Republican Pennsylvania governor candidate and state Senator Doug Mastriano has been super busy lately running for the highest office in America’s fifth most populous state but luckily for him he was about to find some time recently to squeeze in deleting all the old Facebook posts and tweets espousing QAnon and other far right conspiracy shit about global warming, plus the time he tested positive for COVID-19 in the middle of a meeting with fat former President Trump to talk about ways to overturn the 2020 election in the state, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
In all at least 14 Facebook videos and an unknown number of other posts and tweets have been scrubbed including one livestream from just three weeks ago, says Erin Gallagher, a Harvard researcher who has been tracking Mastriano’s ascent independently of her day job. Gallagher also found Mastriano removed a line about “protecting life” from his Senate website, also deleting a June radio interview that he recorded for Facebook in which he called abortion a “distraction.”
Pennsylvania GOP consultant Chris Nicholas said the explanation is simple. “What’s concerning to some people is that his voter outreach efforts are not evolving. In terms of Facebook conservatives, he and his team, congrats to them, they really maxed out that vote in the primary. That doesn’t win you a general election. Now, you have to do something in addition to that,” said Nicholas.