For Immediate Release
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Contact: Hannah Goss, hgoss@azdem.org
BAD NEWS BLAKE: The Latest Batch of Blake Masters’ Brutal News Coverage
PHOENIX — In the two weeks since Blake Masters crawled out of the Republican Senate primary “bruised and battered” with barely 40% of the vote, he’s stared down a barrage of bad press highlighting his “fringe,” “extreme” beliefs and his pathetic attempts to hide them from Arizonans.
See below for a rundown of the latest brutal coverage:
Jewish Insider: Audio contradicts Blake Masters’ claim he ‘never heard of’ Gab CEO
- Masters earned a nod of approval from Andrew Torba, the chief executive of Gab, a far-right Twitter alternative that is widely viewed as a hotbed of white nationalist sentiment.
- While Masters rejected the endorsement a few days later and insisted he had “never heard of” Torba, the incendiary social media entrepreneur has since countered that Masters’ claim is a “flat-out lie.”
- It would not be unreasonable, however, to expect that Masters might remember his nearly three-minute exchange with the founder of Gab during a live Twitter conversation in January.
- [MORE] Arizona Republic: White nationalist platform founder says ‘it’s a flat-out lie’ Blake Masters never heard of him
- [EVEN MORE] Rolling Stone: Blake Masters Caught Lying About Anti-Semitic Backer: Audio
New York Times: How a New Class of Republicans Could Push America to the Right
- [Masters] has supported a federal “personhood” law that would establish that fetuses are people. He has also raised questions about whether Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision granting couples the federal right to use contraception, was correctly decided…
- He accused the Supreme Court of “squinting and making up so-called rights in the Constitution” when it legalized same-sex marriage in the 2015 decision Obergefell v. Hodges. “Marriage,” he said, “is between a man and a woman.”
Arizona Republic: (Op-ed): There’s only 1 way to fix the Arizona GOP: Make it lose in November
- Then there’s the Big Liar Senate nominee, Blake Masters, who released an ad saying, “I think Trump won in 2020.”
- He supports a national abortion ban and has blamed gun violence on Black people. He espouses the “great replacement theory,” the idea that Democrats are trying to flood the country with millions of immigrants in order “to change the demographics of our country.” As if that weren’t enough, Masters praised the Unabomber as an “underrated thinker.”
Politico: Blake Masters: King of the Trolls
- [Describing Masters] a millennial message-board addict with an awkward personal affect that sharply contrasts with his macho posturing…
- Keeping tabs on the websites that were ground zero for Trump’s embrace by this crowd, like 4chan — which is ephemeral by design, with posts deleted automatically to make room for new content — is a challenge, but even a cursory search finds plenty of evidence that Masters is “their guy.”
- “God I hope Masters wins,” reads one post, sitting placidly in a stream of racial slurs and debates over abortion. “I’m a huge fan of Blake Masters too…”
- Just as Trump was in 2016, so is Masters the most appealing candidate to the kind of nihilistic, racist, woman-hating far-right-winger that characterizes the website’s politics subforum.
Business Insider: Blake Masters says the GOP isn’t John McCain’s party anymore. Now, he’s taking on Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly for McCain’s old seat.
- And even as he rejects the mantle of McCain, Masters will have to woo middle-of-the-road voters in a state that’s trending purple and has generally sent moderates to the Senate.
- But observers warn that this political positioning could come back to bite Masters in the general election, when both independent voters and the Republicans he failed to win over during the primary are up for grabs.
- “McCain absolutely does still have sway in Arizona,” said Mike Noble…
- After the event, [an Arizona Republican] told Insider she would “never even consider voting for Masters” after what she witnessed. “All he did was badmouth other people…”
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