From the New Pennsylvania Project (NPP):
Just one week before the January 6th insurrection, on a virtual meeting with Christian nationalists who hoped to keep Donald Trump in the White House, Doug Mastriano, the GOP candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, “prayed Congress would ‘disregard’ Pennsylvania's election results,” and disenfranchise the nearly 7 million voters who cast their ballots in the Commonwealth alone.
But he wasn’t just addressing Congress. “Looking ahead to Jan 6, [Mastriano] said: ‘I pray that… we’ll seize the power.’” Those aren’t the words of someone planning a peaceful trip to the Capitol.
As described by Rolling Stone, “Mastriano’s appearance is brief, but he delivers a rapid-fire prayer, dense with violent imagery,” such as his thinly veiled call to violence, praying “‘that we will seize our Esther and Gideon moments…’ invoking a pair of Old Testament heroes who made themselves instruments of God’s vengeance.”
He knew what was going to go down.
This is more clear evidence that Mastriano is an extreme threat to our democracy and a white Christian nationalist who will not tolerate any but his own religion. This belief is dangerous because it assumes that being Christian “is the standard of American life, and everything else or everyone else is a deviation from that” according to Brock Bahler, a senior lecturer in religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Such a mindset can become a basis for rationalizing racism, and for delegitimizing anyone outside the faith.
We must defend our democracy and expand the electorate in PA to secure free and fair elections in the future. We must work to register newly energized women and students in order to win by a big enough margin that “stolen election” is an obvious lie.