Blake Masters, a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who received the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, has been haunted by a trail of juvenile writing deploring the United States’ entry into World War I and World War II, approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal and insisted on an isolationism that extended even beyond Mr Trump’s.
In the most recent examples, unearthed and provided to DailyExpertNews by opponents of Mr. Masters, in 2007, as a Stanford student, he entered the chat room of CrossFit, his workout favorite, to nurture views that may not sit well with the 2022 Republican electorate.
As he had done on other forums, Mr. Masters in the CrossFit chat room that he was opposed to American involvement in both world wars — although World War II, he admitted, “is harder to argue because of the hot-button issue of the Holocaust (never mind our friend Stalin more than killed twice as many as Hitler…why are we covering that up in schools?).”
He didn’t talk about Pearl Harbor or say he thought the United States should have ignored it.
Also in the CrossFit chat room, Mr Masters, then 20, claimed that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not pose “substantial threats to Americans”.
“In my opinion, being a true libertarian is against all wars that are not strictly defensive, and with the US military (many of our best men and women!) sadly stationed in over 100 countries and dozens of bombing campaigns since the last war was declared. defense isn’t the name of the game,” he told his fellow CrossFit enthusiasts. “We should be more like the Swiss in this regard — decentralized and defensive.”
Such views could very well fit the Ron Paul type of libertarianism that Mr. Masters subscribed to as a 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 hard-fought race for the Republican nomination to face Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a freshman Democrat who is among the most vulnerable incumbent officials this year. . The Arizona primaries are on August 2.
Another GOP contender, businessman Jim Lamon, insisted on Mr. Masters from 2006 on an early blogging site, Live Journal – reported by Jewish Insider in April and June – in which Mr. Masters claimed that “‘unlimited’ immigration is the only choice” for a libertarian-minded voter.
As a candidate, Mr. Masters, now 35, takes a stance at odds with his younger self and in line with Mr Trump’s views: he favors militarizing the border and ending what he calls a Calls “invasion” by immigrants entering the country illegal.
Mr Masters declined to comment on this article. His campaign manager, Amalia Halikias, released a statement calling him “the clear frontrunner,” noting Mr Trump’s endorsement and disdain for journalists “who spend their time scouring 2007 CrossFit message boards to trying to discredit him.”
She said voters were more interested in “how to resolve the inflation and border crisis that Joe Biden and Mark Kelly have brought to us.”
Mr. Masters has also been criticized for contemporary statements, such as his April 11 comment that America’s gun violence problem came down to “black people, frankly,” and his apparent embrace of the “replacement theory” promulgated by white supremacists when he called Democrats accused of trying to flood the nation with immigrants “to change the demographics of our country.”
Mr. Masters’ early writings covered a wide range of subjects and encountered a number of stumbling blocks for one with general political aspirations.
In a 2006 post on the libertarian site LewRockwell.com, he echoed an elaborate conspiracy theory about the United States’ entry into World War I, suggesting a link between the “Houses of Morgan and Rothschild” banks and the failure to warn US officials. steamship passengers against German threats preceding 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 anti-Semitic forgery—“accurately describe much of what is happening in our world today.”
The message ended with what Mr. Masters called a “gripping quote” from Hermann Göring – Hitler’s right-hand man and one of the most powerful Nazis in the Third Reich.
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, attacked Mr. Masters’ calls to Göring and Griffin, calling them “historical figures who traded in some of the worst anti-Semitic tropes imaginable.”
“Any history student should know better than to elevate leaders who once gave voice to dangerous anti-Semitic tropes like the infamous ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'” said Mr. Greenblatt.
He added: “Regardless of how old he was at the time, Mr. Masters must reject his decision to uphold these men and their ideas and condemn anti-Semitism in all forms.”
For example, Mr. Lamon has taken political advantage by posting an ad portraying Mr. Masters as a conspiratorial anti-Semite.
mr. Masters commented in which he said he knew “the left-wing media” would “try to defame me” and “call me a racist and a sexist and a terrorist.” He added: “Well, it turns out the Republican losers would too.”
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Mr. Masters has defended his 2006 writings as the youthful scribbles of a teenager shying away from the war in Iraq. “I was 19 and wrote in opposition to the war in Iraq — a position that turned out to be prescient,” he told Jewish Insider in April. “I went too far and stated that no recent American wars were just.” He added: “I suppose it was only a matter of time before I was called anti-Semitic for criticizing war propaganda in an essay I wrote as a teenager.”
Still, as a student at Stanford, one of the nation’s most elite universities, he should have known better, said Abe Foxman, a longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League and now national director emeritus.
“While Masters may not have been familiar with Griffin’s anti-Semitism, as a student at Stanford he would certainly have been familiar with who Göring was and what he was doing — especially citing him from the Nuremberg Trials,” Mr Foxman said.
In 2007 Mr. Masters have dispersed his libertarian critique of the United States in the oddly chosen forum of CrossFit’s chat rooms.
“To anyone who comes back to me claiming that Iraq and even al-Qaeda pose a substantial threat to Americans, I have little more to say other than that I’ve come to the opposite conclusion,” he wrote.
He called the United States “an empire-driven (soft and hard) nation-state with security-hungry sheep” and dismissed the Federal Reserve Board as a “semi-private banking cartel”.
And on the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Mr. Masters — who now embraces Mr. Trump’s slogan “America First” — asked, “What about the non-Americans in the Twin Towers? Personally, I see no reason to mourn the deaths of ‘American’ innocents any more than those of other nationalities.”
Finally, on September 25, 2007, Mr. Masters, then still a Stanford junior, bid farewell to his CrossFit interlocutors and signed on with one last expression of sophomoric-sounding self-assurance.
“I don’t mean disrespect, but it takes years to understand where I’m coming from, let alone agree or disagree,” he wrote. “It would be foolish NOT to receive the usual (intelligent, perhaps, yet typical) objections and questions in response to a post like mine above… I don’t know what gave me the urge to try anyway.”
He laced it with a wink emoticon.
