At face value, Blake Masters has an odd background for a U.S. Senate candidate. The Arizona Republican has worked as an executive at tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s company; he’s helped lead Thiel’s foundation; he’s helped promote Thiel’s ideas, and he’s been the beneficiary of Thiel’s electoral generosity.
The 35-year-old candidate, with effectively no background in government or policymaking, nevertheless launched a far-right campaign — and picked up an endorsement from Donald Trump, who not only tends to agree with Thiel, but who was also eager to undermine Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich for not doing more to advance the Big Lie.
Masters is proving to be quite a candidate. The Daily Beast reported on a newly unearthed quote in which the GOP Senate hopeful reflected on gun violence.
Tech investor and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters acknowledges that the United States has a gun violence problem. But he also has a theory about why there’s a problem—it’s “Black people, frankly.” Masters boiled the issue down in an April 11 interview on the Jeff Oravits Show podcast, telling the host that “we do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence.”
My MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones did some important fact-checking on Masters’ overtly racist rhetoric, but just as notable is the degree to which the comments were part of a larger, ugly pattern.
A Washington Post analysis noted that the Arizona Republican has also condemned Ketanji Brown Jackson as an “affirmative action candidate” for the Supreme Court. Masters has also argued that Democrats “don’t actually care about crime,” because the party is aligned with Black people, whom the Senate candidate believes are responsible for crimes. He’s similarly argued that “critical race theory” is “straight up anti-White racism.”
The emerging picture isn’t exactly subtle.
But race isn’t Masters’ only area of interest. The Arizonan has also been an enthusiastic proponent of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, insists the gender pay gap is just a “left-wing narrative,” and has not only denounced the Griswold v. Connecticut precedent, he’s told voters that he’ll only vote to confirm judges who agree with him. (This is the Supreme Court case that said states can’t ban contraception for married couples.) This week, one of Masters’ primary rivals launched a related ad, reminding Arizonans about Masters’ apparent belief that World War II wasn’t a “just” conflict, his record of quoting a notorious anti-Semite, and his praise for the Unabomber. The race for control of the Senate is likely to come down to a handful of contests, and both parties agree that Arizona’s race is one of the most competitive battlegrounds. Republicans see incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly as vulnerable, and their focus is on finding a credible candidate to defeat him. For Trump, Thiel, and much of the right, that candidate is Masters. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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