I don’t like talking about individual races, but want to comment on what’s going on in the Arizona senate race with Republican candidate Blake Masters.
Background on the race, this is for the seat John McCain left when he passed away, where the governor appointed Martha McSally to be the senator to replace him, who lost her race for senate a month earlier in 2018 to Krysten Sinema. Martha McSally was defeated again in 2020 and Mark Kelly, who’s the husband of former Congresswoman and assassination survivor Gabby Giffords defeated her in the 2020 special election.
The race for the full six year term is happening this year, where Donald Trump endorsed Blake Masters to be nominee, who will likely get the GOP nomination now.
The reason I want to comment is I’ve actually met Blake four times years ago and genuinely have been disgusted on a personal and policy level by his campaign.
For how I met Blake, it was really just at events going back 5+ years ago.
My opinion on him wasn’t much of anything, besides a casual hello, 2-3 minutes of conversation and view he was the standard non technical tech person.
Just to explain that, it’s not an insult, but sort of a category of people who hang around Silicon Valley.
- Can’t code
- Can’t engineer
- No definable skill that’d suit them for a tech company.
That said, they tend to get very wonky and attempt to be intellectual on business, so they normally go into VC, journalism, a random business development position and lately politics.
Again, not an insult, because I’d probably categorize myself in a similar box.
Blake Masters fit into this and until I heard he was running for senate, for half a decade, I never once thought about his name.
Running so far, he’s been a 9 out of 10 for what I’d call a perfect nightmare of a candidate.
His campaign site as a core issue makes this bizarre claim he’ll abolish wokeness as a senator, where he goes to make a pretty mean spirited policy point on transgender people with restrooms, not even identifying them as transgender. Just calling them men in women’s restrooms.
He commented on gun violence, encouraging more access to high powered assault weapons. He blamed gang violence for gun crime and directly cited black people as a problem.
He also just this week commented on the January 6th riots, where he said he believed it was a false flag operation by the FBI.
Outside those obvious and disturbing issues, he’s also not even a very good Republican in the traditional sense.
His campaign is openly for new spending to not balance the budget and calling to breakup tech companies, which isn’t conservative in the slightest.
Blake Masters is running on this strange campaign, which is right wing populism, that sadly seems to be an extension of Silicon Valley conservatives and the only person to talk about with that is Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel being the billionaire who co-founded PayPal & Palatir, while being the founding investor in Facebook has for about a decade had a lot of press on things I agree with.
A huge investor in anti-aging technology.
An early skeptic of the idea college was for everyone.
A relatively strong investor overall.
Peter Thiel is someone I really respected and thought was an innovative person, until in 2016 he endorsed Donald Trump and became the man to introduce him at the 2016 GOP convention.
Which the only reason Blake Masters is where he is today is entirely due to Peter Thiel.
The two wrote the book Zero to One together and Blake’s only professional background is a very vague VC career, where Peter Thiel did give him some clout in it.
This entire run would have been written off as just a non candidate polling in single digits without Peter Thiel’s connection, where Thiel this year is donating over 20 million dollars to the Republican Party.
To get into what’s wrong with Blake Masters, Peter Thiel’s name has to be brought up.
The issue with Thiel is he’s become a full time contrarian, where I’m not sure what he advocates is so much his actual views, but views that make him feel different in Silicon Valley and tech.
Explaining this, he always pushed against conventional wisdom, but I think was angry how left wing Silicon Valley was, so he adopted views on immigration and other policies, where there’s not a great logic and just serves to irritate others.
An example being how Peter Thiel was a partner at the tech accelerator firm Y Combinator, but after 2016, they cut ties with him.
Most people would be upset to lose a partner status at a billion dollar firm, but I almost think Peter Thiel gets a thrill from it, where it makes him feel different.
Blake Masters, if he becomes a senator would likely be the strongest card Peter Thiel has ever had in US politics for a person he can control and weirdly enough, I feel his category of the GOP has this strange leaning with the alt-right, which we’re seeing with Masters.
Commenting on this, the reason is I’d say I know about 50-100 people who have met and know Blake Masters. Probably about 10-20 who have worked with him in someway also. Those same people all have had some form of connection with Peter Thiel directly or indirectly.
As of now, basically every single one is silent on Blake Masters campaign and what Peter Thiel has become in politics.
This is something which I hope changes, because as of now, he’s someone we’re all connected with, which is running a very angry, conspiratorial and at this point, flat out alt-right campaign financed by a person who I know at least 20 people who’ve taken investment money from for projects.
Eventually there has to be the moment to cut the cord and I think for people in the tech world, Blake Masters is the moment to cut ties with Peter Thiel.