Doug Mastriano has sterling credentials as a right-wing extremist, a fact currently being highlighted by his association with the social media platform Gab and its heinously antisemitic founder and CEO. Mastriano, the Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee, doesn’t need Gab to prove himself—he’s a longtime bigot and conspiracy theorist who actively supported Donald Trump’s coup attempt. But Mastriano’s ties to Gab are providing some eye-popping content in recent days.
Mastriano’s campaign paid Gab a “consulting” fee, possibly to buy followers on the platform, which is known as a “haven for white nationalists.” Around the same time, Gab CEO Andrew Torba interviewed Mastriano, with Mastriano telling Torba, “Thank God for what you’ve done,” among other praise. Now, Torba is spewing out one antisemitic statement after another, explicitly connecting himself to Mastriano in some of them.
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Torba recently drew attention for saying, “We don’t want people who are atheists. We don’t want people who are Jewish” in the “explicitly Christian” conservative movement he considers himself a part of. He named one name in particular: “Ben Shapiro is not welcome in the movement unless he repents and accepts Jesus Christ as his Lord and savior.”
Mastriano has not disavowed Torba, even as Torba has doubled down in a series of videos. “We’re not bending the knee to the 2 percent anymore,” he said in one. About 2% of people in the United States are Jewish.
“My policy is not to conduct interviews with reporters who aren’t Christian or with outlets who aren’t Christian, and Doug has a very similar media strategy where he does not do interviews with these people,” he said in another, reported by The Jerusalem Post. “He does not talk to these people. He does not give press access to these people. These people are dishonest. They’re liars. They’re a den of vipers and they want to destroy you.”
This is an avowed Christian nationalist more or less speaking for the Republican nominee for governor of a large purple state, and said nominee hasn’t cut ties. Even if establishment Republicans find a way to pressure Mastriano into disavowing Torba, the fact that it didn’t happen immediately tells you what you need to know about Mastriano’s real thoughts here.
But the fact that Mastriano was associated with Gab at all would tell you that. The platform was established touting “free speech,” making clear that hate speech and harassment were included in that freedom. The man charged with killing 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue had posted antisemitic messages to Gab, making Mastriano’s embrace of Gab as he runs for Pennsylvania office particularly gross.
When Andrew Torba says, “We don’t want people who are atheists. We don’t want people who are Jewish,” it’s crystal clear that Doug Mastriano is part of that “we.”
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