Founder of extremist social-media site working with Doug Mastriano has a message for news media: ‘Repent now’

“Repent now and accept Jesus Christ into your heart. Every knee will bow, yours included.”

That was the response from Andrew Torba, the founder of the social media site Gab, to a HuffPost reporter who wrote last week about Doug Mastriano’s gubernatorial campaign paying the site $5,000 for consulting services.

“We’re taking back this country for the glory of God and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop us,” Torba wrote to reporter Christopher Mathias.

HuffPost reported last week that new accounts on Gab now automatically follow Mastriano, a Christian nationalist and the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania.

Gab, a platform favored by anti-Semites, extremists, and believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, drew public scrutiny in 2018 after one of its users allegedly killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

In a video Torba posted on Saturday, he said the $5,000 payment from the Mastriano campaign was to “run ads on Gab social,” as other candidates are doing.

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Mastriano has seen his followers on Gab grow quickly, from about 2,300 in early April, according to WESA-FM in Pittsburgh, to nearly 38,000 today. Recently, he has been posting frequently. Some of the posts have resulted in dozens of anti-Semitic attacks on state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor, WESA reported.

“I, and many other White Christian Americans, am being TERRORIZED by jewish mafia psychopaths,” one commenter wrote three days ago in response to a different Mastriano post criticizing Shapiro’s economic and energy policies.

“If you really want to win, appeal directly and openly to Whites. Trump getting close to this is the only reason he won in 2016 and not doing it enough is why he lost in 2020,” another commenter added.

Neither Torba nor Mastriano returned requests for comment from The Inquirer on Monday. Mastriano’s campaign does not field questions from most news organizations.

“As many of you know, my policy is to not conduct interviews with reporters who aren’t Christian, or with outlets that aren’t Christian,” Torba said in his Saturday video, “and Doug has a very similar media strategy.”

» READ MORE: Doug Mastriano embodies a Christian nationalist movement as he runs for governor

After the Pittsburgh attack, Torba said Gab has a “zero tolerance policy” for violence and terrorism. But, as HuffPost noted:

In the years since, Gab has remained a haven for hate, and Torba himself has grown increasingly antisemitic and racist in his words and behavior. “We’re building a parallel Christian society because we are fed up and done with the Judeo-Bolshevik one,” he tweeted last year, using a term popularized by the Nazi Party in the 1930s. In February, Torba was a featured speaker at a white supremacist conference in Florida, where he used “great replacement” rhetoric. (Other speakers at the event praised Adolf Hitler and called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be hanged.) More recently, after a white supremacist gunman targeted Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, killing 10, Torba implored his Gab followers to marry and reproduce with only white people.

Social media is crucial to Mastriano’s unconventional campaign strategy. Facebook, Gab, and other platforms allow him to communicate directly with his supporters without having to field questions from journalists that might ask questions he doesn’t want to answer. He limits his interviews to only the most friendly radio hosts and podcasters.

In early May, while Mastriano was still fighting for the GOP nomination in a crowded primary field, Torba interviewed him. The two men praised each other, and Mastriano told Torba: “Thank God for what you’ve done.”

The following week, according to Media Matters for America, Gab endorsed Mastriano. Torba wrote: “Finally we have a strong Christian man to lead PA out of the pit of hell and into the glory of God.”

Other Republicans have advertised on Gab — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), Rep. Paul Gosar (R., Ariz.), and Georgia GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker — but in his video posted over the weekend, Torba called Mastriano’s race for governor “the most important election of the 2022 midterms.”

On Monday, the sponsored comments appearing under a Torba post about Mastriano including one selling ivermectin, falselyclaiming that it “destroys” both COVID and cancer, and another from the Freedom First Society that stated: “If you don’t believe in God, then you cannot claim to have inalienable rights granted to you by God.”