By Matthew Langston
The special election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District has continued to heat up with new ads as Election Day, Sept. 10, draws closer.
State Sen. Dan Bishop, the Republican candidate in the race, was the subject of a new attack ad from Stand Up Republic, a 501(c)(4) organization founded in early 2017 by Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn.
McMullin and Finn ran together in the 2016 presidential election as a conservative alternative to then-candidate Donald Trump and have continued to criticize Trump and the Republican Party since then.
A spokesman for Stand Up Republic told the Washington Post that the group only gets involved in elections that it believes “will have a direct impact on the health of American democracy.” The most prominent race that the group has been involved in was the 2017 Senate election in Alabama. It spent $500,000 on ads opposing Republican Roy Moore, a controversial candidate who ultimately lost to Democrat Doug Jones by just under 1.5 percent of the vote.
In response to the ad, Bishop released a fiery statement that said, “Dan McCready was already running the most dishonest campaign in America but this ad is a new low filled with libelous, defamatory slander and any media outlet that publishes or broadcasts it should prepare to join the ad’s sponsors in defending it in court.”
With this background information noted, let’s explore the accuracy of Stand Up Republic’s ad and its claims about Bishop.
The Claims
The ad opens with footage from the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia that followed the white supremacist rally held there on Aug. 12, 2017, and ended with multiple injuries and the death of an activist.
“When [neo-Nazis] were banned from social media, Dan Bishop took their side,” a narrator then claims. “In fact, he invested in a social media website because it welcomed the white supremacists.”
A news headline displayed in the background confirms that Gab is the social media website to which the ad is referring.
After showing offensive anti-Semitic images that have been posted on the website, the narrator references Gab as also being the website on which the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter announced his plans to commit a mass shooting at the city’s Tree of Life synagogue, which resulted in 11 deaths.
The narrator then says, “Bishop says it’s about free speech,” and closes the ad by saying, “But if he supports extremists, we can’t support Dan Bishop.”
The Fact-Check
UNC FactCheck has previously written about Bishop’s investment in Gab in our profile of him.
Bishop first tweeted and posted on Facebook about his $500 investment in Gab on Aug. 17, 2017, which was less than a week after the violence in Charlottesville.
In his Facebook post, Bishop says, “So, I’m about done with SF thought police tech giants’ Big Brother routine, and so … I just invested in a free-speech social network startup mentioned in a Washington Post article today, Gab.ai. Free markets are the answer to many kinds of tyranny.”
It appears Bishop was referring to a Washington Post article posted the previous day that is titled “Silicon Valley escalates its war on white supremacy despite free speech concerns.” That article, which briefly mentions Gab, discusses the crackdown that social media and tech companies began to undertake against hate groups and their leaders in the aftermath of Charlottesville.
The Gab app was removed from the Google Play Store the same day Bishop posted online about the website. Google said the app violated the company’s hate-speech policy, which could be a reference to the website’s minimal amount of moderation.
On the fundraising website that Bishop linked to in his original tweet and Facebook post, Gab promotes itself as “an ad-free social network for creators who believe in free speech, individual liberty, and the free flow of information online.”
In a story published a month later, Gab CEO Andrew Torba is quoted as saying, “We want everyone to feel safe on Gab, but we’re not going to police what is hate speech and what isn’t.”
Since its creation in 2016, Gab has developed a reputation for being a digital platform for controversial, openly racist and far-right figures, including the organizers of Charlottesville’s white supremacist rally and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, that have been banned from Twitter, Facebook and other websites for their hateful rhetoric. Gab came under further scrutiny after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, which temporarily resulted in the website being taken offline.
Still, Stand Up Republic’s claim that Bishop invested in Gab specifically because it welcomed white supremacists is questionable. Since it came less than a week after Charlottesville, the timing of Bishop’s investment in Gab is curious, though, especially since there were signs that Gab was not a website that Bishop, as a public figure, should have invested in.
Bishop later posted a statement on Twitter on Oct. 31, 2018, in which he distanced himself from Gab. That statement came after several media outlets published stories about his investment in the website.
“I made a $500 crowdfunding investment 14 months ago in a startup called Gab, which promoted itself as a new, unbiased social-media platform,” said Bishop. “I don’t use Gab, but if its management allows its users to promote violence, anti-Semitism, and racism on the platform, they certainly have misled investors and they will be gone quickly, and rightfully so.
It is worth noting that a Gab account that appears to have been Bishop or someone posing as him did make three posts in August 2017, with the first post coming the same day Bishop announced his investment in Gab. The last post was on Aug. 18, 2017, and there was nothing substantial in any of the posts.
Still, this raises questions about whether Bishop intended at some point to use Gab as another social media platform, even though it remains uncertain if the below account was his.
Stand Up Republic’s ad is accurate about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter posting his plans on Gab. The shooter was an avid user of the website, as seen by screenshots of his posts that involve conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism.
Lastly, the ad is right that Bishop did originally express his support online for Gab being “a free-speech social network.” Bishop has never explicitly said that he supports extremists, though, so it could be misleading for Stand Up Republic to claim in its ad that Bishop does.
