PHILADELPHIA — Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, told a crowd of vocal supporters at an event last weekend that he would fight “pole dancing and pornography” in the state’s public schools.
“On day one, the sexualization of our kids — pole dancing and all this other crap that is going on — will be forbidden in our schools,” Mastriano told the crowd to rapturous applause.
“All the graphic, pornographic books that are in elementary schools will be pulled out,” Mastriano added.
Political analysis podcast “The David Pakman Show” broke the story and included video of the Mastriano event.
“Of course, there isn’t any pole dancing and pornography in public schools,” Pakman commented on the FreeSpeech.org network blog, “but just by asserting that there is, Mastriano will get a sizable chunk of his supporter base to believe kids are being sexualized and that he’s the only one who can stop it. Doug went on to claim that he will eliminate the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, which is yet another one of these buzz terms for folks on the far right.”
Yesterday, The Atlantic published an article on what the magazine termed Mastriano’s “lunatic appeal.”
A former Philadelphia mayor quoted by The Atlantic called Mastriano “an existential threat to democracy,” but acknowledged that, in today's political climate, “there’s an appeal to that brand of lunacy.”
