Brittany Kosin has deep roots in her community, a great smile and she wants your vote in the newly defined legislative district 178, which includes Warwick, where she lives with her husband and three children, Upper Southampton, Wrightstown and most of Northampton. At this writing, the 178th legislative district map has been approved by the court, but the exact boundaries are not yet available. The current representative for the 178th district, Republican Wendi Thomas, is retiring. No other candidates have yet stepped forward.
[Update February 26: Another candidate, Republican Kristin Marcell, also announced her intention to run for the District 178 seat. Marcell’s name may be familiar from her run for the district 9 Council Rock School Board seat in November. The result was in contention because she beat the closest competitor, Democrat Nicole Khan, by one vote. In a recount, Marcell’s win was confirmed and she was seated. From that narrow victory, Marcell’s decision to run for higher office was born. She announced her intention earlier in February. The Beacon apologizes for not mentioning it.]
Kosin’s children attend the Central Bucks School District, and she and her husband, T.J. Kosin, have made clear which side they are on. They are against mask mandates and vaccine mandates, for parental choice, and favor bringing civics back to school.
Brittany Kosin, 31, isn’t kidding. She believes children can begin learning about the Constitution in kindergarten. And she’s not opposed to teachers sharing personal stories about their family experiences, whether it is immigrant arrivals, or internment in Japanese camps during World War II. They should not, however, tell students how to vote in an election. “I believe, again, there is a fine line between relating experiences and forcing political views on our youth,” she says. By 7th grade, students should be ready to discuss the Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Holocaust, “with progressively in-depth discussions through high school, ” Kosin said.
“We need to emphasize that Native Americans were the first enslaved people in America. We also need to emphasize that the Nazis killed over six million Jews, seven million Soviet civilians, three million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians, 312,000 Serb civilians, 250,000 people with disabilities, up to 250,000 Roma, around 1,900 Jehovah’s Witnesses, and at least 70,000 criminal offenders or so-called Social dissidents, and an unknown amount of the LGBT+ community,” said Kosin. When offered an opportunity to add what were called “Negro-Germans” to the list, she declined.
She has strong opinions about current school issues.
Earlier this month, on the show “Unindoctrinated Radio,” on WJAS out of Pittsburgh, Kosin said her complaints about school curriculum included “CRT, diversity, equity and inclusions – that covers the majority of it – and teaching to the test.” She had another complaint as well: “I’m interested in not having foundations with no foundation of education indoctrinate our kids,” she said.
That got the Beacon asking, what foundations? She told us, “[T]he Anti-Defamation League is one of these organizations with no educational background. Schools in the commonwealth use the ADL as an anti-bullying campaign, yet their stance on ANTIFA shows clear bias.”
The statement was shocking; then again, so many groups, from far-left to far-right, Black, Asian, Jewish, Arab, and others, have had a beef with the ADL. She answered, “Antifa was labeled a domestic terrorist organization by President Trump. I disagree with how the ADL presents Antifa as a misunderstood group.”
Clearly, she and her husband are on the right. Jared Holt, now a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), based in Washington, and formerly an investigative reporter at Right Wing Watch, wrote a piece last September about the Kosins’ founding of the Proud American Patriots Network in 2020. The PAPN presents itself as doing disaster relief work and other good deeds.
Holt said the Proud American Patriot’s Network “laid blueprints for a new national Three Percenter entity under the veil of a proposed 501c4 nonprofit political advocacy organization, seeming to bury the group’s extreme sentiments beneath the façade of a formal, government-registered nonprofit.” The Three Percenter group mostly dissolved, nationally, after January 6; Canada, where it is still active, considers it a terrorist group.
But that was then, and this is now. Brittany Kosin is running for state office based on the fact that she is an ER nurse at Lehigh Valley Hospital, has 16 years of experience as a volunteer firefighter, and runs a small marketing company with her husband.
Perhaps those are good skills for a legislator, putting out fires, and handling emergencies, with a tourniquet if necessary, or sending something on to the ER.
She has a slickly produced campaign ad on Twitter. This is what elections are about.
You decide.