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Doug Mastriano and J.R. Majewski are two of the most visible QAnon-supporting politicians running for government in the upcoming mid-terms. We take a look at them with the help of Ryan Briggs of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Music by Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 205 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Q-Pilled Midterms episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
As you may know, we've been covering QAnon since 2018, when most Americans had no idea what QAnon even was, and our podcast was covering, at the time, An obscure conspiracy theory embraced by a small but growing number of people.
Fast forward 205 main episodes, and we're dealing with a very different reality.
Heading into the 2022 midterm elections, we're forced to contend with a slew of queue-pilled candidates, including multiple incumbent congresspeople.
So this week, we're lifting our wary eyes to several newcomers to the scene, including J.R.
Majewski, which That still sounds made up to me, but fine.
He is in Ohio and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
For help with the latter, our guest is Ryan Briggs, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who has covered Mastriano in the past.
But before we jump into all of that, you should come and check us out perform the QA podcast live this very month of October.
Now, maybe too late to check us out in San Diego on October 2nd.
It also might be too late, not sure, but Berkeley on the 4th.
However, Phoenix, Arizona on the 6th.
We know you're in Arizona, folks.
We know you're there.
We know you're dealing with pilled people.
We promise Jake will be securing the perimeter with tactical aplomb.
Shot collars so you can't leave.
Oh, no, we meant the other way around, like you protect them from bad people.
Oh.
Oh, not protect them from themselves.
Jake will be infringing on your human rights.
Apparently, not sure.
Per usual, that's what you're paying for.
Come check us out at the Crescent Ballroom.
Then Denver, Colorado on the 8th.
Austin, Texas on the 10th.
That's going to be amazing.
Can't wait.
Brad Abrams is going to be our guest and he's preparing a little segment For that little stint.
And then finally, we'll be back home, kicking our feet up, probably not even making it to the venue, but still come out on the 18th of October in Los Angeles, California.
Tickets can be purchased at tour.QAnonAnonymous.com.
Jake, you're going to be performing the sequel to the award-winning story that you did for the first three dates.
What was the title there?
The title of that story was, In Space, No One Can Hear You Marjorie Taylor Scream.
Wow.
Okay.
And so, the second one is coming out, I hear.
Yeah, the second one.
The tagline from Aliens is, This Time It's War, so I'm gonna have to find a funny spin on that to make it QAnon somehow, so.
Yeah.
It could be about your writing, and it would be, This Time It's Poor.
This Time... That's great.
So yes, I mean, Cats Out of the Bag story trilogy based on my favorite movie series.
And as some of you may know, the third installment takes place on a prison planet.
So that's going to be even more spectacular.
Yeah, we were chatting about that, and that should be very fun.
But I'm very excited about it.
It's very rare that I actually follow up on my threats to make some kind of trilogy, so... Yes, that's true.
That's true.
No leaving them hanging this time.
You're forced to.
Yeah, I'm forced to.
Management has intervened.
Alright, and Travis, tell the good people what you've got in store for them if they come to see us live.
Yeah, I'm going to be talking about the history and evolution of the reptilian alien lizard person conspiracy theory.
Its roots in both pulp fiction and occultism, because that's basically what happened.
It was just a made up story that was picked up by some occultists and then now millions of people believe it.
Fun stuff.
So yeah, come check it out.
And also, we will have like merch, exclusive tour merch for these dates.
And with that said, let's get running for office.
So yeah, midterms are coming up, which means another new slate of QAnon candidates.
The number of QAnon candidates used to be zero.
And then when it was one, I was like, oh, holy shit.
There is one guy out in Florida who is a QAnon follower who's running for office.
This is weird.
Now there are a bunch of them, including the two that are already in office.
So according to Alex Kaplan's QAnon candidate count, there are 15 QAnon congressional candidates who have secured a spot on the ballot this year.
There are also two QAnon gubernatorial candidates.
Those are in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Looking forward to that.
But today I'm going to be focusing on just two QAnon candidates, J.R.
Majewski from Ohio and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, who's running for governor there.
So first, I want to look at a recent story involving J.R.
Majewski.
He's the Republican congressional candidate running for Ohio's 9th district.
Majewski is running to unseat longtime Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur.
This is a seat that Republicans could have picked up, according to some analysis I read.
So the district was heavily gerrymandered by Republicans in 2011, and the incumbent has been serving since 1983.
So it could run on the idea of like, you know, Fresh blood in the House, but Republican voters in the district decided to choose the craziest person for the candidate in the primary.
So, looks like it might not go their way, at least according to the polls.
Now, first of all, I want to say that Boguski has blocked me on Twitter, even though I have never mentioned him or interacted with him one time.
That's very sus.
You know someone is kinda Q, you know, involved when they just seek out Travis View and block him in advance.
Yeah, just preemptively block me.
This is very strange.
You know, that wouldn't fly if you were elected.
Oh, okay.
Here we go.
Yeah, do it again.
There's precedence now.
He is extremely litigious.
I don't fully understand why the Constitution says that you have to unblock me on Twitter if you're a member of Congress, but I'm rolling with it and I will have my Jewish lawyer send you a threatening letter just like I did with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Now, why would we specifically say that about the lawyer?
He said that about himself, by the way.
He said that about himself, but that's a word they can use, you know, Travis?
It's like Jay-Z said in various rap musics.
It's like Jay-Z said in various rap musics, "Get you a Jew,"
you know?
If you want to...
Okay, alright.
Well, I've made it worse somehow by bringing it up.
Alright, yeah, he can say it, I guess.
I'm not offended.
I wasn't offended by what you said, Travis.
We do tend to make pretty good lawyers.
Not me, much to my parents' chagrin.
No, you would make an awful lawyer.
No offense.
I love you.
You're amazing in many other ways.
If you defended somebody, they would somehow be convicted of stuff they weren't even originally accused of.
I would be good at the performance aspect of it.
I would be good at appealing to the jury, but then they would check their notes and be like, wait a minute, this is all made up.
Majewski is a QAnon promoter.
At one point he even claimed that he believes everything that has been put out by Q and that Q is military intelligence.
I never, you know, like I said before, it's not that, um, it's not that I, I believe in it.
Um, I believe in everything that's been put out from Q. What I think is, like I've said before, I think there's been conflation between people that join or get involved.
They don't, Do their own due diligence.
They just, they, they think that they know they become arrogant.
And, you know, a lot of it has to do with the fact that there's these boards, you know, and these boards kind of propagate a certain mentality, a certain behaviors, and they manifest themselves in other people.
And then they start conflating with other, you know, schools of thought like follow the ball.
And then they, they twist and they smear, you know, what Q's trying to put out, which is military level intelligence, in my opinion.
And those two don't mix.
They have certain points where they're aligned, but they have totally different...
You know, intentions to certain degrees.
Wow.
I wonder where Fall of the Cabal was inspired.
Uh, yeah, the totally different thing.
Yeah.
I mean, it's funny is that this is, um, this is something that some QAnon followers like say a lot where it's like, oh no, the Q drops are pristine and perfect and flawless.
But it's those other QAnon followers who spin out their wild theories that make QAnon look bad.
Why can't it be both?
Majewski has also appeared on the QAnon show Red Pill 78 and talked about the Q-drops.
In addition to that, he painted a giant Trump 2024 sign on his lawn in blue, red, and white, and he showed it off on Fox News while wearing a shirt with a Q on it.
So he's majorly Q-pilled.
It's not an occasional subtle thing.
Well, I'm not entirely sure it's fair to call him a QAnon candidate yet, so hopefully you have more evidence to present.
Unsurprisingly, Majewski was at the Capitol on January 6th.
Now, I'm bringing him up today because he recently found himself embroiled in some controversy because of claims he made related to his military service.
In interviews, Majewski has repeatedly claimed that he was deployed to Afghanistan, such as this interview that he did.
Did you serve in Afghanistan?
Yes, I did.
How many tours?
One.
What year were you there?
What years?
2002-2003.
Wow, so you served right at the beginning.
2002, 2003.
Wow, so you served right at the beginning.
What was that experience like?
Tough, tough.
I don't like talking about my military experience.
Not that, not that we've said too much.
I just don't, I don't really like to, I really don't like to divulge a lot of things about the military because, you know, there, to me, you know, it was a, it was a tough time in life.
You know, the military wasn't easy, but in retrospect, it's one of the best decisions I've ever made.
So the claim that he was deployed to Afghanistan came to question after the Associated Press reviewed his military records.
And here's what the AP reported.
Military documents obtained by the Associated Press through a public records request tell a different story.
They indicate Majewski never deployed to Afghanistan, but instead completed a six-month stint helping to load planes at an airbase in Qatar, a longtime U.S.
ally that is a safe distance from the fighting.
Left like that, they had to kind of like rub it in.
It's like, oh, this guy was chilling out in a wealthy, friendly country that's like nowhere near where the shit was happening.
Yeah, I mean, it says a lot about who Majewski believes is listening to this or following him, that he doesn't feel comfortable saying, yeah, you know what?
I served, but I was really lucky.
I worked as an airfield technician or whatever, so I wasn't up on the front lines with the guys fighting.
I knew a lot of people who were.
You know, it's like, you still served, you're still a veteran, it just, to me it says something that you feel like you have to allude to the falsity that you were in combat and that it was, you know, it was really hard and I don't really like to talk about it all that much.
I think this is an issue that reaches across the aisle.
Candidates and or news anchors fucking lying about being in the military because this country worships the idea that you actually fought and killed other people so much that it's like, wow, that's going to really help my image publicly.
And it's so fucked up because I have friends who served who are like more than happy to tell you that like I was really lucky I worked on helicopters or I you know I was mostly at the base I didn't go to combat I lost some friends like that really fucking sucked but like I was you know safe for the most part you know I have a bunch of friends who are like you I'm more than happy to be honest about what their time was like when they served.
And so I always find it interesting of people that are, you know, it's like, what, somebody's not going to find out?
I mean, this is all like, you know, you can look this kind of stuff up.
That is the American promise, though.
You can switch towns, even if it's very close to yours, and lie about everything, including your name.
It sounds as though we have ourselves a case of stolen valor, but Majewski called a press conference to address the accusations.
And instead of, I guess, fessing up or whatever the truth is, he essentially claimed that he can't provide evidence of his deployments because they are classified.
Oh, okay.
In fact, the orders and the military records that I've been able to obtain from my personal files shows that all of my deployments are listed as classified.
This was a strategic and strategically placed excuse me to crush me and defame me with a fake hit piece.
These enemies of the truth did not bother to publish that.
The Air Force has explicitly stated there is no way for us to verify whether or not J.R.
Majewski served in Afghanistan during his deployment time frame in Qatar.
OK, so now we have to choose between is the United States shady enough to be doing this and or is this guy lying?
So the story is that he did.
No, of course not.
I don't think he did a.
Classified secret mission in Afghanistan.
And then once he got out, he just talked about it all the time.
And then, I mean, that doesn't sound plausible unless he's he's very bad at keeping secret information secret.
At the end of the day, it's just, uh, you know, you have to be like, no, you weren't cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like why are we even arguing over like, yeah, how violent, how violent was it?
Uh, you know, when, when you were over there, did you get to, did you get to pull the trigger and kill some baddies or, or are you a cuck?
Like, it's just like, I don't know, it's so sad, it's so sad, and you have to call this press conference.
And then it becomes a bigger thing, too, because it's like, oh, well, the fake media is doing this hit piece, you know, they didn't bother to include the truth, and so you're lumping in with your own lie, you know, this perpetuation of, you know, the misleading media, yadda yadda yadda yadda.
I think we could all agree, no matter what happened in Qatar, J.R.
Majewski is a huge loser.
Yeah, sounds like there are some immediate consequences for the revelation that Majewski misrepresented his military service.
The National Republican Congressional Committee initially planned a million dollar ad buy intended to boost Majewski's campaign, but they cut that entirely after these revelations.
So it sounds like the GOP just said, fuck this, I give up.
They're going to use that money elsewhere.
And they basically ceded that seat to the Democrats.
Now to turn our attention to Pennsylvania.
We're going to take a brief look at the career and campaign of gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.
In November, Mastriano will face off against his Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
But the reason we're looking at Mastriano is because he is definitely the most-pilled candidate running for governor.
In fact, he made over 50 tweets referencing QAnon before they were discovered by Media Matters and he deleted them all.
Coward.
Not a true believer, I guess.
He's like, as soon as he gets some heat for his QAnon hashtags, he says, never mind, I don't want to deal with that anymore.
Yeah, what would the Q team think, dude?
Sounds like you ain't got the backbone.
Yeah, man, your clearance revoked.
Holy shit!
Mastriato, he has a much more hardcore military background than Majewski does. He served in the army from
1986 to 2017 and he obtained the rank of colonel. Yeah, most of his
life basically and During his career. He mostly worked in military
intelligence, which again another red flag I gotta say this, you know
I think the government needs to do a better job of handling the intel officers it creates because he makes these people
like Michael Flynn in the comments.
And then once they get out of the service, the rest of us have to deal with these lunatics.
I don't know what it is about military intel that makes people just worse for society once they're once they're civilians.
So true.
But yeah, it's a problem.
The government fails to put them directly in a prison and then dismantle their entire operations.
That's true.
I call upon them to do so.
They need to MK Ultra them to just to make them, you know, adjust it back to society, to civilian society again.
And then arm the self-destruct button.
I would imagine that when you spend a decade in a, you know, military field that is driven by paranoia, speculation, and, you know... Baking, dot connecting, you know?
And dot-connecting and massively overfunded.
Also, you know, and pair that with, you know, there do be some sus, you know, people out in the world planning some bad shit.
I would imagine that your worldview is completely hijacked by that.
Yeah.
And that it is, you know, like a lot of people who serve, who come back, you know, it is hard to turn off.
And, you know, when you apply that to an intelligence sort of apparatus, I mean, I'm not surprised that this is the result in some cases.
Yeah, I mean, let's not forget that a lot of them are probably just going to be framing mentally disabled teenagers for the duration of their stint.
But yeah, I think it also just cooks your fucking brain, as does, you know, as do a lot of these institutions, so.
I mean casualties on casualties.
So Mastriana was a warrior and a scholar because he racked up advanced degrees like he was a trust fund kid with no direction in life.
In 1992, Mastriana received a master's degree in strategic intelligence from the Joint Intelligence College.
In 2001, he received another master's degree in air power theory from the Air University.
In 2002, he received yet another master's degree in military operational art and science from the Air Strategic Studies.
And how are they giving out masters in like a year?
It's just like a year-long program?
You get a master's degree?
Because all you read is Sun Tzu.
Right.
So that one was from the Air University School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.
In 2010, they received another master's degree in strategic studies from the United States Army College.
And in 2013, they finally got off his ass.
Finished his final thesis, his dissertation I guess, and he completed his PhD in history from the University of New Brunswick.
Oh god.
So we're talking about Dr. Mastriano?
Yes, Dr. Mastriano.
A PhD in history.
Even Travis can't challenge this.
This is an indictment of the entire educational system.
Dr. Mastriano sounds like the competition to like Chef Boyardee.
He's got his own can of ravioli.
While he was a major at Ayer University, Mastriano wrote a thesis titled The Civilian Putsch of 2018, debunking the myth of a civil military leadership rift.
In this thesis, Mastriano writes from the perspective of a military colonel like himself who is forced to hide out in a cave because a politically correct leader has taken over America and killed millions.
Weird little paranoid fiction.
So here's an early paragraph from that thesis.
I, Colonel Nathan H. Green, am writing this from a self-imposed exile in an isolated cavern in the George Washington National Forest near Lexington, Virginia.
I took refuge here shortly after the putsch occurred when the dictator, Benedict Aurelius, the radical, popular and charismatic third party leader, abolished the Constitution Dismissed Congress and compelled the President to resign.
While consolidating power, dictator Aurelius declared martial law and conducted a massive purge.
The purge went deep and impacted nearly every family in the nation, with millions perishing.
Dictator Aurelius' form of political correctness was then imposed upon the populace, with scores being sent to re-education camps to adapt their views to his.
Imagine reading this and instead of putting him into a cannon and shooting him into the sun, you give him his PhD.
You've clearly become smart, sir.
Years of education have paid off because your brain is working great.
The board is like, the one guy on the board is like, I don't know, Phil.
I mean, it's a little bit out there, don't you think?
And the other guy's like, well, I mean, this young man, it's clear that he's really got a penchant for creative writing.
I think we should nurture this.
I think we need more like him.
He's going to go on to do great things.
Maybe even run for office one day.
I don't know.
This guy kind of seems like a tapeworm in Tom Clancy's stool.
Let's go for it.
Maybe, maybe they'll do an episode on him on an obscure podcast about conspiracy theories.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't understand military education necessarily, but I understand how you could get a master's degree writing dystopian fiction about what happens when the military gets too woke.
It's not even that good.
There's not a ton of lore.
It's like, woke dictator gets into office, kills all the families, and, like, installs his woke agenda.
But that's okay, because everybody who's reading it and involved in that education is so fucking Cold War cooked that they're like, wow, what a great satire of communism and the threat that it poses.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
One of the good things about the thesis is that I think it does provide a peek into his worldview, and that's illustrated in the second passage that I have pulled from the thesis.
Two trends transformed the military, which occurred along the lines of a classic encirclement, the maneuver of choice to defeat an adversary.
On one flank, The foundational morality and traditions were under assault in what was called a culture war where America embraced relativistic morality.
The last institution to cling to the Judeo-Christian worldview was the military.
The advocates of political correctness saw this as a threat and compelled the military to adopt and promote moral relativism.
Until this occurred, the military was perceived as a dangerous, politically incorrect culture which stood in the way of a larger cultural transformational agenda.
The assault started with the insertion of homosexuality into the military.
Wow.
Dude, the military started to fall because a finger found its way into my butthole while I was getting a blowjob.
I mean, these people are so fucking stupid and anybody who looked over this and gave this guy anything but the door into a long solitary confinement for brain worms It is mind-boggling and I think it's, hey, this is perfect representation of everything I've been ranting about.
So fucking have at it, sir.
Mastriano, Mr. Fellow Italian, let's go.
So he does provide a little bit more lore in sort of like how America fell.
And I kind of want to talk about this thesis for the rest of the episode, but I'll provide just one last paragraph where he talks about a certain event that led to this.
I just read ahead and it says Pearl Harbor of Space!
What the fuck?
Go ahead.
Internationally, the U.S.
was paralyzed for six months by an attack called the Pearl Harbor of Space where adversaries destroyed our vital space assets while foreign automation hackers simultaneously launched a devastating cyber war against our computer networks.
As the country endeavored to recover from these assaults, the Sino-Russian alliance attacked America's vital interests abroad We're getting everybody in here!
I love to have vital interests abroad in like almost every country.
With massive Chinese offensives in Asia and the Pacific and a Russian Federation attack
into the Middle East, these setbacks corresponded with the creation of a UN army and a unified
European Union military which replaced the US as the technologically dominant global
force.
In the end, the competing interests of the United Nations and the European Union neutralized
hegemony.
Economically, the European Union and China became aggressive rivals against U.S.
interests.
Domestically, life was bleak, with a rampant drug culture, hedonism, and a plethora of alternate religions dominating the American youth.
We were a people without vision or direction.
Oh my God, dude, the military is just a red pill.
It's all just the whole thing is a fucking red pill and they love it.
And it's how it goes.
And we've been cultivating it for years.
And we fucking wonder why QAnon took such route.
Mastriano viewed his military career through a religious lens.
For example, he was initially deployed on the Iron Curtain in Germany during the final years of the Cold War.
He viewed himself as a defender of the West against atheistic communism.
When Mastriano deployed to the first Gulf War, he claimed that God favored the United States on the battlefield.
In late February of 1991, Mastriano's unit was about to face Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard when a sandstorm struck.
In Mastriano's telling, this sandstorm was perfectly timed to blind the Iraqi forces, allowing Allied forces to break their line.
Days later, a ceasefire was announced.
When Mastroianno relayed the story to the podcast Crosspoint in 2018, he claimed that this was a miracle caused by prayer.
I don't know why a lot of times this doesn't come up in the factual history of Operation Desert Storm.
I guess we want to beat our chests because we were well trained, we had great equipment, but there was a lot more to it.
God did something powerful and he answered the prayers.
Well, somebody might say out there, the skeptic, oh, you were just really lucky.
It's interesting that luck was so precise that it happened the first minute.
That our first tank was in Iraq.
Okay, and how long did it stay?
It stayed that way until 8 o'clock in the morning on 28 February, the minute the ceasefire went into effect.
What's even more interesting to me, though, is that wherever we liberated, whatever zone that was behind us that we'd liberated, and the American and Allied forces were located, the wind went back to its normal direction behind us.
But where we needed to stay, with the Iraqi forces, Blowing in the opposite direction, it did.
If you look at Landsat photos, this old satellite photos from when Saddam Hussein put all the oil wells on fire in Kuwait, you can see the wind blowing in the proper direction before we entered Iraq and then shifting and staying that way until the war was over.
So God saved thousands of lives because people prayed.
We humbled ourselves before God and he changed history.
I wonder why the history books don't mention the power of prayer that caused God to change the direction of the wind.
For the next three decades, Mastroianno continued to serve in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he appears to have developed a dim view of Islam.
As the New Yorker reported, he has often spread Islamophobic memes online.
In one, he spread a conspiracy theory that Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, directed fellow Muslims to throw a five-year-old over a balcony.
In another, he shared a graphic that read, quote, Islam wants to kill gay rights, Judaism, Christianity, and pacifism.
Which, I don't know why he would be mad at Islam for wanting to kill gay rights.
It seems like he'd be on the, if that was the case, he would be on the same page there.
That's that's the classic, oh, you should be on our side because like, actually, they're going to take your shit away, too.
I love women.
That's why I hate the hijab.
Yet another, he encouraged the idea that the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was started by Muslims.
Captioning a photo of two dark skinned men grinning, quote, something wicked this way comes.
In 2019, after retiring from the military and teaching at the U.S.
Army War College, Mastroianni decided to run for office, and he soon began attending events held by a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.
This is a loosely linked network of Charismatics and Pentecostals that, over the past decade, has played an influential role in conservative American circles.
Many members believe that God speaks to them directly, and that they have been tasked with battling real-world demons who control global leaders.
So he eventually won a position on the Pennsylvania Senate.
And what's interesting about Mastriano is that he has a lot of social media savvy.
And like Marjorie Taylor Greene, he built a following on Facebook.
He used the Facebook Live feature to do what he called fireside chats, where he would opine on whatever he thought was interesting.
And he got thousands of views doing this.
In April of this year, before the gubernatorial primary, Mastriano attended the QAnon-affiliated God and Country Conference in Gettysburg.
There, he called the separation of church and state a myth, and the conference organizers presented him with a sword to thank him for his work.
And we thought, Lord, what would be the best gift for them?
And we thought of the David Sword, because you've been cutting a lot of... And so we have inscribed in there, for God and country, because you've been fighting for our country.
And you're fighting for our religious rights in Christ Jesus.
So we wanted to bless you with that sword of David.
Did she say cutting a lot of heads off?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I guess.
Okay.
Metaphorically.
Figuratively though, you know.
Or the heads of the serpent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Hydra.
The Hydra of the Jew!
I get it.
Now, there are lots of things concerning about Mastroianno's beliefs, but I think top among them is his election denial.
So, in 2020, Mastroianno issued a legislative memo to fellow lawmakers saying that he will introduce a Senate resolution disputing the 2020 general election.
It says that the legislature will name a new set of electors and withdraw the certification of Joe Biden's victory.
There's this weird, I don't know, there's this weird fantasy that decertification is Legal process?
I don't think it's ever happened.
Everything I've read says that it's just a made-up concept.
On January 6th, Mastriano spent about $3,300 to charter buses to ferry 135 supporters to Washington for the Stop the Steal rally using campaign cash.
He later says that he left before things got violent, but video revealed that he crossed police lines.
He has since been interviewed by the January 6th Committee.
In one podcast interview, he boasted that if elected governor, he could handpick a Secretary of State and through that person, in that role, essentially decide the validity of elections unilaterally.
I'm Doug Mastriano, and I get to appoint the Secretary of State who's delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs and everything.
I could decertify every machine in the state with the stroke of a pen via my Secretary of State.
I already have the Secretary of State picked out.
It's a world-class person that knows voting integrity better than anyone else in the nation, I think, and I already have a team that's going to be built around that individual.
Ron Watkins.
It's a weird platform if you're, like, running for an election.
If elected, I will make sure it will be the last election.
And a lot of people are very excited about that.
We love our Masturano, folks.
Yeah, we love, we love the thing that we clung to so much, the Constitution and the rule of law and the government.
We don't care about that anymore.
We actually just want, like, our guys in.
To talk more about Doug Mastriano, we are now joined by Ryan Briggs.
He is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who has covered Mastriano.
Ryan, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
Now, first of all, I want to talk about Doug Mastriano's bizarre attempt to counter accusations of anti-Semitism.
And these accusations came up because of his associations with the social media site Gab and its founder, Andrew Torba.
So what happened there?
Well, as you're probably aware, Torba is the proprietor of this kind of conservative, alternative social media platform called Gab.
It's sort of a replica of Twitter, and it's probably best known to your listeners because of its connection to the Tree of Life shooter.
Who was, you know, an anti-Semite who had used the platform, went into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people.
And, you know, that obviously tainted the platform's reputation for a number of people for, you know, very understandable reasons, especially here in Pennsylvania.
Earlier this year, it had come to light that Mastriano had paid something like $5,000 to Gav, I believe his explanation was that it was for advertising, but, you know, that came to light actually, I think, in interviews with Torba himself, you know, and obviously caused a lot of, you know, sensation here locally that he had connected himself financially with that platform in addition to, you know, obviously having a connection to Torba outside of just that payment.
In order to counter these accusations, he received the endorsement of a rabbi named Joseph Kowalkowski.
And so, in your reporting, you uncovered some unconventional beliefs held by the rabbi.
Yeah, Kulakowski is an unusual figure.
He's a Hasidic rabbi, although he's, you know, I would say controversial even amongst Hasidic rabbis.
He had been in trouble for taping himself on the Sabbath going to a monster movie festival and had, you know, like other Hasidim yelling at him online.
And so, you know, he's already from the jump kind of just like controversial, like within that denomination.
But obviously, you know, what caught our eye was that he had, you know, prolific YouTube content musing about, you know, human alien hybrids, you know, his thoughts about secular Jews, and how They, you know, can't be victims of anti-semitism because when they lose their faith they sort of lose, you know, the right to call themselves Jews.
And I mean, you know, he goes on extensively talking about You know, Adolf Hitler and how he may have been a, you know, reptilian shapeshifter.
Other targets of, you know, his ire, I would say, you know, he kind of regarded in a similar light as, you know, people who were not fully human.
So that was kind of the theme through a lot of his, like, YouTube content.
And that's what, you know, we noticed.
It is interesting to have a rabbi promote the idea of some sort of A hybrid shapeshifter, because usually that's what the Jews are accused of being.
Well, yeah, I point you back to that comment I was making about how, again, you know, if you're a secular Jew, if you don't sort of fall into the right religious category, you know, that this guy's defined, then you lose your right to that.
So he's like, yeah, all that stuff, you know, the George Soros stuff.
Um, that's that's not even anti-semitism.
That's, you know, anti-reptilian.
Yeah, essentially.
Soros deserves it.
Yeah, exactly.
In fact, I have a clip here of Kowalkowski expressing his view about the race of Hitler.
What you have to learn is that Hitler himself came from this era of lineage and non-human era of lineage.
I mean, there's a reason why he never took off his boots was to hide the fact That his feet were reptilian in nature, because he came from a non-human race, a demonic race.
He was a hybrid.
The word Erev, the term Erev Rav, Erev means mixture.
So Erev Rav can be translated, it's usually said the mixed multitude.
Okay, didn't take off his boots.
Then why is my living room filled with pictures of Hitler's feet?
I think one thing that's like important to point out is that like, you know, why is Mastriano getting anywhere near this guy?
I mean, this is something we literally found by like Googling his name.
And I think it's important to highlight that the Torba connection was seized upon by his Democratic opponent and pretty effectively cast at him to the extent where he was denounced by certain Jewish Republicans.
I think Politico was reporting recently that a former GOP gubernatorial candidate had hosted a fundraiser for Mastriano's opponent.
And, you know, that also seemed to tie back into some of these like anti-Semitism charges.
So it's like the timing of him kind of digging up this guy, you know, who's not even from Pennsylvania.
He's like based in New York somewhere.
I think, you know, it was very sort of like.
oriented around the political side of it and also convincing his own followers, I think, to a certain degree, right?
Because this, you know, came to light in like a news story in the Epoch Times or something like that that only probably Mastriano followers were going to see.
You know, it's about convincing them, I think, that he was not actually, like, anti-Semitic.
And, you know, what do you know?
You get the headline of, hey, a rabbi endorsed me.
How could I be anti-Semitic?
Um, what's this, a Washington Post article about the Democrats funding Mastriano?
Oh no, they couldn't be running ads for him because he's a quote-unquote Pied Piper candidate like Donald Trump.
I'm sure this won't backfire.
No, that's not real.
Love the party.
It's true.
It's real and I'm reading it right now.
Yeah, I think those are still some of, you know, it's like most of the television advertising that you've seen for Doug Mastriano was like paid for by Democrats.
And you said, Ryan, you said that the Googling of this rabbi is literally one click away.
You just search for his name and you get the Hitler reptilian feet and all of that.
He's a prolific Quora user, which I feel like is kind of like a red flag in a lot of ways.
He just has hundreds and hundreds of questions and answers that he's done on that site.
I pulled a couple of them out.
There's a lot of stuff that you would expect to see.
He said Nancy Pelosi caused January 6th by ordering police to push people into the Capitol.
He said Chelsea Clinton was guilty of mini-genocide because she married a Jewish guy and didn't convert.
So, I mean, that's like sort of, you know, stuff that you find, again, typing his name in and like his core profile just pops up.
Here's a quote from the Washington Post.
Sorry to interject here.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro spent an estimated $855,000 boosting Mastriano in an ad calling him one of, quote, Trump's strongest supporters and talking about his belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
The ad notes that if Mastriano wins the primary, it would be quote, a win for what Donald Trump stands for.
Shapiro spent more than double what Mastriano spent on his own ads.
So... Yeah, well... So I guess the rabbi is not the only Jewish person supporting him?
Yeah, I mean, it's obviously got the echoes back to 2016 in Pennsylvania, right, where it's the same, well, nationally, right, where the Democrats are saying, oh, we want Donald Trump, because he'll be a weaker opponent.
You know, in a lot of ways, like Shapiro is kind of like, who is his Democratic challenger, obviously, is cutting that same kind of cloth, right?
I mean, he is like, you know, a deep, Here's Mastriano saying of Shapiro, quote, I'm going to have to send him a thank you card.
fundraising and I think you sort of saw them look at Mastriano and say, "Yeah, we're
gonna do it but for real this time." You know, someone who's just too crazy.
Here's Mastriano saying of Shapiro, "I'm going to have to send him a thank-you card."
For spending double. Why wouldn't you spend the $850K on your own campaign?
Or, I don't know, anything!
Anything better than boosting his own- like, that's $850- that is almost a million dollars.
Yeah, no, good stuff.
Anyways, we can move on, but that's a fun little side note there.
Now, it seems as though Mastroianno has attempted to clean up evidence of his extremist views.
For example, he deleted all the tweets that made reference to QAnon, and there are over 50 of them.
He also deleted several Facebook videos.
Can you tell me what those videos were about and why the campaign claimed that they were deleted?
Yeah, I mean part of it would be sort of like speculation on my part because we don't actually know like everything that necessarily got deleted and when I first was covering Mastriano back in like 2020 around January 6th, I'd heard the same The same thing back there, right?
Like, you know, he was known for being a January 6th, and I'd heard from, you know, other political operative types, like, hey, you know, he's deleting stuff now that people are kind of looking at him, and, you know, there was this sort of insurrection, like, at the Capitol.
So, you know, this has been something that's probably been going on for years, and it's not totally clear.
Everything that, you know, has been scrubbed off of Facebook.
But what we know is that more recently, you know, he had taken out some of his, like, live-streamed videos where he was talking about climate denialism and also just kind of making, I guess, kind of generally controversial comments about Republicans, saying that Republicans that, you know, weren't backing him had it out for veterans or, you know, had disdain for veterans, I think was the term that he used.
You know, we noticed it and when we contacted his campaign about it, I mean, they're notoriously like silent towards pressing queries, but they said they actually like responded to this one and said, oh, you know, this is just a default setting on on Facebook.
And, you know, Facebook just deletes these after 30 days.
You go back and say, well, why are there other videos that are more than a month old that didn't get deleted?
Because, of course, there are because he didn't wipe everything.
And, you know, you don't get a response.
And that's pretty, you know, That's pretty true to form for the Mastriano campaign generally, so that's what you're left with.
I could guess at the motive for trying to do that, but I think it's in keeping with what you described about his vanished QAnon content.
Says something, you know, does something kind of in the moment, gets in trouble for it, goes away.
You don't talk about it, you know, and you move on.
So that's been, you know, part of his M.O.
on the campaign trail, obviously.
You mentioned that it was tough to get a response back from the Mastriano campaign.
And, you know, it's not uncommon for Republican candidates to be hostile to the media, but Mastriano seems to be especially hostile to the point of outright banning media during meet and greets that he hosts across the state.
So what's it like for reporters who want to try to get to know the Mastriano campaign?
I think that the best example is this video that you could probably like find online.
I wasn't at this one, but we sent a reporter to a rally and he had erected like a little pen for reporters to stand in.
It was sort of like around the corner behind like a building from where he was speaking.
So, you know, it was clearly just sort of like an F.U.
kind of thing.
You're going to be in this little box.
I'm sure one of his supporters also filmed it and was circulating the image of the muzzled reporter standing in this little pen while he's giving his speech on the other side of a building or whatever.
It's pretty clear that a big part of it is just for the kayfabe of owning the media, sticking it to reporters and stuff like that.
But it also veers into what I would say is kind of like bizarre territory, where sometimes I think it's politically inopportune for him to just completely shut out the media, to almost never give your side of anything, to shoo all of these traditional media platforms, especially given what I was saying before about his lack of traditional advertising and campaign media.
You know, he's just not really in the newspapers, you know, beyond stories talking about these kind of scandals or, you know, Shapiro casting him as, you know, being too radical for Pennsylvania.
And, you know, I think he and probably his supporters look at it the same way that they would look at, you know, stunts that like Donald Trump would pull, you know, the national press at his rallies.
Kind of skewering reporters and so on.
But like, Trump obviously like, you know, manipulated the media.
He, when the cameras stopped rolling, you know, like he would be talking to reporters and trying to push certain lines or, you know, give people bits of information or whatever.
Like he had experience kind of like working both ends of it.
And Mastriano just doesn't.
He just doesn't talk to reporters.
And that's it.
And I think there's like some serious questions, you know, because occasionally we'll catch him and you shout some questions at him and, you know, just breeze past or have a security kind of block, you know, reporters.
But I think at a certain point, it kind of makes it seem like you're just like dodging questions.
I think just personally, like, I sort of have questions about if he is afraid that, like, if he was put on the spot, that he might stumble over his words.
You know, I mean, if you've watched some of his videos, he's not really like, you know, the smoothest kind of orator or anything like that.
And I think there are some questions of how much of it is just based on anxiety or just like aversion rather than like a real strategy, you know?
Because I think the message is clear at this point, right?
You don't like the press.
Like, that's clear to everybody.
Now, Mastroianni has faced a lot of controversies, and one of them involves him posing in a Confederate uniform for a faculty photograph at the Army War College.
Now, that's not necessarily bad, you know, given the context, if you're doing like a recreation thing, but what exactly is the story with this?
I mean, Mastriano would say that he's just like a history nerd or history buff or something.
You know, he'd give lectures on history.
That was sort of the focus in his, like, academic career and all that.
He's known for these sort of eccentricities, like, you know, he was in the armored cavalry when he served in the military.
Occasionally will appear at events wearing sort of like an antique, like a cavalry hat, like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now or something.
When he comes to other events, he'll wear spurs on his dress shoes, which is weird when you're just dressed, you know, normally.
And he has these sort of like affectations.
It's like hard for me to really speculate about what he was thinking.
At that time, because I think there is a component to it where he thought like, this will be cool in the same way that the other eccentric historical garb that I put on is cool from time to time.
But you're also working at like the Army War College in Pennsylvania, right?
Like, what are you doing wearing a Confederate uniform?
And I can't really explain much more to that decision, you know, beyond that.
That's something for Doug to answer.
Yeah, what was striking to me is that in that photograph, he is the only person wearing a Confederate uniform.
It's one thing if you're like with a group of people, you know, you know, you're like, I'll say, because this campaign, we'll get mad about this if people don't mention it, but there was one guy who was dressed as like a Swiss Guard or something.
And he was like, that's not fair.
Everybody was dressing up.
Yeah.
Mastriano, I think his campaign is unique in that it's joined by a couple of prophets, like more than one, people who claim that they can channel messages directly from God.
One of these prophets who spoke at a campaign rally for Mastriano was a man named Lance Wallnau. And Wallnau has made a number of bizarre
statements. He, for example, has claimed that environmentalists are possessed by demons. He
has prayed that God would overturn the 2020 election. And he's also praised President Vladimir
Putin as a quote, "good dictator." He's also called President Joe Biden the Antichrist.
In one video clip, he even once claimed that an anointed cake saved a man from
homosexuality.
Sexuality I read a testimony today about an owner of a bar who was gay
And this is crazy.
I'm not saying this is going to work for you.
But some hookers that were in his bar got saved.
And they got saved because one of the guys who used to hang out there got saved.
And they baked a cake for the owner of the bar who was gay and very adamantly anti-Christian.
And they basically prayed over the cake.
It was an anointed cake.
And they made the cake and gave it as a gift.
And when he ate the cake, I know this is strange, this is Ed Silvoso's testimony, it's not mine, the power of God hit him while he was eating the cake.
And he went back to the guy at the bar that had given it to him that he knew got religion.
And he said, what the heck?
He said, I had a weird experience eating your cake.
And he said, well, that was the presence of God.
He ends up leading the God of the Lord And baptizes him, and when he gets baptized, the guy gets delivered.
And the spirit that was working him got broken off.
I'm telling you, it's a story.
That's the only prophet.
Another one of these prophets is Julie Greene, who actually we happen to mention in the last main episode about Clay Clark's reawakened tour.
Greene claims that she used to receive messages from God infrequently, but now they come to her up to twice a day.
Um, I've been prophetic for, uh, probably seven, eight years now, maybe even 10.
Um, or more, but they didn't start coming this fast like this up until about last year, about, uh, July or August of last year, I was getting a, maybe once a month, starting last year.
And all of a sudden they once a week and then once a day.
And it was just like, there was even sometimes it was twice a day.
That's gotta make you feel good when, you know, when God reaches out more frequently.
Yeah, he's hitting me up twice a day.
So obviously it's common for, you know, political candidates to seek the endorsement of religious leaders or religious leaders to, you know, endorse someone.
But what's with the prophets?
This is, you know, part of these kind of allegations that Mastriano and some of the, you know, figures that you just mentioned like Wall Now, you know, are part of a larger movement called, you know, the New Apostolic Reformation, which is like a very vague Uh, kind of group, you know, a lot of people that get lumped into this category don't really acknowledge, like, that it exists or that they have a real tie to it, but it's essentially this kind of, you know, philosophy movement that promotes the creation of, like, a new Christian hierarchy that's kind of, you know, separate from, you know, Catholicism or, you know, most, you know, mainstream Protestantism.
And the hierarchy, you know, has these kind of, like, tiers to it with prophets at the top.
And, you know, it can be, like, difficult to even describe fully what this is, but it's, you know, in a lot of reporting you'll see it talked about as a kind of Christian nationalist movement, you know, that's working, you know, behind the scenes to promote dominionism, I think is what they would call it, essentially advocating for a more explicitly, like, Christian state.
And, you know, Mastriano personally, like, denies, you know, any connection to these groups, but he keeps, you know, appearing with, you know, these figures like Wall Now.
There's another one, Abby Abildness, you know, who's part of the Pennsylvania Prayer Caucus.
You guys might be familiar with the Prayer Caucus.
Another one of these, you know, kind of groups that often are described as being associated, you know, with this NAR movement.
And, you know, even though Mastriano says that he has no connection to this group, you know, he often espouses very similar beliefs, you know, that you need to get, you know, prayer back in schools and, you know, kind of have the government be guided by these religious principles.
So you hear about the prophetic stuff and it's kind of like, wow, what are these, you know, kind of like screw loose people or is this, you know, some sort of weird Um weirder you know thing and I guess there's like a comedic element to it but it has like a deeper meaning you know for sure and I think it there is something you know it's worth taking pretty seriously about it because these are people who are definitely tied to like a larger network right and they're you know espousing these almost like theocratic principles so that's that's where a lot of them are
How much support has Mastriano received from the Republican Party more broadly?
of those things of like, why do these people keep showing up, right, if there's no connection
there.
How much support has Mastroianni received from the Republican Party more broadly? Recent
headlines have led me to believe that his campaign is not doing that great.
There was a recent one from the New York Times headlined, Mastriano's sputtering campaign, no TV ads, tiny crowds, little money.
So yeah, it sounds like, I mean, from what I've read, Mastriano isn't very happy with the support he's received from the GOP more broadly.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you caught the New York Times story about this recently, but one of his more recent live streams where he's kind of discussing the state of the campaign, you know, I've watched him for years and he usually has like sort of an upbeat kind of cordial presence on these you know, videos that he records. The most recent one, I
mean, he seems like kind of despondent.
And he's talking about this, you know, and he's sort of saying that they've struggled to make
any inroads with national Republicans. And I don't think it's like a secret necessarily that there's,
you know, sort of a schism happening like behind the scenes with the Republican Party nationally
and some of these more like insurgent or like MAGA type candidates, right? Like there's been,
you know, friction between like McConnell and some of these like Peter Thiel backed
people. And I think to like a certain degree that's happening, you know, with Mastriano's
campaign. But it's also like, you know, a pretty important race in a lot of ways. And
this sense that I get about Mastriano specifically and what kind of differentiates him from just
these other campaigns that have sort of like butted heads with national Republicans is that
there's just been sort of like open derision from some of the national Republicans at sort of how
poorly his campaign has been run.
And this ties back to what we were saying earlier about the lack of television advertising.
It's not that, you know, Mastriano would say that he's just running a grassroots campaign, but the reality is that his campaign is really strapped for money.
Um, you know, and at the last, uh, like filing deadline, I think he had like a couple hundred thousand dollars, um, you know, in, in his campaign account.
And I don't know, to put that into any context, you know, I mean, like, uh, his opponent, Josh Shapiro has millions and millions and millions of dollars to draw upon.
To pay for TV advertising and all of that.
And I think just even from, you know, like his reaction when he discusses it on his stream or whatever, you know, you can see that, like, I think they're a little concerned about it, you know, and just sort of like, what is the strategy here?
And you hear that from, you know, groups like the RGA, where they're saying, you know, we can't back a campaign.
That, you know, is in disarray or, you know, isn't kind of, you know, able to operate to a certain, you know, standard.
And it's not surprising that Mastroiano might struggle with that because, again, this is a guy, you know, whose primary political background is that he was a state senator for a couple of years, right?
So this isn't somebody who, you know, even if he was not trying to run an unconventional grassroots campaign, I think would probably struggle.
It's just some of the kind of basic aspects of running a large multi-million dollar campaign operation.
It's just hard.
And so you've seen from Mastriano on the campaign trail is he's sort of stuck with stuff that he's comfortable with.
He goes around to churches a lot of times.
You can see on Rumble, he'll post videos of his speeches and they're usually at kind of friendly spaces like that.
And that's been the bulk of his campaign.
And I think that's good if you're kind of running just in South Central Pennsylvania, where he's from.
But I think if your goal is to peel off You know, kind of moderate Republican voters in like the Philly suburbs or something like that.
Like, I don't think that that's going to really do it for you.
I think, you know, at a certain point, you need money, you need media.
Not everybody's going to tune into your Facebook stream, you know, but he's kind of stuck with more, I think, what he knew from before the, you know, before the gubernatorial campaign.
Yeah, recently the chair of the Republican Governors Association, Doug Ducey, implied that he's not interested in helping Mastriano's campaign because he doesn't want to fund lost causes.
He made these comments during an interview at Georgetown University.
You would think that would be a huge pickup opportunity for Republicans, but Republicans nominated a candidate, Doug Mastriano, who It has fully embraced that populist agenda on the 2020 election, January 6th.
I'm curious whether or not you still see that as truly a pickup opportunity.
We're watching Pennsylvania very closely.
Another axiom that we have at the RGA is that we don't fund lost causes and we don't fund landslides.
So we're in a relationship with our candidate, but we're saying to the candidates, you have to show us something.
You have to demonstrate that you can move numbers, that you can raise resources, and that you get this to the 5-yard line or the 5% line, and that's when the RGA parachutes in and punches the victory in.
So, Pennsylvania is a place where we think, in terms of the dynamics and the demographics, it is a pickup opportunity, but much of this is on the candidate.
Yeah, it's another one of those, you know, moments where, again, Matt Strano hears this stuff and he says, well, look, Trump won Pennsylvania, right?
Trump won Pennsylvania before and he didn't spend that, you know, that much money to run a traditional campaign operation.
And, you know, that's true and it's like reasonable to an extent, but like it always sort of leaves out the part where it's like Trump was rich and famous already, right?
And Doug Mastriano is not particularly wealthy and only famous kind of, you know, to a certain degree.
And a lot of, you know, a lot of that is sort of colored by infamy for many voters.
So, to Doug Ducey's comment, I think that this race is going to be a lot closer than polling might have you believe, because I think people are going to stick with party affinity.
And vote, you know, Republican vote Democrat and and so on.
But like, I don't think it's going to be like a landslide, right?
There's no indication that Mastriano is just cruising to victory here.
So it's like, which is it, right?
Yeah, according to polls, he's like 10 or 11 points underwater.
But you know.
Yeah, again, like, I'll believe it when I see it, you know?
Like, I don't, I don't, I certainly don't think that, you know, there's a lot of indications that things are going very well for Mastriano right now, just using, like, traditional political metrics, but I would say that, like, you know, you see these polls floating around, and, you know, it's got Democrats up by double digits, and I don't know, you know?
I'll just say that much.
Like, I grew up in rural Pennsylvania.
There are definitely plenty of people who think like Doug Mastriano, act like Doug Mastriano.
And I think, you know, what people might say to a pollster who calls them up out of the blue, right, might be different than, you know, what they do when they actually like step into the voting booth.
So I personally kind of look at that and I've sort of been like, okay, maybe, maybe it's comfortable, but I don't know.
Recently on Twitter, you observed that there have been a lot of new Twitter accounts boosting Mastriano's campaign, and they appeared very recently.
Now, are you suggesting that there might be something inorganic about Mastriano's support on Twitter, or there's just a lot of recently enthusiastic Mastriano fans?
It's hard for me to speculate.
I don't know if I can imagine a campaign...
Coming up with Dougvember or Mastrianomonday as their meme or hashtag to boost the campaign in the waning days of the race here.
But I'll say that we pulled up the user creation data for a bunch of these accounts that all appeared
in the last couple of weeks with names like Doug Enjoyer and Doug Sell
that were all made sometimes a couple minutes apart.
And believe me, I've gotten an earful from some of them after I posted that on Twitter.
And they say, "We're just conservatives.
"We're just gearing up for election day.
"Our accounts are always getting suspended or banned.
"So we have to create these burner accounts "to get out there and stump for Doug."
And so they would say, you know, hey, we're just, you know, fellow travelers here, whatever.
And stuff like that happens, like, you know, in every campaign cycle to, like, some degree.
But I think the reason that it sort of stuck out to me, beside the fact that the names Funny to me.
Is that like, you know, it's happening in the vacuum we talked about already of like, this is kind of like the news of what's going on with the Mastriano campaign this week.
It's it's hashtag Dougvember.
It's getting, you know, like a few dozen of these like burner accounts, you know, to try to like retweet each other and get these like memes going of like Doug Mastriano wearing like sunglasses over like an 80s, you know, kind of like background.
And I sort of view it as like, A, it's strange that that's happening, but TV advertising is not really happening.
And it almost is like, are you filling the void with these little social media shenanigans that are probably impacting hundreds of people at most?
I think it's also like, you know, kind of a way to try to create a little bit artificially like a sense of momentum.
You know what I mean?
And to be like, look, like, you know, there are people out here talking.
About Doug.
I mean, the idea that I think that these memes just, like, would be created by the average Doug voter, someone who's, like, attending one of his rallies, like, at a church in central Pennsylvania, is going to go home and make, like, an epic meme of Doug Mastriano wearing sunglasses, I think is, like, you know, farcical.
There's clearly more of this, like, kind of political component to it.
And what I think it's trying to do is to, like, make it seem like, look, you know, these people are out there.
They're online.
They're going crazy for dark Doug.
And again, also just to take it a step further, Mastroianno, he retweets all this stuff from the official accounts, the campaign accounts, and so on.
But you've also seen him do stuff like he'll retweet obviously fake polls.
This week he retweeted a poll that was conducted by a high school class that had him kind of within the margin of error with Josh Shapiro.
And I'm like, OK, maybe these are all just, you know, like Gen Z Doug Mastriano fans.
They got together in a group chat and they said, let's go hard for Doug before the election and all that.
But it also kind of feels like the campaign is sort of like embracing it because it's like something, right?
We got to give people something.
To believe in, to again, get away from the lost cause idea.
And this is at least something, and I don't know how much money they have for other stuff.
Again, I have no evidence that they're paying for any of this.
I have no evidence that the campaign is connected to it in any way, but I do know that they promote this stuff when they see it.
And I think that advantages them.
Jenna Ellis retweeted the tweet that I'd put out just showing the creation dates on all of these
Doug Bember accounts or whatever. So they're just like anything they can kind of get,
anything they can kind of put out there to be like something's happening. I think they're in
that stage now because it's coming down to the wire. So that's why it's notable to me.
Again, I don't have a TV ad to analyze from Doug Mastriano.
I don't have quotes from him in the the newspaper to analyze. I have Doug Bember to look at.
I suppose there's also no evidence that the Shapiro campaign is paying for Twitter followers.
But I think you raised a really good point earlier that, at least anecdotally, from what I've seen, You know, memes tend to sort of naturally spawn from somebody in a very public place doing a very sort of outrageous thing that has a lot of eyes on it.
And then there is a sort of organic push to memorialize those moments in, you know, in the meme format.
And so I think you're onto something in the idea that, you know, going to these very safe spaces that are, you know, in the general sense, sort of smaller, I'm begging you to look at some of the videos that his campaign has produced themselves and post it on Twitter, because it'll literally be like a still image of Doug Mastriano and his wife with like a lens flare.
And then like maybe, you know, like a kind of Christian rock song playing over the back.
And that's it.
It's just it's just like a photograph.
And, you know, it's like, it's not up to me to advise campaigns or tell them what's effective or not effective, but I look at that and I'm like, even if I, you know, put myself in the shoes of like a Doug Mastrano supporter, it would be kind of hard for me to engage with that internet meme because it's just a picture of you that's kind of weirdly cropped and has some music playing over it.
Yeah, he would probably do better going to a public park and talking about Hitler's reptilian feet.
You know, that would probably spread a little bit.
That would be a little bit more memeable, I would think.
Yeah, maybe the Spurs are hiding talons.
It would definitely open up some new demographics for him.
And I think that's probably the stage that you're at in this campaign, where it's like, you gotta see who are some of these, you know, kind of new audiences that I can tap into.
Yeah, yeah.
Is there anything else that you think is really notable about Mastriano and his campaign in reporting on him that you discovered?
I mean, we covered a lot, and it sounds like you guys are kind of going back through some of the greatest hits.
I mean, like, kind of where he came from is, like, you know, the most interesting thing to me, I guess.
Beyond, like, not something that we would even necessarily, like, just write as a standalone news story, but just as sort of, like, the character study.
Like, this guy is, like, from New Jersey.
He was raised in a Catholic family, he thought.
my family's not religious enough, has this kind of conversion when he's like a teenager, you know, has this, you know, military career.
And I get the sense that it's like, at some point, he's like looking for something else to do.
But for a long time, it like wasn't clear, like what that was going to be, you know, so for like, a long time, he's just sort of, you know, at these like NATO bases, and he's writing like books about like Alvin York, and, You know, completing multiple dissertations, as you're aware, and I'm like, you know, where does this guy take that sort of turn into all the stuff that we, like, talked about?
And I guess I, like, came back to that, like, the Space Pearl Harbor thing because I was like, that's interesting to me because I don't know If I just, like, view Doug Mastriano as, like, a fully-pilled, like, QAnon guy.
But it's almost like he's a guy who kind of, like, formed some of those beliefs, like, way before QAnon, like, ever happened.
And, like, it sort of found him, you know?
Like, he kind of became almost, like, one of those, like, General Flynn-type characters for a lot of these people.
I think that's, like, a lot of the appeal that he has, is they, like, look at him and they see, um they see that kind of you know figure again like the sort of like um authoritarian traditional christian american guy who can lead a state like pennsylvania out of
You know a lot of areas have just been sort of locked in like this like downward de-industrializing spiral for like decades and like people are mad right it's like that there's that same feeling that like Trump tapped into and you see a guy like Mastriano and like he he sort of brings that like aura to like a lot of people so just like where he came from how he sort of got here is like fascinating to me and all that and it's such like in other ways like unlikely I guess for a place like Pennsylvania To have somebody like him be on the top of the, you know, Republican ticket at, like, this stage, you know?
Like, our prior Republican governors were, like, obviously hewed to the center of the party and all that, and he's totally different than, you know, people who ran for this position in the past.
Just that evolution, I think, is, like...
Interesting, but like again, I don't even feel like I like fully grasp all of it.
You know, he's like still kind of a cypher because it's like never sat down with them, you know, and I probably never will.
So I just sort of get these artifacts, you know, and the people that he surrounds himself with and you have to sort of study it and try to piece together like this guy.
Where did he come?
Where did he come from?
But I don't know.
Maybe I'll have better luck with it than I did.
Ryan, thank you so much for joining us.
Where could people learn more about your reporting?
You can follow me and my colleagues at inquire.com.
You can find me on Twitter at RW underscore Briggs.
Thank you.
Thanks so much, Ryan.
Thanks a lot, guys.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto Q. For 30 years, I wore the uniform of the United States Army.
One of the biggest challenges besides deployment was serving in Alpha Company.
There's a lot of pressure on these soldiers, you know.
There were suicides there and that's when Doug came in and he instilled discipline.
He took it very seriously.
He did not want any of his soldiers to be hurt.
With a leader like that, things started to happen.
I don't remember any more suicides.
And so it's important for me that I bring everyone along with me and give everyone a hope and opportunity.
