DeSantis Is Going to Appear at a Rally With Pennsylvania’s Extremist Candidate for Governor

Jewish groups are outraged.

AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, File

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will appear at a rally in Pittsburgh for Pennsylvania’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano on Friday, sparking outrage from Jewish groups in DeSantis’ home state. DeSantis is one of the few GOP politicians who comes close to former president Donald Trump in terms of popularity among conservative voters, and his fundraising is on a record-breaking pace. But Mastriano is considered to be much further on the extremist fringes of the political spectrum—even for a Republican. 

Mastriano, who easily won the GOP primary earlier this year, is facing Democrat Josh Shapiro in November and is currently trailing by a sizable margin. In fact, Mastriano may owe some of his success in the primary to a Democratic effort to back the candidacy of someone so far to the right, he would defeat moderate GOP candidates who might have been more palatable to voters. Mastriano, often described as a Christian-nationalist, supports a total ban on abortion, expanded gun rights, and claims climate change is just “pop science.” He also has denied that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and has said that if elected governor, he would force everyone in the state to re-register to vote. In May, he suggested he would only certify a national election result if a Republican won. 

But he also has gushingly described DeSantis as the model governor and described his own vision of turning Pennsylvania into the “Florida of the north.” The flattery seems to have worked, as it appears that the invitation to DeSantis did not originate with Mastriano. In a Facebook posting, Mastriano said that DeSantis had contacted him about appearing.

Critics of Mastriano aren’t just concerned with his political views, but also about the company he keeps. On Friday, the Florida Democratic Party Jewish Caucus criticized DeSantis’ appearance, asking their Jewish counterparts in the Florida Republican Party to join them. The issue is Mastriano’s relationship with Andrew Torba, the founder of far-right Twitter alternative, Gab.

Mastriano has appeared in interviews with Torba and his campaign has paid Gab $5,000 to promote his candidacy. Gab has gained a reputation for right-wing extremist content and was the platform used by the mass shooter who attacked Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. After Jewish and Black leaders, including the Republican Jewish Coalition, criticized Mastriano’s campaign for its ties to Gab, Torba responded by saying, “We’re not bending the knee to the 2 percent anymore,” apparently referencing the estimated 2 percent of Americans who are Jewish. Torba also said that he and Mastriano would only respond to questions from interviewers who were Christian.

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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