ICYMI: The Evolution of Blake Masters [Jewish Insider]

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Jewish Insider: The Evolution of Blake Masters
By Matthew Kassel
June 7, 2022

The Arizona GOP Senate candidate — who just earned Trump’s blessing — decries ‘open borders’ but once called for ‘unrestricted’ immigration’ while praising drug smugglers as ‘heroes’

Key Points:

• Blake Masters, an author and venture capitalist now seeking the Republican nomination in Arizona’s high-profile Senate race, has cast himself as an outspoken immigration hawk who frequently inveighs against the dangers of “open borders” amid an influx of “illegal aliens” from Mexico carrying enough drugs “each month,” he warns, “to kill every American twice over.”

• Masters’ approach stands out, however, because it is so strikingly at odds with sentiments he expressed in the mid-aughts as an undergraduate at Stanford University.

• In a series of short, polemical blog posts, Masters once suggested that “illegal immigration is an ethical contradiction in terms,” argued that “‘unrestricted’ immigration is the only choice,” and commended U.S. service members who had participated in a drug trafficking ring along the southwestern border as “heroes,” among other things.

• The posts, published to a LiveJournal account in 2005, when Masters was 19, were recently unearthed by Jewish Insider and have not previously been reported.

• In one representative entry, for instance, Masters suggested that a government-drawn border is just a “line in the sand,” and said that libertarians “would have no trouble stating that ‘illegal immigration is an ethical contradiction in terms, with regards to nation-states.’”

• Elsewhere, Masters applauded U.S. law enforcement officers involved in a widespread criminal conspiracy — uncovered by an FBI sting operation known as Operation Lively Green — to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. from Mexico. The drug bust, Masters insisted, had “it backwards.”

• Even as Masters claims to have evolved in recent years, his older writings suggest a deeper penchant for extreme and often contrarian views that seem to be a defining feature of his political self-conception.

• Masters was also apparently an active commenter on web forums for gun enthusiasts and weightlifters. Back in 2008, for example, on a site called GlockTalk.com, a user named “kinggps,” who claimed to be “located in Tucson,” expressed interest in buying “a cheap 12g, an SKS, AK’s, or a good .308 bolt action rifle, among other things,” concluding, “and go Ron Paul!” — a reference to the former libertarian congressman from Texas who was then running for president. (Masters supported Paul’s campaign.)

• “I don’t care about the Supreme Court,” Masters declared at the beginning of one entry. “It just doesn’t matter. That everyone thinks it does, or should, only illustrates the degree to which people prefer to dwell on what they’re fed than actually think…”

• Among his arguments was the surprising suggestion — buried in a parenthetical near the end of the post — that American democracy had been a misguided experiment. The Founding Fathers were “wrong to set up the Supreme Court (and, by extension, the entire government),” Masters argued. “To their credit, I doubt they ever imagined we were going to be conditioned to worship democracy and let things get so messy.”

• Collin Wedel, a Tucson native who said Masters had been one of his closest friends until they stopped talking because of political differences… [said] “Blake was the one who convinced me to be pro-choice,” said Wedel, who is now an attorney in Los Angeles. “I remember him arguing with me. I mean, it was Tucson, Arizona, in the ‘90s, so it was a very conservative evangelical community, and he was not that.”

• “How can you control somebody else’s life or body?” Wedel said Masters had once reasoned while questioning the anti-abortion line.

• Masters’ teenage scribblings weren’t reserved exclusively to LiveJournal. In recent weeks, he has faced scrutiny for a provocative essay — published on a libertarian website in 2006 and discovered by JI — in which he referenced a “poignant quotation” from Hermann Goering, the high-ranking Nazi leader, while arguing that “the U.S. hasn’t been involved in a just war in over 140 years,” among other tendentious assertions.

• Not long after Trump issued his endorsement last week, Lamon had already gone on the offensive, releasing an attack ad designed to ensure that voters would not forget the contents of Masters’ college essay.

• “You think you know Blake Masters?” a narrator intones, before noting that the Republican Senate candidate had “called World War II unjust,” “extensively quoted an antisemite who believes Jews and Zionists are bent on world domination” and “unironically quoted a Nazi war criminal.”

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