For Immediate Release
Thursday, April 21, 2022
Contact: Hannah Goss, hgoss@azdem.org

ICYMI: Blake Masters Praises Unabomber as Part of Thiel-First Ideology  
PHOENIX — New reporting from Vanity Fair provided an inside look into Blake Masters’ deep-rooted Thielian ideology, the central role it (read: Peter Thiel) plays in his campaign, and how his message hasn’t been particularly well-received by Arizona voters.

Also included: The California tech bro’s penchant for spouting provocative takes for attention, including a recent interview where he praised the Unabomber and promoted Ted Kaczynski’s deadly manifesto.

See below for highlights from the piece: 

• Masters has publicly said he thinks “everybody should read” the Unabomber’s anti-tech manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which may sound strange for a young tech executive running to serve in the United States Senate.

         ….

• [Discussing the future of American society] “Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him. “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said. It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was. “I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”

         ….

• I asked him about the term Thielbucks, and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters and cool-kid cultural figures as a sort of cultural vanguard. […] “We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”

         ….

• I asked whether he thought the core of his project was a fight against a consumerist techno-dystopia that many on the left have also come to fear. He said yes. I asked why, if this was the case, it almost never came across in his mainstream media appearances. “That’s interesting feedback,” he said. “That it’s not coming through.”

         ….

• [At a campaign event] He talked through his proposal to regulate tech companies as common carriers, like America once regulated phone companies. The crowd seemed interested but hardly electrified.

###