Hidden Extremists Unleashed By Trump
Very possibly the worst result of the trumpian hurricane has been to unleash innumerable other lizards and creatures that were previously living under rocks where they sought refuge and safety while remaining relatively harmless to the above ground world.
They don’t need refuge any more because more and more, the slime is becoming the norm, as the country continues to swirl downwards in a spiral that is wreaking havoc far beyond trump himself. Trump, the would-be modern day Boss Tweed, has encouraged the worst people to run for office, and he will support them, as long as they follow his orders.
As a case in point, a morality tale of sorts, consider Doug Mastriano, a retired army colonel and far right wing candidate for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. He is currently a state senator, representing the 33th district, an area of the state just this side of Alabama.
Mastriano mightily promoted the debunked conspiracy that trump lost the election because of widespread voter fraud. An editorial in the York Dispatch, strongly criticized Mastriano’s actions relating to the 2020 presidential election and described him as someone who “regularly spouts his love of freedom” but has a relationship to Trump that had been “exposed as nothing more than a vassal doing his master’s bidding,” and that his actions were that of a “craven oligarch” making a “shocking call for tyranny” in a “campaign to undercut democracy itself for a generation.”
Some call Mastriano a Christian nationalist, a member of a movement that believes the U.S. is a Christian nation and that the nation must be taken back for god. The movement advocates public policy to be formed strictly by Christian beliefs and that promotes religious art and symbolism in public places. Christian nationalists typically support right wing politicians and policies related to such public issues as immigration, abortion and gun control.
Mastriano was born in New Brunswick, N.J., and was raised in Hightstown, a predominantly white, small town of 5,494 people, in Mercer County. Among its notable residents, was Randal Pinkett, a business consultant who in 2005 was the winner of season four of the reality television show, “The Apprentice,” which launched the bad haired guy on to the national stage.
In 1986, Mastriano received a bachelor’s degree in history from Eastern University, a private Baptist university in St. Davids, Pa. The university is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA. One of the university’s notable graduates is Morgan Hikaru Aiken, a professional basketball player in Japan.
A career in the military was launched when, while at Eastern, Mastriano participated in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and later received a slew of degrees, including a master’s degree in strategic intelligence from the Joint Intelligence College; a master’s degree in airpower theory from the Air University, a branch of the Air Force; a master’s degree in military operational art and science from the Air University’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies; a master’s degree in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College; and a doctorate in history from the University of New Brunswick.
After college, Mastriano was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army and assigned to the Military Intelligence Corps. He later served in Germany, Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, and with NATO, before retiring in 2017 at the rank of colonel.
After entering politics, Mastriano finished fourth of eight candidates in the 2018 primary election for Congress, receiving a total of 10,509 votes. In 2019, he tried again, this time for the state Senate, for which he campaigned that “marriage is between a man and woman — and that no amount of disinformation or political correctness will change these facts.” He won the seat and was sworn in on June 10, 2019.
During his campaign for state senate, Mastriano was accused of spreading Islamophobia after sharing several posts on his campaign Facebook page targeting Muslims. “Islam wants to kill gay rights, Judaism, Christianity and pacifism” read one of the posts.
After the 2019 fire at the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, Mastriano shared an image that implied the fire was started by Muslim terrorists, a fact that was never proven. In 2018, Mastriano also referred to the birther conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and posted on his Facebook page an article headlined, “A Dangerous Trend: Muslims running for office.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Mastriano was an opponent of federal guidelines to curb the spread of the deadly disease, including ending the lockdown laws that forced many businesses to temporarily close. He called for suspension of the federal HIPAA law so that the U.S. Department of Health could share more COVID-19 data, including publishing the names and addresses of those infected with the virus. He pressed for the resignation of Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, claiming that she was “being complicit in the virus spreading through our elder care homes, triggered by unscientific and illogical directives, forcing them to readmit COVID-19 patients.”
In response to an order that people wear protective masks in stores, Mastriano called for a mask-burning party at a rally in Gettysburg and later urged people to reject store employees telling them to wear a mask and “tell them to mind your own business and say you’re exempt.”
He soon became heavily involved in promoting the roundly rejected conspiracy that trump lost the 2020 election because of widespread voter fraud. Mastriano alleged various irregularities in the voting and called for the resignation of the Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar. He also issued a joint memo calling for a full recount “in any counties where state law was broken, regardless of the Department of State’s instructions, as well as in any precinct where questionable actions were demonstrated.”
At Mastriano’s request, the Republican Party’s Majority Policy Committee of the state Senate hosted a public meeting on Nov. 25, 2020, to consider bogus claims of election fraud. Trump’s legal team, including Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, gave a lengthy presentation in the meeting, and Trump participated by phone, claiming the election process was unfair and that he should be declared winner. Giuliani later tested positive for COVID-19,
After the meeting, trump invited Mastriano and other Pennsylvania officials to meet with him at the White House. Mastriano met with Trump but left abruptly after learning that he, his son and a friend of his son, who also was at the White House meeting, had tested positive for COVID-19. All participants of the meeting had been administered a rapid test for the virus as part of the White House health protocol, but the results of the test were not provided to them until they were already in the meeting in the West Wing.
Pennsylvania political leaders had been warned by federal officials a few days before the Nov. 25 meeting that the state had entered the “red zone” for the percentage of positive virus test results indicating uncontrolled spreading of COVID-19 in the community.
Mastriano and most other participants had not worn masks during the Gettysburg public meeting. Some of the participants had ridden in a large van from the Gettysburg meeting to the White House meeting, while Mastriano, his son and his son’s friend had driven together in a separate car. Another Pennsylvania state senator, Judy Ward, who sat next to Mastriano during the public meeting, tested positive for COVID-19 within five days after the meeting. Mastriano acknowledged on his Facebook page that his case was “pretty mild.”
Mastriano and three other state senators later tweeted that they would introduce a resolution to permit the state legislature to appoint delegates to the Electoral College instead of following the results of the presidential vote in the state.
“Officials in the Executive and Judicial Branches of the Commonwealth infringed upon the General Assembly’s authority by unlawfully changing the rules governing the Nov. 3, 2020 election in the Commonwealth,” a statement said, “based on the facts and evidence presented and our own Board of Elections data, that the Presidential election held on Nov. 3, 2020, in Pennsylvania is irredeemably corrupted.”
Mastriano’s personal Twitter account was then briefly suspended, leading trump to accuse Twitter of bias.
“Wow! Twitter bans highly respected Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano after he did a great job of leading a hearing on the 2020 Election fraud. They and the Fake News, working together, want to SILENCE THE TRUTH. Can’t let that happen. This is what Communist countries do!” trump tweeted.
The account was soon restored and Twitter said the removal was a mistake.
Mastriano published an op-ed article in the York Daily Record on Dec. 11, accusing Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, Secretary Boockvar, and the state Supreme Court of taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to abuse and contravene state election laws that were modified on Oct. 29, 2019.
Mastriano joined two lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results, Texas v. Pennsylvania, which the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed on the same day for lack of standing, and Kelly v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit brought by Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., which the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected three days prior to Mastriano’s article in the York Daily Record.
Mastriano helped organize bus rides for Trump supporters to the Jan. 6, Washington, D.C., protest to challenge the Electoral College results of the presidential election. Mastriano claimed that he and his wife left when the rally turned violent. But a crowdsourced video analysis disclosed on May 2021, identified Mastriano and his wife watching as another rioter tears a police barricade away and then passing through a breached Capitol Police barricade. Mastriano had claimed the accusations against him were the work of “angry partisans” who were “foot soldiers of the ruling elite.”
Mastriano traveled to Arizona to observe the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot “audit,” which had been ordered by the state’s Republican senate majority to generate the conspiracy theories. Mastriano said the 2020 Pennsylvania ballots should be subjected to a similar “audit,” even though Pennsylvania had already recounted the votes twice and twice confirmed Biden’s win.
On Feb. 15, Mastriano was subpoenaed by the Congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack to inquire about his role in trying to empanel a slate of alternative electors in Pennsylvania, in an effort to overturn the Presidential election.