapacious capitalism taking advantage of consumers is only now, apparently, moving out of “fringe” theory territory. Instead, along the way, we’ve contorted ourselves into thinking that, actually, wages might be the problem. Like this story in USA Today from October 2022, months after data showed that the issue was likely corporate greed: “Good news is wages are rising. Unfortunately, that may also be bad news. Here’s why.” Workers demand higher wages, which leads to higher inflation, which leads to workers demanding still higher wages—a wage-spiral, in financial parlance. One financial consultancy executive told the paper: “A company has no choice but to pass on those costs to the consumer. That feeds consumer prices, and ‘round and ’round we go!” 

The Masters of the Universe who spend their days doing nothing but moving money from one account to the other are quick to blame normal people who have normal jobs for everything. Or that ready-made bogeyman, the Federal Reserve, for printing too much money. Business people are just engaged in rational competition while workers are doing crazy things like forming unions and demanding a living wage. No less a person than Adam Smith himself called this “ignorant” in his landmark work Wealth of Nations, which I’m convinced is one of the most-cited, least-read works of all time.

“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.”

TL;DR: If you think that corporations do not attempt to ensure wages are as low as possible or even lower than the market dictates, you are a fool. And there are a lot of fools with a lot of power these days.

At this point I should probably justify how this is a Rhapsody essay about the human experience. Here’s why: Throughout history, one of the primary ways ruling classes have controlled things is by creating their disciplines and their own languages replete with customs and rituals and knowledge that they withhold from normal people yet cite to justify their own position. Think about centuries of the Catholic Church holding masses all over the known world in LATIN even though nobody spoke Latin, and then exploiting this in the form of things like indulgences — telling people that if they pay money, they can be absolved of their sins and get to Heaven. That’s just one example.

What grinds my gears is how some economists often treat economics as if it is a natural science with observable laws that have passed through the rigor of the scientific method. To be crystal clear, the problem is not economics itself, the problem is when it crystallizes into dogma, which can then be used to uphold exploitative systems of labor. For example, Curtis Dubay, the Chief Economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argued just this month“it’s worth reiterating the obvious: there is no such thing as ‘greedflation.’” He then lists “the facts: Inflation is caused by clear and well-understood economic factors that stem from supply and demand. Prices rise when we have too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. There is nothing more complicated to the story than that.”

The story is more complicated than that. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices over time. Prices don’t set themselves. It’s not like the relationship between barometric pressure and rainfall or the temperature at which an element liquifies. Human beings working at companies set prices. But Dubay and the like would have us believe this is the case because models in textbooks say so, and also because it behooves the business community for consumers to believe that the business owners themselves are in no way at fault — they are just reacting “rationally” to the market.

As researchers at financial research firm TS Lombard write: “Unlike in previous episodes, when rising inflation meant rising wages and shrinking profits, margins have benefited from inflation over the past two years. Wages have risen in nominal terms, but profits have risen even more amid falling real labour costs.”

Why are profit margins rising more than wages? Because people at companies who decide what things cost are ensuring that is the case. And as Alexandra Scaggs writes for the Financial Times, this is because “the concentration of pricing power and resources among S&P 500 companies makes it easier for them to wring out profits in good and bad times, and those profits often come at the expense of individuals’ incomes and living standards.”  

Call it whatever you want, but at the end of the day it’s corporate greed being passed on to workers and consumers. In fact, some are now saying not only is greedflation real — it is good. Economists who point to models from microeconomic textbooks who want us all to believe otherwise are simply trying to employ specialized language to over complicate a simple reality and have us believe we simply shouldn’t trust our eyes (or real world evidence) because they know better. Don’t get me wrong, there are times I really want expertise, like when I had brain surgery. But this is not that kind of expertise.