TIPP Insights: Doug Mastriano, a Confederate uniform, and the lame press

 

(Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

By TIPPINSIGHTS EDITORIAL BOARD, TIPP Insights

Few days ago, Reuters broke a story about Doug Mastriano, the conservative Republican aspirant for the Pennsylvania governor’s race. The New York Times saw it fit to ask Maggie Astor from its National Desk to write a piece. CNN, Business Insider, and the Philadelphia Inquirer all piled on.

Mastriano’s offense was that he posed for a faculty photo at the Army War College, where he worked in 2014, in a Confederate uniform. Mastriano, who came into the Left’s crosshairs because he questioned numerous state officials about their conduct during the 2020 election, won the Republican nomination in the summer to challenge Democrat Joe Shapiro. Worse, he had won Trump’s endorsement.

The media’s conspiracy engines were firing on all cylinders. Reuters noted that it based its reporting on a Freedom of Information Act request. Every outlet repeated this fact. Legacy media circles have a long-standing belief that sensitive information is often hidden in deep closets to help the fortunes of a person otherwise unfit to serve in a public position. A FOIA request, when won, shines a light on such an individual. After all, the purpose of the Fourth Estate is to hold conservatives in power “accountable.”

Except that there was not much to uncover here. At the time of the photo, Mastriano, an Army colonel, worked for the college, a U.S. Army educational institution in Carlisle, established in 1901. The establishment is only a 45-minute drive from Gettysburg, where the local culture is rich in celebrating Civil War history. The Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association, the oldest such Civil War organization in the nation, puts on several extensive reenactments of the battles each year. Over 6,000 visitors flock to the Daniel Lady Farm in Straban Township. More than 900 reenactors are featured.

The Mastriano photo was taken in 2014 when America’s cancel culture had not even taken root, and one doesn’t know what prompted Mastriano to wear the attire to a staff meeting. It was long before President Trump’s comments about Charlottesville in 2017, which led to years of acutely negative coverage of the 45th president’s race record. Recall that after a violent Charlottesville rally, Trump had made brief public remarks: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides,” Trump said. The media viciously attacked Trump’s “many sides,” painting him as racist, a caricature which extended through summer 2020 after George Floyd. The Reuters story this week wanted to draw a parallel between Mastriano and Trump.

If reliving the 159-year history of the battles between Union and Confederate soldiers is such a crime, what is the purpose of the Gettysburg National Military Park, one of the most-visited National Park Service sites? Erasing America’s past is a primary goal of the Left. The Times, one of America’s oldest newspapers and a mirror into the nation’s history, was unapologetic in February 2022: “Since Mr. Floyd’s murder, at least 230 monuments and memorials — relics that stood sentry in front of courthouses, college campuses, town squares, and public parks — have been dismantled, hauled away, vandalized or given new names.”

Buried in the Times story was the real reason for histrionic media anxiety. “If elected in November, Mr. Mastriano would appoint Pennsylvania’s top elections official.” Of course.

The media would instead prefer officials like Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, who issued confusing guidance to Pennsylvania election officials that could have swung the election to President Biden. Boockvar is known to have ruled multiple times regarding the segregation of mail ballots, curing wrongly cast ballots, and accepting votes without the required signature. State Republican senators charged that just one of those directives “leaves open the possibility that timely votes will be commingled with votes received after 8 p.m. on Election Day, despite the fact that these votes remain the subject of litigation before the United States Supreme Court.”

The media has cleverly manufactured the “election deniers” term to be as despicable behavior as “Holocaust deniers” or “climate deniers.” Anyone who questions anything that happened in 2020, like Mastriano, is vile. We never knew what happened because the J6 Committee or the media have refused to investigate election irregularities in the swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. The public continues to have grave misgivings about the election as new revelations surface about how Facebook and Big Tech suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story and helped candidate Biden, who won the electoral college by a mere 43,000 votes. A TIPP story by Paul Sperry shows that 8 in 10 Americans following the Hunter Biden lap-top story think the cover-up changed the election results.

So, the media is on to Plan B to stop election denier Mastriano. He wore a Confederate uniform for a staff picture, so he must be racist and, therefore, evil.

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