A group of prominent Jewish and Black Pittsburgh leaders on Thursday condemned Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano for his ties to the right-wing social media platform Gab.
Gab is a site accessed by the accused Tree of Life shooter Robert Bowers, who used the platform to share conspiracy theories targeting Jewish people and wrote “Screw the optics, I’m going in” shortly before the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood in 2018.
WESA revealed recently that the Mastriano campaign paid $5,000 to Gab for consultation services. The Huffington Post then reported that new accounts on Gab automatically follow Mastriano’s account.
At a press conference at the City-County Building in Pittsburgh, state Rep. Dan Frankel, D-Squirrel Hill, who is Jewish, strongly denounced Mastriano’s association with Gab. He accused Mastriano of mining the platform for votes.
“Gab, the platform that helped radicalize and encourage the gunman who attacked our synagogue, is a festering cesspool of intolerance,” said Frankel.
The Mastriano campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Frankel said a certain piece of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community was lost forever after the Tree of Life shooting, where 11 congregants were killed. It is the deadliest attack on Jewish people in U.S. history.
He said it is important to call out Gab because antisemites and bigots who use the platform shouldn’t go unchallenged, and shouldn’t be encouraged to participate in politics.
“They are depending on our silence … to allow signposts of hatred to creep back into the mainstream discourse,” said Frankel. “We cannot allow that to happen.”
Officials said that Mastriano has posted on Gab dozens of times, and that many of the hundreds of replies on the site were filled with antisemtism and bigotry, some specifically directed at Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish.
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Frankel said Shapiro is supporting his legislation to expand the state’s hate crime laws, and he added that Shapiro has experienced investigating Gab as attorney general of Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh City Council member Ricky Burgess, D-Point Breeze, is the most senior Black elected official in Pittsburgh and a pastor at the Nazarene Baptist Church.
He echoed Frankel’s condemnation of Mastriano and said it was a time for the Black, Jewish and other communities to unite, amid a rise in hate crimes across American cities.
Burgess urged voters to support Shapiro and Austin Davis, a state representative from McKeesport who, if elected, would become Pennsylvania’s first Black lieutenant governor.
Burgess said that the Shapiro/Davis ticket represents the symbolism of Black and Jewish groups uniting against bigotry and white supremacy.
“Our coalition is greater than theirs,” said Burgess.
