DL Open Thread: Sat., May 21, 2022

Mastriano Was MAGAt Before MAGAt Was Mainstream. Wrote of left-wing ‘Hitlerian putsch’ back in 2001:

Two decades before he was Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor, Doug Mastriano warned in a master’s thesis that the United States was vulnerable to a left-wing “Hitlerian Putsch” that would begin with the dismantling of the U.S. military and end with the destruction of the country’s democracy.

The thesis, written in 2001 when Mastriano was a major at the Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College, is highly unusual for its doomsaying and often fearful point of view, and its prediction that only the U.S. military could save the country from the depredations of the country’s morally debauched civilian leaders. The paper is posted on an official Defense Department website and lists Mastriano as the author at a time when he said he received a master’s degree from the school.

In it, Mastriano adopts the point of view of a colonel who is living in 2018 — some 17 years in the future — and has taken refuge in an “isolated cavern” in the George Washington National Forest. The military’s collapse, in his telling, allowed a left-wing leader obsessed with “political correctness” and backed militarily by the United Nations and the European Union to rise to power in a struggle that led to the deaths of millions of Americans.

Reminds me of something Evan The Q would, and did, write. It had a weird name, too. Agenda 12? Plan 9 From Outer Space? Something like that. I’m calling it–gonna be a good year for D’s in Pennsylvania.

People’s Convoy–The Reality Series. Turns out their brains and bodies weren’t merely rotted by right-wing memes and Covid, they had also watched too much reality TV. So, of course, everything was captured on camera:

A line of about two dozen semis and 100 passenger vehicles formed around 4:30 in the afternoon Thursday, but there was no roll-out. Instead, we have… this: A mess of a livestream, where convoy members confront each other after one punches another in the face. The victim’s wife began livestreaming the argument immediately after the punch was thrown. On the stream, we hear people talk about a lot of truly messed-up stuff allegedly going on within the Convoy: A cat being hung from another member’s truck (the cat is apparently OK), sexual assault, and messages written in blood in front of a casino. As icing on the cake, a so-called “security” member calls the woman recording the stream a homophobic slur:

The People’s Convoy finally declared victory and went home. It is no more.

RWNJ School Board Takeovers Fizzling. There are more of us than there are of them. Except in places where there are more of them than us. Betcha those Okie school boards aren’t filled with enlightened members.

‘Dark MAGA Doesn’t Exist.’ Well, it does to Madison Cawthorn. Apparently not to anyone else. Yet.

Osienski/Charlie Brown vs. Carney/Lucy? Has Carney learned no life lessons since high school? He now rivals Minner as the worst Governor of the modern era. Seriously, John, you’re not the QB at St. Mark’s any more…did they have Junior ROTC there?

What do you want to talk about?