Peter Thiel, billionaire, backer of Republican
candidates and close personal friend of Donald
Trump, wishes to place yet another shill answerable
only to himself in Congress. In April 2021, Masters
appeared as a potential candidate for United States
Senate in 2022, having received $10 million from
Peter Thiel in the run-up to a potential bid to
challenge incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly. Masters
officially entered the race on July 12, 2021.
Promoting himself as "an America first
conservative", Masters announced a platform of
opposition to H-1B visas and criticism of Big Tech
monopolies. Masters supported the audit of the vote
in Maricopa County. He called election integrity the
"top issue" of his campaign, adding that while
President Joe Biden was the congressionally
certified president, "it's really hard to know" the
winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. A few
months later,
Masters stated he personally thought "Trump won in
2020" in a campaign ad and appeared at a fundraiser
with the former president at Mar-a-Lago shortly
afterward. Masters' campaign attracted attention
from a campaign advertisement that he released
stating that "You should be able to raise a family
on one single income"
Blake Masters lost badly to incumbent Mark Kelly in the 2022 General
Election.
Blake Masters has now
joined the chorus in the latest Kari Lake
smash hit to top the MAGA billboard: “I
lost, so the election was stolen.” Masters
went on a tear on Thursday evening, charging
thousands of Arizona voters were
disenfranchised and calling on every member
of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors
to “resign in disgrace”. “They all deserve
to be recalled by the voters, and
investigated by the AG (pray that @AbrahamHamadeh
makes it in),” he tweeted. According to
Masters-think, the Republican-run Board of
Supervisors was either “grossly negligent”
or outright rigged the Nov. 8 election by
making sure that Election Day lines were
long and tabulation machines didn’t work.
“We may never know how many thousands of
voters were disenfranchised,” he tweeted.
“And yes this would have made a difference
in Abe and Kari’s races.” He also complains
that that not enough Republicans voted by
mail. Oh, the irony.
Masters is just as
far outside the ideological mainstream as he
let on during the primary. He thinks that
America is in a period of extreme societal
decline—a “dystopian hell world,” in his
words—and “evil and incompetent” Democrats
are mostly to blame. To rescue our country
from the left, Masters believes that America
needs a more combative Republican Party
willing to weaponize state power to pursue a
hard-right nationalistic agenda, enforce
socially conservative values, and punish
anybody who gets in the way. Of course,
far-right nationalism itself isn’t all that
unique within the post-Trump GOP. But
Masters’ worldview is both more thoughtful
and more extreme than those of his
Republican counterparts. He hasn’t arrived
at this perspective merely out of political
expediency: he’s a true believer in
hard-right nationalism and a harsh critic of
small-L liberalism.
Republican Senate
hopeful Blake Masters repeatedly has said
there’s “rot” in the military and that its
leadership is inadequate, incompetent and
should be fired." [...] ""Our top generals
have turned into woke corporate bozos, and
our troops deserve better,” he wrote on in
November, accompanied by a campaign video of
him lambasting the military. “I hate to say
it, but our military leadership is totally
incompetent,” Masters said, standing in what
appears to be an agricultural field. “No
active duty American general has ever won a
war.
Blake Masters, the
Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona,
has repeatedly said the U.S. should clean
house on the senior ranks of the military,
pushing the claim that all the generals and
admirals are “woke” and “left-wing” losers
who’ve never won a war. His solution? Fire
them all, and promote “the most conservative
colonels.” “Your entire general class,
they're left-wing politicians at this point.
It's very hard to become a general without
being some kind of left-of-center
politician,” he said at an Apache Junction
Ladies for President Trump event in August
2021, according to audio obtained by VICE
News. “I would love to see all the generals
get fired. You take the most conservative
colonels, you promote them to general.
Controversial
comments about the U.S. Capitol riot, an
immigration conspiracy theory, and the false
claims of a stolen election have disappeared
from Republican Senate hopeful Blake
Masters' campaign website. Masters is
demonstrating that his campaign reboot
involved more than removing his views on
abortion. During the Arizona GOP Senate
primary, Masters' website urged a stop to
"the Biden crime wave" that seemed to cast
the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection as
trespassing. Today, there is no apparent
reference to the violent clash between a
pro-Trump mob and police at the Capitol.
That change, along with others first
reported by CNN, reflects an evolving shift
in tone from Masters, as he looks to broaden
his appeal beyond Republican voters in his
bid to oust Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.
The campaign
website for Arizona
Senate candidate
Blake Masters
appears to have
removed a popular
far-right claim that
the 2020 election
was stolen.
Masters' website
previously stated
that the "2020
election was a
rotten mess" and
that "if we had a
free and fair
election, President
Trump would be
sitting in the Oval
Office."
The claims were on
Masters' campaign
website as late as
August 23, based on
available archived
screenshots from
WaybackMachine,
before it disappears
around August 25.
The website now just
states, "We need to
get serious about
election integrity,"
before going into
several points to
reform US elections,
including banning
drop boxes and
"ending
indiscriminate mass
mailing of ballots."
CNN first reported
the updates to the
website.
His campaign site
has toned down some
of its language
around other go-to
Republican talking
points.
NBC News previously
reported that
Masters' website
removed more extreme
anti-abortion
stances, calling for
a "federal
personhood law" that
could make abortion
illegal even at the
state level. The
website also
previously said that
Masters was "100%
pro-life."
Now, it says Masters
supports a "law or a
Constitutional
amendment that bans
late-term (third
trimester) abortion
and partial-birth
abortion at the
federal level,"
while also affirming
that the candidate
disagrees with Roe
v. Wade.
In his section on
immigration, CNN
reported that the
website was scrubbed
of language that
references the great
replacement
conspiracy theory —
a claim that
non-white voters are
being brought into
the US to outnumber
white voters for a
certain political
agenda.
A
source close to
Masters told CNN
that the website is
updated and managed
by the candidate
himself.
A widely reported
radical response from Blake
Masters—according to at least one Valley
health care worker—”offend every single
woman and individual that supports abortion
rights and women’s personal health
decisions.”
Aug. 27, 2022
Scrubbed From
Blake Masters Website Aug. 25, 2022
And What It
Was Replaced With:
More Republican
projection, less reality
This WOULD have been
saved to the Internet Archive but for
Masters having it excluded so there would be
no record of these changes. Only a website
owner can request that a site be excluded.
Arizona Republican
Senate candidate Blake Masters softened his
tone and scrubbed his website's policy page
of tough abortion restrictions Thursday, as
his party reels from the U.S. Supreme
Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade."
[...] "Look, I support a ban on very
late-term and partial-birth abortion," he
said. "And most Americans agree with that.
That would just put us on par with other
civilized nations." (Late-term abortions are
extremely rare, according to a Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention tracker.)
Just after releasing the ad, Masters'
campaign published an overhaul of his
website and softened his rhetoric,
re-writing or erasing five of his six
positions. NBC News took screenshots of the
website before and after it was changed.
Masters' website appeared to be refreshed
after NBC News reached out for clarification
on his abortion stances. "I am 100%
pro-life," Masters' website read as of
Thursday morning. That language is now
gone.
California tech
financier turned Arizona GOP senate
candidate Blake Masters often cites his own
business record as a model for his hardline
anti-China policies, claiming that as an
investor he had not raised money for “a
single startup” in China, and wanting to
“literally ban” Chinese nationals from
working for U.S. companies out of national
security concerns. One problem. It turns
out, Masters has participated in multiple
funding rounds for a Chinese biomedical
startup—including alongside Chinese
Communist Party investors. He also had
business ties to a second, U.S.-based
medical company when it was honored by a CCP-backed
organization.
The Arizona Senate
candidate said he’d “never heard of” his
Christian nationalist superfan Andrew Torba.
New audio reveals he talked to the Gab CEO
at length
Peter Thiel's $15
million helped Blake Masters win the
Republican primary. Thiel's biographer
explains what Thiel wants and how he's
connected to Masters.
Aug. 8, 2022
Blake Masters -
Wrong Side
What do you call a
Nazi-loving,
anti-American,
tax-hiking Arizonan?
Blake Masters.
Elected
officials and candidates for
office in 2022 continue to
challenge and question the
results of the 2020 presidential
election in Arizona.
The
results have been examined and
re-examined, challenged in court
and in a monthslong ballot
review. No evidence has been
found of widespread fraud or
error in the results.
Yet
candidates deny the outcome.
Others don't quite go as far.
But they raise questions about
potential irregularities they
say could have influenced the
vote and should be examined.
The
Arizona Republic is listing
candidates by category by the
race that they are entered in.
This list is not complete and
will be updated throughout the
2022 election season.
Election deniers
These
candidates in Arizona races deny
that Joe Biden won the 2020
presidential election, either in
Arizona or nationwide.
The New York Times by Jonathan Weisman, July 6, 2022
Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arizona who won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, has been dogged by a trail of youthful writings in which he lamented the entry of the United States into the First and Second World Wars, approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal and pushed an isolationism that extended beyond even Mr. Trump’s.
In the most recent examples, unearthed and provided to The New York Times by opponents of Mr. Masters, he took to the chat room of CrossFit, his workout of choice, as a Stanford undergraduate in 2007 to espouse views that might not sit well with the Republican electorate of 2022.
As he had in other forums, Mr. Masters wrote on the CrossFit chat room that he opposed American involvement in both world wars — although World War II, he conceded, “is harder to argue because of the hot button issue of the Holocaust (nevermind that our friend Stalin murdered over twice as many as Hitler … why do we gloss over that in schools?).”
[ . . . ]
Also on the CrossFit chat room, Mr. Masters, then 20, argued that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not “constitute substantial threats to Americans.” ...
Center
for
Arizona
Policy
2022
Candidate
Questionnaire
Position Sought:
U.S.
Senate
Question
4: Adding “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” and “gender expression” to the protected classes of race, religion, age, sex, and ancestry in nondiscrimination law.
Candidates'
Position: Oppose.
Question
9: Protecting individuals and businesses from being required to provide services or use their artistic expression in a manner that violates their moral or religious beliefs.*
Andrew Anglin, who
publishes the hate site Daily Stormer,
announced his endorsement of Masters in a
blog post that also expressed support for
Trump-endorsed Ohio Senate candidate J.D.
Vance, another GOP candidate bankrolled by
billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel,
reported Jewish Insider. “I cannot give a
more forceful endorsement, and I demand that
anyone in Arizona (who is not some kind of
known neo-Nazi or whatever) get in contact
with his campaign and see what kind of help
he needs,” Anglin wrote in the June 9 entry.
“This is exactly the kind of man this
country needs." The 37-year-old Anglin, an
outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler and an
early Trump supporter, has gone into hiding
since helping to orchestrate the 2017 "Unite
the Right" rally in Charlottesville,
Virginia.
Jul. 1, 2022
Photo Illustration
by Thomas
Levinson/The Daily
Beast/Getty/Alamy
Republican
senatorial candidate
Blake Masters enjoys
the financial and
political support of
his longtime friend,
mentor, and
billionaire business
partner Peter Thiel,
who is gay. But
Masters, who
attended Thiel’s
wedding, also
apparently believes
Thiel’s marriage
should be illegal.
We got to cut the
knot at some point though because I'll tell
you what, I'm not going to receive Social
Security," GOP Senate primary candidate
Blake Masters said at a primary debate
hosted by the conservative group
FreedomWorks
The “Last Week
Tonight” host aimed his ire at the Peter
Thiel-backed GOP candidate for Senate in
Arizona who’s blamed gun violence on
“Black people” and admires the Unabomber.
there is clear
evidence that Jackson was cold-cocked by a
woman who was shooting cell phone video of
him from a few feet away. The video shows
the woman lashed out with a balled fist at
Jackson's left jaw. Jackson's head snapped
back; the smack on Jackson's face appeared
to be audible. In the video, Jackson's
arms appear to be flailing. "I defended
myself against her because she'd already
punched me," he said. "I pushed her left
shoulder away so we could get some distance
because she was right up against me." "When
I pushed her away, that's when the male mob
descended upon me," he said. The candidate
event hadn't started yet. Masters was
circulating behind the small group near
Jackson. The video shows that Masters,
who is 35, rushed in, put his hands around
Jackson's neck and pushed him to the ground
outside the meeting room. Two attendees
harassed Jackson as he lay on the ground.
Jackson suffered a bruised neck - the result
of someone tugging on a gold chain around
his neck, he said - and bloodied knees when
he hit the ground.
Blake Masters, the
Republican Senate candidate from Arizona,
met with conservative activists at a Phoenix IHOP this spring and was asked whether he
would support investigating US intelligence
operations to uncover the federal
government's "nefarious activities." Masters
replied, "Absolutely," and then floated the
conspiracy theory that the January 6, 2021,
attack on the US Capitol actually may have
been a false-flag operation set up by the
FBI,
out of nowhere comes
Blake Masters, a U.S. Senate candidate who'd
been glad-handing in the background. Masters
lunged at Jackson, put both hands around his
neck and pushed him backward.
Blake Masters, whom
former President
Donald Trump
recently endorsed
for Senate in
Arizona, said during
a podcast appearance
earlier this year
that “Black people,
frankly” are
responsible for
America’s gun
violence problem.
“We do have a gun
violence problem in
this country, and
it’s gang violence,”
Masters said on the
“Jeff Oravits Show”
on April 11, the
Daily Beast reported
on Sunday. “It’s
people in Chicago,
St. Louis shooting
each other. Very
often, you know,
Black people,
frankly. And the
Democrats don’t want
to do anything about
that.”
Masters — who has
peddled the great
replacement theory
and falsely insisted
that Trump won the
2020 election — went
on to say that
Democrats “don’t
like the Second
Amendment” because
“it frankly blocks a
lot of their plans
for us.”
Masters has leaned
on racism,
conspiracy theories,
and guns throughout
this campaign. . . .
The previously
unreported donation is Thiel’s first new
investment in the super PAC, Saving Arizona,
since he seeded it with $10 million more
than a year ago. It brings his investment in
Masters — a friend and former employee who
recently resigned his leadership positions
at Thiel’s foundation and hedge fund — to
$13.5 million.
A half-dozen
mainstream Republican Senate candidates are
drawing on the “great replacement”
conspiracy theory once confined to the
far-right fringes of U.S. politics to court
voters this campaign season, promoting the
baseless notion that there is a plot to
diminish the influence of white people in
America.
He said that “at a
minimum,” abortion should be left up to the
states. But, he added, “I actually think we
should go further than that though.” “I
think the 14th Amendment says you have the
right to life, liberty and property,” he
said at an event in Carefree, Arizona. “You
can’t deprive someone with that without due
process. Hard to imagine a bigger
deprivation of due process than killing a
small child before they have a chance to
take their first breath. So I think you
do need a federal personhood law.”
Blake Masters, a
Tucson-based venture capitalist, boasts on
his website that he will only vote to
confirm federal judges “who understand that
Roe and Griswold and Casey were wrongly
decided, and that there is no
constitutional right to abortion.” Roe v.
Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,
decided in 1973 and 1992, respectively, both
upheld a constitutional right to abortion
access. But the ruling in Griswold v.
Connecticut in 1965 protected a married
couple’s right to buy and use contraceptives
without government restrictions.
Former President
Donald Trump is scheduled to attend a
fundraiser next week for Arizona Republican
Blake Masters, marking his first foray into
the state’s contentious GOP Senate primary.
[...] The fundraiser, according to an
invitation obtained by POLITICO, is being
held Wednesday night at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago
Club in Palm Beach
By:
Adam Wren, Meghan
Morris,
and Kimberly
Leonard
Oct. 8, 2021
The Republican Senate candidate
Blake Masters earned about $1 million from his
business relationship with the investor and GOP megadonor Peter Thiel last year, underscoring just
how financially enmeshed he is with his billionaire
benefactor, new documents show.
Thiel, the PayPal founder and
Facebook investor and board member, paid Masters a
salary of $775,000 over the past year, according to
Masters' personal-finance disclosure, filed on
Thursday with the US Senate clerk.
The documents — filed nearly 10
weeks late, Insider previously reported — also show
that Masters earned more than $340,000 in royalty
payments from Thiel Capital stemming from sales of
the book "Zero to One," which Masters wrote with
Thiel.
Masters is the chief operating
officer of Thiel Capital and the president of the
Thiel Foundation. Thiel has already donated $10
million to Saving America, a pro-Masters super PAC;
such committees may raise and spend unlimited
amounts of money to advocate for or against
political candidates.
Masters did not immediately
return Insider's message seeking comment. He'd told
Insider in September that his financial disclosure
would be "pretty vanilla." In October, he said he
hadn't filed a timely disclosure because he was
"busy campaigning and parenting," adding that "the
most interesting and unique thing in my disclosure
will be crypto."
His cryptocurrency holdings are
indeed intriguing: He reported between $1.47 million
and $6.19 million worth of assets across nine
cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, bitcoin cash,
dogecoin, ether, filecoin, litecoin, tezos, and
zcash.
This makes Masters one of the
most heavily cryptocurrency-invested congressional
candidates.
Masters also owns between $2,000
and $30,000 in gold and silver bars and coins,
according to his disclosure.
Masters also reported having a
gun trust, described in the disclosure as a "trust
established to hold weapons regulated by the
National Firearms Act."
Masters' trust contains "guns and
silencers," the disclosure said, without detailing
his holdings further. Gun trusts may contain any
kind of legally owned weapon but are often used to
legally possess machine guns, short-barrel rifles,
and shotguns.
Ties to Thiel
Masters, 35, filed papers with
the Federal Election Commission on July 9 to run in
the GOP Senate primary in Arizona. If he wins, he
would likely face incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, a
Democrat, in what could become one of the most
expensive races of the 2022 midterm elections.
Under federal law, Masters had 30
days to disclose his financial records or otherwise
file for an extension, which he did not. Had Masters
filed for an extension, Senate officials could have
granted him as many as 90 more days to submit his
personal financial information. He faces a $200
late-filing penalty, according to Senate rules.
Masters' ties with Thiel date to
his Stanford Law School days, when he took the
investor's entrepreneurship class, published his
notes online, and then, with Thiel, wrote a
bestselling compendium of the notes, "Zero to One."
After a stint in legal-tech
entrepreneurship, Masters spent the past seven years
at Thiel Capital.
When Donald Trump became
president, Thiel — at times with Masters — helped
Trump vet and select candidates for senior
government positions. For example, Thiel sought to
replace the longtime director of the National
Institutes of Health with Andy Harris, a Republican
congressman and doctor with far-right views,
according to Max Chafkin's recent biography of
Thiel.
Want to have an intimate
dinner with Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel?
Just donate $5,800 to one of his employees’
campaigns for US Senate. Donors who give the maximum
legal amount to support Blake Masters’ bid to unseat
Democratic Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly in 2022 will be
invited to have dinner with the candidate and Thiel,
according to the campaign.
Masters said he supports the
ongoing review of ballots in Maricopa County being
conducted on behalf of legislative Republicans, led
by a
Trump supporter who promoted the former
president’s unfounded election conspiracy theories.
Asked whether he believes Democratic President Joe
Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020
election, Masters deflected. Masters considered
challenging Republican Sen. Martha McSally last
year, spooking some in the GOP who feared he would
weaken the incumbent ahead of the general election,
but opted against running. McSally lost to Kelly,
who is now finishing the term of the late Sen. John
McCain and seeking his own six-year term in office.
Formed on April 19th, the Saving Arizona
PAC is taking aim at the state’s 2022 Senate
race, which will see former astronaut Mark
Kelly defending his seat for the Democrats.
According to Politico, the PAC will support Thiel Capital executive
Blake Masters
2016, he gave
$4 million across various campaigns,
including $1 million to a super-PAC
supporting
Trump, on whose behalf Thiel
spoke at the Republican National Convention.
He’s known to have funded right-wing hoaxer
James O’Keefe
