Shawn Berger isn’t one to sit idly by when he sees something he doesn’t agree with.

In 2019, the future of St. John Neumann Regional School, where his two daughters attend, was in doubt.

The 38-year-old Palmerton businessman helped redo the school’s social media platforms and boost promotion, helping it go from 60 students to having a waiting list in just six months.

One year later, in the midst of a state-mandated COVID-19 shutdown just before the 2020 holiday season, he kept the American Lobster restaurant he owns in Wind Gap open, a decision he said helped his employees pay the bills and provide a Christmas for their families.

Now, Berger is looking to advocate on a much larger scale, having thrown his hat into the ring as a Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor in the 2022 election.

“I fight hard for my employees. I’ve been fighting hard for schools and the freedom of choice for everyone. We should have the freedom to decide where we send our kids to school, the freedom to decide whether we wear masks or not, the freedom to decide whether or not we want the vaccine,” Berger said.

He’s running as a Republican, but says he’s for Democrats and Independents. “I believe that we should all stick together and fight our way through so we all get what we want.”

Berger said he learned the concept of hard work from a young age, coming from a family of third generation asphalt black toppers. At 20 years old, he started his own business, VIP Landscaping and has since opened Berger’s Construction, American Environmental Vacuum Truck Service and American Lobster.

He lives in Palmerton with his wife, Vanessa, and their two daughters, ages 7 and 10.

The shutdown

Just before American Lobster was slated to open its doors in 2020, the initial COVID-19 shutdown hit and Berger lost $5,000 in products. When the second shutdown came in December, he had seen enough.

“I had a waitress, a couple of waitresses come to me, and they were crying,” Berger said. “They went through all their savings during the previous shutdown. And they said that if they couldn’t work this Christmas, there wouldn’t be a Christmas for them because they had no money. They wouldn’t be able to get a tree. They wouldn’t be able to have a family gathering. So I decided to stay open and fight back.”

American Lobster stayed open and its sales went up 400%. Even as state officials and local police visited the restaurant with shutdown notices, Berger did not close the doors. Using donations from supporters across the state, American Lobster banded together with other restaurants to fight against potential lawsuits.

“The case never made it to court because the state had no leg to stand on,” Berger said.

A bigger scale

Berger decided he had to keep fighting and his gubernatorial campaign was born.

“This pandemic is real and everyone accepts that,” he said, “but at the end of the day, it’s destroying our economy the way they’re going about it. You have people like Tom Wolf and Joe Biden mandating things that they legally have no ability to do because they don’t have a medical license.”

Berger said he would remove COVID-19 mandates immediately, propose legislation to protect medical information against employers and add “failure to provide vaccine record” to the list of wrongful termination acts.

Transparency is a primary focus. He hopes to implement his Right to Know Act to create integrity within the voting system, ensure that all citizens’ rights to witness ballot counting is not infringed, to reveal corruption from deep within, and to allow every citizen to view the audits that will be happening from third party auditors throughout the state.

“People need to know everything about where their tax money is being spent,” Berger said.

Gas prices and farms

Rising gas prices are another item to be addressed in Berger’s action plan. A new Hybrid Subsidy Act, he said, will ensure that gas prices will never wildly fluctuate or increase, by lowering the tax when the price of gas goes up, and keeping it at a low, balanced amount so Pennsylvanians can plan their budget accordingly.

“Everything that comes out of my deep fryers at my restaurant, I run through my diesel pickup truck to offset the diesel prices that are at the pump,” Berger said. “We can start mass producing it on a state level by farming it here in canola oil plants. Once we can start stabilizing Pennsylvania itself, we can start stabilizing gas prices.”

Homegrown in Carbon County, Berger is hoping to bank on local support when Election Day rolls around.

“Right now, one of the biggest things in the local area here is the disappearance of farmland,” he said. “We’re tired of seeing all these buildings and warehouses put up and farmland disappearing. We don’t want to see the truck traffic. We want to see cattle. We want to see farms. We want to see people getting along.”

To win the Republican primary, Berger will have to outlast a large field of contenders including Lou Barletta, Jake Corman, Guy Ciarrocchi, Joe Gale, Charlie Gerow, Melissa Hart, Scott Martin, Doug Mastriano, William McSwain, Jason Richey, Mike Turzai, John Ventre, Dave White and Nche Zama.