mastriano, doug rep

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gop support his opponent josh

see NAR new apolostic ref

MERRI OK

pension plan plum

see am 1st Sos marchant

theocracy dominionist?

jericho march 12 21?

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comes up a fair bit in j6 depos eg

Doug Mastriano Faces Senators Skeptical of His Ambassadorial Nomination

RWW 7 26

07/17/2026

Peter Montgomery

Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Christian nationalist and conspiracy theorist who ran unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in 2018 and Governor in 2022, has been nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Slovakia. Mastriano appeared with several other nominees before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday, where, faced with skeptical questions from Democratic senators, he lied about his record.

Mastriano’s revisionism was at its most extreme when responding to Sen. Tim Kaine’s questions about his involvement in Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. Kaine pointed out that Mastriano had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop certification of the election. Mastriano said he had only come to Washington to hear the president speak.

When Kaine pressed him on promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and urging Congress to overturn the election results, Mastriano repeatedly said some version of “All I did was hold a committee hearing.”

That is far from the truth.

Mastriano did indeed organize a hearing near Gettysburg that gave a platform to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to make wild claims about the election; Trump himself called in to say that the election was “rigged,” that he had won the state “by a lot,” and that he should be declared the victor. Mastriano ended the hearing with a call to arms: “The time for dithering and deliberation is over. It’s time for decisive action.” Mastriano attended a secretive White House meeting after the hearing.

Here is some of what Mastriano did in addition to that hearing:

Two days after the 2020 election, he called on the secretary of the commonwealth to resign.

On a prayer call organized to try to keep Trump in power, Mastriano denounced “weak and feckless” Republican officials for not doing more to help Trump and prayed that “we’ll seize the power that we had given to us by the Constitution and by you providentially.”
Shortly after the election, Mastriano told QAnon activists that he hoped God would intervene in efforts to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania, claiming that the state’s elections were less secure than those in Afghanistan.

On Nov. 28, 2020 he tweeted that he was pushing to have the legislature appoint pro-Trump electors. From WHYY: “Days after President Joe Biden’s victory was certified in Pennsylvania, Mastriano sponsored a resolution in the Legislature to undo the certification, declare the election in dispute and effectively overturn state law by empowering the Republican-controlled Legislature to pick electors. The resolution did not gather any cosponsors and died in committee without action on Nov. 30.”

But wait, there’s more:

In late November, Trump called in while Mastriano was appearing on the radio show of MAGA activist Eric Metaxas and praised Mastriano’s efforts to keep Trump in power. Mastriano had just called for an emergency session of the state legislature to “vote on taking back our power to select our electors for the presidential election.”

Mastriano spoke at the Dec. 12 Jericho March rally at which Oath Keepers’ Stewart Rhodes threatened a bloody civil war if Trump did not remain in power. Mastriano told the crowd that things had looked pretty bad in America in 1776, but God had intervened and handed George Washington victory. “This is our day,” he told rallygoers. “This is our hour. Let’s stand together. We don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately.”

Mastriano asked God to bless letters he said Trump had asked him to send then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy “outlining the fraud in Pennsylvania” and prayed that his letters would “embolden them to stand firm and disregard what has happened in Pennsylvania until we have an investigation.”

On another prayer call Mastriano prayed for victory against “the lies and deceit, the cowardice, the dithering.”

Two days before the attack on the Capitol, Mastriano appeared on “The Eric Metaxas Show,” where he said:

But at this point here, we're gonna see what's going to happen on the sixth of January in Washington, D.C., with our, you know, our U.S. senators and congressmen and congresswomen, you know, disputing at least six states as they rightly should. But where are we? Where do we stand as a nation? We're calling out to God for divine intervention. I feel like my back is up against the Red Sea right now. We're waiting for something to happen, some revelation to come forth that will part the waters and let truth to come forth.

Sen. Kaine’s response: “You can’t erase your record now.”

Kaine said it’s his experience that people who are attracted to conspiracy theories rarely embrace just one. Mastriano denied being involved in conspiracy theories, but again, his record is clear. He participated in “ReAwaken America,” a traveling carnival of conspiracy theories, MAGA politics, and Christian nationalism. While campaigning for governor in 2022, he appeared at a conspiracy-laden QAnon conference, where he was awarded a “Sword of David” by QAnon conspiracy theorists Alan and Francine Fosdick. At that conference, Mastriano told the crowd he would be elected governor because “my God will make it so.” He introduced legislation to ban “chemtrails” that are the subject of many right-wing conspiracy theories.

Mastriano did the now-familiar Trump-nominee sidestep when asked who had won the 2020 election; he repeatedly refused to give a simple answer, saying instead that Joe Biden had been certified as the winner.

Sen. Jacky Rosen asked questions related to Mastriano’s Christian nationalism, which was widely covered during his campaign for governor. Sen. Rosen said she wanted to talk about religious pluralism. Referring to Mastriano’s Christian nation rhetoric and claim that separation of church and state is a myth, she asked if he believes the country’s political leaders should all be Christian.

Mastriano avoided giving a direct answer to that question, while professing his commitment to religious pluralism and religious liberty for everyone. Rosen noted the Mastriano campaign’s connections to the notoriously antisemitic Andrew Torba and Gab; Mastriano said he had severed those relationships once Torba’s antisemitism had become apparent.

Mastriano is aligned with dominionist Lance Wallnau and other New Apostolic Reformation figures, including musician and MAGA activist Sean Feucht. Mastriano has promoted and campaigned with conspiracy theorists like “prophet” Julie Green.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen questioned Mastriano about remarks he made on a 2018 radio interview calling European Union leaders the “political, diplomatic enemies of the United States of America.” Mastriano said the dynamic was more hostile back then and that he has deep connections to European leaders today.

Shaheen also questioned comments he had made to staff about the EU being a “rising rival, comparable to China” that would eventually create a standing army to challenge the United States. “My view is we do work better together,” he said, saying that he served alongside NATO troops and he does not want to see NATO fade away or be overshadowed by an EU army.

“I haven’t heard anybody at NATO suggesting that that’s gonna happen,” said Shaheen. “I think you’re absolutely right—we do work better when we work together and cooperate, and I would think somebody who served on the battlefield with those countries would know better than to make those kinds of statements. And I can tell you, as a diplomat representing the United States of America, you should absolutely know better.”

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RWW

07/07/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick featured Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton on his most recent podcast.

Rick Green claims that the American healthcare system is terrible because "we have a socialist healthcare system in America, thanks to their candidate, Barack Obama."

Sean Feucht was honored to receive the Pennsylvania Freedom Medal from Christian nationalist state Sen. Doug Mastriano.

Dale Partridge asserts that "restoring order will require not being moved by the screeching of women, the manipulation of foreigners, or the cries of liberals."

Brian Sauvé wrote a song about the dangers of young women getting an education, a job, and independence, proving that Christian nationalists can take just about any topic and turn it into terrible, heavy-handed art.

Finally, Hank Kunneman declares that "our country was founded on Christian principles": "Most of our documents were based on the Bible; the way that our civic government and laws and things and the way that our Constitution was framed." None of that is true.

an 5 26

President Donald Trump had big plans for outspoken MAGA ally Kari Lake, but with those plans having thoroughly imploded, a new MS NOW analysis explained how she has been given a familiar "consolation prize."

Lake first emerged as a news anchor in Phoenix, Arizona, before making the jump to politics as an avowed supporter of Trump and the MAGA movement. Despite high hopes for her as a future star for the Republican Party, the transition largely flopped, as she lost the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race to Democrat Katie Hobbs and the 2024 Senate race to Democrat Ruben Gallego.

With no actual electoral success to her name, Trump attempted to install her as the next director for Voice of America, the international broadcaster funded by the U.S. government, amid plans to gut the institution and reshape it into a more right-wing form with the help of One America News. This effort, too, fell flat after a judge ruled that she was ineligible to serve at the head of VOA, invalidating her tenure and reversing the mass layoffs she had overseen.

In the wake of all that failure, Trump on Monday nominated Lake to serve as the new ambassador to Jamaica, echoing an emerging pattern of the president placing close allies in key diplomatic roles.

"President Trump on Monday appointed Kari Lake, a fierce ally of the president who had led the administration’s efforts to shutter Voice of America and other federally funded news groups, as the next ambassador to Jamaica," the New York Times reported this week. "Her appointment, if confirmed by the Senate, would end her tumultuous time at the parent agency for federally funded news groups that broadcast to countries with limited press freedom, such as China, Russia and Iran."

Writing about the development on Tuesday, Steve Benen, a longtime contributor and producer for MS NOW, wrote that the appointment of Lake fit a growing pattern from the administration and its handling of MAGA allies with failed political ambitions.

"Lake’s nomination coincided with the president also tapping Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano — another prominent Republican election denier who launched a gubernatorial campaign that failed — to serve as U.S. ambassador to Slovakia," Benen wrote. "The far-right state senator will also need to be confirmed by the Republican-led Senate. Time will tell when and whether Lake and Mastriano receive the support they’ll need on Capitol Hill, but their nominations are emblematic of a larger pattern: The White House sure does like to hand out ambassadorships to those whose earlier political plans didn’t quite work out."

Benen further detailed the various names who received a similar parachute from Trump: Mike Waltz was named U.N. ambassador after being ousted as White House national security adviser; former GOP Rep. Billy Long went from an "incredibly short tenure" leading the IRS to serving as ambassador to Iceland; and, John Giordano went from a failed interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey to serving as the ambassador to Namibia.

"Even Kristi Noem, after her many failures as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, made the transition to a diplomatic role as 'special envoy' to the Shield of the Americas, a poorly defined security initiative for the Western Hemisphere," Benen concluded. "As an Associated Press report summarized last year, 'Diplomacy may be soft power, but in President Donald Trump’s administration, it’s also lately a soft landing.'

AN 6 25

Former GOP gubernatorial nominee and state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin) has introduced legislation seeking to ban conceptual geoengineering techniques he falsely links to the “chemtrail” conspiracy theory.

In a pitch for his bill, Mastriano associated the theoretical techniques aimed at combatting climate change have been falsely associated with the baseless conspiracy theory that some condensation trails, or contrails, left by high-flying aircraft are being used to introduce toxic substances into the atmosphere.

The “Clean Air Preservation Act” would outlaw “solar radiation modification or sunlight reflection methods” in Pennsylvania and impose strict penalties on violators. Sen. Camera Bartolotta (R-Washington) is a cosponsor of the bill.

Joshua Horton, project manager at the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program, told the Capital-Star that research behind solar geoengineering aims to identify ways to mitigate climate change by reflecting sunlight back into space. Solar geoengineering methods are largely conceptual and there is little evidence to suggest these methods would harm the environment or public health.

“To be clear, there is no geoengineering going on. There’s no solar radiation modification going on,” Horton said. “So to the extent that this bill is premised on the belief that it’s happening, it’s just factually incorrect.”

IFrame Content

In a memo in December seeking support for the bill, Mastriano said the “release of unknown, experimental, and potentially hazardous substances into the atmosphere without the consent of the people of Pennsylvania is a clear violation of Article 1, Section 27 of the PA Constitution.” He has previously proposed similar legislation.

Mastriano’s memo also cited a 2023 White House report on potential future solar geoengineering research, falsely claiming it proves the federal government “may conduct solar radiation modification or geoengineering experiments involving the release of air contaminants into the atmosphere, and those activities may occur within the Commonwealth.”

That report “focused on potential research and its governance, not authorizing any deployment or specific activities,” according to Michael Thompson, managing director at the nonprofit Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Engineering. “The report explicitly aimed to guide how research could be approached and managed, emphasizing transparency and risk assessment, and to reduce the risk that research is perceived as a step towards inevitable deployment.”

Thompson’s organization seeks to promote “just and inclusive deliberation” on the research and possible future employment of solar geoengineering. He told the Capital-Star that controversy surrounding the theoretical practice is “amplified when state-level discussions wrongly link scientific inquiry into solar geoengineering with debunked ‘chemtrail’ hoaxes.”

“For solar geoengineering, public concern is understandable,” Thompson said. “People rightly want to know what is being researched and would be alarmed by pollutants being added to the skies for nefarious reasons, but that’s just not happening.”

A spokesperson for Mastriano did not respond to requests for comment.

On May 31, Mastriano held a virtual roundtable to rally support for the bill, which is awaiting consideration in the Senate Agriculture & Rural Affairs committee.

Jolie Diane, who runs a website called Zero Geoengineering, called in from California to give a presentation riddled with falsehoods on “weather modification policy and the governance of geoengineering experimentation.”

Diane has a history of lobbying state legislatures to ban solar geoengineering. She does not hold any scientific credentials, despite Mastriano calling her a “leading expert in weather modification.”

During the roundtable, which garnered thousands of views across social media platforms, Mastriano rallied against theoretical methods such as stratospheric aerosol injection.

Horton explained that stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI, is a conceptual solar geoengineering method that would involve aircraft introducing aerosols into the upper atmosphere to “reflect a small fraction of incoming sunlight back to space.”

“It’s pretty simple technology, but it doesn’t exist yet. It’s been explored almost exclusively through computer models,” he said. “The research tends to show it would produce net benefits globally.”

Mastriano also spoke against cloud seeding, a common practice employed for decades to increase rainfall that would be banned under the bill. A 1967 state law already requires anyone who wants to try cloud seeding to apply for a license from the state Department of Agriculture.

No one has ever applied for this license, nor has the state’s agriculture department ever investigated unauthorized cloud seeding, press secretary Shannon Powers said in an email.

While cloud seeding is not practiced in Pennsylvania, “there are … cloud seeding weather modification activities that have been ongoing for 75 years, and involve putting silver iodide in clouds to enhance rainfall,” Horton said. “A lot of small counties all over the west, and places beyond the U.S., pay for services for pilots to go up there and spray this stuff.”

Mastriano and Diane both alluded to the debunked “chemtrail” conspiracy theory, which alleges that nefarious actors are spraying toxic substances into the atmosphere via contrails created by high-flying aircraft. He claimed that normal contrails should dissipate within minutes, falsely suggesting that if contrails are visible for longer, it’s an indication they are infused with toxic substances.

According to the National Weather Service, contrails form as hot, moist air from an aircraft’s engine mixes with freezing outside air. That moisture condenses and forms a contrail, which can be visible for hours depending on factors like humidity and wind.

“These clouds are not part of a global conspiracy,” Thompson said. “Lawmakers know better than this and should do minimal homework before bringing bills to their legislative bodies.”

Mastriano has a history of sharing “chemtrail” misinformation. In a November 2022 Facebook post, he shared a photo of contrails with the caption, “I have legislation to stop this … Normal contrails dissolve / evaporate within 30-90 seconds.”

“When these bills appear, given there is no active nefarious geoengineering taking place

… one has to assume they are brought forward primarily for political reasons, rather than a misunderstanding of the facts,” Thompson said.

“We worry that these kinds of politically motivated legislative efforts, by fostering confusion and fear, make such nuanced and forward-looking consideration far less possible.”

Similar legislation restricting solar geoengineering has been proposed in more than two dozen states. Tennessee lawmakers passed a law banning the practice last year.

“We are concerned generally that legislation aimed at governing or banning non-existent activities, such as non-existent chemtrails, disempowers and distracts rather than enabling citizens to engage with decisions being made now that will impact them in the future,” Thompson said.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Tim Lambert for questions: info@penncapital-star.com.

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AN 1 24

In a Sunday, January 7 editorial, The Philadelphia Inquirer urges voters to consider ousting three longtime lawmakers this year over their Donald Trump-influenced lack of "integrity."

The newspaper's editorial board calls out the "disgraced" actions of US Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and Pennsylvania's own — US Representative Scott Perry (R), as well as State Senator Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin), noting "all three" public officials "are up for reelection this year."

"Unfortunately, Mastriano, Perry, and Menendez know nothing about integrity," the board emphasizes, and "voters should keep that in mind."

Despite the fact Menendez was "charged with taking bribes in return for using his power to benefit foreign governments" in September — and just last week — indicted again on charges alleging he abused "his office to help a New Jersey developer obtain millions of dollars in investment from a fund with ties to the government of Qatar" — the senator says he's "not going anywhere."

The board writes:

*Perry defied a subpoena from colleagues in the House that investigated events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. The final House reportmentions Perry 22 times and referred him to the Ethics Committee.

*Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) said Perry sought a pardon from Trump during his final days in office, which Perry denied. FBI agents seized Perry’s telephone, though the congressman said he was not a target of any federal investigation

"Mastriano spread false information about vote totals in Pennsylvania, though like Perry, Mastriano did not challenge the votes regarding his state Senate race. Mastriano used campaign funds to bus protesters to Washington and marched to the Capitol with insurrectionists," the editors note, adding there's "nothing more egregious than a public official participating in a plot to overturn a presidential election."

"None of them have any business serving in a government the authorities say they worked to subvert. Yet, despite allegations that they abused their office, each man continues to pocket their six-figure, taxpayer-funded salaries," the editors emphasizes. "There was a time when disgraced elected officials would at least resign for the sake of the institution and the public they served. But instead, taxpayers are stuck for now."

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random rww

February 10, 2023

Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites @ The Washington Post: The making of Anna Paulina Luna.
Allan Smith and Vaughn Hillyard @ NBC News: Trump frustrated with a powerful conservative group after its outreach to Ron DeSantis.
Joe Jervis: Newsmax CEO: Dropping Us Is An Attack On Jesus.
Christopher Mathias @ HuffPost: Doug Mastriano Makes Dan Cox, QAnon-Sympathizing Insurrectionist, Chief Of Staff.
Media Matters: Steve Bannon says the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings “should have gone further” and “were extremely, extremely helpful.”
Josh Kovensky @ Talking Points Memo: How The Fake Electors Scheme Explains Everything About Trump’s Attempt To Steal The 2020 Election.

Tags: Anna Paulina Luna Chris Ruddy Dan Cox Donald Trump Doug Mastriano Steve Bannon Round-Up Newsmax Turning Point USA

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j depo mike roman

... ...5th ...A Q It's been reported publicly that Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastrianowanted assurances about the plan for the alternate electors to meet and cast votes and wanted to speak directly with Mr. Giuliani to ensure that the plan was legal. 6 Are you aware of any of Senator Mastriano's concerns about the 7 alternate electors? 8 9 A Q The Fifth.

It's also been reported that Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward and Arizona State Senator Kelly Townsend also had concerns about the alternate electors plan and that, according to an email written by Mr. Chesebro, quote, Ward and Townsend are concerned 13 it could appear treasonous, end quote. 14

Did you ever learn about any concerns that Ms. Ward or Senator Townsend had about the convening of alternate electors 16 in Arizona? 17 18 A The Fifth. Q We go to exhibit No. 18. This is a one-page email -- or 19 one-page exhibit rather, excuse me -- with an email from 20 Mr. Chesebro to you, Mike Roman, as well as Josh Findlay on 21 Saturday, December 12th, at 7:12 p.m. Can you see the exhibit 22 we've put up as exhibit 18?

...

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philly inq

https://www.mcall.com/news/pennsylvania/mc-nws-pa-republicans-jan-6-help-trump-20221222-ccq7ly5w2rfergjbcnwdatya3a-story.html

hundreds of pages of deposition transcripts released Wednesday by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack offered new insights into the roles Pennsylvania Republicans played in aiding President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The committee is expected to issue the full report on its investigation on Thursday. But the newly released transcripts were filled with new details including that Mike Roman, a Philadelphia native and one of Trump’s top election advisers, helped spearhead the effort to send pro-Trump electors to Washington as Congress met to certify the election results that day.

They also revealed a previously undisclosed attempt by state Sen. Doug Mastriano to access certain voting machines days before Jan. 6 as well as references to a plan floated by the White House to sue Pennsylvania directly in the U.S. Supreme Court over its administration of the 2020 vote. The documents also shed new light on the role a congressional staffer for U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly played behind the scenes.

Here are some of the highlights from the committee’s interviews:

Mike Roman: A key Trump campaign operative’s role in the false electors scheme

Roman, a longtime Philadelphia Republican political operative, appeared to play a key role in organizing false electors in swing states such as Pennsylvania as part of a plot to overturn the election.

A former Philadelphia ward leader and senior adviser to the Trump campaign, Roman was designated by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as “the lead for executing the voting” by the fake electors Dec. 14, 2020, according to an email the committee cited in an interview transcript released Wednesday.

The interview transcript suggests the pro-Trump electors in Pennsylvania were concerned about possible legal exposure if they signed official certificates purporting to be the legitimate electors.

In the interview, investigators referenced a Dec. 12, 2020, email sent to Roman from Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro.

“Mike, here is my suggested language for dealing with the concern raised in the PA conference call about electors possibly facing legal exposure, parenthesis, at the hands of a partisan AG, close parenthesis, if they seem to certify that they are currently the valid electors,” the transcript says.

Investigators also asked Roman whether he knew if Mastriano, the state senator who ran as the GOP’s candidate for Pennsylvania governor this year, had expressed concerns about the elector plan. Roman pleaded the Fifth.

The transcript suggests Roman also played a role in organizing the delivery of Wisconsin Republicans’ fake elector certificate to Congress on Jan. 6. A person investigators identified as Michael Brown texted associates that he “should probably buy Roman a tie for sending me on this one. Hasn’t been done since 1876 ... ”

That’s an apparent reference to the disputed presidential election that year.

Roman refused to say whether he’d instructed Brown to deliver the document, the transcript says.

The interview transcript also references a briefing of Pennsylvania lawmakers in November 2020 about purported election fraud. On Nov. 8, 2020, Roman shared with an associate a screenshot of a message he’d obtained that said: “Maybe the Trump campaign should get some actual evidence of fraud and file in court. They’ve been horrible in their court filings. We just got a report from their legal team. They told us on caucus they have zero evidence.”

Roman declined to tell investigators who sent him the message or to discuss the briefing of Pennsylvania lawmakers, apparently delivered by Kentucky’s secretary of state.

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly: Staffer’s behind-the-scenes involvement in false electors effort

Committee investigators repeatedly asked Roman during his deposition what he knew about behind-the-scenes efforts to undermine the election by a longtime top aide to U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, a Butler County Republican and a top Trump ally in the House.

Between Nov. 21 and Dec. 4, 2020, Roman exchanged 25 messages with Kelly’s then-chief-of-staff, Matt Stroia, according to questioning in the deposition transcripts. Those included exchanges that suggested Stroia may have played a more active and earlier role in the efforts by Trump and his allies than was previously known.

His name had previously surfaced in the committee’s work in connection with efforts to deliver the slates of pro-Trump electors to Pence on Jan. 6.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has said his office passed along the lists to Pence but that it was Kelly’s office that provided it to him. And while Kelly initially denied Johnson’s claims as “patently false,” the congressman’s office later acknowledged an “internal investigation” found Stroia had been in contact with Johnson’s staff.

But Roman’s deposition before the Jan. 6 Committee suggests Stroia may also have played a role in organizing a raucous Nov. 25 state Senate hearing in Gettysburg, during which Mastrianoand Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis pushed unfounded claims of fraud in the Pennsylvania election. Trump called in from Washington to voice his support.

“I hope it turns out like we envisioned,” Stroia wrote to Roman three days before the hearing in a message quoted in the deposition transcripts.

During his interview with the Jan. 6 Committee, Roman pleaded the Fifth and refused to answer questions about it or discuss whether he or Stroia had any involvement in organizing the Gettysburg hearing.

But other messages cited in Roman’s deposition show Stroia was in direct contact with Giuliani, who spearheaded Trump’s election challenges in the state. In one exchange with Roman, Stroia said he’d directed the president’s lawyer to talk to Roman instead.

“Do you know why Mr. Giuliani would have been calling Mike Kelly’s chief of staff ... about presidential election issues rather than you, who was acting as director of election day operations for the campaign?” committee staffers asked. He added: “I told him that you will know everything I do.”

Asked to explain, Roman again pleaded the Fifth.

Doug Mastriano and Jenna Ellis: The state senator and Trump lawyer sought access to Pennsylvania voting machines

The committee’s interview with Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis also shed light on Mastriano’s postelection activities.

“We made good headway convincing [hopefully] two counties with Dominion machines in Pennsylvania,” Mastriano wrote in a Dec. 28 email to Ellis, according to the transcript.

In another email, Mastriano makes reference to efforts to gain access to “ballot images.”Ellis declined to tell investigators why Mastriano was interested in that.

In a Dec. 29 email, Mastriano told Ellis that he’d emailed Trump himself with a letter related to “securing voluntary access for Dominion forensics.”

Fulton County later gave a third-party firm access to its Dominion voting machines, facilitated by Mastriano and state Sen. Judy Ward, R-Blair, for a supposed “audit” of the votes. That prompted the state to decertify those voting machines and force the county to obtain new ones. It wasn’t immediately clear which other counties Mastriano and other Trump allies sought to hand over access to voting machines.

Elliswas also questioned about her contacts with Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutlerand Jake Corman and Kim Ward, the GOP leaders of the State Senate. She declined to answer questions, however, on any efforts she and Giuliani had made to pressure them to set aside the state’s election results.

Cutler previously told the committee that Giuliani and Ellis called him daily during the run-up to Congress’ certification of the election, looking to push a baseless theory that state legislatures could set aside election results based on unsupported suspicions of fraud and appoint a new slate of Electoral College delegates instead.

Cutler said he largely avoided those calls, thinking they were inappropriate and had his attorneys respond, asking Giuliani and Ellis to stop contacting him.

Jeffrey Clark: A White House plan to sue Pennsylvania in the U.S. Supreme Court

In December 2020, Trump had White House lawyers draft a complaint to sue Pennsylvania in the U.S. Supreme Court over the administration of its election, according to committee questioning in the deposition of former Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Clark.

Clark, a Philadelphia native, has emerged as a central focus for the committee due to his role in a drama in which Trump briefly considered appointing him attorney general in the waning days of his administration.

Clark had been introduced to the president by U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a York County Republican and key ally of the president in Congress. And according to earlier testimony before the committee, Clark expressed a willingness to use the Justice Department to pressure state legislatures in battleground states to overturn their election results despite no evidence of significant fraud.

On Monday, the Jan. 6 Committee referred him to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution.

During two contentious deposition interviews with the committee in November 2021 and February 2022, Clark refused to answer almost any questions about his relationship to Perry, his conversations with Trump, or the ideas he floated on how the Justice Department could help contest the election. He repeatedly invoked executive privilege — the doctrine that allows presidents and their staff to resist some legislative oversight — as well as his Fifth Amendmentright against self-incrimination.

He also balked at answering questions about the draft complaint that a White House assistant sent to top officials at the Justice Department on Dec. 29, 2020, for a suit against Pennsylvania. Correspondence referenced in the deposition of Ellis, the Trump lawyer, also referenced a Trump campaign plan to ask the Supreme Court to order new elections in as many as eight states to “ensure electoral integrity.” Those suits were never filed.

Instead, the Trump campaign filed a brief in support of a long-shot lawsuit filed at the Supreme Court by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeking to overturn Pennsylvania’s election. The justices declined to hear the case.

For his part, Clark during his deposition — in one of his only substantive exchanges with committee members — lamented the current partisan state of politics in Washington, recalling his own upbringing in a primarily white, working-class neighborhood near the foot of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.

“My dad was a truck driver who never graduated from high school,” he said. “He was a lifelong Democrat and a Catholic. My mom was a lifelong Republican and a Protestant. I wound up as a blend of the two, a Catholic conservative Republican.”

His lawyer Harry MacDougald was more acerbic. He called the Jan. 6 committee’s questioning “railroading” and accused members of indulging in a “paranoid fantasy.”

“It is not enough in Washington to merely disagree with someone about policy questions,” he said. “Instead, they must be destroyed. Those who disagree with Mr. Clark seek his destruction by any means available.”

The QAnon Hummer Duo: Coordination among right-wing extremist groups

Deposition transcripts were also released Wednesday for two Virginia men who made headlines in Philadelphia when they showed up outside the 2020 vote count at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in a Hummer filled with guns and emblazoned with QAnon stickers.

But the transcripts show neither Joshua Macias, president of the organization Veterans for Trump, nor his bodyguard, Antonio LaMotta, were forthcoming in their interviews with committee investigators. Both men asserted their Fifth Amendmentrights again and again, citing their ongoing prosecution in Philadelphia for weapons violations and attempted election interference.

(They were both later convicted on the weapons counts in October, but acquitted on the election related charges. LaMotta has since been federally charged with illegally entering the Capitol on Jan. 6.)

The committee’s investigators attempted to quiz both men on their contacts with other right-wing extremist groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters — the leaders of which Macias and LaMotta were shown in videos to have interacted with Jan. 5.

One video played during an earlier committee hearing showed Macias meeting with Enrique Tarrio, then-president of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, head of the Oath Keepers, in a Washington parking garage the day before the Capitol attack. Committee members have previously cited the video to suggest some coordination among extremist groups in the run-up to Jan. 6.

But when asked in his deposition how he came to be in the garage, Macias remained tight lipped.

“I walked,” he responded.

Investigators asked him why. “I was asked to,” he said.

By whom? “Someone said, ‘Hey come here,” Macias replied.

He refused to say what they discussed in that meeting.

As for whether he considered himself a QAnon adherent, Macias responded: “I do not ascribe to people’s beliefs. I have my own belief system.”

Philadelphia Inquirer staff writers Jonathan Lai and Jonathan Tamari contributed to this article.

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...Early Warning System on Extremist Candidates

Right Wing Watch provided an early warning system on some of the most far-right candidates running for state and national office this year, educating journalists and ensuring that campaign coverage helped voters understand that dangerous extremism was on the ballot.

Right Wing Watch began covering Christian nationalist Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano well before he became the Republican nominee for governor—even before he entered the race. Mastriano was a major promoter of Trump’s false stolen-election claims in Pennsylvania and used campaign funds to bus supporters to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

This April, Right Wing Watch broke the story about Mastriano’s appearance at a “Patriots Arise” conference organized by QAnon conspiracy theorists Alan and Francine Fosdick, who awarded Mastriano a “sword of David.” Mastriano told the crowd that he would be elected governor because “my God will make it so.” Right Wing Watch also documented Mastriano’s ties to antisemitism promoter Andrew Torba of Gab, dominionist Lance Wallnau, and a conspiracy-promoting road show led by businessman Clay Clark and former Trump adviser Michael Flynn.

Right Wing Watch’s reporting on Mastriano was cited or used by hundreds of editorials and news stories, including those in national outlets like the New York Times and major Pennsylvania outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Another candidate whose extremism had long been documented by Right Wing Watch was Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate and Christian nationalist with far-right views about the U.S. Constitution, who was chosen by Maryland Republicans as their candidate for state attorney general. As Right Wing Watch noted at the time, it was outrageous to imagine Peroutka as the state’s chief law enforcement officer given that “Peroutka declared in 2014 that the Maryland General Assembly was no longer a legitimate governing body because its support for marriage equality violated God’s law, and that therefore none of the laws it passed were ‘legally valid and legally enforceable.’”

When Peroutka won the GOP nomination, news outlets from Vice to the Washington Post turned to Right Wing Watch and its years of covering Peroutka’s extremism. The Washington Post linked to our coverage of Peroutka leading the crowd in Dixie.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/coming-right-wing-attack-pennsylvania-vote

mma no twt

Republicans and their right-wing media surrogates are telegraphing an attack on the legitimacy of the vote in Pennsylvania during next month’s midterm elections. Their deceptive strategy mimics the approach former President Donald Trump and his allies took in the lead-up to and following the 2020 elections.

Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s top election official explained during a Wednesday interview that because of a state law that does not allow officials to begin counting mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, results for Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections might not be available for “days” afterwards. Since Democrats are more likely to trust and participate in mail-in voting while Republicans are more likely to vote in-person, early tabulations could show Republican candidates with a lead that is then whittled down as mail-in ballots are tabulated over time.

This is a known issue that was in effect during the last election cycle – and its continued existence is entirely the fault of Pennsylvania Republicans. Chapman, Pennsylvania’s bipartisan Election Law Advisory Board, Democratic state legislators, and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf have all called for the Republican-led state legislature to pass legislation allowing those ballots to be “pre-canvassed” before Election Day, as occurs in other states. But the General Assembly adjourned its legislative session this week without taking action.

Nonetheless, after the New York Post wrote up Chapman’s interview using the headline, “Pennsylvania election results could take 'days,' secretary of the commonwealth says,” right-wing politicians and media figures began using her comments to baselessly cast doubt on the integrity of the counting process.

[twt]

gOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano chimed in on Thursday morning. He described Chapman’s comments as “an attempt to have the fix in” during an interview on the Trumpist Real America’s Voice network.

This wave of false suggestions that the lengthy counting process — which has been enshrined by Republican legislators — is actually evidence of Democratic malfeasance is the latest sign that the GOP and right-wing media are planning to contest the Pennsylvania results if their candidates lose:

Trump intends to “aggressively challenge elections, particularly ones in which a winner is not declared on Election Night,” and is particularly fixated on the Pennsylvania Senate race, Rolling Stone reported Sunday.
Tucker Carlson, the Fox star and GOP kingmaker, suggested on Wednesday that his viewers should treat a victory by Democrat John Fetterman in the Senate race as illegitimate.
Local election denialist groups and national conservative media figures are driving conspiracy theories about voter fraud related to ballot drop boxes and voting machines in the state.
Fox host Mark Levin, a key player in Trump’s 2020 coup attempt, alleged last week that Chapman’s guidance directing counties to continue to count undated mail-in ballots amid a legal battle shows that Democrats are “trying to steal the election for” Fetterman.

It’s also a rerun of the attack Trump, Carlson, Levin, and their allies made on the integrity of the 2020 presidential race. Election experts had long predicted that Election Day 2020 would end with a “red mirage” showing Trump in the lead, only for there to be a “blue shift” afterward as key states counted mail-in ballots that heavily favored Democratic nominee Joe Biden. But Trump carried out his planned strategy to declare victory on election night, baselessly cited his declining margins and reversals as evidence of widespread election fraud, and spent weeks trying to subvert the result. And right-wing allies like Carlson and his colleagues helped him work their viewers into a frenzy over the fantasy that the election had been rigged.

[twt]

the same strategy could play out in Pennsylvania this cycle, with Mastriano and Senate nominee Mehmet Oz holding early leads on election night, declaring victory, and, with the support of the right-wing press, alleging that mail-in ballots that subsequently reduce or eliminate their leads are fraudulent. Mastriano is a committed election denier who supported Trump’s 2020 election subversion and would have no qualms about following his subversion plan. And Oz actually road-tested a plan like that after the primary election – holding a narrow lead but with observers declaring the race too close to call, he took Trump’s advice, went on Fox, and said, “This election is ours,” while his ally Sean Hannity baselessly raised the prospect of election fraud changing the result.

Trump’s 2020 statements were obvious nonsense, and everyone at Fox knew it. Chris Stirewalt, the network’s politics editor during the election, explained during a June hearing of the January 6 committee that the “red mirage” phenomenon was well known. He even testified that he and some of his colleagues had “gone to pains” before the election to stress to Fox viewers that this would happen “because the Trump campaign and the president had made it clear that they were going to try to exploit this anomaly.”

Don’t expect to see much of that effort at Fox if the situation repeats this cycle – Stirewalt’s former colleagues have seen what happened to employees too eager to tell the truth about elections. The network purged Stirewalt shortly after the election as executives rallied around Trump to preserve flagging ratings.

Perhaps this time will be different – plan A for everyone involved is to use demagoguery, smears about the Democrats, and misrepresentations of the Republicans’ extreme positions to win the elections for Mastriano and Oz outright. But Fox and the right-wing media are putting the country back on the edge of the abyss. The last time they did that, the result was a bloody insurrection at the U.S. Capital and the near-toppling of American democracy. And two years later, Trump’s election lie has been institutionalized within the GOP, and the meager guardrails in place on the party’s extremism have been leveled.

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:{:{When Kremlin propaganda is translated from Russian into English, it can sound a lot like MAGA propaganda. There are references to “cancel culture” and “traditional values,” and such rhetoric was used when the Russian Embassy in Spain posted an English-language video on Twitter in July. The video depicted two blonde girls running through the grass holding hands and encouraged social conservatives to move to Russia — where they won’t have to worry about “cancel culture” getting in the way of a socially conservative Christian lifestyle.}:

The image of those two girls has also been used in an ad for far-right MAGA Republican and “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theorist Doug Mastriano — who is running for governor of Pennsylvania. According to Business Insider, the blonde girls in the ad are from Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’ authoritarian far-right president, is a major ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.}:

Journalist Charles R. Davis, in an article published by Business Insider on October 19, explains, “In a new ad, the GOP candidate — who won his May primary after a late endorsement from former President Donald Trump — even features an image from the same photoshoot used by the Russian government.Posted on Monday, (October 17), the ad features two blonde girls holding hands. ‘For their future,’ it reads, ‘there is hope.’ Visitors to the Mastriano campaign's Facebook page will see it featured as the header. But the girls are not Pennsylvanians, and they are not in Pennsylvania.”

Davis continues, “Insider was able to track the image back to Pexels, a company based in Germany that offers a repository of free stock photos and videos. It was posted by a videographer who lists their location as Minsk, the capital of Belarus.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported that a liberal super PAC has also traced the images to Pexels.

Davis notes that one of the reasons candidates use “stock footage” like the image in Mastriano’s ad is a need to save money. Attorney Jenna Ellis, who promoted former President Donald Trump’s false voter fraud claims after the 2020 election and is now part of Mastriano’s campaign, has complained that the Republican Governors Association (RGA) isn’t doing enough to help Mastriano — who has been trailing his Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, in polls.

:{:{}:

“Those complaints have come as Mastriano has been mired in controversy over his associations, with the candidate recently campaigning with Jack Posobiec, a far-right conspiracy theorist who previously claimed that leading Democrats were part of a pedophile ring that operated inside a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.,” Davis observes. “Mastriano has also praised Andrew Torba, an anti-Semite and self-styled Christian nationalist, paying $5000 to Torba's social media company, Gab, in ‘consulting’ fees. The Republican nominee later distanced himself from Gab following criticism from Jewish and Republican leaders, only to then accept a $500 donation from Torba himself.”}:

Davis adds, “Another controversy was sparked after Reuters uncovered Mastriano donning a Confederate uniform while a serving as an instructor at the U.S. Army War College.”

Manuel Bonder, a Shapiro spokesman, told Business Insider, “From constantly lying about the 2020 election and peddling dangerous conspiracies, to repeatedly using Russian propaganda in his videos, Doug Mastriano's skullduggery knows no bounds — and it is further proof that he is unfit to be governor of Pennsylvania.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/jack-posobiec/fbi-warns-threats-state-poll-workers-right-wing-media-and-denialist-groups-spread

mma 10 22

a combination of local election denialist groups and national conservative media figures are driving conspiracy theories about voter fraud in Pennsylvania — the same falsehoods and misinformation that are putting election workers at an increased risk of violence, according to the FBI and Department of Justice. Pennsylvania is one of several states that have seen increased threats of violence toward election officials, driven by false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that future voter fraud is likely.

Nearly all of the groups and media figures pushing these narratives in Pennsylvania support the gubernatorial campaign of Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who helped to incite the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, and has embraced numerous extremist positions. Mastriano also unsuccessfully used his position to attempt to overturn Pennsylvania’s presidential election results, ingratiating himself to some of the state’s most extreme conservative activists.

Against this backdrop, former President Donald Trump has already begun organizing attempts to challenge the results of the state’s midterm elections, according to Rolling Stone.

Trump has been briefed on plans in multiple states and critical races — including in Georgia. But Pennsylvania has grabbed his interest most keenly, including in the Senate contest between Democrat John Fetterman and the Trump-endorsed GOP contender Mehmet Oz. If the Republican does not win by a wide enough margin to trigger a speedy concession from Fetterman — or if the vote tally is close on or after Election Night in November — Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the “election integrity” of Democratic strongholds such as the Philly area.

Already, MAGA activists and Republican Party officials are creating the conditions that make voter suppression and violence against workers more likely. Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee's director for election integrity inPennsylvaniasaid on a conference call with election denialist group Audit the Vote PA that they’d filled “6,000 poll watcher positions in the state this year, compared with 1,000 in 2020,” according to Reuters, which noted that “election conspiracy groups also often appear at events with Republican officials, focused on recruiting volunteers to help watch the polls, according to the groups themselves and county officials.”

Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state recently told PennLive that “a lot of these threats are fueled by mis- and disinformation,” emphasizing, “It’s important to get out accurate information about the election process in Pennsylvania so voters and the public know that when there are delays in counting, it doesn’t mean anything nefarious happening.”

The deep connections between these denialist influencers, their groups, and right-wing media outlets illustrate the extent to which conspiracy theories about voter fraud have become a unifying principle in conservative organizing. Now, those same false claims are potentially driving threats and harassment against election workers across the country.

Right-wing media champion Doug Mastriano’s campaign

Mastriano rose to prominence challenging Biden’s win in Pennsylvania in 2020, and election denialism has been at the forefront of his campaign for governor. He has spread these conspiracy theories across conservative media while rejecting mainstream interviews. He’s a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, which has become a hub for election denialists from all over the country.

One of Mastriano’s top champions in conservative media is neo-Nazi collaborator and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who has appeared at campaign events for Mastriano as recently as this month. Posobiec is another War Room mainstay and occasional guest host,often using Bannon’s platform to praise Mastriano’s campaign, including in an interview in July

Citation From the July 20, 2022, edition of War Room: Pandemic, streamed on Rumble

"The question on everybody’s mind I believe, certainly for this audience, the War Room audience, and if Steve were here right now he’d be asking the same exact question, is voter integrity,” Posobiec said near the beginning of the segment, focusing on the false idea that Pennsylvania's elections are insecure. “What can be done between now and November for the current election that you are in to preserve that idea of voter integrity and fight back against some of these issues that we’ve brought up in the past?” (Bannon was not on his show that day because he was in court unsuccessfully fighting his contempt of Congress case for refusing to testify before the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.)

“We’re going to have to have eyeballs on all the election stations,” Mastriano responded. “I need 20,000 poll watchers to cover the state.”

He then implored War Room listeners who were interested in volunteering “instead of complaining” to go to his website and sign up. To underline the point, Posobiec closed the interview by reminding the audience where they could go to volunteer to become a poll watcher.

More recently, Posobiec told War Room viewers that the governor’s race in Pennsylvania is even more important than in many other states, stating that whoever controlled that office would determine the state’s electoral votes in two years.

“If you’re looking at 2024, you have to understand that Pennsylvania is the keystone,” Posobiec said on October 1. “I railed on this in 2020. The secretary of state in Pennsylvania is an appointed Cabinet position of the governor. It is not a separately elected office.”

“That means the 2022 race for governor is the presidential race, because that determines who your secretary of state is going to be in a state which gives you 20 electoral votes,” he continued. “We’re going to make sure everybody understands the stakes that are at play here, because this is the game for our republic.”

Posobiec’s comments illustrate how Mastriano’s allies in right-wing media continue to shore up his conservative bona fides, even as his campaign attempts to obscure his extremist views. After winning the Republican gubernatorial primary in May, Mastriano or his staff apparently began deleting some of his more controversial videos and social media posts from his official accounts. These actions follow a pattern; as Media Matters previously reported, Mastriano has also posted and deleted more than 50 tweets in support of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

He may now be attempting to downplay his rampant election denialism in the weeks before the midterms. On the morning that Bannon was sentenced for contempt of Congress, Posobiec sat in as a guest co-host to interview Mastriano, and the two avoided the topic completely.

The previous evening, Mastriano appeared on conservative YouTuber Tim Pool’s show, further illustrating the candidate’s total enmeshment in right-wing media. Over the course of that more than two hour-long interview, Mastriano largely avoided pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories as well. Yet even when he seemingly attempts to moderate his position, Mastriano still perpetuates the idea that elections are fundamentally insecure and voter fraud is rampant.

“We’re working real hard to get at least one trained poll watcher in every polling station for transparency and accountability,” he said on Newsmax on October 24.

“Merely asking questions about the elections — it does not make me an election denier,” he said on One America News the same day.

But Mastriano had struck a very different tone immediately after the 2020 election. “We're going to take our power back,” he said on Bannon’s War Room on November 27, 2020, promising to “seat the electors" from a fake pro-Trump slate instead of recognizing Biden’s victory in the state.

A web of election denialist influencers

War Room has also been a platform for some of Pennsylvania’s most active conspiracy theorists, includingToni Shuppe, who heads denialist group Audit the Vote PA.Shuppe has argued that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory – which purports that high-ranking Democrats were involved in a child sex trafficking ring – is “absolutely real.” She also claimed that QAnon, which has many of the same themes as Pizzagate, is a “very valuable resource.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Posobiec also pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and created disinformation about the origins of QAnon in an apparent effort to save the Trump campaign from embarrassment.

In August, Shuppe appeared on War Room to advocate against using machines to count and tabulate votes, based on the debunked theory that voting machines were used to rig the 2020 election.

“We have a massive grassroots movement in Pennsylvania,” Bannon said. “It’s essentially what got President Trump elected in 2016, and to be brutally frank, it’s real votes, certifiable votes, it’s what got him to win Pennsylvania in 2020.” (In reality, Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020.)

“We’re dealing with a weaponized government, which, I don’t have to tell you or anybody that watches your show that that’s what we’re dealing with,” Shuppe told Bannon. “So there’s a risk there, but there’s nothing in the law that says we can’t make these changes in our report that’s on our website.

[vid CitationFrom the August 29, 2022, edition of War Room: Battleground, streamed on Rumble

in addition to appearing frequently on War Room and failing Fox News competitor One America News, Shuppe hosts her own streaming show, also called Audit the Vote PA. The show serves as a combination of propaganda outlet and organizing space to enlist new adherents and keep those already engaged active in the run-up to the midterms.

In July, Shuppe interviewed election denialist and retired CIA officer Sam Faddis, who reportedly recently met with Trump to lay out plans for challenging the midterm results in Pennsylvania.In that segment, Faddis promoted an upcoming rally he was participating in with election denier Catherine Engelbrecht,whose group True the Vote has become a leading voice in the nationwide denialist movement. Faddis also defended Mastriano, and cautioned that conservatives should not become demoralized at the prospect of needing to overcome stolen elections.

“And just in case you’re thinking about staying home and not voting, I get the frustration around 2020 isn’t fixed, we still have what appears to be an illegitimate president, and it is very tempting to throw in the towel and say, ‘What’s the point of voting?’” Shuppe said. “But I strongly encourage you otherwise because November 2022 in Pennsylvania is going to be a pivotal election, not just for our state, but I believe for the rest of the country.”

Shuppe also interviewed Posobiec earlier this month and the two pushed conspiracy theories about the state’s supposed election vulnerabilities.

“If you can get everything right in terms of turnout, if you get everything right in terms of integrity, then you get Pennsylvania back, you flip Pennsylvania,” Posobiec said. He later added, “In order to do that, you need to lay the groundwork out years ahead of the race. And that’s what Sen. Mastriano provides.”

Shuppe responded by claiming Democratic gubernatorial nominee and state Attorney General Josh Shapiro is “ultimately afraid that we’re going to get a transparent, free and fair election process with a Gov. Mastriano and they won’t be able to stuff ballots and cheat the way they did in 2020 [vid CitationFrom the October 5, 2022, edition of Audit the Vote PA, streamed on Rumble

on October 19, Shuppe interviewed local denialist activist Bill Borton, who opposes the use of drop boxes on the false grounds that they have been used to perpetuate widespread ballot stuffing.

“I am reasonably certain there hasn't been a free and fair election in the United States in over 20 years,” Borton said. “Maybe longer.”

“I would agree,” Shuppe responded.

Borton is a plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by America First Legal (AFL), a conservative legal group founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller,against Chester County, Pennsylvania, over allegations that ballots had been dropped in unmonitored drop boxes in violation of state law. Borton, who helped obtain the footage, hopes the case or others like it will bring an end to ballot drop boxes altogether.

“Me being the eternal optimist that I am, this could conceivably mean that a day or so after the drop boxes open, we nab a couple people, have proof of it, and they all get shut down for the rest of the time leading up to the election,” Borton told Shuppe.

Though the complaint alleges that surveillance video shows “over 300 individuals” dropping off more than one ballot, which is against Pennsylvania law, some extremist media figures have exaggerated this case as an example of verified, intentional voter fraud and pressed that this exemplifies the need for physical monitoring at drop boxes.

Infowars’ resident insurrectionist Owen Shroyer opened his September 19 discussion of the subject by complaining that the media is “demonizing conservatives, demonizing Republicans for staking out polling locations and drop boxes,” citing evidence from the AFL that allegedly “found individuals stuffing ballot boxes, same people showing up multiple times with dozens of ballots.” Shroyer asked his audience, “Why don’t Democrats want you watching drop boxes? Because Democrats are using drop boxes to cheat and steal an election.: judge in a similar case brought by AFL in Pennsylvania ruled that in-person monitoring was not necessary.

“Since mail-in ballots have been in use, no fraud has been detected in Lehigh County with the mail-in ballot process,” Judge Thomas Capehart wrote.

Fox News hosts amplify bogus ballot stuffing claims

[vid]

Borton has played an outsized role in some of the national media attention on Pennsylvania’s elections. Most of the national conservative media coverage centers around mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes, both of which have been identified, incorrectly, by Pennsylvania election deniers and the Republican Party as previous sites of voter fraud.

Fox host Mark Levin celebrated AFL’sChester County complaint as a win, adding, “I suspect there's a hell of a lot more than one.”

Separately, a long-running legal fight over undated mail-in ballots came to a head on October 11, when the Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling that allowed undated ballots to be counted in a 2021 local county judge election. Pennsylvania law requires that mail-in ballot envelopes be hand-signed and dated, though both the state’s Commonwealth Court and 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that this provision was designed to unfairly throw out ballots. Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman issued guidance that same day directing counties to continue to count undated mail-in ballots, as the Supreme Court’s decision was not relevant to midterms.

On his radio show,Fox host Sean Hannity pressed that Chapman’s guidance was an excuse for Democrats to give their voters an advantage: “Of course, Democrats, they don't want to follow laws. They want to make them up as they go along and, you know, make everything work to their advantage.”

Levin was more direct, arguing that this shows “they're trying to steal the election for” Democratic Senate nominee and current Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. According to Levin, “This is the sort of thing that changes election results.”

On a previous show, Levin accused Democrats of “causing all this anguish, this anarchy,” as “the Republicans aren't in there trying to change state law through well-placed Republican officials. It’s the Democrats.”

Of course, as Posobiec outlined above, this is exactly the election denialist plan for 2024: Disrupt midterms, get Republicans elected, and lay the groundwork for an easy 2024 Trump win.

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https://www.wesa.fm/politics-government/2022-10-12/political-ads-maintain-pressure-on-mastriano-over-ties-to-site-used-by-tree-of-life-shooter

no lnx many

Political ads maintain pressure on Mastriano over ties to site used by Tree of Life shooter

90.5 WESA | By Chris Potter

Published October 12, 2022

David Dermer

FR171035 AP

State Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin), the 2022 Republican candidate for governor, can't escape criticism of his ties to Gab, a social-media site tied to the Tree of Life shooter.

With the Nov. 8 election less than a month away — and the four-year anniversary of the Oct. 27 Tree of Life shooting even closer — Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano is once again being hammered for ties to Gab, an antisemitic website frequented by accused synagogue shooter Robert Bowers.

“Before murdering 11 worshippers at this synagogue, the shooter posted his manifesto on Gab,” says a new 30-second ad that is set to air on western Pennsylvania screens. “Doug Mastriano paid thousands to the same site to recruit supporters.”

The ad is sponsored by gun-control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund, which says it will spend $1 million to place the spot on TV and online in the Pittsburgh market. The spot blasts Mastriano for paying $5,000 to the site, as WESA reported earlier this year, and it calls Mastriano “a far-right conspiracy theorist who compared gun-safety measures to Nazi Germany.”

That’s a reference to statements Mastriano made during a 2018 Congressional race and that resurfaced this year by The Forward, a Jewish news outlet.

“We saw Lenin do the same thing in Russia,” Mastriano said at the time of gun-control efforts in response to a question about how to stop school shootings. “We saw Hitler do the same thing in Germany in the ’30s. Where does it stop?”

Everytown says the ad is part of a $2.1 million spending plan in the state that also features criticism of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz.

“The fact that Doug Mastriano is looking for support from the same online forum where the Tree of Life shooter posted his screed tells Pennsylvanians all they need to know about Mastriano’s extreme, dangerous agenda,” said Everytown for Gun Safety president John Feinblatt in a statement.

Shapiro, Mastriano and third-party governor candidates in Pa. on 2022 election issues

Mastriano deactivated his account on Gab, whose founder Andrew Torba is an avowed Christian nationalist who says Jews have no place in his vision of the conservative movement. In a Tweet in July, Mastriano said Torba “doesn’t speak for me or my campaign. I reject antisemitism in any form." He blamed “Democrats and the media” for “smears … to distract Pennsylvanians.”

Everytown’s focus is on preventing gun violence, but it has long linked that agenda to a broader concern about right-wing extremism. The gun-control reforms it supports include a measure to prevent people convicted of hate crimes from being able to purchase a firearm.

And the new campaign echoes an earlier spot aired on TV and radio in Pittsburgh and other markets, as well as online, by the Lincoln Project. That campaign, too, flagged Mastriano’s ties to Gab.

“Mastriano knows what he’s paying for, knows exactly what Gab’s audience is,” the Lincoln Projectspot asserts. “They’re not just Nazis, Klansman, racists and crazies. They’re his base.”

That ad was voiced by Peter Coyote, who was featured as the narrator in a recent PBS miniseries, “The U.S. and The Holocaust,” by noted documentarian Ken Burns.

It is not entirely clear what Mastriano received for his $5,000 payment to Gab. His campaign reported it as an expenditure for “consulting services,” though one media outlet reported that after the payment, Gab automatically enlisted new members as followers of Mastriano’s own account.

And even as he professed to have sundered ties with the site, Mastriano accepted a $500 campaign contribution from Torba — a gift that campaign finance records reflect no effort to return.

The slew of stories chronicling those developments, and messages from advocates for the Jewish community and groups like Lincoln, may take a political toll on Mastriano this fall.

While Jewish voters are disproportionately likely to be Democratic, earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Mastriano was “losing ground with a small but significant part of the Trump coalition, squandering opportunities with more conservative and religiously observant Jews.” The paper cited a number of factors, ranging from Mastriano’s Gab ties to his criticisms of a Jewish day school attended by his Democratic rival, Josh Shapiro, and his children.

Mastriano, whose campaign routinely ignores requests for comment from mainstream media outlets, has said little about Gab beyond his tweet this summer. Gab founder Torba has accused reporters of exaggerating Mastriano’s contribution to Gab, noting that $5,000 is a piddling sum in a statewide campaign.

Compared to the money being spent to flag Mastriano’s ties to the group, it has been.

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gop-nominee-doug-mastriano-to-speak-to-radical-conspiracy-theorists-ahead-of-election/

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/40-days-of-fasting-prayer/

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zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand and Jackson Grigsby @ CNN: ‘Let’s get right to the violence’: New documentary film footage shows Roger Stone pre-Election Day.
Alex Griffing @ Mediaite: Matt Gaetz Insists Biden Impeachment Must Be First Priority if GOP Retakes House: ‘Policy, Bill Making… Far Diminished Priority.’
Sarah Posner @ Talking Points Memo: The Key Ingredients Of Christian Nationalism.
Kathryn Joyce @ Salon: Why Trump went full QAnon: He’s desperate — and “those are the only people he’s got left.”
Akela Lacy @ The Intercept: Florida Contracts Go to Companies That Flooded Ron DeSantis Campaign Fund.
Jack Winstanley @ Media Matters: The verdict against Project Veritas underscores that James O’Keefe never had credibility as a journalist.
Allan Smith @ NBC News: In 2019, Doug Mastriano said women who violated proposed abortion ban should be charged with murder.

Tags: Doug Mastriano James O'Keefe Matt Gaetz Roger Stone Ron DeSantis Christian Nationalism Round-Up Project Veritas

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Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano is scheduled to do a campaign event with far-right commentator Jack Posobiec this weekend. Posobiec has collaborated with white nationalists and neo-Nazis and targeted Jewish people with antisemitic hate.

Mastriano is a QAnon conspiracy theorist and a January 6 insurrectionist. He has also shared toxic commentaries about Muslims; abortion; and gun safety; along with making other inflammatory remarks.

He has surrounded himself with numerous extremist media figures in his campaign for Pennsylvania governor. They include: antisemitic Gab CEO Andrew Torba; QAnon and antisemitic conspiracy theorists Allen and Francine Fosdick; “prophet” Julie Green, who has promoted an antisemitic conspiracy theory; and QAnon supporter and 9/11 conspiracy theorist Toni Shuppe. Mastriano also recruited Jenna Ellis, who has a history of anti-LGBTQ remarks and election denialism, as a senior adviser.

Mastriano’s ties to antisemitism were heavily scrutinized when it was revealed that he paid Gab -- a social media haven for white nationalists and antisemites -- for campaign “consulting.” In a newly filed campaign report, he disclosed that he accepted a $500 donation from Torba, who has said that “we don't want people who are Jewish” in his movement.

Mastriano is holding an event with Posobiec on October 1 in Warminster, Pennsylvania. The event is the latest example of an alliance he appears to be forging with Posobiec:

Mastriano has frequently shared Posobiec’s posts on Facebook, including posts that promote Mastriano.
Mastriano has frequently tweeted at Posobiec, including sharing a selfie of the two of them and writing to him in December 2020: “It was great to meet you my friend.”
Posobiec interviewedMastriano on July 20 while guest hosting Steve Bannon’s War Room program. During the interview, Posobiec thanked Mastriano for running and promoted Mastriano to tell viewers how to support his campaign.

Several media outlets have accurately noted Posobiec’s history of extremism when writing about him. For instance:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote that he’s “a TV pundit associated with white supremacy and Nazism. … Jewish groups and media observers pointed out that Posobiec promotes conspiracy theories and once associated with white supremacists.”
The Guardian described him as “a far-right US blogger who has used antisemitic symbols and promoted the fabricated ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory smearing prominent Democrats as pedophiles.”
CNN has written that Posobiec is “a far-right agitator who is known for spreading conspiracies and disinformation” and “has repeatedly posted anti-Semitic memes and associated with White supremacists and neo-Nazis.”

Here is a brief history of Posobiec’s extremism:

Southern Poverty Law Center: Posobiec has “collaborated with white nationalists, antigovernment extremists, members of the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis.”His collaborators include individuals who were “reportedly connected online” to the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. The SPLC has extensively documented Posobiec’s ties to members of white nationalist and racist movements, including neo-Nazis. The organization wrote:

Posobiec has worked with a global network of extreme far-right and pro-authoritarian figures in his activism. He printed his second book through a publishing house where white supremacist Theodore Beale, known by the pen name Vox Day, serves as lead editor. In May 2017, Posobiec and the neo-Nazi Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer amplified the Russian military intelligence-backed “#MacronLeaks” operation, a so-called hack-and-leak effort to boost the campaign of far-right, anti-immigrant French politician Marine Le Pen. Around the same time, Posobiec collaborated on content for the online publication Rebel News at least twice with Jeffrey and Edward Clark, brothers who were active in online Neo-Nazi circles. The Clark brothers were reportedly connected online to Robert Bowers, who is now facing federal charges in connection with the massacre of 11 people in 2018 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Posobiec has appeared at events with such white nationalists as Richard Spencer and Scott Greer. He has appeared multiple times as a guest on the antigovernment conspiracy website Infowars. He has posed for smiling photos with leaders of the neofascist Proud Boys. Posobiec has targeted Jewish reporters with antisemitic hate and collaborated with, and marched alongside, Polish far-right extremists in Warsaw.

SPLC: “Posobiec used Twitter to target Jewish journalists with antisemitic hate. His targets included CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, whose Polish family survived the Holocaust during World War II.”From the SPLC:

Posobiec used Twitter to target Jewish journalists with antisemitic hate. His targets included CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, whose Polish family survived the Holocaust during World War II. Posobiec also targeted a group of journalists reporting on a press conference hosted by Peter Thiel. Three Jewish rights groups – the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action – described Posobiec’s behavior as antisemitic or condemned OANN’s relationship to him after Hatewatch reached out for comment on this investigation. The full statements of those groups as well as additional evidence of Posobiec’s antisemitic remarks can be found here.

Posobiec is a “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist."Pizzagate" is a conspiracy theory which falsely claims that prominent Democratic politicians have trafficked children through a Washington, D.C.-based restaurant. Posobiec has been a promoter of the conspiracy theory and once visited the D.C. restaurant before he was asked to leave.

Posobiec was behind a “Rape Melania” Trump hoax to smear anti-Trump protesters.BuzzFeed wrote in 2017:

Less than a week after the 2016 presidential election, a Trump supporter named Alan Beck tweeted two photographs of an anti-Trump protest in Washington, DC, in which a hooded figure held aloft a sign reading "Rape Melania." The images went viral, and the sign — as well as Twitter — drew swift condemnation from news outlets both right and left.

…

But, BuzzFeed News has learned, the "Rape Melania" sign was not the work of an anti-Trump protester at all. Instead, according to sources, it was the brainchild of a group of Trump supporters led by Jack Posobiec, one of the organizers of the controversial DeploraBall inauguration party and a prominent figure in the pro-Trump internet.

Furthermore, as shown by a series of Posobiec's text messages obtained by BuzzFeed News and confirmed by a source who collaborated with Posobiec, the sign was the culmination of a disinformation campaign by Posobiec and others intended to paint the anti-Trump rallies as violent and out of control.

For more on Posobiec’s extremism, read the SPLC’s investigation.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/gab/new-filing-doug-mastriano-says-he-accepted-campaign-donation-antisemitic-gab-ceo-andrew-torba

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ah an 922

In Pennsylvania, the gubernatorial campaign of Republican nominee Doug Mastriano has been a major source of anxiety to Democrats as well as Never Trump conservatives. State Sen. Mastriano, a Christian nationalist and conspiracy theorist who believes the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, is even to the right of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — and he believes that Pennsylvania Republicans should be able to simply throw out any election results they don’t like.

One of Mastriano’s critics on the right is veteran conservative columnist George Will, an ex-Republican who has no use for former President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. In a September 25 column for the Washington Post, Will lays out some reasons why Mastriano is not only dangerous for Pennsylvania, but also, for the United States on the whole. According to Will, Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race is “the 2022 election that poses the most risk to the nation.”

“Suppose voters pick the Republican candidate, Doug Mastriano,” the 81-year-old Will warns. “And suppose that late in the evening of November 5, 2024, Gov. Mastriano thinks Pennsylvanians picked the wrong person to receive the state’s presidential electoral votes. Today, candidate Mastriano promises that, as governor, he will have the executive power, and a mandate, to intervene, thus plunging the nation into chaos.”

One thing that separates Pennsylvania from other states is the fact that its governors, not voters, pick the secretary of state — or as it’s called in the Keystone State, “secretary of the commonwealth.” The Democrat who currently holds that position in Pennsylvania is Leigh M. Chapman, who was chosen by Democratic two-term Gov. Tom Wolf.

“A member of the House of Representatives is 1/435th of one half of one of the federal government’s three branches,” Will explains. “A senator is 1 percent of the other half. There are limits to how much actual, as opposed to aesthetic, damage a rogue legislator can do to the nation. A governor, however, can do important things on his own, especially if, as in Pennsylvania, he appoints the secretary of state, who administers elections…. Mastriano has raised money on a social media network frequented by anti-Semites, including the one who is accused of murdering 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, but what makes Mastriano more than an especially exotic political exhibit is his vow to appoint a secretary of state ‘who’s delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs and everything. And I can decertify every (voting) machine in the state.’”

Will continues, “In the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Pennsylvania was decided by 0.7 and 1.2 percentage points, respectively. In 2024, the state probably will again be closely contested, and its electoral votes could determine the national winner. So, imagine Mastriano, who has neither evidence nor doubts that Trump won the 2020 election, decreeing ‘corrections’ to the election. His motives are frightening because they are pure: He has the scary sincerity of the unhinged whose delusions armor them against evidence.”

The conservative columnist writes that “fortunately,” the Democrat Mastriano is up against is “two-term” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Some of the polls released in September have shown Mastriano trailing Shapiro by 11 percent, including a Muhlenberg College/Morning Call poll released on September 16 and a CBS News/YouGov poll that came out several days earlier. However, a poll released in mid-September by Atlanta-based Republican pollster the Trafalgar Group showed Shapiro ahead of Mastriano by only 2 percent.

“From the first census, 1790, until that of 1940, Pennsylvania was the second-most populous state,” Will observes. “In 1960, it had as many electoral votes, 32, as California, which today, has 54 to Pennsylvania’s 19. This fall, however, the state will matter more than any other, as its voters’ choice of governor will either imperil or reassure the nation that began here.”

aug 16

In Pennsylvania, Democratic State Attorney General Josh Shapiro — who is hoping to be the Keystone State’s next governor — has been running two types of campaign ads. The first type lays out the things that Shapiro would like to do if he succeeds Gov. Tom Wolf in 2023; the second type paints his Republican opponent, State Sen. Doug Mastriano, as a dangerous extremist who is way out of the mainstream. And Mastriano, a far-right Christian nationalist and conspiracy theorist who falsely claims the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, has given the Shapiro campaign a great deal of material to work with.

Journalist Tim Dickinson, in an article published by Rolling Stone on August 16, describes a radio interview that Mastriano gave in 2018 — an interview that, according to Dickinson, vividly illustrates why Mastriano is such a disturbing candidate.

“No one would mistake Doug Mastriano — the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor in Pennsylvania — for a moderate,” Dickinson explains. “He tried to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, participated in the events of January 6 — where he was slated to be a speaker — and has endorsed a no-exceptions abortion ban, dismissing the notion of ‘my body, my choice’ as ‘ridiculous nonsense.’ But in a radio interview in 2018, the former Army colonel let the mask slip all the way down, revealing himself as an extremist who would block equality for LGBTQ+ couples, who denies global warming, and who believes Islam is ‘not compatible’ with the United States Constitution.”

Dickinson continues, “Mastriano made the extreme remarks during an interview in February 2018, as he announced a campaign for U.S. Congress. Mastriano spoke to hosts for WEEO News Talk 103.7, a conservative FM channel with a studio in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border.”

Dickinson goes on describe other things Mastriano said in that 2018 interview. The MAGA Republican described climate change as “fake science,” and when he was asked about same-sex marriage, Mastriano replied, “I’m for traditional marriage. And I am not a hater for saying that. It’s been like that for 6000 years. It was the first institution founded by God in Genesis, and it needs to stay that way.”

Mastriano, Dickinson notes, expressed vehemently anti-Islam viewers during that interview, saying, “Not all religions are created equal” — a “declaration” that the Rolling Stone reporter finds “particularly alarming in the context of the 2022 election, because Mastriano is running for statewide office on the same ballot as Republican Mehmet ‘Dr.’ Oz, the first Muslim from either party to be nominated for U.S. Senate.”

On August 13, Politico’s Holly Otterbein, a Philadelphia-based journalist, reported that Shapiro’s campaign was getting ready to unleash a “pair of attack ads targeting his opponent’s ties to the far-right social media network Gab.”

According to Otterbein, “Republican Doug Mastriano has come under fire for paying $5000 for ‘consulting’ services to Gab, the site where Robert Bowers made anti-Semitic posts before the deadly mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Mastriano also participated in an interview with Gab CEO Andrew Torba, where he told him, ‘Thank God for what you’ve done.’ In one of Shapiro’s ads, a narrator describes Gab as a ‘White supremacist website’ where “minutes before Jews were killed at this synagogue, the murderer posted his hate-filled plan.’ The spot highlights Mastriano’s payment to Gab.”

How effective Shapiro’s anti-Mastriano campaign ads will be in November remains to be seen. Some polls released in June showed a close race, with Shapiro leading by only 4 percent in a USA Today/Suffolk poll and by 3 percent in a Fabrizio/Anzalone poll. But a Fox News poll released in late July found Mastriano trailing Shapiro by 10 percent, and a poll that Blueprint Polling released in late July showed Shapiro with an 11 percent lead.

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9 22

rww

dominionist author, speaker, and political operative Lance Wallnau is a right-wing anti-LBGTQ activist, conspiracy theorist, and unabashed Trump cultist who has repeatedly praised authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He is also a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist who has urged former President Donald Trump to organize public rallies across the nation and infuse them with right-wing Christianity in order to bring about a revival in the United States'

[vid]

the reason Wallnau has urged Trump to hold such rallies is that Wallnau is one of the leading advocates of Seven Mountains dominionism, a theology connected to right-wing political ideology that teaches that Christians are to “do whatever is necessary” to take control of the seven main “mountains” that shape our culture—education, government, media, business, arts and entertainment, family, and religion—in order to implement the will of God throughout the nation and the world.

As Wallnau explained earlier this year, if right-wing Christians can gain control of the seven mountains, they can control a nation.[vid]

on Monday night, Wallnau announced on his Facebook page that he will be joining Donald Trump Jr. in speaking later this week at a fundraiser for election-denier and Christian nationalism promoter Doug Mastriano, who is the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania.

“I’m coming up from Dallas, Texas,” Wallnau. “I’m paying to go. I’m putting a couple thousand dollars into making this event happen, to help this great guy, Doug Mastriano, take a stand. He’s getting beat left and right. Why? Because he’s standing up for Christian values and is a strong conservative and a MAGA Republican.”

“Doug is doing what God called him to do,” Wallnau continued. “I believe the spirit of God is going to show up in a unique way. They’re attacking everyone who is a Christian in politics as a Christian nationalist. All the Christians are pearl-clutching and handwringing about Christian nationalism. All the nervous religious types are all warning me, ‘Lance, don’t use the term Christian nationalist.’ This just makes me so mad I feel like coming out as a Christian nationalist, because the devil controls—it’s like the rainbow. The rainbow used to be in the Bible a sign from God of his covenant that he’d never destroy [humanity again], but then the LGBTQ movement got a hold of it and now if you put a rainbow on something [people ask], ‘Are you LGBTQ?’ It’s like the devil grabs stuff and brands it. It makes me so mad. I’m not willing to let Christianity or nationalism or love of nation be destroyed by the left, who’s like a ubiquitous force; they’re like a virus."[vid]

mastriano already has deep connections to QAnon conspiracy theorists, self-proclaimed prophets, New Apostolic Reformation dominionists, the antisemitic founder of Gab, and a theocratic offshoot of the Unification Church that worships with AR-15s. We can now add Seven Mountains-promoting Christian nationalists to this list.

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https://www.salon.com/2022/07/04/hes-on-a-mission-from-god-pennsylvania-candidate-doug-mastrianos-with-the-world/

no lnx

INVESTIGATION

He's on a mission from God: Pennsylvania GOP candidate Doug Mastriano's war with the world

Exclusive: Pa. GOP candidate closely linked to Christian extremists who want "spiritual warfare" against America

By FREDERICK CLARKSON

PUBLISHEDJULY 4, 2022

An animating element of politics in the age of Trump is that some people are increasingly living out religious metaphors. These metaphors are derived from contemporary understandings of the Old Testament by new elements within Christianity. This has been central to the campaign of Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who recently won the Republican nomination for governor. (He will face Democrat Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania's current attorney general, in November.) These metaphors are also integral to a movement of the post-insurrection religious and political right that is still in its formative stages.

As reporting by the New Yorker, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Word & Way and Paul Rosenberg at Salon has shown, there is something going on in Pennsylvania that is transforming politics in the state, and maybe on a larger scale as well.

Mastriano, a retired Army strategist and intelligence officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, appears to have a disturbing understanding of the relationship between metaphor and reality when it comes to biblical narratives. He suggested to an interviewer that today's Christians should emulate the warriors of Old Testament Israel.

[RELATED: Trump's army of God: Doug Mastriano and the Christian nationalist attack on democracy

"God can intervene in history," he said, adding that such interventions are carried out by "a man or a woman," such as the biblical Queen Esther (who got authorization from the King of Persia for the Jews to kill all their enemies); and the prophet Gideon (who led 300 soldiers against a far greater force).

Mainstream media generally describe Mastriano as an "election denialist" and a "Christian nationalist." He unconvincingly denies the latter, but he and his supporters are also more complicated than the label usually suggests. He is well known for having spoken at the Jericho March in December 2020 that unsuccessfully called for the Electoral College to switch its votes to Donald Trump. He was also slated to speak at the "wild protest" on Jan. 6, 2021, organized by "Stop the Steal" activist Ali Alexander, along with the likes of Roger Stone, theocratic activist Lance Wallnau and Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. And of course, promoting the Big Lie has been central to his politics since Trump's election defeat.

But there's more.

Some religious leaders who back Mastriano's campaign say they are in direct communication with God, see themselves as God's army, and see Mastriano as a general in their war for the world.

Mastriano's core support is a fusion of QAnon, the far-right Patriot movement and the revivalist New Apostolic Reformation — which views him as a military and political leader in advancing the biblically prophesied end times. We see this in his role in the Jericho March during the run-up to Jan. 6, and more recently when he joined members of the "Shofar Army'' in a ceremony of "spiritual warfare" on the Gettysburg battlefield, and as the headliner at a conference, Patriots Arise.

May the metaphors be with you

The Jericho March was derived from the biblical story of the battle of Jericho, which took place during the journey of the Israelites, led by Joshua, to the Promised Land. God had instructed them to march seven times around the city blowing shofars. The walls of the city collapsed, and the army rushed in, carrying the Ark of the Covenant, and killing everyone in the city. The Ark of the Covenant, as fans of the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" film (among others) will recall, is a chest containing the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses.

Religious extremists who back Mastriano's campaign say they have direct messages from God, and see him as a general in God's army of conquest.

The story of the 2020 Jericho Marchpurportedly began with God giving two different individuals the same vision, calling them to set up a march in Washington as well as in the capitals of the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the days before the presidential electors were to cast their votes. (They were ultimately held in other states and Canada as well.)

Supposedly God wanted the marchers to oppose alleged corruption and restore election integrity — as well as Donald Trump's presidency. In Washington, crowds marched around the Capitol, the Department of Justice and the Supreme Court.

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"God commanded this to happen like he did to Joshua," Apostle Abby Abildness explained on a religious talk show. "We believe God is gonna move'' and "that there will be that victory," she continued. There was "great hope" that Pennsylvania's electoral votes, which Joe Biden had won convincingly, would "go to the president." Of course that did not happen.

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In instances like this, believers see a difference between a foretelling of events and a prophecy that reveals God's intentions. If an event doesn't turn out as expected, they believe, it is necessary to keep on trying, to ensure that somehow, someday, God's will will be done.

Her immanence

Apostle Abby Abildness is a quietly powerful national and international religious leader, as well as a legislative lobbyist at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg. She says she meets with legislators at least once a week, praying and "bringing forth a religious freedom agenda." She also led Jericho marches in Harrisburg.

Her manner is more that of a soft-spoken college professor (which she used to be) than a political preacher. She is nevertheless an important leader in the contemporary religious movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a dynamic theological and organizational revamping of much of pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. For decades, NAR has led the abandonment of traditional mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations in favor of prayer networks.

These prayer networks are led by what is known as the "fivefold ministry" as mentioned in the biblical book of Ephesians: Apostle, prophet, teacher, pastor and evangelist. The networks comprise both physical churches and prayer groups of various sizes.

Abildness is a leader in several such networks, which aim to take control of what they call the "Seven Mountains" of society in order to achieve Christian dominion. These metaphorical mountains are religion, family, government, business, education, arts & entertainment and media. Abildness, whose chosen mountain is government, is working with her allies to increase electoral engagement in apostolic networks, and to involve them in pushing for legislation. She heads the Pennsylvania Apostolic Prayer Network and plays leading roles in other important international networks, including the Oklahoma-based Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network headed by Apostle John Benefiel and the Texas-headquartered Reformation Prayer Network, led by Apostle Cindy Jacobs.

The NAR has generally abandoned written doctrines along with denominations, in favor of its own notions of Old Testament biblical law. Its movement is further informed by revelations from those understood to be apostles and prophets revealing what God wants. They believe God wants Doug Mastriano.

Dancing with the ones who brung him

Last year, Mastriano denied to Eliza Griswold of the New Yorker that he was a Christian nationalist. "Is this a term you fabricated?" he asked. "What does it mean and where have I indicated that I am a Christian Nationalist?" Of course Griswold did not invent the term, which has been used by scholars and journalists for decades.

Mastriano doth protest too much. He has sponsored several bills based on models found in the Christian nationalist legislative playbook formerly called "Project Blitz." These bills would have mandated teaching the Bible in public schools and made it legal for adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples. In the face of organized opposition and intensive media coverage by the New York Times, the Guardian and Salon, among others, the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, which published the Project Blitz legislative playbook, scrubbed all mention of Project Blitz from its website in 2019. But the affiliated Pennsylvania State Legislative Prayer Caucus remains. Its state director, then as now, is Abby Abildness.

[RELATED: A grassroots Christian movement joins the fight against Christian nationalism

Mastriano has denied that he works directly with NAR, but has clearly had a close relationship with Abildness and the wider NAR movement. She has, for example, interviewed him on her podcast and worked with him in the legislature. She calls him "a military strategist" who leads a group of about 30 conservative state legislators (although he's only been in the legislature since 2019). She also introduced him at a regional NAR conference of several hundred people in October 2020, in Gettysburg, which is in Mastriano's senatorial district.

On the Fourth of July in 2019, Mastriano joined Apostle Abby Abildness on the Gettysburg battlefield, where they prayed to "preserve the monuments" from antifa. They were victims of an internet hoax.

There, Abildness told the story about walking the Gettysburg battlefield with Mastriano, his wife and a "prayer team" on the previous Fourth of July. The senator and the apostle went to "pray to preserve the monuments" from antifa, which she believed might be coming to destroy them. She had trepidations, she said, but explained, "When the people pray, God is with us. We're not to fear, we have God. We need to stand up. Speak out. And move forward in this battle. Amen!" (Hundreds of armed militia members, bikers and others who had also heard the rumors showed up to defend the monuments and prevent the burning of the American flag. It turned out the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by a troll on social media and then hyped by right-wing media.)

The conference's headline speaker, Apostle Chuck Pierce from Texas, was preceded by the sounding of the shofar by the Shofar Army, which then led the crowd in shouting, "Arise, oh God, and let your enemies be scattered!" This refrain is from Psalm 68, one of many Old Testament imprecatory prayers in which the faithful ask God to smite his enemies.

A new Joshua

Reported here for the first time are two videos featuring Mastriano before his run for governor. Filmed on the Gettysburg battlefield on July 18, 2020, just days after his prayers against antifa with Abildness, the videos reveal his involvement with a group called the Shofar Army. In the videos, Mastriano performs a ritual act of spiritual warfare — blowing shofars with the Shofar Army and Prophet Bill Yount of Blowing the Shofar Ministries. But as later became clear, they understood the warfare as physical, not just spiritual.

Some of these Christians wore the Jewish prayer shawl or tallit, and wielded the three-foot-long hollowed-out ram's horn called a shofar, which was used by ancient Israelite armies to sound battle commands and community alerts, and is used today in religious services for the Jewish High Holidays.

In one video, the leader, Earl Hixon, prays, "Thank you, Father. We tread upon the enemy." Pointing to Mastriano, he continues, "Father God, I am looking to our new general here, that you have appointed, this Joshua. In Jesus' name!" Mastriano raises his outstretched arm in apparent acknowledgment. A year later, Warren Baker, a member of the group,sounded the shofar at the launch event for Mastriano's campaign for governor. (Former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis also attended the launch.)

In the second video, Hixon follows the Army's shofar blasts by declaring he wants to "mark this day in the history of eternity." He then leads the Army in shouts of the imprecation, "Arise, oh God, and let your enemies be scattered!"

Salon asked André Gagné, professor of theological studies at Concordia University in Montreal, and author of a study of Trump's evangelical followers, to help interpret the videos.

Hixon recognizes "the 'angelic hosts, the warring hosts that have gathered here on this journey,'" Gagné explained. "This is a reference to the assistance of angelic beings in the battle to be waged. Hixon thanks God for this 'Joshua,' pointing to Mastriano, believing that from this moment there will be new 'anointing' on him."

Joshua, of course, led the Jews to the Promised Land, fighting the Canaanites along the way, including the genocide at Jericho.

Gagné continued, "Hixon also says that Mastriano now has 'got new eyes, the new eyes of a seer' and connects it to the idea that we're on the physical ground, yes, there's the grassroots, but there is a double-edged sword as well in Jesus' name."

This, Gagné says, refers to the "opening of Mastriano's 'spiritual eyes' and the presence of the 'angelic and warring hosts.'" It may also refer to the need to wage war on two fronts, both the physical and the spiritual.

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"This entire ritual," says theology professor André Gagné, builds a bridge between the language of 'spiritual warfare' and possible physical violence."

"This entire ritual," Gagné continued, "potentially builds a bridge between the language of 'spiritual warfare' and the physical realm, where possible physical violence could eventually be enacted to push back against the forces of darkness and establish the Kingdom of God."

"Now, the blowing of trumpets," he concluded, "is found in different contexts in the biblical record, and the ritual means different things for Christians. But in this specific 'spiritual warfare' ceremony, the most likely meaning is associated with the expectation and possible eruption of physical warfare."

Rising and shining

Mastriano was the star of a two-day Patriots Arise conference at a hotel near the Gettysburg battlefield the following year, in April 2021. The small stage was festooned with flag bunting and "Mastriano for Governor" signs. The event announcement declared,

It is TIME (sic) for the Patriots to Arise for God & Country! Just as they did in the first American Revolution during 1776.

The conference opened with a sounding of the shofar by 10 members of the Shofar Army. The call, blown three times, was what leader Don Kretzer called "an alarm sound that has been around for almost 4,000 years."

"Blow the trumpet in Zion! Sound the alarm on holy mountain! The day of the Lord is here!" Kretzer declared. Paraphrasing (and embellishing) God speaking to Moses in the Old Testament book of Numbers, he continued:

When you go into a land against an enemy who appears to be stronger than you, that tries to oppress you;when I hear the sound of alarm, I will remember the covenant I've made with you, and I am coming to rescue you, America!

The Shofar Army and NAR leaders envision themselves as waging "spiritual warfare" against a host of enemies, whom they understand to be possessed or controlled by demons. So when they repeatedly ask God to smite his enemies in this way,some people, as Gagné suggests, may feel compelled to act out the metaphors in more literal fashion. (It's probably fair to wonder whether that informed what happened on Jan. 6.)

The conference hosts, "apostolic and prophetic" leaders Allen and Francine Fosdick, auctioned items as a fundraiser for Mastriano ("our dear brother in Christ warrior") but not for any of the other far-right Christian GOP primary candidates from Pennsylvania and Maryland who were also present.

Prophet Julia Green of Iowa preceded Mastriano at the podium. She said Mastriano had heard about a prophecy God had given her, and that was why he had invited her to appear at his events. She read the prophecy from her laptop while Mastriano waited to speak at a nearby banquet table:

Doug Mastriano, I have you here for such a time as this, saith the Lord. It is now time to move forward with the plan that you have been given. Yes, Doug, I am here for you and I have not forsaken you. The time has come for their great fall; for the great steal to be overturned. So keep your faith in me.

Green further prophesied that current Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, would be "removed by my hand" in the wake of a scandal, and that "Treason will be written on him for all eternity." The crowd cheered. Wolf's allegedly treasonous acts were not identified (and have not surfaced to this point). Mastriano said nothing.

The conference began with a dramatic QAnon video comparing conspiracy-theory adherents to American soldiers. It was followed by anti-vax, anti-mask and anti-tax speakers, as well as Bobby Summers, an advocate for the idea of "sovereign citizenship."

Making the demons tremble

The event was similar (albeit much smaller) in terms of theme, tone and content to the ReAwaken America tour, led by Michael Flynn. There have been 15 such conferences since April of last year, drawing thousands of people to each event.

These events are headlined by such figures as Roger Stone, Jenna Ellis and Eric Trump, along with anti-vax and anti-mask presentations and, of course, endless propaganda about alleged election fraud. There is also a strong revivalist Christian component, including opening the event with the blowing of shofars, and speeches by pastoral provocateurs such as noted book-burner Greg Locke.

At a ReAwaken event last year, Prophet Amanda Grace explained the meaning of blowing the shofar, saying it had driven some of God's greatest biblical victories:

When the shofar was blown the walls of Jericho fell. When the shofar was blown, Gideon and an army of 300 men defeated over 147,000 Midianities. It's an announcement to the enemy that his stronghold is about to fall. Demons tremble at the sound of the shofar.

She calls the shofar "a weapon of our warfare. And when we blow it, the power of God comes full force into that situation."

One aspect of the tour is the evident cross-fertilization of the factions of the religious and political right that is reshaping American conservative politics and public life, from the MAGA movement to Jan. 6 to the Mastriano campaign.

Controversial right-wing activist and publisher Floyd G. Brownexplained a bit about how this works in his introduction of tour regular Pastor Dave Scarlett at an April 2022 ReAwaken event in Salem, Oregon. Many people who watch Scarlett's "His Glory" show are Christians, Brown said, "but many of them aren't."

"They are Patriots," he continued. "And I've heard him say many, many times, if you watch 'His Glory' and you're a Patriot, you often become a Christian. And if you watch 'His Glory' and you're a Christian, and if you don't know what's going on, you slowly become a Patriot."

Brown announced that "His Glory" would air on his new commercial streaming service, Liftable TV, which seeks to promote a "biblical worldview" and "truth-centric news." It's like a Reader's Digest of Christian-right streaming, rebroadcasting shows from the likes of anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, 7 Mountains Dominionist Lance Walnau and, of course, Dave Scarlett, who often hosts Julie Green as a guest.

Green's May 25, 2022, interview with Scarlett illuminates much about the Mastriano campaign and the wider movement. Green says that Mastriano campaign functions "are not a normal, everyday political event. … They are all focused on the Lord. They are powerful! They are anointed!" She calls Mastriano "a very powerful man of God."

Scarlett replies that he has talked with a "certain general" (without naming him) who said, about candidates he supports, "that these rallies in the 2024 cycle will start out with [evangelical Christian] praise music, then the candidate, who is a Patriot Christian, will come forward, give whatever their message is, then it will end with revival. It's going to end with altar calls."

Green replied that this was "already happening" at Mastriano's events.

Throughout Mastriano's rise, those around him have been open about their intentions. In a December 2020 broadcast of "The Damascus Road," host Earl Hixon explains their common purpose, to murmurs of agreement from his panelists: Abby Abildness, shofarists Don Kretzer and Bill Yount, and Pastor Brett McKoy, whose Maryland church hosts the broadcast.

Mastriano was supposed to be present, but was under COVID quarantine at the time. Hixon says that in light of that, they wanted the group to serve as Mastriano's "surrogate":

What we have here is the introduction of an army. This is what our King is endeavoring to do — especially on this battlefield we call the United States. This is what we are here for. ... We are all on the front lines. We are aware of what's happening in this country ... that's why we're here, talking about the Mountains of Dominion.

A time to "break the bonds"

Those around Mastriano and his campaign — from Abildness to the Patriots Arise conferees, the Shofar Army and Prophet Julie Green — see themselves as entering a future where the temporal meets the supernatural.

When God is ready, they believe, the heavens will open and angelic forces allied with Christians of the right sort will battle the demonic forces of Satan to the end. This apocalyptic vision drives their support for Mastriano.

Those around Mastriano believe that when God is ready, angelic forces allied with Christians of the right sort will battle demonic forces to the end.

There is always some tension, in this domain of Christianity, between what people believe may be imminent and what may turn out to be a long way off. Regardless of the timing, they have no doubt about God's intentions, and about their commitment to carry them out.

Abildness made this clear in her keynote on the second day of Patriots Arise, when she revealed an experience she had on the Gettysburg battlefield. God had called her there, she said, because he was ready to answer a general's 150-year-old prayer. She and members of her apostolic network found themselves "in a portal where the general had prayed."

"We realized heaven is watching," she said, and that "we are joining heaven. We are joining the people of the ages in this prayer." The time was coming, she said, to "break the bonds" with "a government that is not leading the way they should."

"We realized that heaven is with us."

Mastriano himself declared, later that day, "We will win in November, and my God will make it so."

Read more on the rising force of Christian nationalism:

From the Pilgrims to QAnon: Christian nationalism is the "asteroid coming for democracy"

Christian nationalism drove Jan. 6: Now it's embraced the Big Lie, and wants to conquer America

How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

By FREDERICK CLARKSON

Frederick Clarkson is a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/doug-mastriano/

doug Mastriano caught on video praying for MAGA to 'seize the power' during the days leading up to Jan. 6

Meaghan Ellis

A clip of a prayer led by Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano is now circulating online.

According to Rolling Stone, the prayer meeting is said to have

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rww -->

Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer offers a guide to the “rouges’ gallery of religious zealots, election deniers and militia types surrounding Doug Mastriano’s gubernatorial campaign. The guide includes short bios of Abby Abildness, Grant Clarkson, Jenna Ellis, James Emery, Sean Feucht, Michael Flynn, Francine and Allen Fosdick, Julie Green, Vishal Jetnarayan, Sam Lazar, Mike “MyPillow Guy” Lindell, Scott Nagle, Jeremy Oliver, Ivan Raiklin, Toni Shuppe, Andrew Torba, and Steve Turley.

Here is a taste of Bunch’s “Prophets, ‘Pizzagates,’ and an Oath Keeper“:

It’s now September — that time of year when political candidates start changing their colors weeks ahead of the autumn leaves. None more so than Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who in his right-wing media hits — the Christian nationalist continues to shun mainstream outlets, with the help of his goon squad — has tried to pooh-pooh the notion that he’s a dangerous extremist. This despite the fact that new evidence of his extremism — his fetish for the Confederacy, for example — keeps popping up.

Rather than relying Mastriano’s words, maybe it’s time to judge the retired Army colonel by the company he keeps. Let’s take stock of the rogues’ gallery of self-styled prophets, election deniers and militia types that Mastriano chooses to associate with, and ask yourself if the founding state of American democracy has ever seen a campaign quite like this.

Here (in alphabetical order) is a brief field guide to a few of the key players in Mastriano World:

Abby Abildness: The state director of the Pennsylvania Congressional Prayer Caucus and director of the Global Apostolic Prayer Network, Abildness is a key state leader in the Christian nationalist movement that loosely affiliates under the banner of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) a group that seeks extremist Christian domination over government. She’s also a lobbyist in Harrisburg, where she’s forged ties with key 2020 election deniers like State Sen. Cris Dushand Mastriano. Mastriano also was filmed hugging Abildness at a July event built around a revisionist Christian history of William Penn and Pennsylvania’s founding.

I would add a recent tour of the Pennsylvania state senate chamberto Bunch’s biography of Abildness

Filed Under: Way of ImprovementTagged With: 2022 elections, Christian Right, Doug Mastriano, evangelicals and politics, Mastriano, New Apostolic Reformation, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania politics, Pizzagate

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neo confed trms talk to monument defenders; pix in reb uniform

Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, defends appearing in a photo wearing a Confederate uniform: “All the leaders of the Confederacy were Democrats. … The founders of the KKK were the Democrats.”

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Charles Homans @ The New York Times: The Extremely Online Rise of Doug Mastriano.
rww

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mma

9 22

newly unearthed videos, commentator Toni Shuppe claimed that Pizzagate is “absolutely real. It is 100% real,” and praised QAnon as “a very valuable resource.” Shuppe has been mentioned as a potential secretary of state pick for Mastriano, who would have the power to appoint the position if he becomes Pennsylvania governor.

Shuppe also shared numerous 9/11 conspiracy theories on Facebook from a “trusted friend,” including the false claim about Flight 93: “Never forget that eye witnesses and first responders reported no plane wreckage or bodies in the Pennsylvania field where flight 93 supposedly crashed.” (In a separate post, Shuppe claimed that 9/11 was “a false flag.”)

Shuppe is the co-founder and CEO of Audit The Vote PA, a Pennsylvania-based organization that’s dedicated to falsely claiming that the 2020 vote was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Shuppe also appears as a supposed expert on right-wing outlets like One America News and Steve Bannon’s War Room and writes a Substack newsletter.

The Pennsylvania-based publication LNP | LancasterOnline in May examined Audit The Vote PA’s work and found that it “was rife with errors and speculation and that its methodology was deeply flawed, mistakes that undermine its conclusion and make its findings unreliable.”

Shuppe is a key ally of Mastriano in Pennsylvania because she shares the Republican candidate’s focus on falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen. The two are also both January 6 insurrectionists.

Among his many connections to Shuppe, Mastriano featured her in an endorsement video where she praised him as “the only [state] senator first of all that was willing to admit that the 2020 election was not completely free and fair, on the up and up.” She also did a November 2021 fundraising video for him. Additionally, Mastriano has appeared at events with Shuppe -- including his campaign kickoff -- and shared her election denying work.

Mastriano and Shuppe are so tied together that HuffPost and The Philadelphia Inquirer mentioned her as Mastriano's potential pick for Pennsylvania secretary of state, a non-elected position that’s appointed by the governor. Mastriano has refused to say who he would nominate if he wins.

Shuppe has repeatedly promoted QAnon propaganda online, including using the movement’s hashtag “WWG1WGA.” (Mastriano is also a QAnon supporter.)

Media Matters found additional examples of Shuppe promoting conspiracy theories on her Facebook page, which she promotes through her Substack.

Shuppe promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories, including about Flight 93. On September 11, 2020, Shuppe shared numerous 9/11 conspiracy theories in a Facebook post. She wrote: “This is not my original post and I won't be debating any of this. I am simply sharing info from a trusted friend.” The claims in Shuppe's post included:

“Never forget that eye witnesses and first responders reported no plane wreckage or bodies in the Pennsylvania field where flight 93 supposedly crashed.”
“Never forget that no video has ever been released showing a plane hitting the pentagon despite having 85 external cameras that could have captured the footage.”
“Never forget that at least 7 of the 19 'hijackers' are still alive and the FBI has still not updated its list. At least 5 are listed as connected to US military institutions.”

She also wrote in a separate Facebook post: “It is my opinion that 9/11 was also a false flag staged in order to pull the US into a war against Iraq.”

Media Matters previously noted that Shuppe shared a meme claiming that 9/11 was a “distraction” from a “gold heist."

Shuppe: “I do believe that the idea of Pizzagate, what is happening there is absolutely real. It is 100% real.” In a July 30, 2020, Facebook video, Shuppe endorsed Pizzagate, the QAnon-linked conspiracy theory that prominent politicians have been trafficking children, including through the D.C.-based pizzeria Comet Ping Pong. In 2016, a Pizzagate conspiracy theorist opened fire at the restaurant.

Shuppe said: “I do believe that the idea of Pizzagate, what is happening there is absolutely real. It is 100% real that it's happening. Did it happen in the basement of Comet Ping Pong pizza? I don't know. I don't know all the details, but it is happening."[fbk vid]

SHUPPE: There's all kind of controversy about Pizzagate and Wayfair and all that stuff that can't really be happening. I know you don't — I don't want to believe that. I didn't want to believe it either. And what you need to understand is you got to learn how to think outside the box. Like I — I do believe that the idea of Pizzagate, what is happening there is absolutely real. It is 100% real that it's happening. Did it happen in the basement of Comet Ping Pong pizza? I don't know. I don't know all the details, but it is happening and you need to understand a little bit about how it happens so that you can be educated, you can educate your kids and we can stop this.

Shuppe said she follows QAnon and considers it “a very valuable resource.” Shuppe mentioned QAnon in a September 23, 2020, video that discussed child trafficking issues. Shuppe said she doesn’t “don't know if I consider myself a QAnon -- I follow the movement.” She then defended QAnon supporters and said: “I think it's actually a very valuable resource."[vid]

SHUPPE: I don't know if I consider myself a QAnon -- I follow the movement. If you're not familiar with it, just Google it, look into it, or ask somebody that you trust who's following it objectively and not just blindly believing everything that's blasted out from the movement. That's the biggest misconception, what the media is trying to get everybody to think that is that it's all far right-wing extremists, KKK, white supremist, crazy people. And that's really not what it is at all, in my view. I think if you look at it with an open mind, objectively, with a healthy skepticism and you question the information, you don't just blindly take it. “And this is what's happening. This must be true." But you actually use your brain and you question the information that they're putting out, I think it's actually a very valuable resource.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/facebook-video-doug-mastriano-thanked-pro-confederate-armed-men-supposedly

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rww

carter Walker @ Lancaster Online: ‘Flow from the pulpit:’ The LifeGate church members providing security to Doug Mastriano.
John Fea @ Current: Doug Mastriano’s connection to the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation movement.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/insurrectionist-doug-mastriano-constitutionally-disqualified-2657375251/

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/gop-nominee-particularly-alarming-views/

2018 vid

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an 8 22 took 5th?

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified Tuesday before the panel, while Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano walked out of his own deposition after just 15 minutes following a dispute over his demand to record the meeting, and Guardian reporter Hugo Lowell discussed the latest developments on MSNBC's "Way Too Early."

"They spoke to Pompeo and spoke to Mastriano yesterday trying to get more details in separate lines of inquiry," Lowell said. "The deposition with Pompeo was aimed at the 25th Amendment discussions that happened off of Jan. 6. Mastriano was more about the days and weeks leading up to the Capitol attack, as well as the day of Jan. 6 itself." [25th amend]

Lowell said the investigation was gaining momentum after the public hearings shook loose new evidence and compelled witnesses to cooperate.

"You're seeing the committee fan out and investigate a number of different lines of inquiry through the month of August," he said. "This has been the busiest month so far, at least for their investigation, which is saying something when they have been doing this for 11 months. That's really significant. A lot is teeing up to their interim report they want to release in mid-September when the House comes back into session. They hold series of hearings around the release of that report, so I think they're trying to do a lot of housekeeping, trying to tie together loose ends at the moment."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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8 15 22 an

In six key battleground states that played a decisive role in the 2020 presidential race, Republican candidates who have openly embraced former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" have won nearly two-thirds of the GOP nominating contests for positions with power over state and federal elections, a potentially seismic threat to democracy.

According to a Washington Post analysis published Monday, 54 of 87 Republican nominees for key posts in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have denied the legitimacy of President Joe Biden's 2020 election victory.

"Had those candidates held power in 2020, they would have had the electoral clout to try something that the current officeholders refused: overturning the vote and denying Biden the presidency," the Post notes. "Whether they could have succeeded in practice is a matter of vigorous debate among scholars, who cite the potential for court challenges and other means of upholding the results."

"But the experts agree on one thing: A close presidential contest that comes down to the outcome in states where officials are willing to try to thwart the popular will could throw the country into chaos," the newspaper adds. "It would potentially delay the result, undermine confidence in the democratic system, and sow the seeds of civil strife on a scale even greater than what the nation saw on January 6, 2021."

Trump, who is gearing up for a possible 2024 run as he's under criminal

The notion that Biden was elected illegitimately is*Post* points out, "The predilection among Republican primary voters toward candidates who deny the result of the last election extends well beyond Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona—three states that together accounted for 47 electoral votes in 2020, more than enough to flip the last election to Trump."

Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote in a blog post earlier this month that "the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Trump has been pushed by powerful politicians, starting with Trump himself."

"But it may be leaders closer to home who have the greatest ability to affect the popularity of election denial among the people of their state," he added.

One prominent Republican officeholder that is actively boosting election deniers is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a possible 2024 presidential contender.

The Orlando Sentinel reported last week that DeSantis is "set to appear at rallies for Pennsylvania GOP governor's candidate Doug Mastriano, Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake, and U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, all of whom have denied Biden's win and falsely claimed election fraud.

DeSantis was one of the first Republicans to suggest state legislatures could overrule voters to choose Trump.

"Appearing on Fox News on November 5, two days after the election," the Sentinel observed, "he said 'presidential electors are done by the legislators and the schemes they create and the framework. And if there's departure from that, if they're not following law, if they're ignoring the law, then they can provide remedies as well.'"

The Republican Party's elevation of fervent election deniers—often with the support of dark money—in battleground states and nationwide has dramatically raised the stakes of the upcoming November contests, given that they could usher into power officials willing to subvert the democratic process to secure their desired outcome.

Wisconsin offers an illustrative example of November's implications. As the New York Times reported Monday, "The governor's race this fall, along with a pivotal State Supreme Court contest next spring, will decide whether Republicans can solidify their grip on the swing state and remake its voting laws."

"Nowhere in the country have Republican lawmakers been more aggressive in their attempts to seize a partisan edge than in Wisconsin," the Times noted. "Having gerrymandered the Legislature past the point that it can be flipped, they are now pushing intensely to take greater control over the state's voting infrastructure ahead of the 2024 presidential contest."

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ward worked with DM?

'Manna from heaven': Legal wonks react to fake elector scheme emails

Sarah K. Burris and Raw Story July 26, 2022

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that previously unknown communications between staff on Donald Trump's campaign revealed the work outside advisers were doing to try and overturn the election.

What's being called a "gift to prosecutors" proves both federal and state crimes, according to former impeachment lawyer Norm Eisen on Twitter.

In one email, internal advisers admitted that the "alternate slate of electors" were actually "fake electors." Many of the fake electors were subpoenaed by the Justice Department. The details that it was known that the electors were "fake" is "manna from heaven," said former New York Counsel Maya Wiley.

It was a sentiment shared by NYU Law School Professor Ryan Goodman. He highlighted the piece of the report that said they'd simply send the "'fake' electoral votes to Pence so that 'someone' in Congress can make an objection when they start counting vote, and start arguing that the 'fake' votes should be counted."

That almost happened with Sen. Ron Johnson's (R-WI) staffer reaching out to Mike Pence's aides to see if he could hand the fake electors to the vice president. Johnson has been asked about the details....

in a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” adding a smiley face emoji."

Maggie Haberman

@maggieNYT

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https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2022/07/26/arizona-fake-electors-electoral-college-jack-wilenchik-kelli-ward/10156607002/

media reports on Tuesday again highlighted (Or should we say lowlighted?) the sinister scheme of Arizona’s fake Electoral College electors and their part in trying to gut the democratic process and stage a coup to keep Donald Trump in office.

This time around, according to The New York Times, the “often slapdash efforts of advisers” to Trump included the names of reactionary Republican notables like Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward and attorney Jack Wilenchik.

The report quotes an email from Wilenchik to Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn that reads, “We (Arizona Republicans) would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted.”

Imagine that.

Blatantly admitting that the electors were “fake.”

Wilenchik said 'fake'? He meant to say ...

Kind of damning, don’t you think?

Perhaps that is why the report noted that Wilenchik sent a follow-up email saying, “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” followed by a smiley face emoji.

wilenchik also pointed out Ward’s part in the scheme, saying she wanted to keep the fake electors plot “under wraps until Congress counts the vote Jan. 6th (so we can try to ‘surprise’ the Dems and media with it) – I tend to agree with her.”

We already know from previous reporting that Ward and her husband, Michael, received grand jury subpoenas from the Department of Justice regarding their involvement in the fake electors operation.

Fake electors should pay a price for this

And we’ve known about the coup attempt almost from the beginning.

All of which might cause some to wonder why these latest revelations even need to be reported?

===

hmmn

https://www.witf.org/2022/07/27/gop-candidate-doug-mastriano-called-point-person-in-electoral-college-gambit-but-some-republican-alternate-electors-have-doubts/

some state Republicans are questioning a New York Times report that gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano was a “point person” in plans to give Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes to Donald Trump. The story came as news to some who participated in the venture, which involved creating an alternate slate of electors who would give Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes to Donald Trump.

Mastriano has previously been subpoenaed by a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol, in part because of his efforts to reverse the election results. (He tweeted, for example, that the legislature could choose its own Electoral College delegates if the vote was fraudulent.)

But Mastriano “had nothing to do with any of this,” said Sam DeMarco, who chairs the Republican Committee of Allegheny County. “I never saw him, never heard from him. To the best of my knowledge, he was never copied in” during discussions about the effort.

Such slates were assembled in a number of states where Republicans hoped to overturn Election Day wins for Joe Biden by submitting slates of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College. Tuesday’s Times story, based on emails of Trump supporters involved in that effort, reports that the effort was wide-ranging but also often “desperate and often slapdash.”

trump’s team “appointed a ‘point person’ in seven states to help organize those electors who were willing to sign their names to false documents. In Pennsylvania, that point person was Douglas V. Mastriano,” the paper reported.

But the Times documented signs that Mastriano had doubts about the plan’s legality. It quoted an email from one organizer of the effort, former One America News correspondent Christina Bobb, in which she urged that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani talk to Mastriano “about legalities of what they are doing. Electors want to be reassured that the process is *legal*.”

An earlier media report, published last week in the online political journal Politico, also features an email from Bobb that links Mastriano to the effort. It reported that “Bobb wrote [that] Trump’s team was waiting to hear from the office of state Sen. Doug Mastriano … to get a room for the alternate electors” in Harrisburg, where Mastriano represents Adams County and adjoining areas.

Finding space in the capitol was desirable because state law requires Electoral College voters to meet in “the seat of government” to formally cast their electoral votes. The electors supporting Joe Biden did so in the Capitol building on Dec. 14.

Mastriano’s campaign, which frequently ignores media requests, did not immediately respond to an inquiry from WESA late Tuesday afternoon. But if Mastriano did try to secure a space for the electors, the effort seems to have failed. Even as the Biden electors ratified the outcome, the Trump electors met at the offices of Harrisburg Republican lobbying firm Quantum Communications. There they signed their names to what they called a “conditional vote.” The Trump slate, they said, would only be counted if court action threw the Biden slate out.

“This was in no way an effort to usurp or contest the will of the Pennsylvania voters,” said state Republican Party vice-chair Bernie Comfort in a statement.

via Twitter

In this screengrab posted by an online account that’s been identifying people present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Adams), highlighted in a yellow box, appears to walk with a group of demonstrators parallel to the east steps of the Capitol building.

In any case, Mastriano was not among the 20 would-be electors who signed on to the slate.

Kevin Harley, a Quantum staffer who said he signed the slate when other Republicans didn’t appear, said Mastriano did not take part in that process. “I can say he didn’t show up at any point that day.”

Harley’s boss and fellow alternate elector Charlie Gerow agreed. Gerow said he was called the weekend before the electors met, because they needed a place to gather. (Gerow said that the “seat of government” requirement could apply to anyplace inside of Harrisburg.)

Gerow said he was only “tangentially aware” of the slate effort prior to that point, but “If [Mastriano] played a role, I’m completely unaware of it. It wasn’t in any way apparent on that day.”

Gerow competed with Mastriano for the Republican gubernatorial nomination this past spring: So did another alternate elector, Lou Barletta.

To be sure, Mastriano has actively undertaken efforts to contest the vote count in Pennsylvania. In November 2020, he provided a stage in the form of a Senate hearing for Giuliani to offer up fallacious claims about election fraud. And Mastriano also sponsored buses to take supporters to Washington D.C. on January 6th for the rally which spawned an attack on the US Capitol. Mastriano himself attended, though he has said he never entered the Capitol itself.

But DeMarco said he was mystified by claims that Mastriano was a player in the alternate elector effort. “To the best of my recollection,” he said, “I never had any contact with Doug Mastriano, or saw his name on anything at all.”

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gab ad?

https://www.mediamatters.org/gab/doug-mastriano-paid-campaign-consulting-gab-social-media-haven-violent-extremists-and-white

an 7 222 no lnx twt

In the 2022 midterms, two statewide races in Pennsylvania that are being closely watched are the U.S. Senate race — which finds Republican nominee Mehmet Oz, a.k.a. Dr. Oz, up against Democratic Lt. Gov John Fetterman — and a gubernatorial race in which Democratic State Attorney General Josh Shapiro is hoping to defeat far-right State Sen. Doug Mastriano, a “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theorist, Christian nationalist and QAnon ally who is even to the right of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Shapiro has been warning that Mastriano’s views go way beyond conservatism; he is against democracy itself — a view that Never Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter obviously shares.

In an article published by The Bulwark on July 5, Carpenter lays out some of the ways in which Mastriano’s platform is overtly anti-democracy.

“By now, political junkies are familiar with the rucksack of election-denying baggage that Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano schleps around,” Carpenter explains. “He organized a faux post-election legal hearing for Rudy Giuliani in Gettysburg; he asked Congress to deny Pennsylvania’s electors; he spent thousands of campaign funds busing people to the Capitol on Jan. 6th; he was filmed crossing police barricades; some of his supporters were arrested for their activities that day, and he visited Arizona to observe its disastrous Cyber Ninjas audit in hopes of replicating it in Pennsylvania.”

Carpenter continues, “Those are only the highlights of what Mastriano has done in the past. But what about the future? People like Mastriano are never going to let Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss go. If anything, Trump’s ‘Stop the Steal’ lies provide a pretext for actions intended to ensure MAGA types win in future elections.”

The Never Trumper goes on to cite specific elements of the “election takeover plan” that Mastriano has in mind for Pennsylvania.

Carpenter warns, “His platform includes the following: loosening restrictions on poll watchers to make it easier to challenge votes; repealing vote-by-mail laws; appointing a fellow 2020 election-denier to be secretary of state who could enable him to decertify every voting machine ‘with a stroke of a pen’; forcing all Pennsylvania voters to re-register; and defunding the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.”

As a Pennsylvania state senator, Carpenter observes, Mastriano has “promoted legislation to ban dropboxes and private funding for elections, as well as to eliminate ‘no excuse’ mail-in voting and the permanent absentee voter list.”

“Mastriano’s potential powers as governor far exceed that of a state senator when it comes to controlling Pennsylvania’s elections,” Carpenter notes. “Unlike many other states where the secretary of state is an elected position, in Pennsylvania, the governor gets to make an appointment for the position. Mastriano already has his pick in mind, and although he hasn’t provided a name, he has teased that with this appointment and his powers, he could ‘decertify every machine in the state with a stroke of a pen via the secretary of state.’”

Carpenter points out that Mastriano’s proposal to “reset the voter rolls and force all of Pennsylvania’s 9 million voters to submit new voter applications to re-register to vote” would violate “federal voting laws.”

“But that doesn’t deter Mastriano from campaigning on it and may not prevent Gov. Mastriano from trying it — and creating a massive tangle of legal problems in the face of looming election deadlines,” Carpenter observes. “Where would those legal challenges be decided? Most likely, in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. And for that, Mastriano has another idea in mind in case things don’t go his way. If the state’s highest court doesn’t do as he pleases, he thinks it should be defunded — which is something he’s called for after the 2020 election.”

A USA Today/Suffolk poll released in mid-June showed Shapiro leading Mastriano by only 4%, which is within the poll’s margin of error.

“Only a few months ago, Mastriano was considered a longshot to win the nomination, but under the radar, he cultivated a devoted grass roots following, largely propelled by social media, and overtook his opponents in the primary by an overwhelming margin,” Carpenter notes. “He ended up winning by a walloping 24 points. Mastriano did it all by riding on Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Why? Because he sees a path for Republicans like him to win, no matter what, up ahead. Don’t be surprised if he ends up doing exactly what he said. He’s not hiding his plan, after all. He’s campaigning on it!”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/both-parties-worried-doug-mastriano/

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/pennsylvanias-gop-gubernatorial-nominee-is-a-christian-nationalist-who-associates-with-ar-15-fetishists-historian/

no lnx

in the swing state of Pennsylvania, Republicans have a nominated a gubernatorial candidate who is even to the right of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who is competing with Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, is way beyond conservative — he’s extreme.

History professor Thomas Lecaque, who teaches at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, lays out some reasons why Mastriano is so dangerous in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on May 31. The Republican who may be Pennsylvania’s next governor, Lecaque warns, is afar-right Christian nationalist and an “insurrectionist” who associates with AR-15 fetishists.

“Mastriano’s résumé hits all the main points of today’s bog-standard MAGA candidate template,” Lecaque explains. “He’s an insurrectionist who ginned up enthusiasm for the attempted coup as a featured speaker for Jericho March’s rally in December 2020 before participating — by his own admission — in the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally on January 6, 2021…. Mastriano also has an increasingly familiar religious profile.”

Lecaque continues,“He has described the Gulf War, in which he served in 1991, as a ‘holy’ war — a belief reflected in his bizarre 2002 graduate thesis, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Sphinx.’ He has attended events of the Charismatic Christian dominionist movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. He shares anti-Muslim memes, hangs out with militia members to guard Confederate statues at Gettysburg, and constantly hits all the main themes of Christian nationalist discourse in his speeches and other activities.”

Moreover, Lecaque adds, Mastriano “associates with an extremist sect that places special emphasis on America’s most notorious gun.”

The “extremist sect” that Lecaque is referring to is the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary Church, a.k.a. Rod of Iron Ministries,founded by the Rev. Hyung Jin Moon — who is the youngest son of the late Unification Church founder Rev. Sun Myung Moon and also goes by Sean Moon. And the “notorious gun” is the semiautomatic AR-15, which was used in two mass shootings in May: one in Buffalo, New York on May 10, and the other in Uvalde, Texas on May 24.

“Rod of Iron continues the Unification Church’s tradition of apocalypticism, but adds to this framework beliefs derived a variety of sources that include, most importantly, the rhetoric, imagery, and ideology of both QAnon and Christian nationalism,” Lecaque observes. “The younger Moon wrote a constitution for the messianic kingdom he and his followers believe will replace the United States following its collapse…. Members of the church perform ceremonies wearing bullet crowns and carrying AR-15s.”

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Mastriano, Lecaque notes, has been “a speaker at Rod of Iron events.” According to Lecaque, Mastriano and Moon “are fellow travelers not only in promoting far-right Christian nationalist politics, but also, in being January 6th insurrectionists.”

“Moon reportedly stormed the Capitol with over 50 of his followers,” Lecaque writes. “But the most important connection between Mastriano and Moon is their shared belief in an apocalyptic religion that imagines the present moment as a battleground between good and evil at the advent of the End Times. Rev. Sean Moon derived his church’s unusual name from Revelation 2:27, ‘he shall rule them with a rod of iron.’ He takes the rod to be the AR-15.”

The Book of Revelation part is important. In far-right evangelical fundamentalism, the Book of Revelation in the New Testament is an obsession — and it fits in with their End Times theology.

“The Book of Revelation — also known as the Apocalypse of John — is the final book of the Bible and the place where Moon came to his beliefs about the cosmic significance of the AR-15,” Lecaque observes. “What he and other cultists should consider is that the apocalypse they desire might reveal a different deity than they expect.”

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