Blake Masters won the GOP Senate primary Tuesday in Arizona, and is set to face off against incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ).
Masters beat out businessman Jim Lamon and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R).
Masters ran a sometimes menacing campaign that leaned hard into conspiracy theories. He made an explicit endorsement of the Great Replacement theory part of his regular campaign fare, while staking out a position in favor of reducing legal immigration.
The former chief operating officer of billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Masters has been involved with Thiel on more than just the business side. The two are ideologically sympatico, with Masters fusing Thiel’s signature combination of pro-big business libertarianism and America-only nationalism into the core of his campaign.
He’s a writer, too. Masters co-wrote a book with Thiel in 2014 composed of notes taken during a class that Thiel taught on how to build startups. It wasn’t Masters’ first brush with the pen, however. As an undergraduate at Stanford, the aspiring senator frequently posted on an online chatroom for the workout program CrossFit and on an obscure libertarian forum blaming the “Houses of Morgan and Rothschild” for the U.S.’s entry into World War I, while also remarking that the “hot button issue of the Holocaust” made it more difficult to argue against U.S. involvement in World War II — “(nevermind that our friend Stalin murdered over twice as many as Hitler … why do we gloss over that in schools?)” he added.
While the young Thielite has sought to cast himself as a new brand of right-wing Republican, some of his proposals are familiar: He wants to privatize Social Security, for example.
On a key issue in the 2022 midterms, the right to an abortion, he has espoused a position in line with his strident persona, calling for a nationwide abortion ban in the form of a federal fetal personhood law.
He has also capitalized on Trump’s efforts to discredit the 2020 election, earning the former President’s endorsement after releasing an ad claiming that “Trump won in 2020.” That set him apart from an ealry top competitor, Brnovich, who, despite campaign-trail efforts to out-Trump Masters, had accepted the results of the 2020 election.
In other words, he wants to shovel public money toward Peter Tiel and his friends. That’s hardly a winning message.
Well. Sigh.
Meanwhile, here in Kansas on an otherwise good night, Kris Kobach (R-Undead) won the GOP nomination for state Attorney General, despite his party’s publicly telling him, again, that they didn’t want him to run; they’re afraid he will lose in November. Which, given how the vote on the abortion amendment turned out, may now be even truer than before.
Especially in a state with a large retiree population.
This will be a true test at how effective the 40+ GOP campaign to dumb down Americans has worked. Having lived in Tucson AZ for several years, I am not terribly optimistic that the Democrats will be able to overcome those rubes. I left in 2006 and it was bad then, and by all appearances it has gotten much worse.
Someone needs to inform Masters that, before we can accept that, every penny that everyone still alive and their survivors has paid in over the last 70 years must be returned to the payer with interest from the SS fund. And before he says that, well, it’s bankrupt, we counter with no, it’s not. He and his idiot colleagues have been pilfering from the fund for decades. First order of business is to put every single pilfered dime back into the fund; then, pay out.
Congress can do whatever the hell it wants with SS as soon as they make good on every dime that’s been paid in and reimbursed with interest.
I’m tired of the program we’ve been paying into since FDR continually being called an entitlement and a drain on the budget. Companies have done away with pensions and 401Ks are subject to the whims of the stock markets, which Thiel and his ilk control.
No. If they want to disband SS, then they need to pay out millions and millions of dollars to those of us that have contributed over the decades, AFTER Congress returns every single dime with interest that they’ve pilfered over the decades.
Thiel has the money. Let him take this on. But SS goes nowhere until every last payer has been reimbursed with interest.