“Privatizing Social Security,” “Would Have Objected To The 2020 Certification,” “Pushing an Immigration Conspiracy Theory” – A Brutal Final Week For Arizona GOP Candidates

Three new reports today are highlighting the flaws of the leading GOP Senate candidates are in Arizona: both Masters and Lamon have expressed support for “privatizing Social Security” and “agree they would have objected to 2020 presidential certification,” and The New York Times detailed how Blake Masters is “pushing an immigration conspiracy theory” that “could repel Latinos in the state.”

See for yourself:

Arizona Republic: Here’s where Arizona’s US Senate candidates stand on the future of Social Security
By Ronald J. Hansen
July 29, 2022

• Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters raised eyebrows during a June candidate forum when he said he favored privatizing Social Security for younger Americans.

• Kelly, who is seeking his first full, six-year Senate term, has said Social Security is politically untouchable.

• “More than 1 million Arizonans rely on Social Security, and countless others are paying into it so it will be there for them when they retire. I’ll always fight in the Senate to make sure Social Security doesn’t go anywhere,” Kelly said in a June tweet.

• During a June 23 candidate forum hosted by FreedomWorks, the politically engaged conservative nonprofit that has long embraced Trump’s priorities, the Republicans were asked about the future of entitlement programs such as Social Security. All five GOP candidates cited alarm at federal spending and view it as threatening Social Security.

• “We’ve got to cut the knot at some point though, because I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to receive Social Security,” Masters said. “We need fresh and innovative thinking. Maybe we should privatize Social Security. Private retirement accounts, get the government out of it.”

• In a January interview with Tucson’s KVOI (1030 AM), Lamon hinted that entitlement spending would tumble if he had his way.

• “Entitlements — ‘Oh Jim, you’re going to take those?’ You’re damn right, because that’s where the money is,” he said.

• On the campaign trail, Lamon praised an 11-point plan put forward in February by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and said it was “pretty detailed with pretty good stuff.”

NBC News: Masters and Lamon agree they would have objected to 2020 presidential certification
By Vaughn Hillyard
July 29, 2022

• Blake Masters, former President Trump’s pick in Tuesday’s GOP Senate primary in Arizona, said in a new interview with NBC News that he would have objected to the 2020 presidential election certification had he been serving in the U.S. Senate on January 6, 2021.

• “I think what [Sen. Josh] Hawley and, I believe, what [Sen. Ted] Cruz did was right,” Masters said. “I think their constituents had a lot of concerns.”

• In an interview with NBC News, Masters said he would not shy away from his alliance with the former president despite Trump’s loss in Arizona in the 2020 election. The two appeared together at a rally in the state last week.

• The Tucson-raised candidate, however, continues to face an onslaught of TV ads questioning his past positions financed by Jim Lamon, a solar company executive. Lamon has loaned his campaign $14 million so far.

• “Masters is a product of big tech California. This guy is backed by the globalist Peter Thiel and the Club for Growth–two of the biggest swamp creatures out there,” Lamon told NBC News on Thursday night during a campaign event in Scottsdale.

• He dismissed Trump’s endorsement of Masters as a “bad endorsement,” comparing it to the “bad one” the former president made in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, where Trump-backed Mehmet Oz is struggling in general election polling.

• Lamon also said he would have objected to the 2020 certification on Capitol Hill. 

New York Times: Pushing an Immigration Conspiracy Theory, While Courting Latinos
By Jennifer Medina
July 29, 2022

• As he vies for the Republican nomination, Mr. Masters has pushed a different sort of racial politics that could repel Latinos in the state.

• For months, Mr. Masters has promoted a specious theory portraying illegal immigration across the southern border as part of an elaborate Democratic power grab. In speeches, social media videos and podcast interviews, he has asserted that Democrats are trying to encourage immigration so their party can dilute the political power of native-born voters.

• “What the left really wants to do is change the demographics of this country,” Mr. Masters said in a video posted to Twitter last fall. “They do. They want to do that so they can consolidate power and so they can never lose another election.” In May, he told an interviewer that Democrats were “trying to manufacture and import” a new electorate.

• What Mr. Masters calls an “obvious truth” is what experts in extremism describe as a sanitized version of the “great replacement,” a once-fringe, racist conspiracy theory that claims that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to replace white Americans with immigrants to weaken the influence of white culture. The idea has been linked to the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in May, the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019 and the killings at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

• As he turns toward the general election, he faces the challenge of… trying to attract new Hispanic supporters in a state where they make up more than a third of the population.

• Anti-immigrant policies in Arizona have been far more damaging to Republicans there, and Mr. Masters is going even further than the party has in the past.

• Several Hispanic voters in Phoenix and its suburbs said in interviews that they viewed Mr. Masters’s comments as scare tactics.

• John Ruiz, a retired state worker from Chandler, Ariz., called Mr. Masters “repulsive.” “They’re trying to make it look like we’re invading this country,” he said. “People come over here to work.”

• Democratic leaders and activists in Arizona call Mr. Masters’s immigration rhetoric dangerous, racist and hypocritical, as he sounds an alarm about changing demographics while trying to win over the group causing those demographics to change.

• Mr. Masters hasn’t always endorsed a hard-line stance on immigration. In 2006, while in college, he wrote online that “‘unrestricted’ immigration is the only choice” for a libertarian-minded voter, which he called himself at the time. But he has since fashioned himself into a nationalist, explaining in one ad that it was “about time our government put America first.”

• His message has been welcomed by the far right and by white supremacists, including Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist leader; Andrew Torba, the creator of Gab, a social media platform popular with extremists; and Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Mr. Anglin endorsed Mr. Masters last month, saying that he was “exactly the kind of man this country needs,” and urged readers to volunteer for his campaign.

###