The-Ave.US

Douglas V. Mastriano (photo, left) is a retired Army colonel with big political ambitions and small understanding of democracy.

Born in 1964, son of a Navy lifer, he graduated from a tiny Baptist college in Pennsylvania (info here) and received an Army commission at age 22. (His bio — read it here — doesn’t say so, but he must have been an ROTC student.) Serving primarily in Europe and Washington D.C., but also in Iraq and Afghanistan, he retired after 30 years of service, and then immediately began pursuing media and political careers.

Before delving into that, let’s back up a little. While in the military, Mastriano acquired four master’s degrees, all of them in military specialties, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of New Brunswick — a respectable, but small, Canadian institution (8,300 students, >900 grad students; info here) — and wrote a biography of Sergeant Alvin York. So, he has some minor academic credentials, all of them in military matters, which earned him an instructor post at the U.S. Army War College, but he’s definitely not mainstream academia. (Nor could he be, with his closed-minded and partisan biases; see below.)

(Update: Mastriano’s scholarship forming the basis of his Ph.D. and book deal have come under scathing scrutiny, see story here.)

Less than a year after retiring from the military, Mastriano ran for Congress in a safe GOP district, finishing 4th in a crowded primary field, and began seeking appearances on conservative radio and TV shows. The following year, in 2019, he won a special election to a vacant state senate seat in a district that last elected a Democrat in 1932.

In his first year as a legislator, he sought to establish a high profile and made himself into a poster boy for the usual rightwing nutcase causes: Anti-gay, anti-Muslim, a “reopen” advocate and anti-masker. He blamed the Notre Dame Cathedral fire on “Islamic terrorists” (it was accidentally started by workmen); and, last week, presided over a “hearing” on Pennsylvania’s election results, which was in no way an honest inquiry, but rather a grandstanding of Trump’s baseless claims that massive voting fraud stole that state’s electoral votes from him. This got Mastriano flagged by Twitter for spreading disinformation.

So, here you have a guy steeped in military culture and rightwing ideology, who has some education and has written a book, but isn’t much of a thinker. He isn’t fussy about truth or proof, and while he probably has a good grasp of the top-down authority structure of  military hierarchies, his understanding of 9th-grade civics is wanting. To wit:

“Saturday morning, Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano — who Trump has taken to retweeting recently — added to the state Republican voices attempting to challenge the outcome of the election in a series of tweets. Without citing any proof, Mastriano claimed, ‘there is mounting evidence that the PA presidential election was compromised. If this is the case, under Article II, Section 1.2 of the US Constitution, the state legislature has the sole authority to direct the manner of selecting delegates to the Electoral College,’ he said in one of his tweets. ‘Therefore, we are introducing a Resolution to exercise our obligation and authority to appoint delegates to the Electoral College,’ he said.”

(Read story here.) In other words, Mastriano is making himself a zealous party to an attempt to overthrow our system of government and install a strongman who was just voted out of office by the American people. Which, by the way, isn’t going anywhere; because even if the legislature passes it, the Democratic governor will veto it.

This guy is of a piece with the mentality that pervades today’s Republican Party. A graduate of a Bible college, like many other Republicans, he thinks he’s doing God’s work. (The “Gott mitt uns” syndrome; if you don’t know what that is, look it up here. Some people refer to such people as “the Christian Taliban.”) Steeped in military culture, he has an authoritarian mindset; immersed in rightwing ideology, he’s bigoted, anti-democratic, and blows off doctors and health experts. What you have here is a plateful of hubris and arrogance combined with intellectual dishonesty. That’s all too typical of what Republicans are today, and is what you’ll get by voting for them.

Finally, Trump lost. Period. The people have spoken. The American people voted him out of office, and had every right to do so. I’m a veteran myself, and I respect Mr. Mastriano’s service, but his present attitude is extremely disrespectful to Pennsylvanians who chose Biden, and disrespects everything America stands for. Shame on him.

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