ICYMI: The Strident Writings of a Young Blake Masters Dog His Senate Run [The New York Times]

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The New York Times: The Strident Writings of a Young Blake Masters Dog His Senate Run
By Jonathan Weisman
July 6, 2022

As a Stanford student in 2007, the Arizona candidate, now 35, chose a CrossFit chat room to express his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II and downplay Al Qaeda as a threat to Americans.

Key Points:

• Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arizona who won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, has been dogged by a trail of youthful writings in which he lamented the entry of the United States into the First and Second World Wars, approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal and pushed an isolationism that extended beyond even Mr. Trump’s.

• In the most recent examples, unearthed and provided to The New York Times by opponents of Mr. Masters, he took to the chat room of CrossFit, his workout of choice, as a Stanford undergraduate in 2007 to espouse views that might not sit well with the Republican electorate of 2022.

• As he had in other forums, Mr. Masters wrote on the CrossFit chat room that he opposed American involvement in both world wars — although World War II, he conceded, “is harder to argue because of the hot button issue of the Holocaust (nevermind that our friend Stalin murdered over twice as many as Hitler … why do we gloss over that in schools?).”

• He did not address Pearl Harbor or say whether he thought the United States should have ignored it.

• Also on the CrossFit chat room, Mr. Masters, then 20, argued that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not “constitute substantial threats to Americans.”

• Such views might well have fit with the Ron Paul brand of libertarianism that Mr. Masters subscribed to as a college student. But they would be an extreme outlier in the Senate he hopes to join next year.

• Not surprisingly, Mr. Masters’ youthful writings have already become fodder in the hotly contested race for the Republican nomination.

• Another G.O.P. contender, the businessman Jim Lamon, latched onto Mr. Masters’ 2006 writings on an early blogging site, Live Journal — reported by Jewish Insider in April and June — in which Mr. Masters had claimed that “‘unrestricted’ immigration is the only choice” for a libertarian-minded voter.

• As a candidate, Mr. Masters, now 35, takes a position diametrically opposed to that of his younger self and in line with Mr. Trump’s views: He favors militarizing the border and ending what he calls an “invasion” by immigrants entering the country illegally.

• Mr. Masters has also been denounced for contemporary statements, like his April 11 remark that America’s gun violence problem boiled down to “Black people, frankly,” and his apparent embrace of the “replacement theory” promulgated by white supremacists when he accused Democrats of trying to flood the nation with immigrants “to change the demographics of our country.”

• In a 2006 post on the libertarian site LewRockwell.com, he rehashed an elaborate conspiracy theory about the United States’ entry into World War I, implying a connection between the banking “Houses of Morgan and Rothschild” and the failure to alert American steamship passengers to German threats that preceded the sinking of the Lusitania. His main source was C. Edward Griffin, an ardent libertarian who once said that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — a notorious antisemitic forgery — “accurately describe much of what is happening in our world today.”

• The post ended with what Mr. Masters called a “poignant quotation” from Hermann Goering — Hitler’s right-hand man and one of the most powerful Nazis of the Third Reich.

• Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, assailed Mr. Masters’ invocations of Goering and Griffin, calling them “historical figures who trafficked in some of the worst antisemitic tropes imaginable.”

• Mr. Lamon, for one, has taken political advantage, running an ad framing Mr. Masters as a conspiratorial antisemite.

• In 2007, Mr. Masters expanded upon his libertarian critique of the United States in the oddly chosen forum of CrossFit’s chat rooms. “To he or she who comes back at me with the claim that Iraq and even al-qaeda constitute substantial threats to Americans, I have little more to say than I have arrived at the opposite conclusion,” he wrote.

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