Doug Mastriano: Pa.’s Confederate in the attic | Will Bunch Newsletter

Is there a weirder time of the year than late August? Even the later sunrises can’t stop the onslaught of brutal, humid, 90-degree days. And yet the school buses are rolling, there’s a college football game when you turn on the TV, and the bug spray has been yanked from the shelves for Halloween doodads and pumpkin spice. Can we squeeze in one more beach trip before autumn is imposed?...jeez!

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There’s a new poll just out from YouGov with the what-once-would-have-been shocking finding that more than half of Donald Trump’s political supporters — and nearly 40% of all Americans — now think America will slide into a violent second civil war over the next decade.

If that’s the case, Pennsylvania better pray that Republican Doug Mastriano doesn’t become the commonwealth’s 48th (and maybe last) governor in the November election, because the state senator and retired Army colonel seems to have picked a side...and it’s not ours.

You probably heard over the weekend about the latest bizarre flight by MastrianoWorld into a cloud of extremism once unthinkable for the founding state of American democracy: The candidate’s decision to don a Confederate soldier’s uniform when he posed for a faculty picture at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., in 2014.

According to the scoop by Phil Stewart and Jarrett Renshaw of the Reuters news service, administrators told the profs if might be fun if they dressed for the occasion in a historical costume. Most didn’t — and only one wore the uniform of the rebellion that killed 360,000 American-flag bearing soldiers for the cause of preserving the enslavement of Black people.

Mastriano, whose campaign features a goon squad of bodyguards to keep reporters away, hasn’t answered any questions about his ideological wardrobe malfunction, but that hasn’t stopped the Republican’s online supporters from launching a veritable Pickett’s Charge of “whataboutism.” What about that other dude in the photo wearing a costume (apparently of a militia fighter from the American Revolution...a more noble cause, no?). Mastriano’s senior legal adviser, Jenna Ellis, took a break from fending off probes into Trump’s 2020 election activities to charge “the left is trying to erase history” — at least the ugly kind her candidate elected to elevate.

The bigger problem for Mastriano is that this doesn’t appear to be a one-off. On Monday, the left-leaning watchdog Media Matters dredged up a Facebook Live video of the candidate from 2020 — the year rocked by protests seeking a racial reckoning after the police murder or George Floyd — in which he thanks armed men guarding a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at the Gettysburg battle site that sits in Mastriano’s state senate district.

“Thanks for being vigilant,” Mastriano tells one armed posse in a truck flying a Confederate flag, while a few moments later he turns to a vigilante wearing a strange cape that is half the American flag and half the rebels’ stars and bars. “You’re looking good there, man. I can’t think of a better cape.”

On another occasion, according to a report in the New Yorker by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eliza Griswold, Mastriano showed up in July 2020 when militia members responded to a false rumors that leftists from “Antifa” were going to topple some of the 40 or so monuments at Gettysburg (out of 1,325 total) that honor Confederates. “Americans doing American things,” Mastriano said at the time. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

In October 2020, Mastriano introduced state legislation to increase protection of monuments in Pennsylvania from vandalism by what he called “mobs.” He said, “These monuments are part of our history, a history that changed our nation and the world,” But he knew better this time than to mention the Lost Cause, instead citing the rare cases when statues honoring abolitionists — including a memorial to Frederick Douglass not in Pennsylvania, but New York — were vandalized. Still, I’m sure the folks with the AR-15s sewing U.S. and Confederate flags together knew what Mastriano really meant.

Nostalgia and the history fanaticism of, say, Civil War battle reenactors can be a complicated and sometimes nuanced thing, The late, great writer Tony Horwitz produced an excellent book on this in 1999 called Confederates in the Attic. But Mastriano is not a product of the American South, this dude grew up in New Brunswick ... which isn’t even South Jersey.

When it comes to politics, the grey wool of Gen. Lee’s brigades fits Mastriano about as tightly as that dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang “Happy Birthday” to JFK. The man who claims to have such a passion for a “part of our history” wants to ban Pennsylvania schoolkids from learning the parts of their history that involve slavery or the fight for civil rights by Black Americans. Women’s rights over their own bodies would be gone with the wind in a Mastriano administration. And this Republican’s reactionary take on state’s rights includes the power of a state undoing the presidential votes cast by its own citizens.

But the revelations of Mastriano’s Confederate cosplay seem even scarier. The retired career military man seems to have a psychological obsession with scenarios around a collapsing United States, and his own heroic and presumably violent role in saving America, or perhaps destroying America to save it. In 2001, the would-be governor wrote a haunting, creepy war-college thesis about a predicted-for-2018 “putsch” by left-wingers seeking to impose “political correctness” on the public, with a military too weakened by its acceptance of homosexuality to fight back — except for a lone, heroic colonel hiding in the woods.

But a right-wing putsch in the real world is different, apparently. Mastriano was famously all-in for Jan. 6, 2021 — renting buses and marching all the way to the Capitol grounds. Over the weekend, the Philadelphia Democratic state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta tweeted photos of Mastriano on Capitol Hill and in his Confederate garb and said, “Doug Mastriano has never seen an insurrection against the United States that he didn’t love.”

It makes you wonder what this homophobe with a rebel messianic complex would try to pull off with the power of the Pennsylvania governorship in his hand. Doug Mastriano is the avatar of a movement that isn’t just whistling “Dixie” when it looks to restore antebellum hierarchies around race and gender, while forcing transgender youth and the LGBTQ community into dark shadows. Voters in Pennsylvania — where Lee’s advance was finally halted in the blood-soaked woods and cornfields of Gettysburg — will have to stop this second wave, 159 years later. Please give Doug Mastriano the only fate his cruel nostalgia understands. Make his campaign a Lost Cause.

Question: What do you think of how [John] Fetterman’s handled his health challenges during the campaign? Do you think it will be a factor in the election? — Via Pat Tracy (@pattracy2) on Twitter

Answer: Pat, I’ve been wondering this a lot as we go into the fall campaign for U.S. Senate race, with polls showing Democrat Fetterman with a solid lead over the GOP’s Mehmet Oz. Honestly, Fetterman’s initial handling of the serious stroke he suffered in May — when his team was slow to divulge details or discuss the severity of his crisis — was a little disappointing. The candor has improved, but now the question is whether the fact that Fetterman, by his own acknowledgement, is still recovering his ability to speak fluidly should be an issue. It might make any debates with Oz awkward, but I think voters won’t care. Fetterman’s commitment to fighting for a pro-middle-class agenda is going to matter more than his ability to give flowing speeches.

Remember Kamala Harris, the 49th vice president of the United States? Of course you do, but you have to wonder whether the same could be said of the nation’s political journalists, who routinely ignored the groundbreaking Harris — both the first female veep but also the first woman of color in the role — during a recent spate of speculation that 79-year-old President Biden might not seek a second term. In 2020, Biden’s selection of a running mate had seemed especially consequential because of his age and questions about whether he’d run in 2024. That has made it all the more bizarre that the pundit class has come to rank the likes of (cough, cough) male politicians like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg or California Gov. Gavin Newsom as possible 2024 candidates — with Harris casually dismissed. But it has been true that Harris’ staff was reportedly rife with dysfunction, and Team Biden had struggled to find her a meaningful role. It was getting harder to imagine how this Californian would get back in the game.

But it turns out there was such a game-changer: America’s student loan crisis. As a 2020 presidential candidate, then-senator Harris had pushed hard for college debt relief. Then-candidate Biden eventually came around, too, promising a minimum of $10,000 forbearance for individuals — but once he was elected his heart didn’t seem to be into the idea. It was different for his vice president. In December 2021, Harris told radio’s Charlamagne tha God the debt crisis “is real” and “we need to address it.” It’s been reported that privately the vice president became a behind-the-scenes force in the Biden White House in arguing not just for debt relief but for a more robust plan. The solution that emerged last week had Harris’ fingerprints all over it, with the doubling of the cancellation for Pell Grant recipients to $20,000 aimed at giving maximum relief to Black and brown borrowers. Ironically, Biden’s recent policy wins have boosted his own chances of running and winning in 2024, when he’ll be turning 82 — but if Harris isn’t back near the top of the conversation of who’s up next, she should be.