QAA Podcast - Episode 205: Q-Pilled Midterms feat Ryan Briggs

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Tickets to come see us live: tour.qanonanonymous.com Doug Mastriano and J.R. Majewski are two of the most visible QAnon-supporting politicians running for government in the upcoming mid-terms. We take a look at them with the help of Ryan Briggs of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to the full Trickle Down 10-part miniseries and all upcoming extra series: www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Ryan Briggs: https://twitter.com/rw_briggs New Merch: merch.qanonanonymous.com Music by Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to chapter 205 of the Q&ONONANANANANANANAS podcast, the Q-Pilled Midterms episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View. As you may know, we've been covering Q&ONN on since two.

2018, when most Americans had no idea what QAnon even was, and our podcast was covering at the time an obscure conspiracy theory embraced by a small but growing number of people. Fast forward, 205 main episodes, and we're dealing with a very different reality. Heading into the 2022 midterm elections, we're forced to contend with a slew of Q-pilled candidates, including multiple incumbent Congress people. So this week, we're lifting our wary eyes to several newcomers to the scene. including J.R. Majuski, which that still sounds made up to me, but fine. He is in Ohio and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.

For help with the latter, our guest is Ryan Briggs, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who has covered Mastriano in the past. But before we jump into all of that, you should come and check us out perform the QA podcast live this very month of October. Now, maybe too late to check us out in San Diego. on October 2nd. It also might be too late, not sure, but Berkeley on the 4th. However, Phoenix, Arizona on the 6th, we know you're in Arizona, folks.

We know you're there. We know you're dealing with pilled people. We promise Jake will be securing the perimeter with tactical aplomb. Shot collars so you can't leave. Oh, though. We met the other way around, like you protect them from bad people. Oh, oh, not protect them. from themselves. Jake will be infringing on your human rights. Apparently, not sure.

For usual, that's what you're paying for. Come check us out at the Crescent Ballroom. Then Denver, Colorado on the 8th. Austin, Texas on the 10th. That's going to be amazing. Can't wait. Brad Abrams is going to be our guest and he's preparing a little segment for that little stint. And then finally we'll be back home kicking our feet up, probably not even making it to the venue, but still come out on the 18th of October in Los Angeles, California. Tickets can be purchased at tour.cunonanonymous.com. Jake, you're going to be performing the sequel to the award-winning story that you did for the first three dates. What was the title there?

The title of that story was, in space, no one can hear you, Marjorie Taylor, scream. Wow. Okay. And so the second one is coming out, I hear. Yeah, the second one, the tagline from Alien. is this time it's war, so I'm going to have to find a funny spin on that to make it QAnon somehow, so... Yeah, it could be about your writing,

and it would be, this time it's poor. That's great. So, yes, I mean, cats out of the bag, story trilogy, based on my favorite movie series. And as some of you may know, the third installment takes place on a prison planet,

so that's going to be even more spectacular. Yeah, we were chatting about that, and that should be very fun. But I'm very excited about it. It's very rare that I actually follow up on my threats to make some kind of trilogy. Yes, that's true. That's true. No leaving them hanging this time.

You're forced to. Yeah, I'm forced to. Management has intervened. All right. And Travis, tell the good people what you've got in store for them if they come to see us live. Yeah, I'm going to be talking about the history and evolution of the reptilian, alien lizard person conspiracy theory. It's roots in both pulp fiction and occultism, because that's basically what happened.

It was just a made-up story that was picked up by some occultists, and then now millions of people believe it. Fun stuff. So, yeah, come check it out. And also, we will have, like, merch exclusive tour merch for these dates. And with that said, let's get running for office. So, yeah, midterms are coming up, which means another new slate of Q. Q&ON candidates. The number of Q&N candidates used to be zero. And then when it was one, that was like, oh, holy shit, there is one guy out in Florida who is a Q&O follower who's running for office. This is weird. Now there are a bunch of them, including the two that are already in office. So according to Alex Kaplan's Q&N candidate count, there are 15 Q&N congressional candidates who have secured a spot on the ballot this year. There are also two Q&N gubernatorial candidates. Those are in Pennsylvania.

and Maryland. Looking forward to that. But today I'm going to be focusing on just two Q&on candidates, J.R. Majuski from Ohio and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, who's running for governor there. So first, I want to look at a recent story involving J.R. Majuski. He's the Republican congressional candidate running for Ohio's 9th District. Majuski is running to unseat longtime Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur. This is a seat that Republicans could have picked up, according to some analysis I read. So the district was heavily gerrymandered by Republicans in 2011, and the incumbent has been serving since 1983. So it could run on the idea of like, you know, fresh blood in the house, but Republican voters in the district decided to choose the craziest person for the

candidate in the primary. So it looks like it might not go their way, at least according to the polls. Now, first of all, I want to say that, but just gets blocked beyond Twitter, even though I have never mentioned him or interacted with him one time. That's very suss. You know, you know someone is kind of cue, you know, involved when they just seek out Travis view and block him in advance. Yeah, just preemptively block me. This is very strange.

You know, that wouldn't fly if you were elected. Oh, okay. Here we go. Yeah, do it again. There's precedence now. He is extremely litigious. I don't fully understand why the Constitution says that you have to unblock me on Twitter if you're a member of Congress, but I'm rolling with it, and I will have my Jewish lawyer send you a threatening letter just like I did with Marjor Taylor Green. Now, why would we specifically say that about the lawyer?

Well, he said that about himself, by the way. He said that. He said that about himself, but that's a word they can use, you know, Travis? Okay. You know, it's like Jay-Z, you know, it's like Jay-Z said in, you know, various rap musics, you know, you get, get you a Jew, you know, if you want to, you know, if you want to. I've made it worse somehow by bringing it up. All right. Yeah, he can say it, I guess. I'm not offended.

I wasn't offended by what you said, Travis. We do tend to make pretty good lawyers, not me, much to my parents chagrin. You would make an awful lawyer. No offense. I love you. You're amazing in many other ways. If you defended somebody They would somehow be convicted of stuff

They weren't even originally accused of I would be good at like the performance aspect of it Like I would be good at appealing Oh yeah I would be good at appealing to the jury But then they would check their notes and be like Wait a minute This is all made up

Mujiski is a QAnon promoter At one point he even claimed that he believes Everything that has been put out by Q And that Q is military intelligence I never you know like I said before It's not that I believe in it. I believe in everything that's been put out from Q. What I think is, like I've said before, I think there's been conflation between people that join or get involved.

They don't do their own due diligence. They just, they think that they know. They become arrogant. And, you know, a lot of it has to do with the fact that there's these boards, you know, and these boards kind of propagate. a certain mentality, a certain behaviors, and they manifest themselves in other people. And then they start conflating with other, you know, schools of thought like fall, look, ball. And then they twist and they smear, you know, what Q's trying to put out, which is military level intelligence, in my opinion.

And those two don't mix. They have certain points where they're aligned, but they're, they have totally different, you know, intentions to certain degrees. Wow, I wonder where Fall of the Cabal was inspired. Yeah, the totally different thing. Yeah, I mean, it's funny is that this is something that some Q1L followers like say a lot, where it's like, oh, no, the QDrops are pristine and perfect and flawless, but those other Q&N followers who spin out their wild theories that make QAnon look bad.

Why can't it be both? Majuski has also appeared on the Q&ON show Red Pill 78 and talked about the QDrops. In addition to that, he painted. a giant Trump 2024 sign on his lawn in blue, red, and white, and he showed it off on Fox News while wearing a shirt with a cue on it. So he's majorly cue-pilled. He's not an occasional subtle thing. Well, I'm not entirely sure it's fair to call him a cue in on candidate yet. So hopefully you have more evidence to present. Unsurprisingly, Madruski was at the Capitol on January six. Now, I'm bringing him up today because he recently found himself embroiled some controversy

because of claims he made related to his military service. In interviews, Majuski has repeatedly claimed that he was deployed to Afghanistan, such as this interview that he did. Did you serve in Afghanistan? Yes, I did. How many tours? One. What year were you there? What years? 2003. Wow. So you served right at the beginning. What was that experience like? Tough.

Tough. I don't like talking about my military experience. Not that we've said too much. I just don't, I don't really like to, I really don't like to divulge a lot of things about the military because, you know, to me, you know, there was a, it was a tough time in life. You know, the military wasn't easy, but in retrospect, It's one of the best decisions I've ever made. So the claim that he was deployed to Afghanistan came to question after the Associated Press reviewed his military records. And here's what the AP reported.

Military documents obtained by the Associated Press through a public records request tell a different story. They indicate Majuski never deployed to Afghanistan, but instead completed a six-month stint helping to load planes at an air base in Qatar, a longtime U.S. ally that is a safe distance from the fighting. left like that they had to kind of like rub it in like all this guy was chilling out in a wealthy friendly country that's like nowhere near where the shit was happening yeah i mean it says a lot about who majuski believes you know is listening you know is listening to this or following him that he doesn't feel comfortable saying yeah you know what i served but uh i was really lucky i was i worked as a you know um airfield technician or whatever so you know i was i was and up on the front lines with the guys fighting. I knew a lot of people who were, you know, it's like you still served, you're still a veteran. It just, to me, it says something that you feel like you have to allude to the falsity that you were in combat and that it was, oh, you know, it was really, it was really hard

and I don't really like to talk about it all that much. I think this is a thing that really, this is an issue that reaches across the aisle. Just candidates and or news anchors fucking lying about being in the military because this country worships the idea that you actually fought and killed other people so much that it's like, wow, that's going to really help my image publicly. And it's so fucked up because I have friends who served who are like more than happy to tell you that like I was really lucky. I worked on helicopters or I, you know, I was mostly at the base.

I didn't go to combat. I lost some friends. Like that really fucking sucked. But like I was, you know, safe for the most part. You know, I have a bunch of friends who are like more than happy to be honest. about what their time was like when they served. And so I always find it interesting of people that are, you know, that it's like, what, somebody's not going to find out?

I mean, this is all like, you know, you can look this kind of stuff up. That is the American promise, though. You can switch towns, even if it's very close to yours, and lie about everything, including your name. It sounds as though we have ourselves a case of stolen valor. But Majewski called a press conference to address the accusations and instead of, I guess, fessing up or whatever the truth is he essentially claimed that he can't provide evidence of his deployments because they are classified okay in fact the orders and the military records that i've been

able to obtain from my personal files shows that all of my deployments are listed as classified this was a strategic and strategically placed excuse me to crush me and defame me with a fake hit piece these enemies of the truth did not bother to publish that the Air Force has explicitly stated there is no way for us to verify whether or not J.R. Majuski served in Afghanistan

during his deployment time frame in Qatar. Okay so now we have to choose between is the United States shady enough to be doing this and or is this guy lying so the story is that he did no of course not I don't think he did a classified secret mission in Afghanistan and then once he got out he just talked about it all the

time and then I mean that doesn't sound plausible unless he's he's very bad at keeping uh secret information secret at the end of the day it's just uh you know they have to be like no you weren't cool yeah yeah like why are we even arguing over like yeah how violent how violent was it uh you know when when you were over there did you get to did you get to pull the trigger and kill some baddies Or are you a cuck? Like, it's just like, I don't know, it's so sad. It's so sad. And you have to call this press conference.

And then it becomes a bigger thing, too, because it's like, oh, well, the fake media is doing this hit piece. You know, they didn't bother to include the truth. And so you're lumping in with your own lie, you know, this perpetuation of, you know, the misleading media, yada, yeah, yeah. I think we could all agree, no matter what happened in Qatar, J.R. Mujuski is a huge loser. Yeah, sounds like there are some immediate consequences for the revelation that

Majuski misrepresented his military service. The National Republican Congressional Committee initially planned a million dollar ad buy intended to boost Majuski's campaign, but they cut that entirely after these revelations. So it sounds like the GOP just said, fuck this, I give up. I'm getting, they're going to use that money elsewhere. And they're, yeah, they basically seated, seated that seat. to the Democrats. Now to turn our attention to Pennsylvania. We're going to take a brief look at

the career and campaign of gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. In November, Mastriano will face off against his Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. But the reason we're looking at Mastriano is because he is definitely the most pilled candidate running for governor. In fact, he made over 50 tweets referencing Qadon before they were discovered by media matters and he deleted them all. Coward. Not a true believer, I guess. He was like, as soon as he gets some heat for his Q and on hashtags, he says,

never mind, I don't want to deal with that anymore. Yeah, what would the Q team think, dude? Sounds like you ain't got the backbone. Yeah, man, your clearance revoked. Now, Masteriotto, he has a much more hardcore military background the Majusky does. He served in the Army from 1986 to 2017. And he obtained the rank of a colonel. Yeah, most of his life, basically.

And during his career, he mostly worked in military intelligence, which, again, another red flag. I got to say this. You know, I think the government needs to do a better job of handling the intel officers it creates. Because he makes these people, like Michael Flynn or Phil Waldron or Seth Cashel, and then was the gal the service, the rest of us have to deal with these lunatics. I don't know what it is about military intel that makes people just, worse for society once they're once there are civilians so true but uh yeah it's a problem the government fails to put them directly in a prison and then dismantle their entire operations that that's true i i call upon them to do so they need to mk alter them to just to make them

you know adjust adjust it back to society uh to civilian society again and then arm the self-destruct button i would imagine that when you spend a decade uh in a military field that is driven by paranoia, speculation, and, you know, and... Baking, dot connecting, you know? And dot connecting and massively overfunded. Also, you know, and pair that with, you know, there do be some suss, you know, people out in the world planning some bad shit. I would imagine that your worldview is completely.

hijacked by that and and that it is you know like like a lot of people who serve who come back you know it is hard to turn off and and you know when you apply that to to an intelligence sort of apparatus I mean I'm not surprised that that this is the result in some cases yeah I mean let's not forget that a lot of them are probably just going to be framing mentally disabled teenagers for the duration of their stint but yeah, I think it also just cooks your fucking brain, as does, you know, as do a lot of these institutions. So, I mean, casualties on casualties.

So, Mastriana was a warrior and a scholar because he racked up advanced degrees like he was a trust fund kid with no direction in life. In 1992, Mastriela received a master's degree in strategic intelligence from the Joint Intelligence College. In 2001, he received another master's degree in air power. Theory from the Air University. In 2002, we received yet another master's degree in military operational art and science from the Air Strategic Studies. And how are they given out masters in like a year? It's just like a year-long program. You get a master's degree? Because

all you read is Sun Tsu. Right. So that one was from the Air University School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. In 2010, you received another master's degree in strategic studies from the United States Army College. And in 2013, they finally got off his ass, finished his final thesis, his dissertation, I guess, and he completed his Ph.D. in history from the University of New Brunswick. Oh, God. So this is, so we're talking about Dr. Mastriano? Yes, Dr. Mastriano. A Ph.D. in history. Even Travis can't challenge this. This is an indictment of the entire educational system. Dr. Mastriano sounds like the competition to like chef boy R.D. He's got his own can of ravioli.

While he was a major at Air University, Mastriano wrote a thesis titled The Civilian Push of 2018, debunking the myth of a civil military leadership rift. In this thesis, Mastriano writes from the perspective of a military colonel like himself, who is forced to hide out in a cave because a politically correct leader has taken over America and killed millions.

Oh my God, man. Weird little paranoid fiction. So here's an early paragraph from that thesis. I, Colonel Nathan H. Green, am writing this from a self-imposed exile in an isolated cavern in the George Washington National Forest near Lexington, Virginia. I took refuge here shortly after the putch occurred when the dictator, Benedict Aurelius, the radical, popular and charismatic third-party leader. Abolish the Constitution, dismissed Congress, and compelled the president to resign while consolidating power.

Dictator Aurelius declared martial law and conducted a massive purge. The purge went deep and impacted nearly every family in the nation with millions perishing. Dictator Aurelius's form of political correctness was then imposed upon the populace, with scores being sent to re-education camps to adapt their views to his. Imagine reading this And instead of putting him into a cannon and shooting him into the sun You give him his PhD You've clearly become smart sir

Years of education have paid off Because your brain is working great The board is like the one guy on the board is like I don't know Phil I mean it's it's a little bit out there don't you think And the other guy's like Well I mean this is this young man It's clear that he's really got a pension for creative rights

And, you know, I think we should really, I think we should nurture this. I think we need more like him. You know, he's going to go on to do great things. Maybe even run for office one day. I don't know. This guy kind of seems like a tapeworm in Tom Clancy's stool. Let's go for it. Maybe they'll do an episode on him on an obscure podcast about conspiracy theories.

I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I guess they don't understand military education necessarily, but I don't understand how you could get a master's degree writing dystopian fiction about what happens when the military gets too woke. It's not even that good. There's not a ton of lore. It's like woke dictator gets into office, kills all the families, and like installs his woke agenda.

Like it's just, it's just, it's basic plot points. There's no like interesting details here. Nothing's really been fleshed out. But that's okay because everybody who's reading it and involved in that education is so fucking Cold War Cook that they're like, wow, what a great satire of communism and the threat that it poses. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the good thing about the thesis is that I think it does provide a peek into his worldview, and that's illustrating this, the second passage that I have pulled from the thesis. Two trends transformed the military, which occurred along the lines of a

classic encirclement, the maneuver of choice to defeat an adversary. On one flank, the foundational morality and traditions were under assault in what was called a culture war, where America embraced relativistic morality. The last institution to cling to the Judeo-Christian worldview was the military. The advocates of political correctness saw this as a threat and compelled the military to adopt and promote moral relativism. Until this occurred, the military was perceived as a dangerous, politically incorrect culture, which stood in the way of a larger cultural, transformational agenda.

The assault started with the insertion of homosexuality into the military. Wow. Dude, the military started to fall because a finger found its way into my butthole while I was getting a blowjob. I mean, these people are so fucking stupid. And anybody who looked over this and gave this guy anything but the door and it's a long solitary confinement for brainworms. It is mind-boggling and I think it's, hey, this is perfect representation of everything I've been ranting about. So fucking have at it, sir. Mastriano, Mr. Fellow Italian.

Let's go. So he does provide a little bit more lore in sort of like how America fell. And I kind of want to talk about this thesis for the rest of the episode. I'm just provide just one last paragraph where he talks about a certain event that led to the downfall of the United States. I just read ahead and it says Pearl Harbor of Space. What the fuck? Go ahead. Internationally, the U.S. was paralyzed for six months by an attempt.

called the Pearl Harbor of Space, where adversaries destroyed our vital space assets, while foreign automation hackers simultaneously launched a devastating cyber war against our computer networks. As the country endeavored to recover from these assaults, the Sino-Russian Alliance attacked America's vital interests abroad with massive Chinese offense... We're getting everybody in here!

I love to have vital interests abroad in like almost every country. With massive Chinese offensives in Asia and the Pacific and a Russian Federation attack, into the Middle East, these setbacks corresponded with the creation of a UN army and a unified European Union military, which replaced the U.S. as the technologically dominant global force. In the end, the competing interests of the United Nations and the European Union neutralized U.S. hegemony. Economically, the European Union and China became aggressive rivals against U.S. interests. Domestically, life was bleak with a rampant drug culture,

hedonism, and a plethora of alternate religions dominating dominating the American youth, we were a people without vision or direction. Oh my God, dude. The military is just a red pill. It's all just, the whole thing is a fucking red pill, and they love it, and it's how it goes, and we've been cultivating it for years. And we fucking wonder why QAnon took such root. Mathriano viewed his military career through a religious lens. For example, he was initially deployed on the Iron Curtain in Germany during the final years of the Cold War. he viewed himself as a defender of the West against atheistic communism. When Mastriano deployed to the First Gulf War, he claimed that God favored the United States on the battlefield. In late February of 1991, Mastriano's unit was about to face Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard when a sandstorm struck.

In Mastriano's telling, this sandstorm was perfectly timed to blind the Iraqi forces, allowing allied forces to break their line. Days later, as ceasefire was announced, when Mastriano relayed the storm, to the podcast Crosspoint in 2018, it claimed that this was a miracle caused by prayer. I don't know why a lot of times this doesn't come up in the factual history of Operation Desert Storm. I guess we want to beat our chest because we were well trained, we had great equipment,

but there was a lot more to it. God did something powerful, and he answered the prayers. Well, somebody might say out there, the skeptic, oh, you were just really lucky. It's interesting that luck was so precise that it happened at the first minute that our first tank was in Iraq. Okay. And how long did it stay? It stayed that way until 8 o'clock in the morning on 28 February, the minute the ceasefire went to effect.

What's even more interesting to me, though, is that wherever we liberate it, whatever a zone that was behind us that we'd liberate it, and the American and allied forces were located, the wind went back to his normal direction behind us. But where we needed to stay with the Iraqi forces blowing in the opposite direction, it did. If you look at Lansat photos, this old satellite photos from when Saddam Hussein put all the oil wells on, on fire in Kuwait. You can see the wind blowing in the proper direction before we entered Iraq and then shifting and staying that way until the war was over. So God saved thousands of lives because people prayed. We humble ourselves before God and he changed history. I wonder why the history books don't mention the power of prayer that caused God to change the direction of the wind. For the next three decades, Mastriano continued to serve in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan

where he appears to have developed a dim view of Islam. As the New Yorker reported, is often spread Islamophobic memes online. In one, he spread a conspiracy theory that Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, directed fellow Muslims to throw a five-year-old over a balcony. Another, he shared a graphic that read, quote, Islam wants to kill gay rights, Judaism, Christianity, and pacifism, which I don't know why he would be mad at Islam for wanting to kill gay rights. It seems like he'd be on the, if that was the case, it would be on the same page there. That's the classic, oh, the, you know, You should be on our side because, like, actually, they're going to take your shit away, too.

I love women. That's why I hate the hijab. Yet another, he encouraged the idea that the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was started by Muslims, captioning a photo of two dark-skinned men gritting, quote, Something Wicked This Way Comes. In 2019, after retiring from the military and teaching at the U.S. Army War College, Maastrian decided to run for office, and he soon began attending events. held by a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.

So this is a loosely linked network of Charismatics and Pentecostals that over the past decade has played an influential role in conservative American circles. Many members believe that God speaks to them directly and that they have been tasked with battling real-world demons who control global leaders. So eventually won a position on the Pennsylvania Senate. And what's interesting about Mastriano is that he has a lot of social media savvy. And like Marjorie Taylor Green, he built a lot of. following on Facebook. He used the Facebook live feature to do what he called

fireside chats where he would opina, whatever he thought was interesting. And he got thousands of views doing this. In April this year, before the gubernatorial primary, Maastriano attended the Q&N affiliated God and Country Conference in Gettysburg. There he called the separation of church and state a myth, and the conference organizers presented him with a sword to thank him for his work. And we thought, what would be the best gift for them? And we thought of the David's sword because you've been cutting a lot of... And so we have inscribed in there for God and country because you've been fighting for our country

and you're fighting for our religious rights in Christ Jesus. So we wanted to bless you with that sword of David. Did she say cutting a lot of heads off? Yeah, yeah, yes. Okay. Perthorically. Figuratively, though. The heads of the serpent and the...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the hydra. The hydra of the Jew, I get it. Now, there are lots of things concerning about Master Alan's beliefs, but I think top among them is his election denial. So in 2020, Masteriano issued a legislative memo to fellow lawmakers saying that he will introduce a Senate resolution disputing the 2020 general election. It says that the legislature will name a new set of electors, and with draw the certification of Joe Biden's victory.

There's this weird, I don't know, there's this weird fantasy that decertification is a legal process. I don't think it's ever happened. Everything I've read says that it's just a made-up concept. On January 6, Mastriano spent about $3,300 to charter buses to ferry 135 supporters to Washington for the Stop the Steel rally using campaign cash. He later says that he left before things got violent, but video revealed that he crossed police lines.

has since been interviewed by the January 6th committee. In one podcast interview, he boasted that if elected governor, he could handpick a secretary's state and through that person in that role essentially decide the validity of elections unilaterally. I'm Doug Maastriano, and I get to appoint the Secretary of State who's delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs, and everything. I could decertify every machine in the state with a, you know, stroke of a pen, via my secretary of state. I already have the secretary state picked out. It's a world-class person that knows voting integrity better than anyone else in the nation, I think.

And I already have a team that's going to be built around that individual. Ron Watkins. It's a weird platform if you're, like, running for an election. If elected, I will make sure it will be the last election. And a lot of people are very excited about that. We love our Mastriano, folks. Yeah, we love, we love the thing that we clung to so much, the Constitution and the rule of law and the government, we don't care about that anymore. We actually just want, like, our guys in.

To talk more about Doug Mastriano, we are now joined by Ryan Briggs. He is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who has covered Mastriano. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having, man. Now, first of all, I want to talk about Doug Mastriano's bizarre attempt to counter-accusations. of anti-Semitism. And these accusations came up because of his associations with the social media site Gab and his founder Andrew Torba.

So what happened there? Well, as you're probably aware, you know, Torba is the proprietor of this, you know, kind of conservative, alternative social media platform called Gab. You know, it's sort of a replica of Twitter. And it's probably best known to your listeners because of its connection to the Tree of Life shooter. who was, you know, a anti-Semite who had used the platform, went into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people.

And, you know, that obviously tainted the platform's reputation for a number of people for, you know, very understandable reasons, especially here in Pennsylvania. Earlier this year, you know, it had come to light that Mastriano had paid. something like $5,000 to GAV. I believe his explanation was that it was for advertising, but, you know, that came to light, actually, I think, in interviews with Torba himself, you know, and obviously caused a lot of, you know, sensation here locally that he had connected himself financially with that platform in addition to, you know, obviously having a connection to Torba outside of just that payment.

In order to counter these accusations, he received the endorsement of a rabbi named Joseph Kalakowsky. And so in your reporting, you uncovered some unconventional beliefs held by the rabbi. Yeah, Kolokowski is an unusual figure. He's a Hasidic rabbi, although he's, you know, I would say controversial even amongst Hasidic rabbis. He had been in trouble for taping himself on the Sabbath going to a monster movie festival and had, you know, like other I see him yelling at him online. And so, you know, he's already from the jump kind of just like controversial, like within that denomination.

But obviously, you know, what caught our eye was that he had, you know, prolific YouTube content musing about, you know, human alien hybrids, you know, his thoughts about secular Jews and how they, you know, can't be victims of anti-Semitism. because when they lose their faith, they sort of lose, you know, the right to call themselves Jews. And I mean, you know, he goes on extensively talking about, you know, Adolf Hitler and how he may have been a, you know, reptilian shapeshifter. Other targets of, you know, his ire, I would say, you know, he kind of regarded in a similar light as, you know, people who were not fully human. So that was kind of the theme through a lot of his, like, YouTube content. And that's what, you know, we noticed.

It is interesting to have a rabbi promote the idea of some sort of hybrid shape shifter, because usually that's what the Jews are accused of being. Well, yeah, I point you back to that comment I was making about how, again, you, you know, if you're a secular Jew, if you don't sort of fall into the right religious category, you know, that this guy is defined, and you lose your right to that. So he's like, yeah, all that stuff, you know, the George Soros stuff, that's not even anti-Semitism. That's, you know, anti-Reptilian, yeah, essentially. Yeah, Soros deserves it. Yeah, exactly. In fact, I have a clip here of Kalkowski expressing his view about the race of Hitler. What you have to learn is that Hitler himself

came from this Aerov lineage, and a non-human Aerov lineage. I mean, that, there's a reason why he never took off his boots was to hide the fact that his feet were reptilian in nature because he came from this non-human race a demonic race it was a hybrid the word Arab the term Aerov means mixture so Aerov could be translated it usually said the mixed multitude could be multitude because of being master. Oh, no. Didn't take off his boots.

Then why is my living room filled with pictures of Hitler's feet? I think one thing that's, like, important to point out is that, like, you know, why is Mastriano getting anywhere near this guy? I mean, this is something that we literally found by, like, Googling his name. And it's, I think it's important to, like, sort of highlight that the, the Torba connection, you know, was seized upon by his Democratic opponent. and pretty effectively like cast at him and to the extent where, you know, he was denounced by certain Jewish Republicans. I think Politico was reporting recently that, you know, a former

GOP gubernatorial candidate had hosted a fundraiser for Mastriano's opponent. And, you know, that also seemed to tie back into some of these like anti-Semitism charges. So it's like the timing of him kind of digging up this guy, you know, He's not even from Pennsylvania. He's, like, based in New York somewhere. I think, you know, was very sort of, like, oriented around the political side of it and also convincing his own followers, I think, to a certain degree, right? Because this, you know, came to light in, like, a new story in the Epoch Times or something

like that that only probably Mastriano followers were going to see, you know, it's about convincing them. I think that he was not actually, like, anti-Semitic. And, you know, what do you know? You get the headline of, hey, rabbi endorsed me. How could I be anti-Semitic? What's this? A Washington Post article about the Democrats funding Mastriano? Oh, no. They couldn't be running ads for him because he's a quote-unquote Pied Piper candidate.

Like Donald Trump, I'm sure this won't backfire. No, that's not real. It's true. It's real. And I'm reading it right now. Yeah, I think those are still some of, you know, it's like most of the television advertising that you've seen for Doug Mastriano was like paid for by Democrats. And you said, Ryan, you said that the Googling of this rabbi is literally one click away. You just search for his name and you get the Hitler Reptillion Feet and all of that. He's a prolific Quora user, which I feel like he's kind of like a red flag in a lot of ways. He just has like hundreds and hundreds of like question and answers, you know, that he's done on that site.

I pulled a couple of them out. I mean, you know, there's a lot of stuff that you would like kind of expect to see. He said Nancy Pelosi caused January 6 by ordering police to push people into the Capitol. He said Chelsea Clinton was guilty of mini-genocide because she married a Jewish guy and didn't convert. So, I mean, that's like sort of, you know, stuff that you find, again, typing his name in and like his core profile just pops up. Here's a quote from the Washington Post. Sorry to interject here. Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro spent an estimated $855,000 boosting Mastriano in an ad calling him one of quote,

Trump's strongest supporters and talking about his belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The ad notes that if Mastriano wins the primary, it would be, quote, a win for what Donald Trump stands for. Shapiro spent more than double what Mastriano spent on his own ads. So, yeah. So I guess the rabbi is not the only Jewish person supporting him? Yeah, I mean, it's obviously got the echoes back to 2016 in Pennsylvania, right, where it's the same, well, nationally, right, where the Democrats are saying, oh, we want Donald Trump. because he'll be a weaker opponent. You know, in a lot of ways, like Shapiro is kind of like, who is his Democratic

challenger, obviously, is cutting that same kind of cloth, right? I mean, he is like, you know, a deep party insider. It's very much a centrist Democrat. He's super polished. He has tons of, you know, fundraising. And I think you sort of saw them look at Mastriano and say, yeah, we're going to do it, but for real this time, you know, someone who's just too crazy. Here's Mastriano saying of Shapiro.

quote, I'm going to have to send him a thank you card for spending double. Why wouldn't you spend the 850K on your own campaign or I don't know anything anything better than boosting his own? Like

that's 800 and 50. That is almost a million dollars. Yeah. Yeah. No, good stuff. Anyways, we can move on, but that's a fun little side note there. Now, it seems as though Masteriano has attempted to clean up evidence of his extremist views.

For example, he deleted all the tweets that made reference to Q&N, which were, and there were over 50 of them. He also deleted several Facebook videos. Can you tell me what those videos were about and why the campaign claimed that they were deleted? Yeah, I mean, part of it would be sort of like speculation on my part because we don't actually know, like, everything that necessarily got deleted. And when I first was covering Maastriano back in like 2020 around January 6th, I was I had heard the same thing back there, right?

Like, you know, he was known for being a January 6th, and I'd heard from, you know, other kind of political operative types. Like, hey, you know, he's deleting stuff now that people are kind of looking at him. And, you know, there was this sort of insurrection, like at the Capitol. So, you know, this has been something that's probably been going on for years. And it's not totally clear everything that, you know, has been scrubbed off of Facebook. But what we know is that more recently, you know, he had taken out. some of his, like, live-streamed videos where he was talking about climate denialism and also

just kind of making, I guess, kind of generally controversial comments about Republicans, saying that Republicans that, you know, weren't backing him, had it out for veterans or, you know, had disdain for veterans, I think was the term that he used. And, you know, we noticed it and when we contacted his campaign about it. I mean, they're notoriously, like, silent towards press inquiries, but they say, said, they actually, like, responded to this one and said, oh, you know, this is just a default setting on, on Facebook. And, you know, Facebook just deletes these after 30 days. You go back and say, well, why are there other videos that are more than a month old that didn't get deleted?

Because, of course, there are. Because he didn't wipe everything. And, you know, you don't get a response. And that's pretty, you know, it's pretty true to form for the Masteriano campaign generally. So that's what you're left with. You know, I could, you know, guess at the motive for trying to do that, but I think it's, you know, in keeping with what you described about, you know, his vanished Q&N content. He says something, you know, does something kind of in the moment, gets in trouble for it, goes away. You don't talk about it, you know, and you move on. So that's, that's been, you know, part of his MO on the campaign trail, obviously. You mentioned that it was tough to get a response back from the Masteriano campaign. And, you know,

it's not uncommon for Republican candidates to be hostile to the media, but Mastriano seems to be especially hostile to the point of outright banning media during meet and greets that he hosts across the state. So what's it like for reporters who want to try to get to know the Mastriano campaign? I think that the best example is this video that you could probably like find online. I wasn't at this one, but we sent a reporter to a rally and he had erected like a little pen for reporters to stand in. It was sort of like around the corner behind like a building from where he was speaking. So, you know, it was clearly just sort of like an FU kind of thing. Like, you know, you're going to be in this little box. I'm sure one of his supporters, you know,

also filmed it and was, you know, circulating kind of the image of the muzzled reporters standing in this little pen while he's giving his speech, you know, like the other side of a building or whatever. And, you know, it's pretty clear that like a big part of it. it is just sort of for like the k-fabe of like, you know, owning the media, owning, sticking it to reporters and stuff like that. And but it also veers into what I would say is kind of like bizarre territory where sometimes I think it's politically like inopportune for him to just like completely shut out the media.

It's in to sort of almost never give kind of like your side of anything to shoe like all of these traditional kind of media platforms, especially given what I was saying before, you know, about his lack of traditional advertising and campaign media. You know, he's just not really in the newspapers, you know, beyond stories talking about these kind of scandals or, you know, Shapiro casting him as, you know, being too radical for Pennsylvania. And, you know, I think he and probably his supporters look at it the same way that they would, you know, look at, you know, stunts that, like, Donald Trump would pull, you know, the national press at his rallies and kind of skewering reporters and so on. But, like, Trump, obviously, like,

you know, manipulated the media. He, when the cameras stopped rolling, you know, like, he would be talking to reporters and trying to push certain lines or, you know, give people bits of information or whatever. Like, he had an experience kind of, like, working both ends of it. And Mastriana just doesn't. He just doesn't talk to reporters. And that's it. And I think there's like some serious questions, you know, because occasionally we'll, we'll catch him and you shot some questions at him and, you know, just breeze past or have a security kind of block, you know, reporters. But I think at a certain point, it kind of makes it seem like you're just like dodging questions. I think just personally, like, I sort of have questions about

if he is afraid that like if he was put on the spot, that he might stumble over his words. You know, I mean, if you've watched some of his videos, he's not really like, you know, the smoothest kind of orator or anything like that. And I think there are some questions of how much of it is just based on anxiety or just like a virgin rather than like a real strategy, you know, because I think the message is clear at this point, right? You don't like the press. Like, that's clear to everybody. Now, Master Hale has faced a lot of controversies and one of them involved him posing in a Confederate uniform for a faculty photograph at the Army War College. Now, that's not necessarily bad.

add, you know, given the context if you're doing like a recreation thing. But what exactly is a story with this? I mean, Masteriano would say that he's just like a history nerd or history buff or something. I give lectures on history. That was sort of the focus in his like academic career and all that. He's known for these sort of eccentricities. Like, you know, he was in the armored cavalry when he served in the military and occasionally will appear at events wearing sort of like an antique, like cavalry hat, like Robert Duvall and Apocalypse Now or something. When he comes to other events, he'll wear spurs on his dress shoots, which is weird when you're just dressed normally. And it has these sort of like affectations. It's like hard for me to really speculate

about what he was thinking at that time, because I think there is a component to it where he thought, like, this will be cool in the same way that the other eccentric historical garb that I put, put on is cool from time to time. But you're also working at, like, the Army War College in Pennsylvania, right? Like, what are you doing wearing Confederate uniform? And I can't really explain much more to that decision, you know, beyond that. That's something for Doug to answer. Yeah.

What was striking to me is that in that photograph, he is the only person wearing a Confederate uniform. It's one thing you feel like with a group of people, you know, you know, you're like. I'll say because this campaign will get mad about this if people don't mention it, but there was one guy who's dressed as like a Swiss guard or something. And he was like, that's not fair. Everybody was dressing up. Yeah.

Mastriano, I think his campaign is unique in that it's joined by a couple of prophets, like more than one. People who claim that they can channel messages directly from God. One of these prophets who spoke at a campaign rally for Mastriano is a man named Lance Walnau. And Walnau has made a number of bizarre statements. He, for example, has claimed that environmentalists are possessed by demons. He has prayed that God would overturn the 2020 election. And he's also praised President Vladimir Putin as a, quote, good dictator. He's also called President Joe Biden the Antichrist.

In one video clip, he even once claimed that an anointed cake saved a man from homosexuality. I read a testimony today about an owner of a bar who was gay. And this is crazy. Now, I'm not saying this is going to work for you. But some hookers, they were in his bar, got saved. And they got saved because one of the guys who used to hang out there got saved. And they baked a cake for the owner of the bar, who was gay, and very adamantly anti-Christian. And they basically prayed over the cake.

It was an anointed cake. And they made the cake and gave it as a gift. and when he ate the cake, I know this is strange. He said, Asa Vos's testimony, he's not mine, the power of God hit him while he was eating the cake. And he went back to the guy at the bar and that had given it to him

that he knew he got religion. And he said, what the heck? He said, I had a weird experience eating your cake. And he said, well, that was the presence of God. He ends up leading the God of the Lord and baptizes him. And when he gets baptized, the guy gets delivered and the spirit that was working him got broken off i'm telling you it's a

story that's the only prophet um another one of these prophets is julie green we actually we happened to mention the last main episode about clay clark's reawakentor uh green claims that she used to receive messages from god infrequently but now they come to her uh up to twice a day um i've been prophetic for probably seven, eight years now, maybe even 10 or more, but they didn't start coming this fast like this up until about last year, about July or August of last year. I was getting maybe once a month starting last year, then all of a sudden they, once a week and then once a day. And it was just like, there was even sometimes it was twice a day. That's got to make you feel good when, you know, when God reaches out more frequently. Yeah, he's hitting me up twice.

advice a day. So obviously it's common for, you know, political candidates to seek the endorsement of religious leaders or religious leaders to, you know, endorse someone. But what's with the profits? This is, you know, part of these kind of allegations that Mastriano and some of the, you know, figures that you just mentioned like Walnau are part of a larger movement called, you know, the new apostolic reformation, which is like a very vague kind of group. You know, a lot of people that get lumped into this category don't really acknowledge like that it exists or that they have a real tie to it. But it's essentially this kind of, you know, philosophy movement that promotes the creation

of like a new Christian hierarchy that's kind of, you know, separate from, you know, Catholicism or, you know, most, you know, mainstream Protestantism. And the hierarchy, you know, has these kind of like tears to it with prophets at the top. And, you know, it can be like difficult to even describe fully what this is. But it's, you know, in a lot of reporting, you'll see it talked about as a kind of Christian nationalist movement, you know, that's working, you know, behind the scenes to promote dominionism, I think, is what they would call it, essentially advocating for a more explicitly like Christian state. And, you know, Mastriano personally, like, denies, you know, any connection to these groups, but he keeps, you know, appearing with, you know, these figures like Wall Now.

There's another one, Abbey Abilniz, you know, who's part of the Pennsylvania Prayer Caucus. You guys might be familiar with the Prayer Caucus. Another one of these, you know, kind of groups that often are described as being associated, you know, with this NAR movement. And, you know, even though Mastriano says that he has no connection to this group, you know, he often espouses very similar beliefs, you know, that you need to get, you know, prayer back in schools and, you know, kind of have government be guided by these religious principles. So you hear about the prophetic stuff and it's kind of like, wow, what are these, you know, kind of like screw loose people or is this, you know, some sort of weird, weirder, you know, thing. And I guess there's like a comedic element to it, but it has like a deeper meaning, you know, for sure. And I think there is something, you know, it's worth taking pretty seriously about it because these are people who are definitely tied to like a larger network, right? And they're, you know, espousing these almost like theocratic principles.

So that's where a lot of them are kind of come from in Mastriano's world. And again, it's one of those things of like, why do these people keep showing up, right? If there's no connection there. How much support has Mastriano received from the Republican Party more broadly? Recent headlines have led me to believe that his campaign is not doing that great. There was a recent one from the New York Times headlined Mastriano's sputtering campaign, no TV ads, tiny crowds, little money. So, yeah, it sounds like, I mean, from what I've read, Mastriano isn't very happy with the support he's received from the GOP more broadly. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you caught the New York Times story about this recently, but.

one of his more recent live streams where he's kind of discussing the state of the campaign. You know, I've watched him for years and he usually has like sort of an upbeat kind of cordial presence on these, you know, videos that he records and the most recent one. I mean, he seems like kind of despondent and he's talking about this, you know, and he's sort of saying that they've struggled to make any inroads with national Republicans. And I don't think it's like a secret necessarily that there's, You know, sort of a schism happening like behind the scenes with the Republican Party nationally and some of these more like insurgent or like MAGA type candidates, right? Like there's been, you know, friction between like McConnell and some of these like Peter Thielbacked people.

And I think to like a certain degree that's happening, you know, with Mastriano's campaign. But it's also like an, you know, a pretty important race in a lot of ways. And this sense that I get about Mastriano specifically and what kind of different. differentiates him from just these other campaigns that have sort of like butted heads with national Republicans is that there's just been sort of like open derision from some of the national Republicans at sort of how poorly his campaign has been run. And this, you know, ties back to what we were saying earlier about the lack of like television advertising. It's not that, you know, Douglass, Mastriano would say that like, he's just running a grassroots campaign. But the reality is that, you know, his campaign. And campaign is really strapped for money. You know, and at the last, like, filing deadline, I think he had, like, a couple hundred thousand dollars, you know, in, in his campaign account. And I don't know, put that into any context, you know, I mean, like his opponent,

Josh Shapiro has millions and millions and millions of dollars to draw upon to pay for TV advertising and all of that. And I think just even from, you know, like his reaction when he discusses it on his stream or whatever, you know, you can see that, like, I think there are a little. concerned about it, you know, and just sort of like what, what is the strategy here? And you hear that from, you know, groups like the RGA, where they're saying, you know, look, we can't, you know, back a campaign that, you know, is in disarray or, you know, isn't kind of, you know, able to operate to a certain, you know, standard. And it's not surprising that Master Annam might struggle

with that because, again, this is a guy, you know, whose primary political background is that he was a state senator for a couple of years, right? So this isn't somebody who, you know, even if he was not trying to run an unconventional grassroots campaign, I think would probably struggle with just some of the, you know, kind of basic aspects of running, you know, a large multi-million dollar campaign operation. It's just hard. And so you've seen from Masteriano on the campaign trail is he's sort of stuck with stuff that he's comfortable with. He goes around to churches a lot of times. You can see on Rumble, he'll post videos of his speeches. And they're usually at kind of friendly spaces like that. And that's been the bulk of his campaign. And I think that's good if you're kind of running just

in South Central, Pennsylvania, where he's from. But I think if your goal is to peel off, you know, kind of moderate Republican voters in like the Philly suburbs or something like that, like I don't think that that's going to really do it for you. I think, you know, at a certain point, like you need money. You need media. Not everybody's going to tune into your Facebook stream, you know, but that he's kind of stuck with more, I think, what he, what he knew from before the, you know, before the gubernatorial campaign.

Yeah, recently the chair of the Republican Governors Association, Doug Deucy, implied that he's not interested in helping mastery analyst campaign because he doesn't want to fund lost causes. He bade these comments during an interview at Georgetown University. You would think that would be a huge pickup opportunity for Republicans, but Republicans nominated a candidate, Doug Mastriano, who has fully embraced that populist agenda on the 2020 election, January 6th. I'm curious whether or not you still see that as truly a pickup opportunity.

We're watching Pennsylvania very closely. Another axiom that we have at the RGA is that we don't fund lost causes and we don't fund landslides. So we're in a relationship with our candidate, but we're saying to the candidates, you have to show us something. You have to demonstrate that you can move numbers,

that you can raise resources, and that you get this to the five-yard line or the 5% line, and that's when the RGA parachutes in, and punches the victory in. So Pennsylvania is a place where we think, in terms of the dynamics and the demographics, it is a pickup opportunity, but much of this is on the candidate. Yeah, it's another one of those moments where, again,

Maschranow here's this stuff. And he says, well, look, Trump won Pennsylvania, right? Trump won Pennsylvania before he didn't spend that, you know, that much money to run a traditional campaign operation. And, you know, that's true and it's like reasonable to an extent. but like it always sort of leaves out the part where it's like Trump was rich and famous already, right? And Doug Mastriano is not particularly wealthy and only famous kind of, you know, to a certain degree. And a lot of, you know, a lot of that is sort of colored by infamy for many voters in Pennsylvania.

So to, you know, the Doug Ducey's comment. I mean, it's like, I think that this race is like going to be a lot closer than, you know, polling might have you believe. leave because I think people are going to stick with like party affinity and vote, you know, Republican, vote Democrat and so on. But like, I don't think it's going to be like a landslide, right? There's no indication that Mastriano is just cruising to victory here. So it's like, which is it, right? Yeah, according to polls, he's like 10 or 11 points underwater. But, uh, you know, yeah, again, like I'll believe it when I see it, you know, uh, like I don't, I don't, I certainly don't think that, you know, there's a lot of indications that things are going very

well for Masteriano right now, just using like traditional political metrics, but I would say that like, you know, you see these polls floating around and where, you know, it's got Democrats up by double digits. And I don't know, you know, I'll just say that much. Like I grew up in rural Pennsylvania. There are definitely plenty of people who think like Doug Masteriano, act like Doug Masteriano. And I think, you know, what people might say to a pollster who calls them up out of the blue, right, might be different than, you know, what they do when they actually, like, like step into the voting booth. So I personally kind of look at that and I sort of am like, okay, maybe it's comfortable,

but I don't know. Recently on Twitter, you observed that there have been a lot of new Twitter accounts boosting Mastriano's campaign and they appeared very recently. Now, are you suggesting that there might be something inorganic about Mastriano support on Twitter or there's just a lot of recently enthusiastic Mastriano fans? It's hard for me to speculate. I can't, I don't know if I can imagine. campaign coming up with Doug Vember or Masteriano Monday as, you know, like their meme, you know,

or hashtag to kind of like boost the campaign in the waning days of, you know, the race here. But I'll say that, you know, we like pulled up like the user creation data for a bunch of these accounts that all appeared in the last couple of weeks with names like Doug Enjoyer and Doug Sell that were all made, you know. like sometimes like a couple minutes apart and believe me I've gotten like an earful from some of them after I like posted that on Twitter and they say you know we're just you know conservatives we're just gearing up for election day our accounts are always getting suspended or banned so we have to create these like burner accounts to you know get out there and and stump for Doug and so they would

say you know hey we're just you know fellow travelers here whatever and stuff like that happens like, you know, in every campaign cycle to, like, some degree. But I think the reason that it sort of stuck out to me beside the fact that the names are funny to be is that, like, you know, it's happening in the vacuum we talked about already of, like, this is kind of like the news of what's going on with the Mastriano campaign this week. It's hashtag Doug Vember. It's getting, you know, like,

a few dozen of these like burner accounts, you know, to try to like retweet each other and get these like memes going of like Doug Mastriano wearing like sunglasses over like an 80s, you know, kind of like background. And I sort of view it as like, A, it's strange that like that's happening, but TV advertising is not really happening. And it almost is like, are you filling the void, you know, with these little social media shenanigans that are probably impacting like hundreds of people at most. I think it's also like, you know, kind of a way to try to create a little bit artificially like a sense of momentum. You know what I mean? And to be like, look like, you know, there are people out here talking about Doug. I mean,

the idea that I think that these memes just like would be created by the average Doug voter, someone who's like attending one of his rallies like at a church in central Pennsylvania is going to go home and make like an epic meme of Doug Mastriano wearing sunglasses I think is like you know farcical it's there's clearly more of this like kind of political component to it and what I think it's trying to do is to like make it seem like look you know these people are out there they're online they're they're going crazy for dark Doug and again also just to take it a step further masterano like he retweets all this stuff from like the official accounts the campaign accounts and so on

But you've also seen him do stuff, like he'll retweet, like, obviously fake polls. This week, he retweeted a poll that was conducted by, like, a high school class that had him kind of, like, within the margin of error with, you know, Josh Shapiro. And I'm like, okay, maybe these are all just, you know, like Gen Z, Doug Mastriano fans. They got together in a group chat, and they said, let's go hard for Doug before the election and all that. But it also kind of feels like the campaign is sort of, like, embracing it because it's like, something, right? We got to give people something to believe in, to, again, get away from the lost cause idea. And this is at least something. And I don't know how much money they have for other stuff. Again, I have no evidence that they're paying for any of this. I have no evidence

that the campaign is connected to it in any way. But I do know that they promote this stuff when they see it. And I think that advantages that. Jenna Ellis retweeted the tweet that I'd put out, just showing the creation dates on all of these, you know, Doug Vember accounts or whatever. So they're just like anything they can kind of get, anything they can kind of put out there to be like something's happening. I think they're in that stage now because, you know, it's coming down to the wire. So that's why it's notable to me. And just that, you know, again, I don't have a TV ad to analyze from Doug Mastriano. I don't like have, you know, quotes from him in the newspaper to analyze. I have Doug Bember to look at. So. Yeah. I suppose there's

also no evidence that the Shapiro campaign is paying for Twitter followers. But I think you raised a really good point earlier that at least anecdotally, from what I've seen, you know, memes tend to sort of naturally spawn from somebody in a very public place doing a very sort of outrageous thing that has a lot of eyes on it. And then there is a sort of organic push to memorialize those moments in, you know, in the meme format. And so I think you're on to something in the idea that, you know, going to these very safe spaces that are, you know, in the general sense, sort of smaller venues and having a sort of meme culture be birthed around that, that there is something inauthentic feeling about that. I'm begging you to look at some of the videos that his campaign has produced themselves and posted on Twitter because it'll literally be like a still image of Doug Mastriano and his wife with like a lens flare. and then like maybe, you know, like a kind of Christian rock song playing over the back.

And that's it. It's just like a photograph. And, you know, it's like it's not up to me to advise campaigns or tell them what's effective or not effective. But I look at that and I'm like, even if I, you know, put myself in the shoes of like a Doug Mastrano supporter, it would be kind of hard for me to engage with that internet meme because it's just a picture of you that's kind of weirdly cropped and has some music playing over it. Yeah, he would probably do better going to a public park and talking about Hitler. reptilian feet, you know, that would probably spread a little bit.

That would be a little bit more memeable, I would think. Yeah, maybe the Spurs are hiding talents. It would definitely open up some new demographics for him. And I think that's probably the stage that you're at in this campaign where it's like, you got to see who are some of these, you know, kind of new audiences that I can tap into. Yeah, yeah. Is there anything else that you think is really notable about Masterial, I want to campaign in reporting on him that you discovered.

I mean, we covered a lot, and it sounds like you guys are kind of going back through some of the greatest hits. I mean, like, kind of where he came from is like, you know, the most interesting thing to me, I guess, beyond, like, not something that we would even necessarily, like, just write as a standalone news story, but just as sort of like the character study. Like, Skies, like, from New Jersey. He was raised in a Catholic family. He thought my family's not religious enough.

has this kind of conversion when he's like a teenager, you know, has this, you know, military career. And I get the sense that it's like at some point he's like looking for something else to do. But for a long time, it like wasn't clear like what that was going to be, you know. So for like a long time, he's just sort of, you know, at these like NATO bases. And he's writing like books about like Alvin York and, you know, completing multiple dissertations as you're aware. And I'm like, you know, where does this guy take that sort of turn into all the stuff that we like talked about? And I guess I like came back to that like the Space Pearl Harbor thing because I was like, that's interesting to me because I don't know

if I just like view Doug Mastriano as like a fully pilled like QAnon guy. But it's almost like he's a guy who kind of like formed some of those beliefs like way before QAnon like ever. happened and like they it sort of found him you know like he kind of became almost like one of those like general Flynn type characters for a lot of these people I think that's like a lot of the appeal that he has is they like look at him and they see um they see that kind of you know figure again like the sort of like um authoritarian traditional Christian American guy who can lead a state like Pennsylvania out of you know a lot of areas have just been sort of locked and like this like downward deindustrializing spiral for like decades and like people are mad,

right? It's like that there's that same feeling that like Trump tapped into and you see a guy like Mastriano and like he he sort of brings that like aura to like a lot of people. So just like where he came from, how he sort of got here is like fascinating to me and all that. And it's such like in other ways like unlikely, I guess for a place like Pennsylvania to have somebody like him be on the top of the, you know, Republican ticket at, like, this stage, you know, like, our prior Republican governors were, like, obviously hewed to the center of the party and all that. And he's totally different than, you know, people who ran for this position in the past. Just that evolution, I think is, like, interesting. But, like, again, I don't even feel like I,

like, fully grasp all of it. You know, he's, like, still kind of a cipher. Because it's, like, you never sat down with them, you know? And I probably never will. So I just sort of get these artifacts, you know, and the people that he surrounds himself with. And you have to sort of study it and try to piece together like this guy. Where did he come from? But I don't know. Maybe you'll have better luck with it than I did. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us.

Where could people learn more about your reporting? You can follow me and my colleagues at inquire.com. You can find me on Twitter at RW underscore Briggs. Thank you. Thanks so much, Ryan. Thanks a lot, guys. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Q&ONAN anonymous podcast. you can subscribe at patreon.com

slash QAnon Anonymous for five bucks a month. Get access to a whole second episode every week, plus our entire archive of premium episodes and ongoing series. If you're already a subscriber, thank you. It helps us stay advertising free and editorially independent. We've got a website, QAnonanonymous.com, and you can find all of our stuff there. Listener, until next week.

May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy, it's fact. And now to do you. For 30 years, I wore the uniform of the United States Army. One of the biggest challenges, besides deployment, was serving an alpha company. There's a lot of pressure on these soldiers, you know. There was suicides there, and that's when Doug came in, and he instilled discipline. He took it very seriously.

He did not want any of his soldiers to be hurt. With a leader like that, things started to happen. I don't remember any more suicides. And so it's important for me that I bring everyone along with me and give everyone a hope and opportunity. I want every Pennsylvania to know that I will have their back.