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Doug Mastriano

Christian Nationalist Mastriano Rising In Pennsylvania Primary

J.D. Vance, the Ohioan who grew up poor, joined the Marines, got a Yale law degree, wrote a bestseller about his hardscrabble upbringing, became a venture capitalist, and panned Donald Trump before becoming a convert to Trumpism and winning Ohio’s GOP primary for U.S. Senate, is one brand of 2022’s Republican candidates—a shapeshifter, as the New York Times’ conservative columnist Bret Stephens noted.

“He’s just another example of an increasingly common type: the opportunistic, self-abasing, intellectually dishonest, morally situational former NeverTrumper who saw Trump for exactly what he was until he won and then traded principles and clarity for a shot at gaining power,” Stephens said in a conversation with New York Times liberal columnist Gail Collins that was published on May 9.

But the GOP’s frontrunner for governor in Pennsylvania’s crowded May 17 primary field, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, is an entirely different Republican: a man of deep religious and political convictions who, if he wins the nomination and the general election, could be problematic for Americans who do not want elected officials to impose their personal beliefs on the wider public, whether the topic is abortion, vaccines, denying election results, or calling on God’s help to seize political power.

Mastriano’s current lead among nine candidates, with nearly 28 percent, could be taken two ways. He could be an extremist, like Trump in 2016, who won because too many contenders split the mainstream vote in a low-turnout primary. (In 2018, less than one-fifth of Pennsylvania’s voters turned out—suggesting that 2022’s winner may be nominated by as little as 5 percent of its state electorate.) Or, if Pennsylvania’s GOP were more firmly in control of its nomination process, Mastriano’s support might pale next to the establishment’s pick.

It remains to be seen if voters’ allegiances will shift as May 17 approaches, especially as the Democrats’ likely nominee, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, has signaled that Mastriano is the Republican he would most like to run against in the general election by launching TV attack ads. Centrist Republicans also are attacking Mastriano, but the Philadelphia Inquirer reports it’s not working.

Mastriano’s prospects, and his chances in the upcoming general election in the fall as another breed of 2022’s GOP mavericks, suggest that wider currents are roiling American politics, including, in this national battleground state, a mainstreaming of white Christian nativism.

Mastriano is a retired Army military intelligence officer and Army War College historian (whose error-filled 2014 biography of a World War I heroic Christian soldier embarrassed its university press). In uniform, he served overseas in Eastern Europe, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. His career in elected office started in a predictable rightward fashion: proposing a bill to ban abortion. But after 2020’s election, he emerged from local ranks as an early and fervent member of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” cavalry who sought to subvert the certification of its winner, Pennsylvania native Joe Biden, who officially beat Trump by 80,000 votes.

Mastriano invited Big Lie propagandist Rudy Giuliani and others to legislative hearings. On January 6, 2021, he bussed Trump supporters to the U.S. Capitol, and newly surfaced videos show that he followed them past police barriers. He opposed COVID-19 mandates, and in mid-2021 started calling for an Arizona-style “audit” of the state’s 2020 presidential election results. But unlike Arizona’s effort, led by the Cyber Ninjas’ Doug Logan, another deeply observant but more private Christian, Mastriano is vocal about how much his religion influences his politics.

A New Yorker profile by Eliza Griswold on May 9 characterizes Mastriano as a white Christian nationalist—a term he rejects—who, before the January 6 Capitol riot, “exhorted his followers to ‘do what George Washington asked us to do in 1775. Appeal to Heaven. Pray to God. We need an intervention.’”

On the 2020 election denial front, Mastriano is not alone. Although he was leading in a crowded field, there are other candidates for governor who have been falsely proclaiming that Democrats stole their state’s 2020 election and the presidency, and even forged Electoral College documents sent to Washington, D.C.

“If you thought Donald Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Mehmet Oz for Senate was the worst development in Pennsylvania’s 2022 GOP primaries, wait until you hear about the Republicans running for governor,” wrote Amanda Carpenter, a political columnist for the Bulwark, an anti-Trump Republican news and opinion website.

“They’re all election conspiracists.” she continued. “The only thing differentiating them is how far down the rabbit hole they go. And, there’s an excellent chance the nuttiest bunny of them all, Doug Mastriano, is going to win the primary.”

But Mastriano is not a mere Trump imitator. He is cut from an older, more gothic American political cloth: mixing a nativist piety, conspiratorial mindset, and authoritarian reflexes. The Philadelphia Inquirer characterized his unbending religiosity as belonging to the “charismatic strand of Christianity.” The New Yorker’s Griswold concluded that “Mastriano’s rise embodies the spread of a movement centered on the belief that God intended America to be a Christian nation.”

This political type is not new, wrote Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist and historian, in 2006 in American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, which detailed how George W. Bush’s evangelism tainted his presidency. However, Mastriano’s ascension, coupled with a Trump-fortified U.S. Supreme Court that’s poised to void a woman’s right to abortion, affirms today’s reemergence of a radical right.

“Christianity in the United States, especially Protestantism, has always had an evangelical—which is to say, missionary—and frequently a radical or combative streak,” wrote Phillips. “Some message has always had to be preached, punched, or proselytized.”

Add in Mastriano’s embrace of Trumpian authoritarianism, and the Keystone State’s leading GOP candidate for governor is proudly part of this pantheon. As the Inquirer wrote on May 4, he “often invokes Esther, the biblical Jewish queen who saved her people from slaughter by Persians, casting himself and his followers as God’s chosen people who have arrived at a crossroads—and who must now defend their country, their very lives.”

“It is the season of Purim,” Mastriano said, according to the paper’s report of a “March [campaign] event in Lancaster, referring to the Jewish holiday celebrated in the Book of Esther.” The gubernatorial candidate continued, “And God has turned the tables on the Democrats and those who stand against what is good in America. It’s true.”

A Heavy Hand?

It’s hardly new for Republicans to demonize Democrats. But under Trump, the enemies list has grown to include not just the media (Mastriano has barred reporters from rallies and abruptly ended interviews), but America’s “secular democracy” (as Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne, put it in Griswold’s piece for the New Yorker). This targeting includes the government civil servants who administer elections and the technology used to cast and count votes.

When it comes to election administration, if elected governor, Mastriano gets to appoint the secretary of state, the state’s top election regulator. He also has pledged to sign legislation to curtail voting with mailed-out ballots, which was how 2.6 million Pennsylvanians—about 38 percent of voters, including nearly 600,000 Trump voters—cast 2020’s presidential ballots. (As of May 10, nearly 900,000 voters had applied for a mailed-out ballot for 2022’s primary.) Such a policy shift, if enacted, would deeply inconvenience, if not discourage, voter turnout.

Mastriano, if elected, could also play an outsized role should the presidency in 2024 hinge on Pennsylvania’s 19 presidential electors. In the wake of the 2020 election, as Trump and his allies filed and lost more than 60 election challenge suits, one of their arguments was the U.S. Constitution decrees that state legislatures set the “time, place and manner” of elections. That authority could include rejecting the popular vote in presidential elections and appointing an Electoral College slate favoring the candidate backed by a legislative majority, which, in Pennsylvania, has been Republican since 2011’s extreme gerrymander.

Pennsylvania has been at the forefront of recent litigation over this power grab, the so-called “independent state legislature doctrine.” If elected governor, Mastriano could hasten a constitutional crisis, because under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which was designed to say how competing slates of presidential electors are to be resolved, the governor—not the state legislature—has the final say, according to Edward B. Foley, a widely respected election law scholar.

“A key provision of the act says that if the [U.S.] House and Senate are split [on ratifying a state’s Electoral College slate], the governor of the state in dispute becomes the tiebreaker,” Foley wrote in 2016, when scholars were gaming post-Election Day scenarios in Trump’s race against Hillary Clinton. While speculating about 2024 is premature, there’s some precedent to heed.

After the 2020 election, 84 people in seven battleground states that Biden won, including Pennsylvania, sent lists of unauthorized Trump electors to the National Archives in Washington. Two of Mastriano’s primary opponents, ex-congressman Lou Barletta and Charlie Gerow, signed the fake Electoral College slates. Mastriano, however, did not.

With days to go before the primary, Josh Shapiro, the Democrats’ likely nominee for governor (he is running unopposed in the party primary) is already running anti-Mastriano TV ads seeking to tie the Republican candidate to Trump. (Incumbent Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, faces term limits and cannot seek reelection.) Shapiro’s strategy to elevate Mastriano is “dangerous,” according to Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, as it affirms Mastriano’s credentials to voters and could backfire in the fall—in a replay of Trump’s 2016 victory in the state.

“A Gov. Mastriano, Shapiro’s new TV spot says, would effectively ban abortion in the Keystone State and, the narrator continues, ‘he led the fight to audit the 2020 election,’” Bunch wrote on May 8. “‘If Mastriano wins, it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for.’ Cue the Satanic music, maybe the only clue that the Shapiro campaign thinks these are bad things. The commercial’s closing pitch: ‘Is that what we want in Pennsylvania?’”

“The answer, for far too many people in a state where the wife-cheating, private-part-grabbing xenophobe won by 44,292 votes in 2016, would, unfortunately, be ‘yes.’”

But a Mastriano primary victory would be more than the latest affirmation of the ex-president’s sway over swaths of today’s GOP. It heralds the rise of “radicalized religion,” as Phillips wrote in American Theocracy about fundamentalists and George W. Bush’s presidency, merged with more recent Trumpian authoritarianism.

“Few questions will be more important to the 21st-century United States than whether renascent religion and its accompanying political hubris will be carried on the nation’s books as an asset or as a liability,” Phillips wrote. “While sermons and rhetoric propounding American exceptionalism proclaim religiosity an asset, a sober array of historical precedents—the pitfalls of imperial Christian overreach from Rome to Britain—tip the scales toward liability.”

Reprinted with permission from Independent Media Institute.

Have We Learned Nothing? 13 Years After America’s Disastrous Iraq Invasion, Obama Quietly Deploys More Troops

Have We Learned Nothing? 13 Years After America’s Disastrous Iraq Invasion, Obama Quietly Deploys More Troops

This article originally appeared in Alternet.

It has been thirteen years since former president George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office and announced the invasion and large-scale bombing of Iraq to “free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

That war and occupation would go on to take the lives of over one million Iraqi people, according to some estimates, and leave behind decimated infrastructure, environmental poison, a sectarian political system and the conditions that fueled the rise of the “Islamic State.”

Met with the largest coordinated global protests in human history, the 2003 invasion was, for people in Iraq, one of many violent U.S. interventions in the country.

As the Iraqi Transnational Collective recently documented, it has been 25 years since the U.S. attacked a bomb shelter in Baghdad’s Amiriyah neighborhood, killing 403 civilians as part of “Operation Desert Storm” assault on cities, infrastructure and people. The brutal U.S. sanctions regime during the ‘90s is estimated to have killed at least half-a-million children – a death toll that was cruelly described in 1996 by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as “worth” the price.

Now, on the anniversary of a war that is broadly considered to be a disaster of epic proportions, and even acknowledged as a mistake by some who initially rallied behind the invasion, the Obama administration is quietly deploying more troops to the country. These deployments come despite the president’s previous pledges that there would be no “boots on the ground” in military operations against the “Islamic State,” which have now been waged in Iraq and Syria for roughly a year-and-a-half.

U.S. Central Command announced on Sunday that it has assigned “a detachment of U.S. Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit to the support of Iraqi Security Force and Coalition ground operations.” The military did not disclose the specific number of marines who will be deployed to a country where there are already nearly 4,000 U.S. troops on the ground.

That announcement came one day after the Pentagon announced that Marine Staff Sergeant Louis F. Cardin was killed by rocket fire on a base near Makhmour, located southeast of Mosul.

CNN’s Barbara Starr reported over the weekend that the firebase had not been previously disclosed to the public and was only revealed by Cardin’s death.

An unnamed defense official told CNN that the Pentagon had been planning to reveal the existence of a “couple hundred” marines living in tents near Makhmour. However, such claims are questionable, given the military’s repeated failure to share the most basic information about its ongoing wars, including civilians it has killed in Iraq and Syria.

“The fact that the U.S. is sending undisclosed numbers of marines back to Iraq is a sad indication that the the Obama administration’s policy in the country does not depart from the policies of former administrations,” Raed Jarrar, government relations manager for the American Friends Service Committee, told AlterNet. “In addition to direct military intervention, the U.S. is also sending Iraq weapons and military aid. It is indirectly supporting human rights violations and war crimes committed by our partner in the country.”

“Obama ran on a platform of ending the Iraq War,” Jarrar continued. “The U.S. has been engaged in military intervention in Iraq since 1991, and Obama is the fourth consecutive president who seems to be following the same unfortunate policies of continuing to interfere in Iraq militarily and continuing to be part of the problem.

Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, Sarah co-edited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.

Photo: Iraqi soldiers train with members of the U.S. Army 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, at Camp Taji, Iraq, in this U.S. Army photo released June 2, 2015. 

Chattanooga Shooting Suspect’s Mideast Travel Being Probed

Chattanooga Shooting Suspect’s Mideast Travel Being Probed

By Rich McKay

CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee (Reuters) – U.S. authorities are investigating trips that the suspect in the fatal shootings of four Marines in Tennessee took to the Middle East, including at least one to Jordan and a possible visit to Yemen, a source close to the probe said on Friday.

Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24, identified as the shooter by the FBI, was shot to death in a rampage on Thursday at two military facilities in Chattanooga.

The suspect, seen driving an open-top Ford Mustang, first went to a joint military recruiting center in a strip mall and sprayed it with gunfire, riddling the glass facade with bullet holes. The gunman then drove off to a Naval Reserve Center about 6 miles (10 km) away, fatally shooting the four Marines before being shot and killed in a firefight with police.

The attack, which comes at a time when U.S. military and law enforcement authorities are increasingly concerned about the threat ‘lone wolves’ pose to domestic targets, also injured three people, including a sailor who was critically wounded.

Investigators are trying to determine whether the suspect had any contact with militants or militant groups, but at this point have no evidence that he did, the source told Reuters.

U.S. law enforcement officials said they were investigating whether he was inspired by Islamic State or a similar group.

Islamic State had threatened to step up violence in the holy fasting month of Ramadan, which ends on Friday evening.

The extremist group, also known as ISIS and ISIL, claimed responsibility when a gunman in Tunisia opened fire at a popular tourist hotel and killed 37 people in June. On the same day, there was an attack in France and a suicide bombing in Kuwait.

At a news conference late Thursday, Edward Reinhold, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Knoxville, Tennessee, division, said investigators had found nothing that tied the suspect to an international terrorist organization.

The SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist groups, said that Abdulazeez blogged on Monday that “life is short and bitter” and Muslims should not miss an opportunity to “submit to Allah.” Reuters could not independently verify the blog postings.

The New York Times, citing unnamed law enforcement officials, reported that his father had been under investigation several years ago over possible ties to a foreign terrorist organization. His name was later removed from a terror watch list.

According to a resume believed to have been posted online by Abdulazeez, he attended high school in a Chattanooga suburb and graduated from the University of Tennessee with an engineering degree.

(Reporting by Suzannah Gonzales in Chicago, Eric Johnson in Seattle, Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee, David Bailey in Minneapolis, Frank McGurty and Katie Reiley in New York, Emily Stephenson, Julia Edwards, Lindsay Dunsmuir, Doina Chiacu and David Alexander in Washington, Dan Whitcomb and Victoria Cavaliere in Los Angeles; Writing by Frank McGurty; Editing by James Dalgleish)

Photo: Police tape and a makeshift memorial sit on the lawn in front of an Armed Forces Career Center in this handout photo provided by the U.S. Navy, where earlier in the day a gunman opened fire, injuring one U.S. Marine in Chattanooga, Tennessee, July 16, 2015, (REUTERS/Damon J. Moritz/U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters)

Gunman Who Killed 4 Marines Identified

Gunman Who Killed 4 Marines Identified

By Michael Muskal, Christina Littlefield, Christine Mai-Duc and Julie Westfall, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

A shooting at a military reserve center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, left four Marines dead and three people injured, including a police officer, officials announced Thursday.

The gunman was also killed, officials said. The FBI identified him as 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez.

The deadly attack was preceded by a shooting at a nearby military recruiting center, where no one was injured.

“This is a sad day for the United States,” William C. “Bill” Killian, U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Tennessee, said at a news conference. “These service members served their country with pride, and they have been the victims of these shootings.”

Killian said the shootings were being treated as an act of domestic terrorism, but he later backed away from that label.

An FBI official said authorities will investigate the shooter’s motive to determine whether terror was the intent. “We will treat this as a terrorist investigation until it can be determined it is not,” Special Agent in Charge Edward W. Reinhold said.

The first shooting took place about 10:45 a.m., and both shootings were over within about 30 minutes, Reinhold said.

A federal law enforcement official described the shooter as a white man who pulled up in a gray Ford Mustang convertible with its top down, jumped out and “almost instantly” started firing. The shooter was heavily armed with multiple weapons, said the official, who asked not to be named because he or she was not permitted to speak about the investigation. The official does not believe the shooter worked at either of the military centers, but said the shooter might have lived nearby.

Officials said the police officer who was injured was pursuing the suspect from the first shooting at a recruiting center on Lee Highway and engaged a man at the scene of the second shooting, the reserve center on Amnicola Highway, about a five-minute drive away.

The officer was shot in the ankle, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke said.

One of the victims who was injured is in critical condition, according to Chattanooga police.

The victims’ names have not been released.

In the first shooting, recruiters reported seeing a vehicle pull up in front of the center, shots being fired at the building and then the vehicle driving away, said Brian Lepley, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command out of Fort Knox, Kentucky.

It is unclear how many shots were fired or what damage the building sustained.

Four Army recruiters were in the building at the time, Lepley said, adding that they were not injured and had been evacuated from the center. Recruiting officers have been trained to react to threats since the 2009 shooting at a recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, he said.

The center recruits for all four armed services, he said.

“We are working closely with the U.S. Navy and local and federal law enforcement to determine exactly what happened today in Chattanooga,” said Maj. Paul L. Greenberg, a Marine spokesman.

Earlier, Berke had tweeted that there was a “horrific incident in our community. We will release details as they are confirmed. Prayers to all those affected.”

Erlanger Medical Center in Chattanooga “received some people” after the shootings, a spokeswoman said. She did not provide more details.

Nic Donohue, a computer technician at Desktop Solutions, which is three doors away from the recruiting center on Lee, heard some of the shots.

“At first, I had music playing in the background so I wasn’t able to clearly discern what was going on. I thought it could’ve been really loud banging at the front door, so I turned off the music,” the 24-year-old said.

“It was a couple seconds later that I heard the second grouping of shots,” he said. “In the back of your head, you really don’t want to believe that it is gunfire and something dangerous is going on.”

Donohue said he stayed in the back during the shooting, which is walled off and not visible through the store’s glass windows and doors, and tried to keep busy with repairs. A couple of minutes later, he went to the front of the store and saw police and emergency vehicles had arrived, he said.

Lee University in Cleveland, Tenn., and Chattanooga State Community College in Chattanooga went into lockdown amid the reports, but Lee University quickly lifted its alert. Chattanooga State, which is about a mile from the reserve center, lifted its lockdown later; the main campus is to remain closed for the rest of the day.

In Cleveland, Tenn., about 30 miles from Chattanooga, Bradley Square Mall went into automatic shutdown after the shootings because of a Tennessee National Guard recruiting center in the building, said the mall’s general manager, Stacia Crye-Shahan.

People at the recruiting center thought they heard shots fired and called 911, and police searched the building she said.

“There’s no evidence of shots fired, and no one was injured here, so we are very thankful for that,” Crye-Shahan said.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said it had agents responding to the shooting, and a White House spokesman said President Barack Obama had been briefed on the situation.

(Tribune Washington Bureau staff writer Richard A. Serrano contributed to this report.)

Photo: A Chattanooga policeman holds a high-powered assault rifle outside the Reserve Recruitment Center at Highway 153 and Lee Highway on Thursday, July 16, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn. (Tim Barber/Chattanooga Times Free Press/TNS)