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This article is more than 3 months old
Republicans just nominated one of the most
radical governor candidates in history
This
article is more than 3 months old
Doug Mastriano may be one of the most radical
candidates ever to receive a Republican nod and he has been clear that he will
use that power
Thu 19 May
2022 09.00 EDT
Pennsylvania
Republicans have nominated state senator Doug Mastriano to be the next
governor. Mastriano is one of the most radical gubernatorial candidates ever to
receive a major party nomination.
Many
Republicans have indulged Trump’s claims that Democrats stole the 2020
presidential election. But few have gone as far as Mastriano has to try to
justify Trump’s fever dream.
On 25
November, Mastriano “staged a faux legal hearing in Gettysburg, in which
Giuliani played prosecutor before a panel of Republican state senators and
representatives”. Mastriano introduced a number of “poll watchers” who told
unsubstantiated stories of “phantom ballots, hacked machines, and dead voters,
which they claimed had all led to an election stolen from Trump”.
Five days
later, after all of Trump’s legal challenges had failed and the Pennsylvania
secretary of state had formally certified Biden the winner, Mastriano
introduced a resolution urging Congress to ignore the official results. His
plan was for the Pennsylvania legislature to ignore millions of votes and
directly appoint electors pledged to Trump.
Ultimately,
Mastriano’s resolution didn’t go anywhere in the Republican-controlled state
legislature because Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, did not yield
to demands to call a special session. But Mastriano was not deterred. On 10
December 2020, Mastriano signed on to an amicus brief supporting Texas’s effort
to convince the US supreme court to throw out the results in Pennsylvania and
several other states. That effort also failed.
In the
lead-up to 6 January 2021, Mastriano was reportedly “in regular communication
with Donald Trump”. On the day, Mastriano was at the US Capitol and was
captured on video “walking through police lines with a crowd of people”.
In a
statement, Mastriano said that “police lines did shift throughout the course of
the day” and he “followed those lines as they existed”. (In February, Mastriano
was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee. It is unclear if he complied.)
In July
2021, Mastriano sent a letter “to several counties requesting information and
materials needed to conduct a forensic investigation of the 2020 general
election and the 2021 primary”. Mastriano’s conduct, however, was so extreme
that he was removed from the process by the Republican leadership of the
Pennsylvania senate. The senate president, Jake Corman, said that Mastriano was
“only ever interested in politics and showmanship and not actually getting
things done”.
During his
candidacy for governor, Mastriano has been clear that he will use his power –
including his authority to appoint the Pennsylvania secretary of state – to
influence the administration of future elections. He said the following on 30
March:
I’m Doug Mastriano, and I get to appoint the
secretary of state who’s delegated from me the power to make the corrections to
elections, the voting logs and everything. I could decertify every machine in
the state with the stroke of a pen via the secretary of state. I already had
the secretary of state picked out. It’s a world-class person that knows voting
integrity better than anyone else in the nation, I think, and I already have a
team that’s gonna be built around that individual.
Yesterday,
with Trump’s endorsement, Pennsylvania Republicans put him one step closer to
the governor’s mansion.
In April,
Mastriano spoke at a far-right Christian conference, Patriots Arise for God and
Country, which was organized by “Francine and Allen Fodsick, self-described prophets
who have long promoted QAnon”, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the
outset of the event, organizers played a video “claiming the world is
experiencing a ‘great awakening’ that will expose ‘ritual child sacrifice’ and
a ‘global satanic blood cult’”. The QAnon conspiracy alleges that top
Democratic officials and celebrities are Satan-worshipers running a secret
child sex-trafficking ring. The video also featured allegations that 9/11 was a
false flag, vaccines are “genocide therapy”, and Hitler faked his death.
Last year,
the Fodsicks promoted Mastriano on promotional material for the event, but
Mastriano said he would not attend. At the time, a spokesman said Mastriano
“strongly condemns the ‘Q anon’ conspiracy theory” and “never committed to
speak at this event but sadly was used to help promote it with his picture on
the invite”.
Last month,
Mastriano attended as a featured speaker, using his remarks to complain about
the “persecution and oppression” he was subjected to for contesting the 2020
presidential election. The Fodsicks auctioned a portrait of Trump for $4,000
during the event, with the proceeds going to Mastriano’s campaign. This year,
his campaign did not respond to a request for comment by the Philadelphia
Inquirer.
In a 31
March appearance at the PA Pro Life Coalition, Mastriano said supporters of
abortion rights wanted to “wipe out” Black and Latino communities. He said he
believed “that’s a baby from Day 1 – at conception”. Mastriano said “my
objective, of course, is to save life at conception and not play games”.
In a 27
April debate, Mastriano said opposition to abortion is his “No 1 issue”. The
first bill he introduced in the Pennsylvania senate was a “heartbeat” bill –
which would ban abortion after six weeks, before many women know they are
pregnant. But Mastriano said that, as Pennsylvania’s governor, he would “work
our way” toward a total abortion ban from conception. Mastriano made clear that
he doesn’t support any “exceptions” to abortion bans for rape, incest or life
of the mother.
Mastriano’s
position on abortion reflect his Christian nationalist worldview. Christian
nationalism, the New Yorker reports, is rooted in “the idea that God intended
America to be a Christian nation”. During his time as a military intelligence
officer in Iraq and Afghanistan he “developed a dim view of Islam”. He has
frequently “spread Islamophobic memes online”, including “a conspiracy theory
that Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, directed
fellow-Muslims to throw a five-year-old over a balcony”.
After
retiring from the military and successfully running for office in 2019,
Mastriano “began attending events held by a movement called the New Apostolic
Reformation”. Members of the New Apostolic Reformation believe “that God speaks
to them directly, and that they have been tasked with battling real-world
demons who control global leaders”. (Mastriano says he has not “worked
directly” with the group.)
In the
legislature, Mastriano has supported a bill that “would have mandated teaching
the Bible in public schools and would have made it legal for adoption agencies
to discriminate against same-sex couples”.”
Judd Legum
is the founder and author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter
dedicated to accountability journalism, where this post originally appeared
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