Blake Masters is Peter Thiel's dream candidate--and a total nightmare for democracy (AZ)

[Nevilledog]

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Clara Jeffery
@ClaraJeffery
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1/ Big piece from @nlanard on Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel protege running for Senate in AZ. Thiel has put $13 MILLION into this race. They're willing to move fast and break things, like maybe democracy itself.

motherjones.com
Blake Masters is Peter Thiel's dream candidate—and a total nightmare for democracy
The right-wing tech giant, who has said he believes freedom and democracy are incompatible, has poured millions into his protégé's Senate campaign.
1:17 PM · Jul 18, 2022

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/blake-masters-peter-thiel-donald-trump-arizona-senate-mark-kelly/

In the spring of 2012, Blake Masters, who was in his final year at Stanford Law, sat in on a computer science class taught by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal. During a lecture titled “Founder as Victim, Founder as God,” Thiel argued a kinglike leader was essential to innovation. “A startup is basically structured as a monarchy,” he explained. “We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.”

Afterward, Masters tweeted that the lecture was the best 90 minutes he’d ever spent in a classroom and linked to the exhaustive notes he’d been taking on Thiel’s course. For months, everyone from tech bros to New York Times columnist David Brooks headed to Masters’ Tumblr to read them. It was heady stuff for a CrossFit-obsessed libertarian described by a law school classmate as being “notable for not being notable.”

Masters was the perfect Thiel protégé. Both men attended Stanford and Stanford Law as proud iconoclasts who chafed at limits on their freedom. But while Thiel alienated dormmates by performatively downing vitamins as they nursed hangovers, Masters had the social skills to make friends in environments as ideologically hostile as the vegetarian co-op he lived in at Stanford. He had the ideal résumé to help a famously awkward billionaire popularize his unorthodox views.

Blake Masters speaking with attendees at the “Rally to Protect Our Elections” hosted by Turning Point Action at Arizona Federal Theatre in Phoenix. Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network
Masters would never leave Thiel’s orbit. After finishing law school in 2012, Masters worked on a legal research startup with funding from his former teacher, co-authored a bestseller with Thiel based on the notes he’d taken from that class, and served as Thiel’s chief of staff and the president of his charitable foundation. Now, Masters is running for US Senate in Arizona with more than $13 million from Thiel behind him. If Masters wins his August primary, he will face Mark Kelly, the former astronaut and husband of former Congress member Gabby Giffords, in one of several races expected to decide which party controls the Senate.

*snip*


They might want to rethink their attack on Kelly. This weekend Masters was on tv saying Kelly is unfit because he was an astronaut.

[marybourg]

1. When I saw the first sign for this guy on my residential street,

I thought it said “Brake Masters”, and that someone had put up a commercial auto repair sign in violation of our cc&r’s.

[Nevilledog]

2. This guy is a major scary douche.

[marybourg]

3. In other words - a current-day Republican.

[Nevilledog]

4. Yes.

[blm]

5. Dems needs ads exposing Thiel types' goal to replace Founding Fathers

constitutional plan for a democratic republic.

Contrast Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Gadsden, et al with the Thiels, Mercers, DeVos/Prince fascists.

[Coventina]

6. Isn't he the guy who physically attacked a BLM protestor?

Why isn't he in jail?