Revisionist History

Doug Mastriano didn't impress former colleagues and instructors. Nor does he impress GOTV as anything but a fear-monger and opportunist.  Based on our experience in academia in general, and in classrooms at a number of levels, nothing he claims passes muster.

As reported in today's Inquirer, Tami Davis Biddle, the former chair of the faculty council at the U.S. Army War College, wrote in a Harrisburg newspaper last week that Doug Mastriano doesn’t deserve our trust or support. Rick Coplen, another retired professor at the College, where Mastriano studied and taught, says the Republican gubernatorial candidate poses a threat to American democracy. The guy is not fit for office, Coplen said.

Other academics have sounded similar alarms. James Gregory, a graduate history student at the University of Oklahoma, has been calling attention for nearly two years to what he describes as questionable conclusions and outright fabrications in Mastriano’s published work on World War I. He’s literally changing history, Gregory said last week, reiterating concerns of other researchers over Mastriano’s work on Sgt. Alvin York. Jeffrey Brown, the University of New Brunswick professor who for a time advised Mastriano on his doctoral dissertation, called the retired colonel a dangerous religious zealot with a post-fact worldview. UNB recently announced that, as a result of questions surrounding Mastriano’s Ph.D., it's reviewing its standards and methods for awarding doctorates.

All four of the scholars mentioned above told The Inquirer they are speaking publicly about Mastriano due to:

• what they see as an emerging pattern of academic falsehoods

• fears that he will interfere with future elections if he becomes governor

The fact that there are colleagues and associates of Mastriano’s that are speaking up now, under ordinary circumstances would be highly unusual, said Jeffrey Brown. But these circumstances, I think, are far from ordinary.

One more question stands out. Would you want anyone with the following positions holding any office, let alone Governor of Pennsylvania?

• Mastriano supports outlawing abortion with no exceptions, including the life of the mother, and supports criminal penalties for those providing abortions. In 2019, Mastriano said women who violated his proposed 10-week abortion ban should be charged with murder. He's called the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade worse than the Holocaust.

• The Associated Press stated that Mastriano leads an increase in Christian nationalism among GOP candidates. Republican strategist Mike Madrid told Politico Mastriano's Christian nationalism is … a movement [with] ...separation between evangelical Christianity, white identity and American nationalism is basically gone. They're merging into the same thing.

• No evidence of compromised voting machines, whomever the vendor might be, has been found. Nonetheless, Mastriano has said that if elected, he would, within his first 100 days in office, immediately end all contracts with compromised voting machine companies. He's offered no indication of to determine which companies those might be.

• Mastriano would repeal Pennsylvania's no-excuse mail voting law, which he previously voted for.

• As Governor, Mastriano would have the power to appoint Pennsylvania's Secretary of State, who oversees elections in the state. In April 2022, Mastriano said that his Secretary of State would reconfigure voter rolls so that Pennsylvanians would have to re-register to vote. Someone should tell him that, according to legal scholars consulted by the Associated Press, such an action would be a clear violation of federal law and constitutional protections.

• At a campaign event this year, Mastriano suggested that he might only certify Pennsylvania's election results if the Republican candidate for president wins.

• Mastriano supports pulling Pennsylvania out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a market-based program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change. He justifies his opposition by claiming climate change is just a theory based on pop science.

• Mastriano, has called for cuts to funding of public education and proposed reducing per-student school funding from $19,000 to about $9,000. The Pennsylvania State Education Association analyzed Mastriano's education plan and determined it would amount to a school funding cut of $12.75 billion, and could lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in public schools in Pennsylvania.

• During a rally this month, Mastriano said, if elected Governor, that he would eliminate the sexualization of our kids, pole dancing, and all this other crap that's going on ... in our schools.

• Mastriano supports removing undocumented immigrants living in Pennsylvania, suggesting that they be bussed to Wilmington, Delaware, hometown of President Joe Biden.

• Mastriano opposes efforts to ban or discourage conversion therapy, a pseudoscientific practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation, calling efforts to discourage the practice disgusting, and claiming the practice can be used to cure children who are confused.