For Immediate Release
Friday, September 23, 2022
Contact: Hannah Goss, hgoss@azdem.org

Arizona Republic: “GOP Senate Hopeful Blake Masters Repeatedly Has Criticized U.S. Military”
PHOENIX — Today, the Arizona Republic uncovered a series of additional comments Masters had made calling America’s servicemembers “woefully inadequate,” “piss poor,” and “embarrassing.” This comes just one week after Vice News published an initial report on Blake Masters’ record of criticizing the U.S. military.

Masters’ unpatriotic comments on our military are nothing new — previously he said our military was “totally incompetent,” called the United States’ participation in World War II “unjust,” said Al Qaeda was not a real threat to America, and encouraged others to question the “official story” of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

These comments disrespecting our servicemembers come as Masters, who has never served this country, is running to fill the seat of the late Sen. John McCain against Sen. Mark Kelly — two Navy combat veterans with decades of service. When asked for an explanation of his remarks, Masters refused to comment.

Read the full story here, or see below for key excerpts:

• Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters repeatedly has said there’s “rot” in the military and that its leadership is inadequate, incompetent and should be fired.
• “I hate to say it, but our military leadership is totally incompetent,” Masters said, standing in what appears to be an agricultural field. “No active duty American general has ever won a war. Think about how crazy that is.”
• Masters has not served in the military.
• Some veterans from both parties met in Chandler on Wednesday to discuss issues they are facing and their support for Kelly. “We’ve served, Senator Kelly has served and he wants to continue to serve,” veteran Martin Sepulveda said at the event. “The stuff I’ve heard from this opponent, as a veteran, is appalling. Fire the generals? A guy who’s not served one minute in uniform says fire the generals? … (We) veterans don’t need that; the country doesn’t need that.”
• More than 490,000 military veterans were living in Arizona per a U.S. census estimate last year, comprising about 7% of the state’s population.
• One of Masters’ common refrains has been that military leadership is incompetent. “I know we still have a lot of great assets, a lot of great people in the military, but the leadership is frankly piss-poor. It’s embarrassing,” Masters told the Daily Wire in November.
• “We need a Republican president in office, then a Republican Congress, but you’ve got to clean house in the military,” he said.
• Masters has not pulled punches when it comes to expressing his views about military leaders, whom he called “woefully inadequate.”
• “Our military, in some sense it’s the strongest, but it’s also kind of there’s rot in there with the critical race theory and like the general corps, I think is woefully inadequate, and frankly, I think they’re ruining the military,” Masters said in January on entrepreneur Noah Kagan’s podcast OkDork.
• Masters has called for military generals to be fired if they haven’t won wars. “It is a little weird to think that anyone who’s made, anyone who’s like a working general today, maybe I’m wrong and there are still some current generals that served in the Gulf War. I think maybe not, but I think every general serving today got promoted for not winning a war,” Masters said in a Twitter Spaces conversation in September 2021, a recording of which was obtained by The Arizona Republic.

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