Peter Thiel’s bid to win two seats in Congress didn’t quite succeed. One of his protégées, J.D. Vance, won his race in Ohio after trailing his Democratic opponent for weeks, while the other, Blake Masters, lost his Arizona senate race by 5 points to Democrat Mark Kelly. Masters’ and Vance’s poli
Masters has publicly echoed Yarvin’s desire to destroy the administrative state by directly referencing an acronym the White Nationalist blogger coined for it—“RAGE—Retire all government employees,” referring to Yarvin as a “friend.” He has also cited the views of Ted Kaczyinski, the Unabomber as influential on himself (though he disavows the bombing).
Masters, the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona, said on his campaign website he supported a "a federal personhood law" — until Thursday.
Just after releasing the ad, Masters's campaign overhauled 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 updated 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.
Another notable deletion: A line that detailed his support for "a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes tha
To close followers of conservative politics, this message may sound familiar. Mr. Masters is unmistakably a figure of the New Right: militant, internet-savvy culture warriors who position themselves as insurgent challengers of the sclerotic establishment in both parties. No longer doctrinaire libertarians, they see coercive state power as an indispensable tool for achieving conservative ends: mandating patriotic curriculums in schools, supporting the formation of “native-born” families, banning abortion and pornography, and turning back the rights revolution for L.G.B.T.Q. Americans.
Arizona Just Chose a Senate Candidate More Extreme Than Donald Trump
Masters loves to demonize immigrant workers, he wants to overturn same-sex marriage equality, and he all but froths at the mouth when anyone says the word “China.” But is he really an economic populist?
You can best advance an agenda of Reaganite economics, authoritarian nationalism, and conservative social values by putting the least emphasis on the first of those three points, and even by dressing it up as its opposite. But there’s no reason any of the rest of us need to play along.
In an essay published in an obscure libertarian publication and unearthed by JI, the Arizona Republican Senate hopeful quotes Goering and a noted conspiracy theorist who espouses antisemitic views.
Blake Masters, a leading candidate in Arizona’s Republican Senate primary, has gained national prominence thanks in part to a series of defiantly controversial online ads in which he has brandished a menacing short-barreled rifle, argued that “psychopaths are running the country” and pushed the false election narrative that former President Donald Trump “won in 2020.”
The self-proclaimed “anti-progressive” seems to revel in such starkly worded provocations. Since launching his campaign last July, he has also described Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore who was seen as an authoritarian if visionary leader, as one of his favorite historical figures, and — more recently — expressed admiration for the Unabomber’s anti-tech manifesto.
Even as his actual positions remain somewhat hard to decipher, Masters, a 35-year-old venture capitalist and Peter Thiel protégé, has quickly staked a claim as one of the most high-profile figures in a nascent but growing coalition of populist right-wing ideologues affiliated with the so-called “national conservative” movement.
