Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor, was a no-show. He had been scheduled to speak over the weekend at the ReAwaken America Tour at its stop in Manheim, a small town in Lancaster County west of Philadelphia. Even Donald Trump took time to call into this Christian nationalist shindig, whose participants didn't bother to hide their fascist longings. But even though Mastriano was scheduled to appear with other pro-insurrection figures, including Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn and MyPilllow CEO Mike Lindell, at the very last minute, Mastriano decided he was too busy to show up.
The likely real reason for Mastriano's hasty pull-out is evident in the tweets of HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias, who spent two days at the conference. Even by the basement-level standards of a Trump loyalist like Mastriano — who was at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection — this gathering was a doozy. It wasn't just the usual slate of election denialists like Flynn and Lindell, along with Eric Trump and Roger Stone. This event featured book-burning preacher Greg Locke, who believes Harry Potter and Halloween are Satanic and told the crowd he was being persecuted by "BLM, antifa, witches and warlocks." Self-declared prophet Bo Polny declared that the "angel of death" would be coming for President Biden, Hillary Clinton and Chief Justice John Roberts, among others, by the end of the year. Trans people were described by another speaker as the work of Satan. Another denounced quantum physics as "demonic."
