Blake Masters, Republican Who Once Cited Hermann Goring wins

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Arizona Republicans have chosen a brash 35-year-old whose record includes once citing a prominent Nazi as their challenger to Sen. Mark Kelly, the ex-astronaut husband of the Jewish representative who was shot at a political event in 2011.

Blake Masters solidly prevailed in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona Tuesday with the support of former President Donald Trump and tech financier Peter Thiel. His win came despite fierce criticism of his past and current rhetoric, which place him as a standard-bearer for the far right of the Republican party.

Much of the background that drew criticism was unearthed by Jewish Insider, which scoured Masters’ online postings from nearly two decades ago to construct an image of an iconoclastic libertarian who more recently has claimed to embrace Republican orthodoxies.

Among the online posts that drew scrutiny was one in which Masters included what he said was a “poignant quotation” from the Nazi official Herman Goering to argue against U.S. intervention in foreign conflicts. On the campaign trail, Masters emphasized that he had not praised Goering — but that did little to assuage the concerns of his critics, including from within Arizona’s Jewish community.

Masters is not the only Republican candidate who has embraced conspiracy theories to win a statewide primary in Arizona on Tuesday. Mark Finchem, a state representative who has said he believes Democrats conspired to steal the 2020 presidential election from Trump, will be the Republican candidate in November for secretary of state, a role with responsibility for overseeing the state’s elections.

Finchem drew criticism last year for comparing a hotel chain’s decision not to host a speech by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to the Holocaust. More recently, he has touted his endorsement by Andrew Torba, the founder of the social networking platform Gab who said last month that Jews are not welcome on the site.

Meanwhile, the Republican incumbent Paul Gosar, a far-right member of Congress who has had yearslong associations with the antisemitic provocateur Nick Fuentes, easily won his primary in Arizona’s 9th District. Gosar held a fundraiser with Fuentes, who has questioned the dimensions of the Holocaust, last year.

Though most Jewish groups, including the Republican Jewish Coalition, have denounced Gosar over time, at least one Jewish candidate this cycle proudly touted his endorsement: Republican Rodney Glassman, a former Democrat who on Wednesday morning was lagging in his primary for state attorney general.

The strength of far-right candidates in the statewide races means that Arizona voters are likely to hear continued messaging that embraces popular conspiracy theories, many of which have antisemitic valences. But their prospects for victory in the general election are hardly assured, as Arizona voters have grown less right-wing on average. The Masters-Kelly matchup in particular will be closely watched, as control of the Senate could hinge on its result.

Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arizona who won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, has been dogged by a trail of youthful writings in which he lamented the entry of the United States into the First and Second World Wars, approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal and pushed an isolationism that extended beyond even Mr. Trump’s.

In the most recent examples, unearthed and provided to The New York Times by opponents of Mr. Masters, he took to the chat room of CrossFit, his workout of choice, as a Stanford undergraduate in 2007 to espouse views that might not sit well with the Republican electorate of 2022.

As he had in other forums, Mr. Masters wrote on the CrossFit chat room that he opposed American involvement in both world wars — although World War II, he conceded, “is harder to argue because of the hot button issue of the Holocaust (nevermind that our friend Stalin murdered over twice as many as Hitler … why do we gloss over that in schools?).”

Also on the CrossFit chat room, Mr. Masters, then 20, argued that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not “constitute substantial threats to Americans.”

Masters, a protégé of Peter Thiel — the Silicon Valley billionaire and quasi libertarian who wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” — has floated a variety of insane and racist theories. He has straight-up said Donald Trump won the 2020 election and suggested January 6 was a false flag directed secretly by the FBI. He blamed gun violence on Black people. (“We do have a gun-violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence,” he said. “It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis, shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly.”) He has endorsed the “great replacement” theory. And he has echoed far-right positions on foreign policy, opposing American entry into World War II and blaming American entry into World War I on a secret plot directed by the “Houses of Morgan and Rothschild.”

Comments like these attracted the admiration of not only Trump, who endorsed him, but also, predictably, the Nazis. Neo-Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin gave Masters a fulsome endorsement on the white-supremacist site the Daily Stormer.

Here is how Masters responded to the endorsement in a statement to the Phoenix New Times, which reported it:

“I’ve never heard of this guy and I reject his support. The reason I’ve never heard of him is because he’s a nobody, and nobody cares about him except the media,” Masters said in an email to New Times. “They’d like to build him up in order to smear anybody who believes in common sense border security as some kind of ‘Nazi.’ It’s a cheap tactic from Mark Kelly’s media allies and it’s not going to work.”

To be clear about this, Anglin is not just kind of racist, nor is he appealing to racists with Tucker Carlson–like dog whistles. He is an obsessive advocate of eliminationist antisemitism. “This is the Jews for you, people. They are a vicious, evil race of hate-filled psychopaths. When you do something they don’t like, they will use the power of the media to come down on you, assassinate your character,” Anglin wrote in what the New Times called “a 30-article series that advocates genocide of Jewish people.”

Arizona has a reputation
https://tucson.com/opinion/letters/lett ... d090f.html

One would think a state bordering Mexico would have done a much better job embracing diversity.

However, Arizona also has one of the most progressive members of Congress--Raul Grijalva