Weighing in Thursday on a crowded Arizona Senate primary, Former President Trump once again endorsed the most unapologetically racist candidate in the field. Blake Masters has made headlines for everything from comparing having to disclose his campaign donors to kristallnacht, to claiming that the fault for gun violence in this country belongs to “Black people, frankly.” A 35 year old tech investor, Masters is backed by billionaire Republican financier Peter Thiel.
According to the Washington Post ‘s description of the candidate, “Masters, 35, has been a fierce critic of the technology industry where he built his career and has given voice to the cultural grievances that animate GOP base voters. He has called for reducing legal immigration and espoused the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming Democrats are trying to “replace Americans who were born here.”
Polling odds
Masters is currently polling third in a field of five Republicans who are vying to challenge Democratic incumbent and former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly to represent Arizona in the US Senate. But Trump is hopeful that adding his endorsement will boost Masters to victory in August’s primary, after his endorsement helped to lift another Thiel acolyte, racist dog-whistler J.D. Vance, to victory in Ohio in early May.
“President Trump is a great man and a visionary,” Masters is quoted by CNN as saying in a statement released by his campaign. “It’s incredible to have his endorsement. I wish everyone could know how this feels.”
For his part, Trump’s endorsement praised Masters for (you guessed it) backing his bogus claims of election fraud in 2020. “Blake knows that the “Crime of the Century” took place, he will expose it and also, never let it happen again,” Trump said in his statement.
As usual, Trump was unfazed in endorsing a candidate who routinely lies and misleads about issues from gun control to immigration, and who doesn’t shy away from anti-semetic rhetoric like the above referenced comparison of disclosing donors to Kristallnacht.
Everyone I don’t like is Hitler
It’s not a new false equivalency for the GOP. Everything from vaccine mandates to gun control efforts to security checks at the Capitol have been compared to Nazi Germany by members of the GOP.
Remember when Fox’s Lara Logan compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele?
Or when Colorado Idiot Lauren Boebert claimed that door-to-door vaccine promoters were “needle Nazis”?
The list literally goes on and on (and on). Here’s a WaPo piece that collects them, if you’re interested. “Yeah, that’s right,” said Masters, agreeing on air with podcast host Greg Medford that his being made to disclose campaign donors was “like Kristallnacht.”
“No, it’s absolutely wild,” said Masters, evidently unaware of what Kristallnacht even was.
(What it was, was a pogrom carried out against German and Austrian Jews in 1938 in which “Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers.[5] Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland.[6] Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed,[7][8] and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.[9] British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from foreign journalists working in Germany drew worldwide attention.[5] The Times of London observed on 11 November 1938: “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.”[10])
And this is what Arizona has to choose between. A former NASA astronaut, or a dog-whistling bigot. We ask, again, how is this even a choice?