Doug Mastriano

Mastriano in 2017

God, guns, and freedom U.S. Politics

Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner

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Persons of interest

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Douglas Vincent Mastriano (1964–) is a state senator for Pennsylvania's 33^rd district, a military historian, and spreader of conspiracy theories and Islamophobia. He represents two counties in south-central PA, which (outside of the rapidly-growing Harrisburg area) is considered to be the most wingnut portion of the state. He later became involved with spreading lies about the 2020 U.S. presidential election and even showed up on January 6, which would go on to bite him when he tried to run for governor of Pennsylvania during the 2022 midterm elections, resulting in him getting utterly trounced.

Military career and writings

Mastriano had a 31-year military career, serving in Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the Afghanistan War. He has written two well-received books about World War I and several technical analyses of the latter-day Soviet Union.

In 2001, Mastriano submitted his master's thesis The Civilian Putsch of 2018 to the Air Command and Staff College. The work is a response to an earlier essay by Charles J. Dunlap Jr. from 1992. While Dunlap posits that the militarization of American society would ultimately be detrimental to democracy and national security, Mastriano's work takes a completely different stance. It depicts a future Army officer hiding in a national park, after a third-party politician compels the President to resign, installs himself as a dictator with aid from the European Union and the United Nations and proceeds to send millions of Americans to re-education camps. The paper was unearthed in early 2022, revealing that Mastriano held very conspiratorial viewpoints well before starting his political career.

Mastriano's work has been criticized for using fraudulent citations and having sloppy research in general, resulting in one of his books needing to be republished with corrections.

Furthermore, when James Gregory investigated Mastriano's PhD work on Alvin York, he discovered over 150 problems with Mastriano's thesis, such as many instances of Mastriano claiming that a source says something that it doesn't say. In the end, though, the university that gave Mastriano his degree did nothing because it didn't want to influence an ongoing election.

Political career and writings

Like Donald Trump, whom he deeply admires, Mastriano has left behind a trail of social media posts suggesting that he's a liar, a fool, and/or an ethically-bereft person. He has propagated or created unfounded accusations toward Ilhan Omar, propagated the short-lived conspiracy that Muslims were involved in the Notre Dame Cathedral fire, has spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros, and spread the madness of Jack Posobiec. Mastriano is a Christian nationalist who has openly called the separation of church and state "a myth". He has also called climate change "fake science". In 2022, he introduced a bill that promoted ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 cures. He is a massive homophobe as well, being opposed to same-sex marriage, and he called attempts to ban conversion therapy "disgusting". And to top it all off, he has ties to QAnon and the militia movement, because of course he does.

Mastriano participated in the 2021 U.S. coup attempt, and was even seen crossing police boundaries. For obvious reasons, he is a person of interest in the January 6 investigation. He attempted to impanel a slate of fake electors in an attempt to overturn the election results, and he classily compared the committee to Nazism and McCarthyism when they tried to investigate him for this. He also has ties to the alt-right hate site Gab. Additionally, he has had members of the Oath Keepers working in his personal security detail.

Gubernatorial run

In 2022, he ran for governor of Pennsylvania. Many of the state's Republicans were well aware that Mastriano would stand no chance of winning, and a few candidates tried to coalesce around Lou Barletta when it was clear that Mastriano was leading in the primary, but Donald Trump ruined their plans by stepping in and endorsing Mastriano. Despite his attempts to keep a low media profile, his extreme antidemocratic rhetoric quickly caught up to him, to the point where he was polling worse than Mehmet Oz in the state, costing Republicans a chance at winning what might have otherwise been a competitive race. Mastriano's views towards the media also caused him to shoot himself in the foot. Mastriano did not trust mainstream media to handle a debate between himself and Democrat Josh Shapiro, then the Keystone State's attorney general, properly, and felt that all media outlets would be biased towards Shapiro. For this reason, Mastriano only would debate Shapiro under a condition that they would both get to decide who the moderators would be. Shapiro called this "stupid" and refused, and thus Mastriano and Shapiro never had a debate, which really hurt Mastriano in the end! Consequently, and unsurprisingly, Shapiro bested Mastriano in the 2022 gubernatorial election by almost fifteen points. Good riddance.

At least Mastriano learned that he wouldn't be able to get farther than state Senate politically after the 2022 election. He has made it clear he has no intention of running for Senate in 2024.