PHILADELPHIA — State Attorney General Josh Shapiro started spending more than $1 million Sunday for two television ads linking State Sen. Doug Mastriano, his Republican opponent in the race for governor in Pennsylvania, to “antisemitic, alt-right extremists” on the social media platform Gab.
Mastriano on Saturday went after Shapiro on the campaign trail, citing a long-debunked claim about New York billionaire George Soros that has been criticized as antisemitic.
Shapiro’s ads about the $5,000 Mastriano paid Gab in April for consulting are getting special play in Pittsburgh.
Those ads, which cast Mastriano as “way too extreme” and “a real threat” to Pennsylvania, note that a Gab user is accused of posting plans on the site just before allegedly killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
Mastriano is set to appear Friday in Pittsburgh at a rally with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Mastriano on Saturday tried to invert the narrative, calling Shapiro “an enemy of the citizens of Pennsylvania” funded by “dark and sinister individuals” like Soros, who is frequently portrayed by conservatives as a villain for funding progressive causes and campaigns.
In doing so, Mastriano repeated a false claim about Soros working for the Nazis during World War II.
“We could talk about Soros, who as a teenager collaborated with the S.S. to turn other Jews in in Hungary,” Mastriano said, in a video posted on his campaign’s Facebook page. “They don’t want to talk about that. So who are the Nazis? It’s not us.”
As a 13-year-old during the war, Soros posed as the godson of a Christian government official to avoid being sent to a concentration camp. Soros told 60 Minutes in 1998 that he sometimes accompanied that official on trips where Jewish properties were catalogued for seizure.
“I was only a spectator,” Soros told 60 Minutes. “I had no role in taking away that property.”
Shapiro had more than $13 million in the bank as of early June, according to the most recent campaign finance reports, while Mastriano had $400,000.
Soros has contributed twice to Shapiro’s campaigns for attorney general, $5,000 in 2016 and $10,000 in 2020.
Andrew Goretsky, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director in Philadelphia, called Mastriano’s comments about Soros “incredibly problematic.”
“It’s deeply troubling to see Doug Mastriano invoke falsehoods and conspiracies, including that George Soros, who was a child hiding in Budapest during the war, somehow collaborated with the Nazis to turn other Jews in,” Goretsky told The Inquirer in a statement.
The ADL, which in July denounced Mastriano for having “politics that teeter on the edge of a kind of extremism,” included him two weeks ago on a list of “right-wing extremists” seeking elected office. The ADL in 2020 compiled a list of some of the conservative conspiracy theories about Soros.
Mastriano, who did not respond for a request for comment Monday, was hit with waves of bipartisan uproar for his affiliation with Gab and the site’s controversial Christian nationalist founder, Andrew Torba.
Torba endorsed Mastriano and interviewed him before the May primary. In the interview, Mastriano praised Torba, saying: “Thank God for what you’ve done.”
In July, Mastriano appeared to delete his Gab account while announcing that Torba does not speak for his campaign.
“I reject antisemitism in any form,” said Mastriano, while trying to blame the controversy on “recent smears” from Democrats and the media.
Torba has continued posting on Gab about Shapiro, celebrating in posts over the weekend that the two ads would bring more attention to his website.
