Earlier this week, Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania senator who used campaign funds to send six charter buses to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, won the Republican primary for governor by a significant margin, winning forty-four percent of the vote. Mastriano, a 58-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel, was recently summoned by a House of Representatives election commission investigating Jan. 6 for his role in the day’s violence. Some of his supporters are currently facing jail for their involvement in the riot, including Samuel Lazar, who calls himself #facepaintblowhard online and storms the barricades and invites others to the metropolis, shouting, “Hang the hell out!” to the crowd from the Capitol stairs. (Mastriano told viewers during a live chat on Facebook that night that he left after the violence began, but videos collected online appear to establish his presence there after the riots began and the Capitol was breached.)
Mastriano rose to national prominence for the first time by leading the Stop Theft campaign in Pennsylvania, which sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, in which Biden won the state by about eighty thousand votes. Mastriano won Trump’s favor – and this spring, his approval – after he called for an audit of the 2020 results. JJ Abbott, a Pennsylvania political analyst, told me he believed Mastriano was even more committed to Trump’s repeal. in the elections. “Unlike Trump, Mastriano really believes what he says,” Abbott said. “He is seriously committed to mobilizing and organizing people who share his worldview and work throughout his life on the ability to realize these ideas.” (Mastriano did not respond to a request for comment.)
Mastriano continues to urge his followers, whom he calls his “army,” to oust democratically elected leaders. He promised that if elected, he would reject all current voter registrations and appoint a like-minded secretary of state who could overturn the election results. “As governor, I have to appoint the secretary of state,” he said recently on a far-right radio show. “And I have a vote reformer who travels the nation and knows the vote reform very well.” He also threatened to abolish voting mechanisms in Pennsylvania. “I can desert any machine in the state with one stroke of a pen,” he said. At a recent campaign event, he called on his followers to “rise up and secure our country.” On Tuesday night, after winning the Republican nomination for governor, he likened his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, the current Attorney General of Pennsylvania, to a tyrant, calling his leadership an “oppressive regime.” Not unlike East Germany, where your freedoms have been taken away. “
Mastriano grew up in New Jersey and served in East Germany as an intelligence analyst while in the U.S. Army. He also took part in the American invasion of Kuwait in 1991. He believes that his wife Rebecca fought a spiritual war while he was there, praying for his victory, and that in response God sent a sandstorm to help his part to defeat Saddam Hussein’s forces. He then called on the US military to be less careful when injuring civilians when coordinating strikes. “This US hypersensitivity to civilian casualties is a huge weakness,” he wrote in a 2002 military document. The aim is to keep this to a minimum, but do not hesitate to strike at the locals where the regime is hiding. After completing three rounds in Afghanistan in 2000, Mastriano withdrew from the U.S. military in 2017.
Mastriano was elected a U.S. senator in Pennsylvania the following year and drew attention at the start of the coronavirus pandemic to “free” events that opposed masking and other public health measures. (He shared on social media the false claim that the coronavirus vaccine, “the poison of the government,” causes autism and kills people.) refer to the scriptures as Mastriano fights in support of gun rights and against abortion, which he recently called the “barbaric Holocaust.”
Mastriano allied with the efforts of the religious right, called Project Blitz, which targets the United States legislature with a series of bills designed to bring Christian ideals into law and public life. In addition to restricting abortion rights, the proposed legislation will impose prayer in public schools and make it illegal for same-sex couples to adopt children. The measures are aimed at making America what supporters see as an ideal Christian nation. “Mastriano wants to replace our representative democracy with a Christian theocracy based on the Book of Leviticus,” Michael Weinstein of the Military Foundation for Religious Freedom, an advocacy organization that monitors possible religious affiliations in the military, told me.
Mastriano is compared to the Old Testament prophets and military leaders who commanded the armies of Israel. He associates his speeches with an admixture of conspiracy theory and biblical allusions. Some scholars have come to describe his mixture of American nationalism and religious jealousy – focused on the idea that God intended America to be a Christian nation – as “Christian nationalism.” (Most alleged supporters reject this label; Mastriano rejected it by email, writing to me, “Did you come up with this term?”) During and after Trump’s presidency, beliefs about Christian nationalism are often mixed with elements on the white, nationalism and other lines of thinking that embrace violence are becoming increasingly influential within the newly charged Christian far right.
“Mastriano is selling industrial-class Christian nationalism,” said Philip Gorsky, co-author of The Flag and the Cross. “It combines so many different elements: QAnon, the Big Lie, and Dominionism,” an ideology that became popular in the 1960s through the work of the widely discredited Christian theorist Rusas John Rushdouni and encouraged believers to take control and return America to its Christian values. . Many who hold Christian nationalist beliefs accept that America is a rightly Christian nation and that any leader who does not conform to their beliefs must be illegitimate. Such thinking, scientists say, makes it easier to justify the cancellation of elections. “This shift to taking control is really different from the old style of cultural warfare on the Christian right,” Gorski said. (Mastriano defended his campaign claims against me, writing: “Isn’t it appropriate to ask questions and seek answers to ensure that everyone has a legitimate vote?”)
The scope of these ideas extends far beyond Pennsylvania. In political contests in the United States this spring, politicians held rallies that mixed religion and right-wing politics. “There is a lot of that at the local and state level,” Gorski told me. He named Cindy Hyde-Smith, a U.S. senator from Mississippi whose campaign was marked by a mixture of electoral disinformation and religious fervor, along with Wendy Rodgers, an Arizona state senator whose radical platform reflects similar views. In North Carolina, Ted Bud, who won the Republican Senate primary, received the Family Research Council’s True Blue Action Award this year for his “unwavering commitment to religious freedom and the rights of the unborn.” Catherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers, told me, “The Family Research Council is one of the leading political groups in the Christian Nationalist movement.” For supporters of this ideology, gaining control of government goes beyond elections. “The most important leaders of a political movement are not necessarily elected,” Stewart said. “They include the leaders of organizations that direct votes and money to politicians, control public communications, set political goals and seize the judiciary. It would be a mistake to dismiss some of the movement’s most conspiratorial claims as simply strange and therefore inappropriate. “Just because Mitch McConnell doesn’t support these ideas doesn’t mean they aren’t powerful nationally,” Gorski said.
It may be difficult, he noted, for those in liberal bubbles to appreciate the seductive power of these arguments. A year ago, Mastriano’s candidacy for governor seemed politically impossible in the masses. Yet his extreme positions helped him build a political platform for clickbait, an army of digital soldiers to push it through (at one time he controlled more than seventy different Facebook accounts, each posting such similar content that the site accepted it. for a bot) and great support from the real world. “His supporters are not just a small number of people from the super-red counties, and it would be really, really not advisable to dismiss them as fraudsters,” Ari Mittleman, host of the Pennsylvania Kitchen Table Politics podcast, told me. “These are the people we go to the supermarket with who stand by our side at children’s football matches.”
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