They don’t want you to see, hear, or know what they stand for. They just want you to vote for them. And govern you.
A CNN reporter says “midterm campaigns, many of them Republican, are widely shutting out local papers, local TV stations and national reporters” from their rallies (read story here; see updated story here).
In Pennsylvania, staff for a GOP candidate for governor who claims to speak for God have mugshots of journalists at the check-in desk for campaign events — with instructions to not let them in.
That candidate is Doug Mastriano (photo, left; profile here), whose events resemble revival meetings as he tries to whip up religious fervor for gun rights, opposing vaccines, QAnon conspiracy theories, and of course Trump’s election lies. He calls Biden’s election victory “persecution and oppression.” (Read story here.)
Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist (profile here), says “the fact that Mastriano’s campaign did not want press there should be a red flag and a huge alert for every Pennsylvanian.”
And well it should. Mastriano is a Christian nationalist, whose “adherents want to see Christianity ‘fused with American civic life’ — from education to business to government — and are ‘very comfortable with violence and militarism in order to essentially defend this idea of a Christian nation,’” says an Indiana University sociologist. Those views conflict with First Amendment separation of church and state.
But it’s not just in Pennsylvania, or by a candidate who says his critics are God and describes opponents are evil.
An Associated Press reporter says, “Many candidates for leading offices — often Republicans — are abandoning the time-honored tradition of debating their rivals before Election Day.” One example: Herschel Walker, who’s running for Senate in Georgia.
Unless you attend campaign rallies, and most of us don’t, the press is what connects us to candidates. The press informs us of what candidates are likely to do in office, beyond what the candidates themselves are willing to say, which often is very little. Some won’t give interviews.
Would you sign a blank check and hand it to a stranger? That’s what you’re doing if you vote for a candidate who won’t speak to reporters, or let them watch and here his campaign rallies. In a democracy, it’s hard to imagine anything more dangerous.