Democracy Has Prevailed.

June 15, 2022

State Senator (And GOP Candidate for PA Gov) Doug Mastriano's HITLER Comments

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Ryan J. Reilly (of NBC News) reports:

The Donald Trump-endorsed nominee for governor in Pennsylvania compared the Jan. 6 attack to historical events staged by the Nazis, saying that he saw "parallels" between the criticism of the Jan. 6 attack and the 1933 Reichstag fire, which Hitler used to seize more power.

Parallel's between the criticism of the attack and 1933? 

But not the attack itself?

State Senator (And GOP Candidate for PA Gov) Doug Mastriano claims to be some sort of expertise in history - but remember this also happened to his reputation:

Before his recent rise in politics, Mastriano's earlier history shows a clear pattern of deception, alongside his Christian nationalist beliefs. This was summarized in a March 20 story by Mark Scolforo of the AP, focused on Mastriano's academic research into the legendary World War I Medal of Honor winner Sgt. Alvin York, who led a small group of U.S. soldiers behind German lines on Oct. 8, 1918, killing more than 20 German soldiers and capturing 132. That research earned Mastriano a doctorate in history from the University of New Brunswick, along with a book contract from the University Press of Kentucky.

Salon then quotes Scolforo: 

For more than a decade, other researchers have questioned Mastriano's claim to have conclusively proved exactly where York was during the October 1918 battle. They argue his research is plagued with errors and that a walking trail he helped build actually takes visitors to the wrong spot.

In the past two months, University of Oklahoma history graduate student James Gregory has filed complaints with Mastriano's publisher and with the Canadian university.

"Many of his citations are completely false and do not support his claims whatsoever," Gregory said in a Jan. 25 email to the University Press of Kentucky, identifying footnotes with no apparent relation to their corresponding book passages.
And then, digging further for facts (like any good non-Doug historian) they contacted Gregory:

I contacted Gregory, who told me he had cited 35 such examples in his letter to the Kentucky press. Half of those were simple transcription errors, he told Salon, but the rest were "examples of academic fraud. They are instances where Mastriano has made a claim and cited a source, yet the source does not say what he claims. He does this often. ... He also likes to make claims of half-truths or make false 'confirmations' without any evidence."

And then this happened to Doug Mastriano, not-so-vetted "expert" historian:

The academic press that published a Pennsylvania state senator’s book about World War I hero Sgt. Alvin York has asked him to review a list of factual errors and sourcing issues in the book and the press’ director said Tuesday it plans to publish a corrected version early next year.  

And:

Runyon said the press “will allow the author the opportunity to respond to the sources in question before preparing our final list of errata and corrections for a new printing. The verified sources and other corrections will also be reviewed by an outside scholar for confirmation.”

She said the press does not typically ask for an outside review for reprints but was “adding this external layer of review to ensure the accuracy of any corrections in the reprint.” 

Ouch. That's gotta sting. 

Anyway, now that we've established Doug's history bona fides, let's look back at his parallels between the criticism of January 6 and the Reichstag fire.

Basically, Doug was being interviewed by Ben Stein (Anyone remember him? Anyone? Anyone?) and this is how Reilly describes Doug's Hitler comments:

Stein said the country is getting "more and more into a dictatorship," and compared Jan. 6 to the 1933 fire on the Reichstag, the legislative branch in Berlin, that Hitler blamed on communists. The Nazis then used the fire as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and assume more power.

"The Nazis immediately seized upon it [the Reichstag fire] to impose emergency measures," Stein said. "I think something like this is happening with the Jan. 6 nonevent."

Stein called the riot a "ridiculously trivial thing."

“It was not an insurrection," he added. "It was not an attempt to take over the government. It was a demonstration by a group that felt frustration by the statistical impossibility of the vote having gone the way the Democrats said it did.”

Yea, except it wasn't a statistical impossibility that Biden won. So Ben Stein is completely wrong here.

And anyway, while Doug has already denounced the violence of this "ridiculously trivial thing" there's no evidence of Doug correcting Ben. Instead we get:

“I agree with the political, with the historic analogy laid out there, so using something that was very suspicious in Berlin to advance their agenda, you know, the national socialists there," Mastriano said. "I do see parallels.” 
No, Doug. Just no.

This gave Reilly the chance to retweet this thread:

Transparency and Accountability, Senator.

 

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