The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters

[Nevilledog]

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Greg Sargent
@ThePlumLineGS
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Terrific piece on the Blake Masters/JD Vance worldview, by @SamAdlerBell. Key point is how this new right is dead serious about the embrace of "coercive state power as an indispensable tool" for subjugating the liberal cultural enemy wherever necessary.
Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, has been running ads showing him cradling a rifle “designed to kill people.”
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters
His bizarre, menacing vision for American politics could well define the future of his party.
3:59 AM · Aug 3, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/opinion/blake-masters-arizona-senate.html

No paywall
https://archive.ph/mRoQd

Blake Masters’s first campaign ad opens with a shot of the Sonoran Desert. A plaintive piano theme tinkles as Mr. Masters, a 35-year-old venture capitalist and, as of early Wednesday morning, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, delivers a monologue in voice-over. “The truth is, we can’t take America for granted,” he says. “And if we want to keep it, we’ve got to fight for it.”

The angles are wide, and the focus is deep. The camera floats above the ground, drifting after a boy’s legs running over the dunes and peering upward at Mr. Masters and his family hiking at the golden hour. In another video, from November, Mr. Masters stands in the desert cradling a gun. “This is a short-barreled rifle,” he says. “It wasn’t designed for hunting. This is designed to kill people.”

Mr. Masters has said that his ads, which mingle scenes of wistful domesticity with bellicose rhetoric and stark vistas of Arizona wilderness, were inspired by the films of Terrence Malick, the enigmatic American director. Mr. Malick once told an interviewer that in filming “Badlands” — a movie set in 1958 about young lovers on a killing spree — he tried to minimize ’50s-era visual cues. “Nostalgia,” he said, “is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything.” Instead, he wanted the film to feel like “a fairy tale, outside time.” This, he hoped, would “take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality.”

Perhaps Mr. Masters is trying to strike a similar balance. Juxtaposing pastoral serenity with masculine violence, his ads conjure a latent darkness — an eagerness to subdue through coercion and threat — undergirding the American dream.

*snip*

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Fascism financed personally by Peter Thiel

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.

NOAH LANARD
Mother Jones, JULY 18, 2022

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.

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.

Years ago, the two men’s focus on electoral politics would have seemed unlikely. Earlier in his career, Thiel wrote about creating floating colonies in the ocean, while Masters told people not to vote. Since then, both have had changes of heart about means, not ends. Instead of escaping state control, Masters and Thiel now hope to use its power to solidify the dominance of the founder class and end the technological stagnation they believe could lead to humanity’s extinction. To do so, they are willing to move fast and break things. But instead of disrupting taxi companies or hotels, American democracy is in their sights. A decade after his startup lectures, there should no longer be any doubt that Thiel’s sympathy for authoritarianism extends well beyond the private sector.

Continues…

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

[Thomas Hurt]

2. still can't call a fascist a fascist.