Who’s ready for more Blake Masters? The Wall Street Journal reports that the Peter Thiel acolyte and failed 2022 Senate candidate in Arizona is gearing up to run for Senate again in 2024, in what could be a three-way race between Independent incumbent Kyrsten Sinema, likely Democratic challenger Ruben Gallego, and a Republican.
Why? Masters’s candidacy was, I repeat, a failure. It was a remarkably repulsive mélange of Terminally Online messaging, off-putting aesthetics, and obsequious Trump toadying, undergirded by the candidate’s own severe charisma deficit. The Masters worldview appeared to draw from some ersatz and unholy combination of the ideas of Thiel, his boss and patron; Silicon Valley monarchist-LARPist Curtis Yarvin; now-deceased terrorist Ted Kaczynski (the “Unabomber”); Singaporean free-market autocrat Lee Kuan Yew; and the paleoconservative/racist thinker Sam Francis. His campaign was based on the belief that this weirdness made him distinct, and that, combined with a Trump endorsement and bizarre videos in which he would, for example, shoot guns (“made in Germany,” he took care to remind us) into an empty desert, it would power him to victory.
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