Doug Mastriano and Gab

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Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, is under increasing scrutiny over his connections to the far-right social media platform Gab and its founder, who has repeatedly made antisemitic remarks defending their ties.

Early this month, news emerged that Mr. Mastriano’s campaign had paid Gab, a haven for white nationalists and users banned from other platforms, $5,000 for “consulting,” according to a state filing that was first uncovered by Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group.

Since then, Mr. Mastriano, a far-right state senator who has falsely argued that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and who rarely speaks to traditional news outlets, has ignored criticism of his association with Gab.

But the platform’s founder and chief executive, Andrew Torba, has hit back — most recently, using an anti-Jewish trope.

“We’re not bending the knee to the 2 percent anymore,” Mr. Torba said in a video this week, an apparent reference to the rough percentage of the country that is Jewish.

Mr. Torba and his platform support Christian nationalism, the view that America was founded to advance Christians and biblical values.

“We’re taking back our country,” he added. “We’re taking back our government, so deal with it.”

Shortly after the payment from the Mastriano campaign, in April, Mr. Torba interviewed Mr. Mastriano on his site, when the candidate told him, “Thank God for what you’ve done.”

Before Pennsylvania’s May 17 primary, Gab endorsed Mr. Mastriano, who was at the forefront of Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 results in the state.

Mr. Mastriano won the nomination in a divided field, despite warnings by some Republican officials that he was too extreme to win in November. Recent polls have shown him running an unexpectedly close race against the Democratic nominee, Josh Shapiro.

According to reporting by HuffPost, Mr. Mastriano may be paying Gab to increase his following on the site: New users appeared to be automatically assigned as followers of the Republican nominee.

In a series of live-streamed videos in recent days, Mr. Torba, who is based in Pennsylvania, responded repeatedly to criticism of him and Mr. Mastriano by reinforcing his own Christian nationalist and antisemitic views.

The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday quoted Mr. Torba as saying in one video that neither he nor Mr. Mastriano would give interviews to non-Christian journalists.

Republican and Democratic Jewish leaders alike have called for Mr. Mastriano to leave Gab. “We strongly urge Doug Mastriano to end his association with Gab, a social network rightly seen by Jewish Americans as a cesspool of bigotry and antisemitism,” Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told The Philadelphia Inquirer last week.

In Pittsburgh, Jewish and Black leaders condemned Mr. Mastriano for his association with Gab, which was used to post antisemitic attacks by the man accused of massacring 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.

Mr. Shapiro, the state’s attorney general, began an investigation of Gab after the killings, though he eventually dropped it.

On Monday, Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, appealed to donors in a tweet to “stop” Mr. Mastriano, who he said “is paying Gab — the same platform that empowered the Tree of Life killer — thousands of dollars to recruit antisemites and white supremacists to his campaign.”

After days avoiding questions about antisemitic remarks by a supporter of his campaign, Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, said on Thursday that he rejected “antisemitism in any form.’’

Mr. Mastriano on Thursday did not condemn Mr. Torba. He blamed Democrats and “the media” for the controversy.
“Andrew Torba doesn’t speak for me or my campaign,’’ Mr. Mastriano wrote in a statement released on Twitter. “I reject anti-Semitism in any form. Recent smears by the Democrats and the media are blatant attempts to distract Pennsylvanians from suffering inflicted by Democrat policies.”

In recent days, pressure from Republicans in Pennsylvania and beyond for Mr. Mastriano to condemn Gab and quit the site has grown. Andy Reilly, the national Republican committeeman for Pennsylvania, who hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Mastriano at his suburban Philadelphia home on Wednesday, said in an interview that Gab was “shameful” and “shouldn’t be part of the usual political dialogue.”

“Doug should make sure he makes it clear that he doesn’t agree with the people posting hateful things on the site,’’ Mr. Reilly said several hours before Mr. Mastriano released his statement on Thursday evening.

About an hour before Mr. Mastriano’s statement was posted, Mr. Torba wrote on Gab that he did not work for the Mastriano campaign and was not its consultant. “The campaign paid Gab as a business for advertising during the primary,” he said. “The campaign posts on Gab, as do 50+ other campaigns from around the country. That’s the extent of the relationship.”

Later on Thursday, Mr. Mastriano made his Gab account private and then removed it, according to The Forward.

The Democratic nominee for governor, Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, responded to Mr. Mastriano’s statement Thursday by recalling his praise for Mr. Torba in May: “Thank God for what you’ve done.”

Isn't he one of the candidates that the Democrats spent a lot of money boosting in the primaries on the assumption he'd be easier to beat than a more moderate Republican? Worked out real good for them in 2016...

Three years before retiring from the U.S. Army in 2017, Donald Trump-backed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano posed in Confederate uniform for a faculty photo at the Army War College, according to a copy of the photo obtained by Reuters.

The previously unreported photo, released by the War College to Reuters after a request under the Freedom of Information Act, showed Mastriano in a 2013-14 portrait for the Department of Military Strategy, Plans, and Operations, where he worked.

Faculty at the time had been given the option of dressing as a historical figure, people familiar with the photo said. At least 15 of the 21 faculty in the photo opted to appear in regular attire. Although one man wears a trench coat and sunglasses and another carries an aviator's helmet, Mastriano is the only one wearing a Confederate uniform.

After Reuters made its formal request for the photo, it was removed from the War College wall where it had hung alongside other annual portraits of faculty groups.

The Army War College (AWC), a premier military higher education institution in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, told Reuters a team had reviewed all art, text, and other images displayed at Carlisle Barracks in 2020, but missed the faculty photo.

"The faculty photo did not get the team's attention; the photo has since been removed because it does not meet AWC values," the college said in a statement.

Asked about the War College photo, a spokesperson at U.S. Army headquarters said: "The Army supports commanders who remove symbols or images that do not comport with Army values."

Pennsylvania plays an outsized role in U.S. politics as a so-called swing state in presidential elections, and Republican Mastriano, who has embraced Trump's stolen election lies, is trailing his Democratic opponent in the governor's race ahead of the November ballot.

It is unclear how the photo might be viewed in Pennsylvania, which played a critical role in the Civil War. More than 33,000 soldiers from Pennsylvania died fighting for the Union, and the state was the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, the conflict's bloodiest battle, which ended with a Union victory and inspired President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Mastriano's district, Pennsylvania's 33rd, includes Gettysburg.

Many Americans continue to participate in Civil War battle re-enactments, wearing uniforms from both sides in an effort to preserve U.S. history.

Jenna Ellis, a senior adviser to Mastriano's campaign and former Trump lawyer, said the media was having a "melt down" because Mastriano once posed as a civil war historical figure for a photo.

"And? He has a Ph.D in HISTORY," Ellis wrote on Twitter. "The left wants to erase history. @dougmastriano wants us to learn from it. I invite @Reuters to go on a Gettysburg tour with Doug. You'll learn a lot!"

Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, attended a Jewish day school as a kid, and this week his Republican opponent made that alma mater a campaign issue.

At a rally, State Sen. Doug Mastriano said Shapiro “grew up in a privileged neighborhood, attended one of the most privileged schools in the nation as a young man — not college, I’m talking about as a kid.”

In addition, Mastriano said on Wednesday, Shapiro is now “sending his four kids to the same privileged, exclusive, elite school, $30-40,000 per pupil. We talk about him having disdain for people like us.”

The school in question is Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, known when Shapiro attended it as Akiba Hebrew Academy. A private Jewish day school, the academy has turned out many famous Jewish alumni, including prominent rabbi David Wolpe, bestselling author Mitch Albom and documentary filmmaker Alison Klayman.

Mastriano never mentioned the school by name or specified that it was a Jewish school. But fellow alumnus Jake Tapper took notice of the implication Thursday on his CNN program, “The Lead.”

It’s a private Jewish parochial school,” Tapper said. “And I suppose, in that sense, it is privileged. But I do not know many people who would describe it the way that Mr. Mastriano did.”

Tapper went on to defend his alma mater from the charge of elitism, saying that more than 60% of the current student body is on some form of tuition assistance, and that he remembered attending school alongside many children who had fled antisemitic persecution in the former Soviet

I don’t think I have ever heard Mr. Mastriano describe any other Pennsylvania parochial schools in that way: elite, exclusive, privileged, full of disdain for fellow Americans,” Tapper said.

Despite Mastriano’s comments, his own education plans would benefit Barrack Hebrew Academy along with all other private and religious schools in the state. The candidate has proposed drastically slashing funding for Pennsylvania public schools, including by eliminating their property taxes and dropping per-pupil spending.

Local public education advocates have said one result of these proposals would be the elimination of Friday-night high school football games — which would, ironically, be in accordance with the Jewish Sabbath.

Shapiro has centered his Jewish identity in his gubernatorial campaign in an effort to appeal to Christians alienated by Mastriano’s blend of conservatism. He has referenced Shabbat in campaign ads and wears a red string around his wrist that his daughter got for him in Israel — “the kind that little old ladies hand out in Jerusalem when they bless visitors to the Western Wall,” Politico reported.