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.”
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.”
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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.
In his victory speech in Chandler, Ariz., on Tuesday night, Mr. Masters — who was endorsed by Donald Trump in June — echoed the themes of his campaign: America is in trouble, riddled with crime and disorder; illegal immigration is an invasion; Big Tech is censoring conservatives and colonizing young people’s minds, while globalist corporations outsource jobs and make American life all but unlivable for middle-class families. In his speech, Mr. Masters attacked “a small minority of hard-core Democratic Party activists” who, he said, “control newspapers and television and schools and universities — and you better believe they control Big Tech, too, ” framing the race as a battle against “the cartels, ” “giant global corporations” and “a system that’s actively trying to destroy families.”
Where Donald Trump was merely a vehicle for disruption, Mr. Masters sees himself and his allies as midwives of transformation.Credit... Mario Tama/Getty Images
Rembrandt Van Rijn
To close followers of conservative politics, this message may sound familiar. Mr. Masters is unmistakably a figure of the New Right: militant, internet-savvy culture warriors who position themselves as insurgent challengers of the sclerotic establishment in both parties. No longer doctrinaire libertarians, they see coercive state power as an indispensable tool for achieving conservative ends: mandating patriotic curriculums in schools, supporting the formation of “native-born” families, banning abortion and pornography, and turning back the rights revolution for L.G.B.T.Q. Americans.
“If you’re not using any political power to shore up a good society that follows the rule of law, ” Mr. Masters warned recently, “you’ll get rolled.” Locked in civilizational battle with the radical left — the “enemy of true progress, the enemy of everything that is good” — conservatives who insist on libertarian orthodoxy are, for Mr. Masters, like pacifists in wartime: “You can recite an eloquent poem about pacifism right before they line you up against the wall and shoot you.”
For many young Trumpists, Mr. Masters is a dream candidate: a true believer who — as a ubiquitous New Right shibboleth has it —
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He wants to ban “critical race theory” from schools and defund “gender ideology.” His campaign distributes yard signs that read, “Blake Masters won’t ask your pronouns in the U.S. Senate.” And he recently told the conservative talk show host Charlie Kirk that Dr. Anthony Fauci “will see the inside of a prison cell this decade.”
Likewise, his Twitter account is an endless stream of insular right-wing watchwords. In April, he called the Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson a “pedophile apologist.” In November, he tweeted, “When a society celebrates Antifa looters, arsonists, and pedophiles as heroes, while turning brave people like Kyle Rittenhouse into villains, it is a society that is not long for this world.” He frequently amplifies Mr. Trump’s 2020 election lies and he recently suggested that Democrats will “cheat” in the midterms.
But Mr. Masters also represents a distinctive innovation upon the swaggering MAGA message of other Republican hopefuls. A quintessential nerdy jock, he seems more Menlo Park than Capitol Hill; even in his pastoral campaign videos, he can sometimes be seen holding an iPad. He keeps a great deal of his wealth in cryptocurrencies. He is the well-groomed avatar of a hard-right Silicon Valley brain trust, including his former employer, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, and an array of farseeing, anti-democratic titans of industry who see America as a stagnant and feeble empire in desperate need of vitalist reinvention.
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Where Mr. Trump was merely a vehicle for disruption, Mr. Masters sees himself and his allies — including his fellow Thiel-backed Senate hopeful J.D. Vance of Ohio — as midwives of
A Masters campaign event in Lake Havasu City, Ariz. His nomination is a sign of a growing conservative appetite for radical solutions to American decline.Credit... Bridget Bennett for The New York Times
Their diagnoses of American malaise are not fantastical; everyone can see the country is in trouble. But their prescriptions for how to fix it, the means they are willing to entertain to do so, are far outside the American mainstream, drawing on a political vision that sees democracy as an obstacle to the urgent interventions of enlightened philosopher kings.
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Most strikingly, Mr. Masters’s presentation — mannered and serious; boyish but grave — is utterly devoid of Trumpian camp; there is none of the irony and kitsch that clung to Mr. Trump even in his cruelest moments. What’s left is only bitterness, enmity and a histrionic vision of a world being torn apart by the globalist left.
Mr. Masters faces a vulnerable Democratic incumbent, Mark Kelly, in November, but even if he doesn’t prevail, his nomination is a clear sign of a growing conservative appetite for radical solutions to American decline. If Mr. Masters does win, however, it may well be his bizarre and menacing vision of American politics — not the rosy amnesia of Mike Pence or the truculent populism of Ron DeSantis — that defines the future of the Republican Party.
At 19, he blogged on LiveJournal under the username kinggps in support of drug legalization, unfettered immigration and the elimination of the Supreme Court, which, he wrote, is “little more than a coercive microcosm of democracy.” As for national borders, Mr. Masters wrote, “Are we really supposed to believe that a government can draw a line in the sand, and that the people living on one side are somehow inherently different or deserving of more or less rights” than “those on the other?”
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Mr. Masters shared his political musings in forums for body builders, CrossFit and gun enthusiasts, his online presence exuding the overconfidence, haughty logic-chopping, and occasional paranoia typical of late-aughts libertarianism. “I don’t mean any disrespect — but it takes years to understand where I’m coming from, let alone agree or disagree, ” a beleaguered Mr. Masters posted on a CrossFit message board in 2007. He then signed off, recommending a workout for their minds: “taking 30 min. of your day” to read antiwar.com, the libertarian Mises Institute website, LewRockwell.com and CounterPunch.
A handful of dorm mates from Mr. Masters’s undergraduate years at Stanford told me he once recorded a liberty-themed rap, which, to my great regret, is no longer available online — though Mother Jones did uncover one 2008 video in which Mr. Masters wears Native American war paint and freestyles, “I’ve got the war paint on, as you can see/Who said what about cultural insensitivity?”
Mannered and serious, boyish but grave, Mr. Masters has none of the irony and kitsch that clung to Mr. Trump even in his cruelest moments.Credit... Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Tanzio Da Varallo
Mr. Masters’s life and political trajectory changed in 2012, when, as a law student at Stanford, he took a class taught by Mr. Thiel, the early Facebook investor who co-founded PayPal and Palantir.
When they met, Mr. Thiel was on his own journey away from hard-core libertarianism toward a more traditionalist and muscular nationalism. Like Mr. Masters, he had backed Ron Paul for president in 2008. And in a programmatic essay published the following year, Mr. Thiel declared that he no longer believed democracy and freedom were compatible: “The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.”
Lamenting that there were “no truly free places left in our world, ” Mr. Thiel placed his hopes in “some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.” That country, he wagered, would be found in cyberspace, outer
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