Tag: blake masters
GOP Megadonors Griffin, Thiel And Uihlein Dropped Tens Of Millions On Loser Candidates

GOP Megadonors Griffin, Thiel And Uihlein Dropped Tens Of Millions On Loser Candidates

In the 2022 midterms, billionaire Peter Thiel donated millions of dollars to MAGA candidates, CNBC reports. But journalist Tom Perkins, in an article published by The Guardian on December 6, stresses that the GOP megadonors who invested heavily in MAGA candidates got very little in return for their money, including Thiel.

“Some donors who spent eight figures notched zero wins in the Senate, while others spent far more money on losing candidates than winners,” Perkins explains. “In the midterms, some of the biggest losers were Republican donors. Among the clearest of those losers is Mehmet Oz, who self-funded much of his own failed run for office — loaning his Pennsylvania U.S. Senate campaign about $22m, or about 55 percent of the roughly $40m he raised. Meanwhile, candidates backed by Peter Thiel, the right-wing tech investor hyped pre-election as a new GOP ‘kingmaker,’ lost in Arizona and Washington, calling into question his judgment and contributions’ value.”

Perkins continues, “Other mega-donors and PACs came out behind despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars collectively on multiple candidates who lost, according to Open Secrets, a campaign finance watchdog, and federal campaign records. Among those is Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund Super PAC, which spent $239m; the billionaire financier Jeff Yass, who spent $47m; the hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, who spent $67m; the packaging giants Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein, who spent $77m; and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who spent $34m.”

Meanwhile, Democratic candidates “in high-profile Senate races,” according to Perkins, “generally had a larger share of small donations.”

Gunner Ramer, political director at the conservative firm Longwell Associates, told The Guardian, “Voters have real concerns over crime, inflation, gas prices and the economy.… but all these really poor candidates — these crazy, extreme Republicans — got beat up hard.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

GOP  Names Failed Candidate Masters To Election Autopsy Panel

GOP Names Failed Candidate Masters To Election Autopsy Panel

After Republicans failed to take a majority in the Senate and underperformed expectations in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections this month, the Republican National Committee is launching a "Republican Party Advisory Council" to figure out why its promised "red wave" never materialized.

Politico reported on Tuesday that the panel will include candidates who were successful in November, such as Sen.-elect Katie Britt of Alabama, and Reps.-elect Monica De La Cruz of Texas and John James of Michigan.

However, the panel will also include Blake Masters, who lost his challenge to incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona.

Masters was the worst-performing statewide Republican candidate in Arizona, winning only 46.5 percent of the vote. That's two percent less than the vote total received by Mark Finchem, an election-denying Republican who was present at the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and who lost a run for secretary of state against Democrat Adrian Fontes.

Masters, who embraced former President Donald Trump, made bigoted remarks, and pushed right-wing policies, was unpopular with independent voters.

According to the New York Times, Steven Law — the head of the Senate Leadership Fund super PAC that has close ties to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — told major Republican donor Peter Thiel that Masters had giv the worst performance before focus groups that he had ever observed. Focus groups are often used to gauge voter sentiments ahead of an election.

Election experts said Masters is a prime example of a bad candidate losing a race that should have been winnable for the GOP in the 2022 midterms.

"The problem in Arizona was Blake Masters himself," the Cook Political Report's Jessica Taylor tweeted.

Some Republicans were not happy that Masters was included on the new GOP advisory panel.

"The fact that Blake Masters is a part of the panel running this autopsy and not a subject of it seems highly problematic," Amanda Carpenter, a Republican who has become a prominent anti-Trump commentator, tweeted.

"What on earth is a candidate who underperformed most of the Rs in his state, a state where Rs lost almost every statewide race, advising his party on its path forward," GOP columnist Noah Rothman tweeted. "What would he have to offer on that score?"

David Bergstein, the communications director at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Masters' role on the panel was "excellent news for Democrats."

"Put Blake Masters in charge of every GOP Senate campaign, I say," Bergstein tweeted.

According to Politico, Masters wants Republicans to change their strategies going forward.

"Our party needs to modernize. We're fighting against Big Tech, the media, and now, the Democrats' GOTV early voting machine," Masters toldPolitico. "I look forward to working with Ronna [McDaniel, chair of the RNC] to make sure the party effectively supports our candidates and wins big in 2024."

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Arizona Re-Elects Kelly In Key Hold For Senate Democrats, Nevada Still Counting

Arizona Re-Elects Kelly In Key Hold For Senate Democrats, Nevada Still Counting

Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly has defeated Republican Blake Masters in Arizona’s Senate race. Arizona has been one of the hardest-fought battlegrounds this year, after both Kelly and President Joe Biden won narrowly in 2020. That marked the first time the state had two Democratic senators since 1953 and just the second time a Democrat had won the state’s presidential election since 1948. With Democrats having held the Senate by the narrowest possible margin for the past two years, this is a critically important win.

Kelly was elected just two years ago in a special election following the 2018 death of Sen. John McCain. Now he will have a full six-year term.

[Editor: Ballots are still being counted in Nevada, where incumbent Democrat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto appears to be erasing a small lead for Republican challenger Adam Laxalt. Her victory would ensure a Democratic Senate majority even before the outcome of a runoff election in Georgia between incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker.]

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Blake Masters Endorsed Notorious White Supremacist Writer

Blake Masters Endorsed Notorious White Supremacist Writer

Author and Senate nominee Blake Masters endorsed a book by Sam Francis in an Instagram post last year. Masters was recommending a commentator who wrote that the country should “oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind”; claimed that “immigrants, in particular Hispanics,” will “kick the common culture into the gutters”; and claimed that “neither 'slavery' nor 'racism' as an institution is a sin.”

Masters, who is a protege of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel, is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Arizona. White nationalist Fox News host Tucker Carlson has heavily backed his candidacy and, in a quote posted on Masters’ campaign website, called him “the future of the Republican party. Very smart guy. I’m rooting for him.”

Francis was a longtime conservative columnist who died in 2005. The right-wing Washington Times fired him in 1995 after he made a racist speech at a white nationalist conference.

Alec Dent wrote in Vanity Fair that Masters “has been promoting Francis’s ideas throughout his Senate campaign, going so far as to recommend his book of essays, Beautiful Losers, which Masters has cited as an influence on his style of conservatism, in an Instagram Story that was pinned at the top of his account. (Vanity Fair reached out to Masters’s campaign for comment. They did not respond; the archived Instagram Story has since been removed).”

Masters has also cited the work of G. Edward Griffin, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist.

By recommending Francis’ work, Masters is sending his followers down a rabbit hole of white supremacist writings and ideas. Here are some examples.

Francis wrote that the United States must “oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind.” Francis was the chief editor of a newsletter for the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. Francis also wrote the group’s mission statement, which stated, in part: “We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called ‘affirmative action’ and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”

We believe the United States is a European country and that Americans are part of the European people. We believe that the United States derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and the European people and that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime. We believe that illegal immigration must be stopped, if necessary by military force and placing troops on our national borders; that illegal aliens must be returned to their own countries; and that legal immigration must be severely restricted or halted through appropriate changes in our laws and policies. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.

Francis wrote that “neither 'slavery' nor 'racism' as an institution is a sin.” From a 1995 Washington Times column:

If the sin is hatred or exploitation, they [Southern Baptists repenting their support of slavery in the mid-1800s] may be on solid grounds, but neither “slavery” nor “racism” as an institution is a sin. Indeed, there are at least five clear passages in the letters of Paul that explicitly enjoin “servants” to obey their masters, and the Greek words for “servants” in the original text are identical to those for “slaves.” Neither Jesus nor the apostles nor the early church condemned slavery, despite countless opportunities to do so, and there is no indication that slavery is contrary to Christian ethics or that any serious theologian before modern times ever thought it was.

Not until the Enlightenment of the 18th century did a bastardized version of Christian ethics condemn slavery. Today we know that version under the label of “liberalism,” or its more extreme cousin, communism.

What has happened in the centuries since the Enlightenment is the permeation of the pseudo-Christian poison of equality into the tissues of the West, to the point that the mainstream churches now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins like pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee pool. The Southern Baptists, because they were fortunate enough to flourish in a region where the false sun of the Enlightenment never shone, succeeded in escaping this grim fate, at least until last week.

Francis claimed that “immigrants, in particular Hispanics” will soon “kick the common culture into the gutters.” Francis wrote in a 2004 column:

The “melting pot” metaphor may have been appropriate when immigration came largely from Europe, with similar languages, religious beliefs, political cultures, and moral and social values. Today it doesn't.

Today not only do the fragments in the pot not melt into the common history and common culture, they openly and deliberately reject them -- as “racist” and exclusive. Immigrants, in particular Hispanics, who make up the largest component, now have the numbers to thumb their noses at the common history and common culture and the very suggestion that they should assimilate to it. Soon they will have the numbers to kick the common culture into the gutters.

Francis wrote that Republicans should “forget about Hispanics” and “start speaking the language of the white middle class.” Francis wrote in a 2003 column:

The Republicans can start winning Hispanics when they’re willing to throw overboard entirely their party’s conservative principles and get down in the mud with the Democrats.

It would make a lot more sense for the Stupid Party [Francis’ term for the Republican Party] to forget about Hispanics as a bloc they could win from their rivals, start thinking about how to control immigration, dump the ads in Spanish and start speaking the language of the white middle class that really keeps them in office.

Francis said whites “could dictate a solution to the racial problem” in part “by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites.” As documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Francis wrote in 1995:

If whites wanted to do so, they could dictate a solution to the racial problem tomorrow — by curtailing immigration and sealing the border, by imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites and encouraging a higher white birth rate, by refusing to be bullied into enduring “multiculturalism,” affirmative action, civil rights laws and policies; and by refusing to submit to cultural dissolution, inter-racial violence and insults, and the guilt that multiracialists inculcate.

Francis criticized interracial relationships as “cultural destruction.” In 2004, ABC aired an ad featuring a Black man and white woman having a sexually explicit discussion. Francis responded by calling it “an intentional act of moral subversion” and added:

But the ad's message also was that interracial sex is normal and legitimate, a fairly radical concept for both the dominant media as well as its audience.

Nevertheless, for decades, interracial couples of different sexes have been sneaked into advertising, movies and television series, and almost certainly not because of popular demand from either race. The Owens-Sheridan match is only the most notorious to date.

In the minds of those who produced the ad, race is at least as important as the moral and aesthetic norms their ad subverts.

To them, the race as well as the religion, the morality, and the culture of the host society are all equally hostile and oppressive forces that need to be discredited, debunked and destroyed.

If the destruction can't happen at the polls or through the courts, they can always use the long march through the culture that control of the mass media allows.

Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family and, ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself.

Francis said that whites must “reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms.” Howard Kurtz wrote in 1995 in The Washington Post:

Francis was let go late last month after his views on racial differences were quoted by author Dinesh D'Souza in The Post's Outlook section. Francis had said at a conference that his fellow whites must “reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. . . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people.”

Francis complained about “the practice of ruining a white person once a year in honor of Dr. King is becoming a national tradition.” Francis’ book Beautiful Losers, the collection of his essays recommended by Masters, includes a piece (“The Cult of Dr. King”) criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Among the many reasons Francis cited against the holiday was that it purportedly would result in “ruining” white people.

The fate of Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder is a case in point, though not unique. Approached at table in Duke Zeibert’s restaurant in Washington on the Friday before the official ceremonies, Mr. Snyder, a sports commentator created and employed by CBS, was asked by a local reporter for his views on the progress of blacks in professional athletics. Mr. Snyder perhaps had dined too well, and he was foolish enough to say what he really thought in response to the uninvited question. He praised the accomplishments and hard work of black athletes, made some insulting remarks about the laziness of white athletes, and suggested that the alleged athletic prowess of blacks was due to their having been bred for size and strength in antebellum days, specifically for their “big thighs, . . . they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs.” It is not known if the Greek, a professional gambler, gave odds on how long he would keep his $750,000-a-year job after uttering his insights, but there was little time to place any bets, and probably few would have taken them. Within twenty-four hours Mr. Snyder was in the ranks of the unemployed, and the incident provided fodder for the capital’s professional gumbeaters for the next week.

Mr. Snyder was not the first offering to the new deity, and the practice of ruining a white person once a year in honor of Dr. King is becoming a national tradition. Last year the victim was another sports figure, Los Angeles Dodgers official Al Campanis, who was asked on ABC-TV’s “Nightline” about black athletic performance and wound up discoursing on the comparative buoyancy of the races when immersed in water. He too got his clock cleaned by his employers, and though the incident did not occur in connection with Dr. King’s birthday, it did happen to fall during the week of the nineteenth anniversary of the civil rights leader’s assassination in April 1968.

Francis told a reporter that civilization must be white to survive because “I just don’t think that Blacks and Hispanics are going to be able to continue that, I mean, for cognitive reasons, intellectual reasons.” From a 1996 Washington City Paper profile:

He wants whites to be “proud of being white,” he tells me on a cold December day, his own white face reddened in his warm office. If they aren’t, and they allow immigration and intermarriage to destroy the white race, “I don’t see any prospect for…Western, European, white civilization surviving,” he says. And “civilization” means not just political and cultural traditions but “science as well,” he adds. Why? “I just don’t think that blacks and Hispanics are going to be able to continue that, I mean, for cognitive reasons, intellectual reasons….You could have a black Einstein or a black Newton maybe,” he adds with a chuckle, “but in general you’re not going to have people who appreciate that.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.