Former GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Thinks Star Wars Is Real
Photo by Pasqualino Capobianco
On Sunday I wrote my theory for what the drones circling over New Jersey are, as many resemble the budding $1.5 trillion air taxi industry that will begin flying over New Jersey and New York next year, and I pointed to former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan sharing a video of Orion and calling it a UFO as an example of how some folks are, well…losing their fucking minds right now. This is another post detailing this ongoing theme that is escalating dramatically.
We’re going back to dying of infectious diseases and being scared of the night sky
— Dave Levitan (@davelevitan.bsky.social) December 15, 2024 at 8:00 AM
Doug Mastriano, former Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate in 2022 and current State Senator, made Larry Hogan’s old man yells at constellation post look downright scientific. As of this writing, this post is very real and somehow still up, as Mastriano is seemingly convinced that Star Wars TIE fighters are flying above New Jersey.
They’re not sending their best
— Robert Maguire (@robertmaguire.bsky.social) December 17, 2024 at 7:15 AM
This is actually a great example of how extremely alienated conservatives have made themselves from mainstream America. Everything that isn’t revanchist reactionary bullshit is labeled as woke, and cultural touchstones like Star Wars become foreign to people who have made themselves foreigners in their own land, and refuse to watch anything that doesn’t come from the lying rage industry on YouTube or Fox News. They are wholly separated from the broader culture and you can feel their detachment from it in posts like these. How the fuck do you not know this is a TIE Fighter???
Once you know how Mastriano’s feeble brain operates, the rest of his politics are pretty predictable. Of course, he’s a QAnon guy and a fundamentalist Christian nationalist who has called the separation of church and state a myth, and he received plenty of attention for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and even attended the January 6th riot. Mastriano was subpoenaed by the United States House Select Committee but stopped cooperating in August.
But you already knew all of that because those are the only kinds of people in America who would see a picture of a TIE Fighter underneath some rage bait and think it’s real. Everyone else still has that functioning part of their brain that wonders if their anger is being manipulated for internet clout, while MAGA Republicans have completely smoothed their brains out en route to becoming the dumbest humans ever created. There are cavemen who never left their caves hundreds of thousands of years ago who could be dropped in the middle of Times Square today and still would have a better grip on modern society than GOP airheads like Mastriano.
I don’t know what the solution to this is—these people are seemingly gone forever. Reality is an abstract construct for the Mastriano’s and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s of the world, as their psychosis is so acute that the only way they can understand reality is to invent it themselves. This is a big problem that is only going to get worse, as an entire group of Americans have let the internet completely cook their brains to a crisp, while the rest of America has decided that these are the people who should be in power.