Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano wrote a master's thesis two decades ago warning of a left-wing “Hitlerian Putsch."
The Donald Trump-endorsed Republican candidate published the highly unusual thesis in 2001, when he was a major at the Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College, from the point of view of a colonel living in 2018 who has taken refuge in an "isolated cavern" following the collapse of the U.S. military and the deaths of millions of Americans under a left-wing leader by the United Nations and the European Union, reported the Washington Post.
“Domestically, life was bleak with a rampant drug culture, hedonism and a plethora of ‘alternate’ religions dominating the American youth,” wrote Mastriano, in the voice of his fictional colonel. “We were a people without vision or direction.”
Mastriano concluded the military must take action to "prevent the destruction of the republic," which he linked to “aberrant sexual conduct,” and the thesis foreshadows the right-wing conspiratorial worldview that fed his claims about Donald Trump's election defeat and the Jan. 6 insurrection.
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“This thesis proves that Mastriano’s embrace of activity that undermines the U.S. Constitution is no recent corruption,” said Peter Feaver, a former senior White House official under George W. Bush. “It stems from poisonous views and misunderstandings that he has held for a very long time.”