White nationalist tech bros
We’ve heard a lot about Elon Musk lately and his former comrade peter Thiel’s fair-haired boy JD Vance. Here’s another one:
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.”
“It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” Masters clarified. “And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”
It’s unclear why Masters—who has pushed the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory narrative—felt compelled to single out Black people. Moments earlier in the interview, during a discussion about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Masters told Oravits that “most Americans just, you know, just want to stop obsessing about race all the time,” adding that “the left’s biggest tool in their toolkit is just to divide people on the basis of race, and that’s really messed up.”
He kind of shows his cards there, doesn’t he? “Don’t talk about race! Pssst…. it’s Black people frankly,”
He’s not just hostile to immigrants and Black people though. Check out this ad from his Republican rival:
Masters—who has also likened federal campaign disclosure laws to Kristallnacht—veered into conspiratorial territory.
Democrats “don’t like the Second Amendment,” he said, because “it frankly blocks a lot of their plans for us”—an unhinged, fact-free statement that liberal officials have cooked up a plot to physically force conservatives to comply with some unarticulated maleficent regime, but have been bayed by fears that a constitutionally endowed populace will shoot them if they try…
“They talk about crime but I find it crocodile tears,” Masters said, an apparent reference to Democratic outrage over an unending drumroll of domestic massacres. “Because if they were actually tough on crime they would get serious about gang violence.” (Masters himself did not put forward a solution to gang violence in the interview.)
He also has extreme views on abortion and birth control:
I am 100% pro-life. Roe v. Wade was a horrible decision. It was wrong the day it was decided in 1973, it’s wrong today, and it must be reversed. But the fight doesn’t stop there,” Master’s campaign website reads. It goes on to pledge the candidate will “vote only for federal judges who understand that Roe and Griswold and Casey were wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion.”
Typical libertarian bro, in my experience. Freedom isn’t really for the girls…
Billionaire Thiel is pouring money into his campaign. And Trump just endorsed him.