Republican Pennsylvania governor candidate Doug Mastriano’s official campaign Facebook account is also helping with another group on the social media site: a Facebook group which has for months featured a stream of xenophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic memes.
The campaign’s role in the public group—called “Mastriano Memes”—has not been previously reported, but Mastriano’s official Facebook account was still an active administrator for the page as of Monday evening.
The page is a firehose of right-wing online content, sometimes hosting dozens of posts a day. Some of the most extreme content mocks trans people, fearmongers about migrants, and trafficks in antisemitic tropes.
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As an administrator, Mastriano—a state senator and dyed-in-the-wool election-denying conspiracy theorist—has control over what content stays up on the page. That would include posts about election fraud, such as one this week that Facebook fact-checkers flagged for promoting “false information,” but remains on the page.
Multiple other recent posts make light of the would-be assassination attempt on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this weekend, which left her 82-year-old husband with a skull fracture. One meme shared on Monday implies that President Joe Biden is a pedophile, and content earlier this month likened abortion to a mother sacrificing her child to Satan.
After Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis sent a planeload of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard under false promises, Mastriano Memes played host to a number of xenophobic posts, one of which called the migrants “scary brown people.” Multiple memes also took shots at the Obamas, who have a home on the Cape Cod island, with one post referring to former first lady Michelle Obama as “Michael,” playing on a long-running right-wing transphobic belief—sometimes framed as a joke—that she is actually a man.
Other transphobic content on the page includes an attack on detained WNBA star Britney Griner and—again—Michelle Obama, with a picture of each woman captioned, “two dudes walk into a bar.” Drag queens are routinely ridiculed.
The page also drifts into antisemitic territory. One post from September features an antisemitic trope depicting Democratic megadonor George Soros as a puppet master. And after Biden’s speech in Philadelphia that month, where the president called out the looming fascist threat posed by far-right Republicans, the page shared a photo of the event with swastikas superimposed over the background. (Mastriano’s Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, is Jewish.)
Multiple memes mock Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman’s stroke, including a tweet from far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec calling Fetterman a “vegetable.” One follower shared on the page what he described as a note “from a doctor friend of mine,” saying that Fetterman “clearly is an unhealthy man” and speculating about the nature and seriousness of his stroke.
As a one of the group’s administrators, Mastriano can remove any unwanted content. And when confronted with controversial posts in the past, his campaign has indeed acted.
In July, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the campaign had deleted more than a dozen Facebook videos—such as content espousing fears that his election will be tainted by voter fraud, and claiming that the anti-abortion movement is “the most important issue of our lifetime.”
The Inquirer also reported that the right-winger has removed tweets promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory and a video where he denigrates local faith leaders as “cowards.” His official Senate campaign site removed a proposition that Mastriano spitballed in 2020 to suspend privacy rules so the government could publish personal information about people diagnosed with COVID.
Mastriano is a Christian nationalist icon with ties to right-wing extremists, who former colleagues have warned is “dangerous” and a “phony.” And this is far from the first time his online life has caught up to him.
After it was revealed that the candidate had paid $5,000 this April in “campaign consulting” fees to the far-right social media hellscape Gab, the founder of Gab delivered antisemitic remarks in Matriano’s defense.
“This is a Christian nation. Christians outnumber you by a lot—a lot,” the site’s founder said in a video. “We’re not going to listen to 2 percent. You represent 2 percent of the country, OK? We’re not bending the knee to the 2 percent anymore.”
And two days before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol—where Mastriano appeared, and even bused in supporters—he paused a Facebook livestream on his official state Senate site to redirect viewers to his political page.
“We’re gonna hop over on the other page, Doug Mastriano Fighting For Freedom, where we can talk freely,” Mastriano said. “So please follow me over to Doug Mastriano Fighting For Freedom, we’ll continue the conversation off of this government page, and onto a page where we can speak freely about everything.”
The Mastriano campaign didn’t reply to a request for comment.
