Pennsylvania state senator rails against Star Wars props amid mysterious drone sightings
State senator Doug Mastriano chalks TIE fighters up to “the fecklessness of this administration.”
Screenshot via Disney
In case you haven’t heard, there are a bunch of drones that have been appearing over New Jersey. They’re pretty large, and no one knows where they’re coming from. (Well, presumably at least someone knows where they’re coming from, but they’re not telling the rest of us.) This has led to, as so often the case in 2024, conspiracy theorizing. Incumbent president Donald Trump accused the Biden administration and the military of being behind it and hiding the truth at a press conference yesterday. This, of course, comes after Trump spent the weekend generating AI images depicting drones delivering McDonald’s to former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. It’s all very stupid.
But it gets stupider. In a screenshot from what looks like a Facebook post, an unidentified poster claims to have a photo of a drone retrieved from the water in Orange Beach (which, at least according to this writer’s googling, is in Alabama, which you may describe as “not even close” to New Jersey). Pennsylvania state senator, former gubernatorial candidate, and January 6 attendee Doug Mastriano shared the image on Twitter (now known as X) to decry “the fecklessness of this administration” and to mention Ukraine, as one does.
They’re not sending their best
— Robert Maguire (@robertmaguire.bsky.social) December 17, 2024 at 9:15 AM
Reader, this is an image of a TIE fighter from Star Wars. You may remember them from the original trilogy as the spaceships the Empire uses in their skirmishes against the Rebel Alliance. It seems Mastriano did not. He has since posted another statement this afternoon, saying that he “posted an obvious Star Wars prop as a meme.” He shared that the Philadelphia Inquirer asked if he knew it was a prop, which he called “Hilarious” and “Modern day ‘journalism.’” Calling a public figure and asking them to clarify their public comments does indeed sound like “journalism.”