Fighting for the right in the Biden era
The evening was hot and hazy, ideal weather for an American Legion baseball game or a barbecue or some other summer diversion that ends with ice cream amid the twinkling of fireflies. Instead, hundreds of people in a festive mood crammed the Hamburg Field House, where industrial fans roared uselessly against the swelter and political messages, wry and blunt, scrolled across a giant screen.
“Welcome to Pennsylvania,” read one. “We’re No. 1 in Voter Fraud.”
“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes journalism.”
“Gun-toting, Bible clinging, 2nd Amendment supporting right-wing extremist.”
These last words captioned a portrait of the Founding Fathers and recalled the campaign-trail utterance that dogged Barack Obama in his first presidential bid, when he speculated that some Rust Belt Americans cling to guns and religion as security blankets against economic insecurity.
Obama, long gone from the White House, is still a haunting presence among the Berks County Patriots, a conservative group that draws big crowds to monthly meetings in the field house for lectures and conversations on immigration, taxation, gun rights, voting integrity and other topics.
That’s because the 44th president — and, to a great extent, his thwarted wouldbe successor, Hillary Clinton — remains the face of the liberal ascendancy that followed George W. Bush, was stalled by Donald Trump and has now been reinvigorated by the election of Joe Biden.
But Biden’s election has invigorated the Berks County Patriots, too, and similar groups around the country. Skepticism over the legitimacy of that election is part of what drew nearly 900 people to the field house on July 15, where Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano of Adams County made his pitch for a forensic audit of Pennsylvania’s 2020 election ballots.
“We have well over 2,000 members,” said Sam Brancadora, a Readingarea real-estate agent who is chairman of the Patriots and sees the growth of the movement as the inevitable response to what he and others view as the socialist underpinnings of the Democratic agenda.
“People have been invigorated for a lot of reasons,” Brancadora said. “Absolutely, we have momentum.”
The past and present
At their core, the Patriots and like-minded groups are the next iteration of the Tea Party, the conservative grassroots movement that formed in 2009, the first year of the Obama presidency, to oppose government expansion, higher taxes and Obama’s health care proposal.
“There are some similarities and probably even some of the same players, if you look at who’s there,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist and pollster at Muhlenberg College who sees the movement as another predictable swing of the left-right pendulum.
Resistance always comes from the grassroots of the party out of power, as Trump supporters would note about the Women’s March and other such groups that sprang up in the wake of his election.
There are inevitable differences between the Patriots and the Tea Party, given how the political and cultural landscapes have shifted since the latter’s heyday.
A key issue
One new target is critical race theory. As an academic concept — that racism is more than a matter of individual biases, but a structural flaw that creates inequity in legal and social systems — it’s been around for decades.
Now, though, it’s become something of a catchall term.
In the Patriots view, critical race theory paints all white people as irredeemably racist and provides intellectual cover for America-bashers, the kind of people who dismiss all that is great about the country because some of its founders owned slaves.
“Critical race theory considers people privileged or oppressed based on the color of their skin,” Brancadora said. “It’s really driving people.”
Borick said there is a gap between what critical race theory is and what groups such as the Patriots claim it is, but that difference is almost beside the point, now.
“It’s a lot different from how it’s going to be portrayed, but it doesn’t necessarily matter to people using it as a symbol of what they think is wrong,” he said. “It becomes a nice flash point.”
Pressuring school boards is also a favored tactic among grassroot groups of any stripe.
“It’s accessible, they feel like they can have quicker impact and it has a lot of symbolism,” Borick said. “It’s education, it’s children. They kind of rally around that.”
The 2020 election
The other top issue is election integrity, an umbrella term that encompasses concerns about poll irregularities to outright fraud.
Such claims have always been made during elections, but the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath — culminating in the violent Jan. 6 attempt by Trump supporters to stop Congress from certifying the outcome — raised the stakes to an unprecedented level.
“There weren’t a lot of people back in 2010 worried about electoral reform,” Borick said. “A lot of it now is due to the different messaging from the people who are the focal point (of the movement), people like Mastriano and obviously, at the highest level, like Donald Trump.”
The votes in 2016 and 2020 showed Berks went to Trump by wide margins, with 2016 bigger.
Mastriano, 57, a retired Army colonel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, proved a charismatic figure when he arrived at the meeting.
His star is certainly rising on the right. People lined up to hug him and have their picture taken with him and get his autograph on their copies of his book, “Thunder In the Argonne,” about America’s role in a decisive World War I battle.
When he took the podium, he dove into the topic at hand with a joke about the weather.
“I think the announcement of our forensic investigation has turned the heat up a little, what do you think?” he said.
That elicited wild cheers. So did the remarks by Kathy Barnette, a conservative political commentator from Montgomery County who is among the candidates in a crowded field to succeed Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.
Because she is a Black woman — one of few people of color at the meeting — Barnette’s denouncing of critical race theory as “evil” carries a special weight among people who lately have been crowding area school board meetings to oppose courses of study focused on race.
Brancadora said the Patriots don’t make formal endorsements of political candidates, though the reception afforded to Mastriano and Barnette made it clear where the group’s sentiments lie.
“Our function is just to bring people to our meetings and educate them on the subject matter we present,” Brancadora said. “It helps them to be more informed voters.”
‘Embrace a traditional view’
Who are the Patriots? The meeting crowd offered a few clues.
They are mostly white, mostly older — the median age of such groups is likely in the 60s, Borick said, and mainly working class.
They embrace a traditional view of America as a force for good with a proud history. They are generally people of faith. They support the police, the troops and secure borders.
And, like other such groups, they tend to live outside of urban areas.
“Berks County, rural Berks — these are bastions of the demographics and ideology for this type of group,” Borick said. “That’s a sweet spot. If I was asked to name to an area in the state where it might be, that would be it.”
That so many heads at Patriot meetings are gray doesn’t mean there aren’t young conservatives, Borick added, but youth tends to engage online rather than in more traditional town square settings.
“This might not be the coziest fit for them, so they find other activities rather than sitting in a big field house with a bunch of older folks,” he said.
The Patriots are dismissed as irrelevant by some and considered a threat by others.
In a recent tweet, the progressive Berks Stands Up organization derided the group as the “Christian Nationalist Berks Patriots” and said its members have been harassing school boards over “imaginary issues” such as critical race theory.
At the same time, it notes that the Patriots are wielding influence in ways they want their own members to adopt. “They’re involved in local politics; are you?” the tweets asks.
That’s an important question, Borick said. Groups like the Patriots, especially in a state like Pennsylvania, “are a fairly potent force in terms of their place within contemporary Republican politics. They carry quite a bit of weight and can be very impactful in the primary process and the general election. You get that type of energized engagement.”
Appalled by Jan. 6
The Patriots recognize they have an image problem and say it’s related to fringe elements in the movement.
“We’re white supremacists as far as our opponents are concerned,” Brancadora said. “I know we’re not, but that’s what they think. There’s nothing we can do about it. We just do the best we can.”
By “they” Brancadora means the left, but also much of the mainstream media, where coverage, he said, has focused on the misdeeds of Capitol rioters and conspirators and glossed over the legitimate concerns of people struggling with fundamental societal and economic changes.
Images of rioters hoisting Trump banners and swarming the Capitol on Jan. 6 appall most members of the movement, he added, pushing back on the idea that the Patriots took part in the violence.
“For (Jan. 6) we started filling buses — we had about five buses,” he said. “We knew, like the whole world knew, there could be violence that day. Because of that, we dissociated ourselves with that bus trip. We were concerned something was going to happen and we didn’t want to have any involvement with that.”
The trip was taken over by “private individuals” and proceeded, Brancadora added. If anyone from the Patriots took part in the insurrection, it was not with group’s blessing, he said.
Some Patriot members traveled to the day’s Trump rally separately. One, a board member, left after the rally and didn’t know until she was on the bus home that violence had broken out.
“Her feeling went from euphoria to despair because she couldn’t believe this was happening,” Brancadora said. “We don’t want violence. We don’t want confrontation. We put out a statement (that) we didn’t condone that behavior.”
The long game
Rather, Brancadora added, the group wants to work within the system.
While allegations of election fraud have gotten no traction, members still say a forensic audit of results ought to be carried out.
“This is where Mastriano comes into play,” he said. “It’s important this is done. Even if our views of what we think happened are incorrect, and I hope they are, this dispels those fears.”
The group also discusses tried-and-true conservative topics as it eyes coming elections, especially the 2022 midterms: jobs, taxes, unions, pension reform.
Gun rights are a perennial concern.
Among the raffle prizes at the July 15 meeting was a hunting rifle — “Those horrible rifles that can shoot, according to some Democrats, 3,000 rounds a second,” the announcer said — and at least one man openly sported a sidearm as he roamed the crowd.
Will the movement succeed in turning back Democratic gains, in recovering the vision and energy that propelled the Trump movement?
That may depend on how successfully they can distance themselves from the fringe.
“In the broader reaches of those organizations you will get more extreme people,” Borick said. “Where do they draw the line? They have to distance themselves from certain actions without distancing themselves from the issues and sometimes they can’t strike that balance. Who do they represent? What is their mission? Their sustainability is often dependent on solving that.”