Just in case you haven’t heard the phrase an eleventy-thousand times so far this election cycle, democracy is on the ballot in November. Democrats want voters to believe it is the bad Republicans who are destroying our constitutional republic, which they call a democracy, but it is usually progressives who are leaning in to embrace their authoritarian tendencies. Take free speech and freedom of religion. An example of that burst on to social media on Monday and I’m still shaking my head over the stupidity.

A Democrat lawyer thought he’d own the conservative voters supporting Doug Mastriano at a campaign rally. There is video of a man on a stage who is firing up the audience by telling a story of early American settlers and leading them in a prayer. Prayer is not an unusual thing at a conservative event but progressives don’t seem to grasp that concept. It can be argued that this person on Twitter didn’t know that conservatives have been known to pray but after the events of the past six years, progressives have shown that they are all about owning the cons over everything else. Most of all, they want voters to think that Republicans are Nazis. Yeah, it’s pretty tiresome.

Yes, this is a Nazi salute, at a Doug Mastriano campaign event in Pennsylvania. In 2022.

Democracy is literally on the ballot in November.

pic.twitter.com/unKyQKDN9A

— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) September 18, 2022

If you listen to the video, you can hear the person asking the crowd to raise their right arm and then to lower it as he talks about Gettysburg and praying for victory. There is no “Heil Hitler” to be heard or anything else that would cause a jaw to drop. Raising an arm in worship is not unusual in many Christian churches.

Republican candidate Doug Mastriano is running against Democrat Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania Attorney General for governor. Mastriano is endorsed by Trump. Mastriano was greatly helped in the Republican primary by Democrats who wanted him to win, figuring he’d be easy for Shapiro to beat in the November general election. Democrats spent millions of dollars in support of candidates they preferred to run against, mostly Trump-endorsed candidates. Well, they got what they wanted and now Mastriano is closing the gap with Shapiro.

The current RCP aggregated average has Shapiro up over Mastriano by 5.4 points. The latest poll from the Trafalgar Group, though has Shapiro up by 2.0 points. Mastriano is closing the gap and this crazy tweet shows that Democrats are getting a little nervous. Is there time for Mastriano to make up the deficit and pull off a win for the governor’s seat in Pennsylvania? Maybe. Early voting has already begun.

It’s true that Mastriano has been a controversial figure in this race. He got into hot water for a photo that surfaced with him wearing a Confederate soldier uniform. The Shapiro campaign released a letter from a bunch of Democrats who are veterans. Mastriano is also a veteran and was on the faculty of the U.S. Army War College in the 2013-2014 academic year when the photo was taken.

The letter, released by the campaign of Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro, comes three weeks after a photo surfaced of Mastriano, a state senator and combat veteran, wearing the Civil War-era garb in a faculty photo from when he was a professor at the U.S. Army War College. The photo was from the 2013-14 academic year.

The prominent signatories of the letter are Democrats. They include Patrick J. Murphy, the former under secretary of the Army who served a term in Congress representing Bucks County; U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, a western Pennsylvania congressman who unsuccessfully ran in the Pennsylvania Senate primary this year; and state Rep. Jared Solomon (D., Philadelphia).

The veterans slammed Mastriano, writing that he ”wore the uniform of traitors who fought to defend slavery on official grounds of the Army War College.” The College, located in Carlisle, removed the photo because it “does not meet AWC values.”

“We lay our lives on the line to defend democracy and Doug Mastriano is actively trying to destroy it,” the veterans wrote. “His dangerous ideals have no place in an organization that requires unity of purpose and action and no place in Pennsylvania.”

Poor judgement, maybe, but probably not as traitorous as the Shapiro campaign would have voters believe. It’s not like he was the Democrat governor of a southern state who once wore blackface and a KKK sheet in his college frat boy days, right?

The whole Nazi schtick against Republicans isn’t even anything new. Remember when George W. Bush was called Bushitler, for example. Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats called Tea Party members brown shirts. Anytime the status quo is threatened by a conservative candidate, liberals lose their minds and all kinds of crazy comes out of their mouths. They should be mocked, not taken seriously. The Democrats got what they asked for and now we’ll see what happens in November.