Pa. could become ‘red’ wasteland in ‘blue’ East | Will Bunch Newsletter

Yes, it was a strange July 4 — shared, thankfully, with family and friends, but with apprehension about the future of what was started in Philadelphia in 1776. The core of the Declaration of Independence states that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends” — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness — “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

It’s time for some major alterations.

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This week’s looming cliffhanger in Harrisburg — over whether GOP lawmakers can make good on their threat to wreak fiscal havoc on Pennsylvania’s four state-supported universities in a “culture war” over fetal-tissue research at the University of Pittsburgh — is also a preview of some scary coming attractions if extremist state Sen. Doug Mastriano wins the governor’s race in November.

For voters who are still shell-shocked from last month’s reversal of a half-century of U.S. abortion rights by a runaway Supreme Court, the initial fears are largely around the core moral questions: the stripping of what once seemed like a guaranteed women’s right, and the immediate implications for the health of those who become pregnant.

But if the staunchly anti-abortion Mastriano — currently polling within the margin of error against Democratic opponent Josh Shapiro — rides a predicted GOP midterm wave of voter anger over inflation and President Joe Biden’s unpopularity, and if his victory also were to extend the right-wing dominance in the legislature, the long-term consequences would likely reach far beyond women’s health.

An extreme abortion ban in Pennsylvania will turn the Keystone State into a pariah for many of the nation’s best and brightest young people when they are deciding where to attend college, and not only stunt but probably reverse the growth of high-tech and professional jobs that have fueled the 21st century revival of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and their suburbs.

The first hint of the commonwealth’s dark future came just hours after the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling that overturned Roe vs. Wade, when the CEO of Pittsburgh-based Duolingo — the leader in language learning founded in 2009 by a Carnegie Mellon professor and now employing 500 people — said his firm would turn its focus away from Pennsylvania if an abortion ban is enacted here.

“To all Pennsylvania politicians: I love that @duolingo is headquartered in Pittsburgh and that y’all use it as an example that successful tech companies can start here,” the founder, Luis von Ahn, wrote on Twitter. “If PA makes abortion illegal, we won’t be able to attract talent and we’ll have to grow our offices elsewhere.”

Three things worth noting here. The first is that Mastriano’s extreme take on reproductive rights — he has sponsored legislation that would ban abortion at six weeks, even in cases of rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother — is just one piece of a broader agenda that would make Pennsylvania less attractive to young job seekers. The Republican has also promised anti-LGBTQ legislation around transgender sports and public bathrooms, and supports radical education reform that would seek to fund Pennsylvania’s public schools on a per-pupil basis comparable to Mississippi.

Second, while the impact of right-wing “culture war” policies could devastate recruiting for good-paying jobs from the pharmaceutical belt of the Philly suburbs to the high-tech gullies that salvaged Pittsburgh from its industrial past, the biggest impact would likely fall upon Pennsylvania’s colleges and universities. Although the state currently ranks among the worst in public funding of higher education and in student debt, those deep flaws haven’t fully undermined a thriving tradition of academia here dating back to Benjamin Franklin’s role in founding the University of Pennsylvania in the 1740s.

But higher-ed would be undermined quite a bit under a Mastriano administration. That’s because most experts predict significant drops in applications and likely enrollment at colleges in states that have banned abortion, or passed laws seen as hostile to the LGBTQ community. One New Jersey college admissions counselor told Politico back in April that “students have told me, ‘I really want to go to Texas [the University of Texas at Austin], but I’m taking them off my list’” — after Texas implemented a law that effectively stopped abortions even before the Supreme Court ruling.

This on top of other issues — forced birth on campus, confusion over women’s health treatment, problems in retaining faculty — are expected to make post-Roe America a nightmare for colleges. For one example, Penn — in competing for top students against the seven other Ivy League institutions — could suddenly find itself the league’s only school in a state where abortion is effectively banned.

Think about what has kept the Pennsylvania economy — once based on mining and heavy industry like Pittsburgh’s steel mills and Philly as “the Workshop of the World” — doing OK, and you see the strength of the “eds and meds” sector with dollops of urban start-up culture. All these things hinge on the ability of luring, or retaining, college graduates.

Now consider this third point: A Republican hat trick in Harrisburg would mean yanking that keystone from the middle of a progressive-minded Eastern Seaboard. A year from now, Pennsylvania could be the only state in a long coastal stretch from Maine to Virginia that has outlawed abortion and further curtailed LGBTQ rights. Why would a start-up company — possibly the next Duolingo — open in Philadelphia when citizens have more rights in New Jersey, New York, or Maryland? And this would be before Mastriano and friends took the ax to public schools, or finished the job of decimating Pitt, Lincoln, Temple, and Penn State over social issues.

Instead, “Mastrianoland” would be aligned, politically, with a growing Bible Belt that continues into Ohio on our western border and stretches all the way out to Idaho. This increasingly looks to be America’s fate — two separate lands, much as existed in 1861, with one giant swath in the middle striding toward theocracy while territory largely bordering the Atlantic and Pacific clings, imperfectly, to a vision of diversity.

This November, Pennsylvania will have to pick a side.

Question: What would you think of a general strike to demand a ban on all assault weapons immediately? Buy back period of 45 days. Confiscation after that? — Via @nancydrewed on Twitter

Answer: This is basically two questions. In terms of the policy, confiscation is clearly a non-starter — perhaps unfortunately, since the United States is already a country with more firearms than people — but I do feel it’s essential that we figure out how to ban the sale of assault weapons like the AR-15 rifle — nothing more than a mass murder machine, as we saw yet again on Monday in suburban Chicago — along with high-capacity magazines. As far as the tactics, I love the idea of a general strike but I’ve also come to see how this particular tactic is doomed in America, because workers lack the labor protections that other developed nations have. I do think the size and creativity of protests for gun safety and abortion rights needs to increase. As a model, I’d look closely at the 1969 Moratorium that solidified public opinion against the Vietnam War.

True confession time: I’ve never much liked Gavin Newsom, the ambitious Democratic governor of California. There’s nothing awful about Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, and I’d vote for him for president over Donald Trump in a New York minute. But from 3,000 miles away, Newsom and his slicked-back look always seemed like a Hollywood version of a liberal politician, not a real one — tarnished by invocations of the French Laundry and Kimberly Guilfoyle (his what-the-heck first wife). Occasionally I would see Newsom mentioned as a logical go-to guy for the Democrats if Biden declines to run for a second term in 2024 — but the speculation seemed off-base. Democrats, according to the old saying, “fall in love” with a presidential candidate, and I had a hard time imagining the party’s base swooning for the prefab Golden State governor.

Times have changed, however. In 2022, feeling the liberation of beating back a recall and on a glide path to re-election, Gavin Newsom has reinvented himself and seems to have captured the angry post-Roe mood of his party’s base. Suddenly, Newsom is like John Fetterman with Italian suits and hair — taking to Donald Trump’s Truth Social website to mock Republican policy on social issues. He even spent some of his campaign dollars for an ad that’s run on Fox News in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Florida that attacks Republicans for “banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors.” He adds: “I urge all of you to join the fight, or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom.” At home, Newsom has accumulated a gigantic budget surplus and hopes to spend it in 2022 both to bail out middle-class taxpayers but also hopefully show government can still get things done. I still have a lot of questions, but we know America could do much, much worse than Newsom raising his right hand on Jan. 20, 2025.