Doug Mastriano is deleting his videos from Facebook as he runs for Pa. governor

In three months, 14 videos have disappeared from Mastriano's page. In them, he dismisses global warming as "pop science" and says Republicans who oppose him secretly "disdain veterans."


by William Bender
Updated 4 hours ago

In early April, Doug Mastriano was recording a Facebook Live video on his phone after a legislative session in Harrisburg when he segued into his thoughts on global warming. The state senator from south-central Pennsylvania, who would become the Republican nominee for governor the following month, told his supporters he wanted to pull the state out of a program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, calling it “nonsense” that human activity could significantly alter the earth’s climate. A connection between burning fossil fuels and global warming? Merely a “theory,” Mastriano said, based on “pop science.” “Heck, the weatherman can’t get the weather right 24 hours out,” he said.

As supporting evidence, Mastriano referred to an event he said he attended in Washington, D.C., in about 1970 when he was a Cub Scout. Environmentalists there had been warning that when the world’s population reached one billion, he recalled, there would be a major catastrophe.“That was the outrage and fear back then,” Mastriano said. “There was no global catastrophe when we reached one billion. … They talked about it like it was fact, like with climate change.” The anecdote, of course, makes little sense, not least because the world population at that time was already an estimated 3.7 billion. The video has since disappeared from Mastriano’s Facebook campaign page. In the last three months alone, more than a dozen other videos have also been deleted.

The removed videos include freewheeling discussions in which Mastriano predicts that this November’s election will be marred by Democratic voter fraud; accuses Republicans who don’t support him of looking down on veterans; and calls the fight against abortion “the most important issue of our lifetime.”This has become somewhat of a pattern for Mastriano, 58, a retired Army colonel who bills himself as a plainspoken populist. He communicates directly with voters online, yet sometimes covers his tracks. Before this latest batch of deletions, Mastriano removed potentially problematic or controversial posts, including tweets promoting the Qanon conspiracy theory, as well as videos in which he called local faith leaders “cowards”; acknowledged his COVID diagnosis while visiting the White House; and feuded with GOP lawmakers in Harrisburg.

Mastriano’s Senate website has also been scrubbed of a plan he pitched during the early days of the pandemic to lift medical privacy restrictions so the government could disclose the names and locations of people infected with COVID-19. Videos have been deleted from his official Senate Facebook page, as well. “There are traces of them, but the videos are gone,” said Erin Gallagher, a disinformation researcher at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

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