My previous blog post on this covered PA State Senator Doug Mastriano's first minute and a half (or so) of his meltdown.
Let's take a look at what happens next - this is right after Doug tried to deflect a question about the QAnon conference/rally he attended by saying that it was "disingenuous" to say that there were Q-conspiracists at "that good event" in Gettysburg.
Michael Graham: Well there were QAnon people there. I know for a fact there were QAnon people there. I hear from the QAnon people. That's one of the of the joys of being in the media.
Doug Mastriano: So what? So what?
Wait. Didn't Doug just say that it was disingenuous to say that there were QAnon people at that conference? That it was wrong to say so? But when faced with someone pushing back with a more solid assertion Doug just folds with a cynical "So what?"
He knows QAnon was at that conference. And since Lexicon defines "disingenuous" as:
Not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.Doug is the one who's being disingenuous.
And so he deflects. Again:
M: I want you to call on Josh Shapiro then and scrutinize who's in his audience and which groups he's speaking with. Or do you give him a free pass?
That's what I always see on the left and I'm sick and tired of it. If you're going to cast judgements and aspersions on people that I associate with then by God Josh Shapiro and Fetterman.
I know Fetterman's been in a room with some really radical people, especially with his bus tour around the state on recreational marijuana.
Free pass every damn time. So we gotta tighten this up.
G: Well Senator some people would argue that Lt Gov Fetterman would be with radical people when he's n a room by himself.
M: [Speaking Over] As far as my right to assemble, you may forget we do have a Constitution and, unlike you, I actually defended The Constitution for 30 years of my life. It's no game.
And I resent the fact that you want to castigate anyone who went down to Washington DC on January 6 as some kind of enemy of the public. That is dangerous. You're talking like an East German there. We had the right to assemble under The Constitution.
Shame on you. I do know that the left and maybe your outlet proudly reported on Barack Obama said in 2016. In 2016 antifa and BLM, they gathered around the nation and they were criticized by some journalists but Barack Obama says, "Nope. Don't condemn this group here because it's not right to condemn a group or a movement based on the actions of a few."And so anyone who breaks the law at any event whether it's in Washington DC or Minnesota, they need to be held to equal justice.
What we see now in America thanks to biased left wing reporting is that we have double standard reporting.
I can gather on the steps in the Capitol [in Harrisburg] and be condemned as reckless as superspreader, endangering our state but we look the other way when Tom Wolf gets on the steps [garbled] and others because it's a cause that that state approved.
This is a very dangerous trend here and I fear for my country. Especially that you buy into this narrative here and perpetuate it. What a waste of time.
We're now about 4 minutes into Doug's snowflaking (which began, let's remember, at about 9 minutes into the posted interview).
But look at the structure of Doug's argument. Unless "the media" reports that Josh Shapiro did something as outrageous as attending a conference that showed a video implying that Hitler faked his own death/that JFK was killed because he knew too much and it was a high risk of "cabal exposure", it should remain utterly silent.
Doug is insisting that anything other than a artificially balanced "both sides do it" neutrality in the media is unfair to him - against the guy who took "The Sword of David" from the same folks who want you to think that those wildfires out in California a few years ago were "accidentially" started by The Rothchilds.
So unless the news media reports something equally egregious about Josh Shapiro, it should just remain silent about Mastriano's QAnon friends. That's how Doug wants the news media to report on him.
Anything else is left wing media bias against him.
Snowflake.
I wasn't able to track down that exact Obama quote about not condemning the group for the actions of a few (I'm not saying it isn't out there, I'm just saying I can't find it) but on BLM/Antifa, I was able to find this:
"I don't think that you can hold well-meaning activists who are doing the right thing and peacefully protesting responsible for everything that is uttered at a protest site," [President Obama] continued. "This week people felt hurt and angry and so some of this is just venting, but I think that the overwhelming majority of people who are involved in the Black Lives Matter movement -- what they really want to see is a better relationship between the police and the community so they can feel that it's serving them."
In the wake of the violent slayings of police officers in Dallas, however, the president also cautioned that if any BLM sympathizers attack law enforcement -- both in their rhetoric and in their actions -- they are "doing a disservice to the cause."
"Any violence to police officers is a reprehensible crime and needs to be prosecuted," Mr. Obama said. "But even rhetorically, if we paint police in broad brush without recognizing that the vast majority of police officers are doing a really good job and are trying to protect people and do so fairly and without racial bias, if our rhetoric does not recognize that, then we're going to lose allies in the reform cause."
I'm not sure how that jibes with what Doug said Obama said.
It does fold into Doug's next deflection: his participation (however deep or shallow) in the events of January 6. To Doug, since most of the people on that day did not storm The Capitol, it's simply unfair to talk about those who did.
(For the record, there's no evidence of Doug being in The Capitol that day. He just wandered past the barricades that the protestors pulled down - and then lied about it later.)
In any event once the violence broke out it was no longer a Constitutionally protected protest. No one has the "right to assemble" if the purpose is to break the law.
Doug knows that - he's just deflecting about the day. Again.
QAnon Doug wants to be Pennsylvania Governor.
And let me end by saying that I agree with Doug on one thing: This is very dangerous and I fear for my country.
