WV delegate says man he was trying to help used his Instagram to make antisemitic comment

Del. Ian T. Masters, whose Instagram account he says was used by someone else last month to write an antisemitic comment, spoke publicly on Thursday for the first time since the comment was reported.

Masters, R-Berkeley, appeared on the Eastern Panhandle’s WRNR radio station. His interview came the day after one given by House Majority Leader Pat McGeehan. During his appearance, McGeehan said he personally investigated how the antisemitic comment was made by an Instagram account Masters previously used and that still bore his full name and a link to an organization he once led.

WRNR is owned by another member of the House Republican caucus, Del. Mike Hornby, R-Berkeley, according to the Secretary of State. Another Republican, Del. Michael Hite, R-Berkeley, was one of the hosts on the show while Masters gave his interview.

The comment in question was left on June 21 by an account with the handle @NoQuarterMasters in response to another comment on a post from April 12 about Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports.

McGeehan told the radio show on Wednesday that he found the individual who actually left the comment — a friend of Masters’ late brother — and he was “very sick,” “basically homeless” and living with substance use disorder after a recent extended hospital stay where he woke up from an almost two-month-long coma. Masters, McGeehan said, had given the man an old iPhone in 2024 that had his personal Instagram account, as well as other social media, still logged in.

On Thursday, Masters further explained the incident and asserted again that he did not leave the comment. 

“I can unequivocally tell you I did not author that comment,” Masters said.

Masters has denied making the comment since it was first reported by West Virginia Watch on June 24. In an interview that day, he said he did not have “any active Instagram account” and did not acknowledge an affiliation with the account’s handle, @NoQuarterMasters. When the comment was made, the account still used Masters’ full name and was previously tagged and featured in photos of Masters posted by other public Instagram pages.

He said Thursday that he didn’t take ownership of the account during his interview with West Virginia Watch because he “wasn’t about to hand over any personal information” to a reporter he didn’t know. Masters did not respond to a phone call for this story.

Masters’ explanation of how the comment was left by someone else through his account largely echoed what McGeehan shared. The person who left the comment, Masters said, was someone he had “known for a long while and cared about and was trying to help.”

“[I] provided them with an older phone [and] some money to try to get back on their feet … It was an older phone my kids had messed around with, but it was ostensibly supposed to be to fill out job applications or reach family or whatever,” Masters said. “I provided that to this person, and I do care about the person — even in light of this — it’s somebody that had been around me during the loss of my brother, somebody who had been very close to my brother and an individual I was trying to help.”

McGeehan said that the person responsible was “probably going to eventually die in the near future” due to either his illness or from overdose. Masters said he learned through McGeehan’s interview that the person “was in an even worse place than [he] was aware.”

“I hope this individual is not that sick, I didn’t know that,” Masters said.

Because this was someone he cared for, Masters said he didn’t at this time want to release their name, but he was “contemplating” doing so.

Masters said he’s working to get information from Meta, which owns Instagram, about the login locations for the account so he can show definitively that it wasn’t him, but he hasn’t gotten that yet.

He also said he’s “been in discussion” with law enforcement regarding the incident.

“I don’t know at present if this circumstance of me leaving a device logged in and a person using that meets that criminal side of things,” said Masters, who is a lawyer by trade. “There’s a lot that I’m trying to process and understand here.”

The profile picture on Masters’ Instagram account — which he said he’s regained control of and has logged out of it on devices he no longer owns — shows a letter addressed to him and partially covered by runes burnt into wooden pendants hanging from strings. The letter, Masters said, was from his brother, who died by suicide in 2014 and the picture is of a “memorial wall” in his home honoring him.

Several of the runes on the pendants show symbols classified by the Anti-Defamation League, an advocacy organization dedicated to stopping antisemitism across the world, as antisemitic symbols commonly used by groups and individuals espousing white supremacist, neo-Nazi and antisemitic ideals.

Masters said, however, that the symbols have been taken out of context and were meant only to honor his brother, who loved Vikings and read a lot of Norse mythology. 

“It’s a sad aspect of our discourse — in the way that everything has been twisted — that this is somehow this Nazi imagery,” Masters said.

One of the pendants shows a carving of a wolf under a horizontal Wolfsangel. Masters said this pendant was an homage to one of his brother’s favorite songs, “Keep The Wolves Away.” 

The Wolfsangel symbol was appropriated by Nazi Germany as the divisional insignia for several Waffen-SS units and, more modernly, is used in the logo for the Aryan Nations in the U.S. and Europe. Unlike the other symbols, per the ADL, it’s not one that is still associated with other religions or cultures outside of these beliefs.

Last week, the state Democratic Party called for a “legitimate” investigation into not just the comment left by Masters’ account, but into the imagery used in the profile picture.

The party, led by Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, outlined several steps that House leadership should take to clear Masters of charges, including performing a “full forensic investigation” of his devices, social media accounts and email and seeking an explanation of the account’s profile picture and the symbols within it, among other things.

McGeehan has classified the request from state Democrats as being politically motivated. He called out Pushkin and Del. Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia — the only two Jewish people in the state Legislature — by name, saying they were “not interested in the truth” about who really left the antisemitic comment and were making “deceptive accusations because they desire power and social status.”

The investigation, McGeehan told WRNR, is “over.”

“I’ve done due diligence … It’s over,” McGeehan said. “As far as I’m concerned, this is a witch hunt. That’s it.”