Masters’ Rocky General Election Start: “Extreme Views,” “Hard-Line Stance On Reproductive Rights,” & “Violent Fantasies” 

Arizona Republic: “Kelly won’t have to do much to expose Masters’ extreme views. He’ll do that himself.”

Arizona Mirror: “He has taken a hard-line stance on reproductive rights, calling for a federal ‘personhood’ law for fetuses.”

New York Times: The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters

After limping out of Arizona’s “scorched-earth” primary, Blake Masters has suffered through a rocky start to the general election: new reports this week are highlighting his “extreme views,” “hard-line stance on reproductive rights,” calls to “privatize Social Security,” and host of “past inflammatory comments.”

See for yourself:

Arizona Republic (Opinion): Trump-backed Blake Masters is Sen. Mark Kelly’s best chance to keep his seat

• Arizona Republican voters just handed Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly a huge gift: Blake Masters.
  
  
• Masters seems the most extreme of the bunch – if there’s such a thing in the MAGA world.
   
  
• Trump’s favorite and the protégé of a billionaire rolled through the GOP primary spouting lies that the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump, that Democrats are out to replace Americans with immigrants (the “Great Replacement” theory) and that gun violence is caused by “Black people.”
  
  
• Kelly won’t have to do much to expose Masters’ extreme views. He’ll do that himself, just as he did to defeat his rivals in the GOP primary.

New York Times (Opinion): The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters

• He frequently amplifies Mr. Trump’s 2020 election lies and he recently suggested that Democrats will “cheat” in the midterms.
  
  
• Masters sees himself and his allies — including his fellow Thiel-backed Senate hopeful J.D. Vance of Ohio — as midwives of transformation… Their prescriptions for how to fix it, the means they are willing to entertain to do so, are far outside the American mainstream, drawing on a political vision that sees democracy as an obstacle to the urgent interventions of enlightened philosopher kings.
  
  
• Most strikingly, Mr. Masters’s presentation… is only bitterness, enmity and a histrionic vision of a world being torn apart by the globalist left.
  
  
• At 19, he blogged on LiveJournal under the username kinggps in support of drug legalization, unfettered immigration and the elimination of the Supreme Court, which, he wrote, is “little more than a coercive microcosm of democracy.” As for national borders, Mr. Masters wrote, “Are we really supposed to believe that a government can draw a line in the sand, and that the people living on one side are somehow inherently different or deserving of more or less rights” than “those on the other?”
  
  
• Masters shared his political musings in forums for body builders, CrossFit and gun enthusiasts.
  
  
• He once recorded a liberty-themed rap… Mother Jones did uncover one 2008 video in which Mr. Masters wears Native American war paint and freestyles, “I’ve got the war paint on, as you can see/Who said what about cultural insensitivity?”
  
  
• Mr. Masters has said, despite having teared up at Mr. Thiel and his husband’s wedding in 2017, that he believes the Supreme Court erred in its Obergefell decision and that marriage ought to be “between a man and a woman.”
  
  
• Mr. Masters treats politics as a game of moral and physical carnage in which nothing is precious, and rules are for losers and marks. Great nations are those that allow great men to rise above the law, while binding the rest of us ever tighter to its dictates. And Blake Masters wants to make America great again.

Arizona Republic: Who is Blake Masters? Here’s what you need to know about the Arizona GOP Senate candidate

• Masters has said the 2020 election was not “free and fair” and that cost Trump the presidency.
  
  
• At a candidate forum in June, Masters said, “Maybe we should privatize Social Security. Private retirement accounts, get the government out of it.”
  
  
• Earlier this year, podcaster Alex Kaschuta asked Masters to recommend an underrated “subversive thinker.” “I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this. … How about Theodore Kaczynski,” Masters said, referring to the “Unabomber.”
  
  
• As a college student, according to Jewish Insider, Masters wrote an article for a libertarian publication about how U.S. leaders sold World War I to the American public. Masters said wars “are frequently manufactured and deceptively sold to the public,” sometimes to benefit special interests. He ended the essay with what he described as a “poignant quotation” he said came from Hermann Göring, the convicted Nazi war criminal who held a high post in the Nazi Party.

Arizona Mirror: Democrats launch campaign highlighting Blake Masters’ ‘extreme’ abortion position

• Two days after Blake Masters won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Democrats are launching an ad campaign about his “extreme” position on abortion.
  
  
• He has taken a hard-line stance on reproductive rights, calling for a federal “personhood” law for fetuses.
  
  
• Masters has also called abortion a “sacrificial ritual” to the left and has referred to abortion as a “genocide.” He has also campaigned on overturning the constitutional right for women to access birth control. 
  

Bloomberg News: Blake Masters Wins Arizona GOP US Senate Race to Face Kelly

• Masters has been criticized for past inflammatory comments, including an April 11 podcast interview in which he blamed gun violence on “Black people, frankly.” He also has supported the “replacement theory” pushed by White nationalists and supremacists.

NPR News: Blake Masters, Trump pick funded by billionaire Thiel, wins Arizona Senate primary

• Masters said in a recent interview that had he been a senator during the last election, he would have objected to the election certification that took place on Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol insurrection.

Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter, @amyewalter: 

• Just hours after GOP nominates Blake Masters in AZ, Dem Sen. Mark Kelly calls his views on Roe/abortion “too dangerous for Arizona.”
  

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