Doug Mastriano’s assaults on the press are a slide into ‘authoritarianism 101′ | Will Bunch

If there were a picture next to the word “irony” in the dictionary, it might be a guy all decked out in circa-1776, self-styled patriot garb, topped by a tri-corner hat, blocking a free press from covering a political rally where the future of democracy in Pennsylvania — and perhaps the American Experiment that was hatched here — is on the line.

That bizarre scene played out Saturday at a venue in the Philadelphia suburb of Warminster — just 20 or so miles north of Independence Hall — as most reporters were barred from attending a big pre-primary rally by the Republican Party’s gubernatorial front-runner, State Sen. Doug Mastriano, and surging U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Barnette.

When reporters from national outlets such as CBS News and the Washington Post tried to enter the event at the Fuge event space, this tri-corner hat dude — perhaps he was representing the years before the First Amendment was ratified, in December 1791? — stood like a troll blocking their path. These journalists reported that when they tried to walk past him, a much more modern security wall, with men in dark sunglasses carrying walkie-talkies, surged forward.

“The short security guy blocking us from going in just told me he loves the press, loves freedoms, loves America,” Colby Itkowitz, the Washington Post political writer, posted on Twitter. “I told him this is not a picture of freedom and he threatened to call the cops.”

On one hand, Saturday’s stonewall was not a big surprise if you’ve been following — or trying to follow, to the extent possible — the surging campaign of Mastriano, the Christian nationalist who is a top promoter of Donald Trump’s Big Lie about 2020 election fraud and roamed the Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Yet we should be shocked and alarmed, because what’s happening right here in the state where the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were drafted is a huge downward spiral in a war not just over the freedom of the press in America — an important, fundamental right in and of itself — but our very notions of democracy, which doesn’t function without an informed public.

What started some seven years ago as a terroristic threat from a future president of the United States — who branded the media with the Stalinist term “enemies of the people” and encouraged a kind of Two Minutes Hate toward penned-in reporters — has now devolved in tandem with an antidemocratic Republican Party. Journalists are blocked and bullied. Debates with potential hard questions are shunned. Basic fact-checking is deflected.

This happens not in a vacuum, but in a bigger world with too many autocrats who see journalism as an unnecessary inconvenience, as more and more journalists are murdered from the Israeli-controlled West Bank to Saudi Arabia to Russia to Mexico. This month, the international Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States a mediocre 42nd in global freedom of the press, observing that “there is a troubling trend of journalists experiencing harassment, intimidation and assault in the field” — and now Pennsylvania Republicans are kicking this up a notch.

The guy in the tri-corner hat and his backup goons may look like a joke, but the threat they pose is very, very real. Posting on Twitter Saturday night, the historian and popular newsletter author Heather Cox Richardson wrote that “silencing the press is authoritarianism 101.”

In other words, Mastriano’s unprecedented antipathy toward the media isn’t some personal quirk of his campaign, but its essence. It’s an assault on core democratic values that has seen the Republican Party in Pennsylvania devolve in less than a generation from the genteel centrism of Tom Ridge and Arlen Specter to the verge of nominating candidates like Mastriano who believe their governance is a mandate from Jesus Christ, not from getting the most votes.

» READ MORE: In wagering on Doug Mastriano, Josh Shapiro plays a dangerous game for Pa. | Will Bunch

The rapid rise of Mastriano — a retired Army colonel who won his first election in 2019 — is rooted in his November 2020 push to have Pennsylvania lawmakers recognize Trump as the winner of the state’s 20 electoral votes even after President Biden won by more than 70,000 votes, which segued into the antidemocratic chaos of Jan. 6, 2021. If Mastriano clinches the nomination on Tuesday and rides a pundit-predicted Republican wave of angry voters into office this November, he and a GOP-led legislature will install a Pennsylvania secretary of state who will enact a regime of voter suppression and share the new governor’s disdain for counting every ballot in 2024.

The brownshirting of the media that we’ve seen this election season from Team Mastriano — which not only routinely bars journalists from campaign events but posts pictures of journalists, like a most-wanted list, at entry desks and even once sent its henchmen to try to stop CNN from filming a rally from a hotel balcony — is central to the authoritarian nature of his crusade. Mastriano has risen to the top of the primary field in a closed bubble of Facebook rants and QAnon-friendly podcasts and festivals that have allowed him to face down independent journalism — and closer scrutiny of his extreme views — with the thuggish bravado of an “I-alone-can-fix-it” strongman.

But the extreme anti-media, anti-openness vibe has more broadly permeated the 2022 election here in Pennsylvania, dragging democracy down. While begging for Trump’s endorsement and connecting with a Republican base in which more than half of its voters accept the 45th president’s lies about a stolen election, the tone was set when four top GOP gubernatorial candidates (not Mastriano) said they wouldn’t debate without a Republican moderator or a ban on “yes-or-no” questions — like whether Biden won the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, the growing disconnect between the Republican Party and reality hampered The Inquirer’s ability to evaluate and consider an endorsement in these critical gubernatorial and Senate primaries. The paper made a sensible decision not to interview candidates who didn’t embrace the truth of Biden’s victory here. Only one Senate candidate and three gubernatorial candidates — all four of them lagging in the polls — acknowledged that fact. In announcing its decision not to make Republican endorsements, The Inquirer asked: “How do you find points of agreement when you can’t reach common ground on facts so basic that they could be used in a field sobriety test?”

The democracy trainwreck of Pennsylvania’s 2022 midterms is certain to go national in 2024′s presidential showdown. The national GOP has already signaled moves to squelch independently run debates in that election, raising the likelihood that U.S. voters won’t see a general election head-to-head encounter for the first time since 1972.

The nation that was birthed in the spirit of the New England town meeting and a celebration of open political debate is now holding elections in an information vacuum, in a climate in which one political party now sees journalists not as the upholders of our 231-year First Amendment tradition but as enemies of a state eager to enforce a right-wing populist “culture war.”

And the rise of popular and right-wing authoritarianism around the globe has coincided with unbridled hostility and violence to the notion of independent journalism. In Israel, where apartheid policies are at odds with any true commitment to democracy, government assaults on the press had been rising long before the shock of last week’s killing — by Israeli troops, witnesses said — of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and the sight of that country’s forces attacking her funeral procession. In Russia, dictator Vladimir Putin’s ability to murder journalists with impunity paved the road to his genocidal war in Ukraine. In Saudi Arabia, a team of government thugs murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, while the Trump administration laughed it off all the way to the bank.

It can’t happen here? Why not? For more than a half-century now, since the days of Spiro Agnew, press freedom in America has been the proverbial frog in boiling water. A conservative movement hell-bent on preserving a culture of white supremacy and patriarchy has now ratcheted up the burner of resentment politics to about a “9,” and its fingers are still on the dial. The mocking and harassment of journalists has entered a new phase of bans and blockades, with would-be autocrats like Doug Mastriano at the vanguard. I shudder at what comes next.

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