When conservative Doug Mastriano won Pennsylvania’s GOP gubernatorial nomination on Tuesday, the synapses in the leftist media Bug Brain began firing the message.
Smear the man. Call him a “far-right election denier” because, like many Americans, he thinks Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election. Paint him in the worst possible light.
The Media Hive’s workers slavishly complied.
“Suicide” and “Titanic”
NBC’s report opened with this neutral headline: “Far-right election denier Mastriano wins GOP race for governor in Pennsylvania.”
The network continued with this level-headed note:
Mastriano’s winning campaign message wove together Christian nationalism, election denialism and a rejection of Covid mitigation policies. A number of Republicans have expressed concern that he is too extreme to beat Shapiro in November, with some state GOP leaders working behind the scenes in the past week to consolidate a large field around another candidate in hope of uniting the non-Mastriano vote.
CNN called Mastriano an “election denier” in its headline, although we can safely assume neither of the two-hate Trump networks did likewise when hard-left Democrats challenged President Trump’s victory in 2106.
“Mastriano used his victory speech Tuesday night to mock Rachel Levine, the US assistant secretary of health and an admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, who is transgender,” CNN reported:
The possibility of the far-right Mastriano’s nomination had panicked Republicans who fear he’ll be rejected by the suburban moderate and independent voters who the party hopes will deliver it control of the House and Senate and wins in a raft of governor’s races in November’s midterm elections.
CNN then ran to GOP senators to bash Mastriano because his victory might sink the Trump-endorsed nominee for Senate, dual-citizen Mehmet Oz:
The fear among Republicans in the Senate is that if Mastriano implodes in the general election it could hurt their Senate candidate, according to several GOP sources. The GOP Senate primary has not yet been called. The uneasiness over Mastriano underscores the larger split within the Republican Party over former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, particularly among those who say such claims will harm the party’s electoral chances in November.
Yet the two networks wonder why Mastriano blocked reporters from entering his events.
The Washington Post delivered an election-denier headline, too: “Doug Mastriano’s Pa. victory could give 2020 denier oversight of 2024.” The experts predict “chaos” because a serious conservative prevailed.
“As governor, Mastriano would have the opportunity not just to speak, but to act,” the newspaper reported:
The Trump-endorsed 58-year-old … would gain significant influence over the administration of the battleground state’s elections should he prevail in November, worrying experts already fearful of a democratic breakdown around the 2024 presidential contest.
Those concerns are made especially acute in Pennsylvania by the fact that the governor has the unusual authority to directly appoint the secretary of state, who serves as chief elections officer and must sign off on results. If he or she refuses, chaos could follow.
The New York Times declared “Republican panic grows” because of Mastriano, and, like the Post, depicted Mastriano’s nomination as Armageddon for the party.
“Conversations with Republican strategists, donors and lobbyists in and outside of Pennsylvania in recent days reveal a party seething with anxiety, dissension and score-settling over Mastriano’s nomination,” the Times claimed:
In the run-up to Tuesday night, Republicans openly used words and phrases like “suicide mission,” “disaster” and “voyage of the Titanic” to convey just what a catastrophe they believed his candidacy will be for their party.
An adviser to several Republican governors, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there was wide displeasure with the outcome, calling him unelectable.
In other words, GOP elitist sore losers don’t like the voters’ decision. So they’re trying to sink Mastriano and help his Democrat opponent win.
Twitter Goes Bonkers
As expected, leftist Twitter is foaming with hate-Mastriano hysteria.
“Far right extremist Doug Mastriano has won the Republican primary for Governor in Pennsylvania,” the communist Mother Jones tweeted. “It’s not exaggerating to say he could cause a constitutional crisis in 2024 if he wins the general election in November.”
The putative concerns about “chaos,” “democratic breakdown,” and “constitutional crisis” boil down to one thing: Mastriano’s secretary of state won’t certify another stolen election.
