In 2022, Senator Mark Kelley (D-AZ), who beat Republican Senator Martha McSally in 2020, will face off against a new Republican challenger. The man at the top of the leaderboards right now is Blake Masters, Chief Operating Officer of Thiel Capital and president of The Thiel Foundation.
The 35-year-old Masters announced his candidacy in July, telling The Associated Press that he wants his children to “grow up in a country” that he still recognizes. According to a third-quarter Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filing, Masters has raised more than $1.1 million.
On Monday, I had the opportunity to speak with Masters about a variety of topics, including border security, as well as what he believes this election means for the future of the United States (the full Blake Masters interview will be released on Sunday).
Citing the border crisis as arguably the most important issue in the state of Arizona, and noting that neither Democrats nor many Republicans seem to want to address the issue in any meaningful way, I asked Masters what his plan would be as an elected senator.
Masters replied:
I think day one is introducing or joining legislation to finish the border wall. I’ve actually been down to the border wall and it’s well built, it’s impressively engineered, it’s tall. People are not just going to easily climb over this thing. It would work if you didn’t have all these gaps, right, where the cartels know to go.
So if you imagine actually finishing that wall, and you double or triple the size of border patrol — those guys need more boots on the ground, frankly, they need to be paid more — and then you arm them, you equip them with the technology they actually need to do their job. All of a sudden, 90% to 95% of the border crisis goes away. It really is that simple. It’s not — you don’t need a whole lot of innovative policy solutions. You just need the political will and the numbers to get it done.
Listen to the exchange here:
Masters later noted regarding the midterm election:
This election, 2022, really will make or break America. The Democrats tell us what they’re going to do if they take power. They will federalize elections, they will pack the Supreme Court, they will add Puerto Rico and D.C. to the union — not because they care about Puerto Rico — because they care about the two Senate seats they would get; they just want to have a lock on power.
He added that while modern progressivism might appear different cosmetically, it’s not “that different from old style Bolshevism in terms of what’s actually happening behind the scenes.”
“But the progressive mindset, the progressive political project, is about shoring up absolute power and absolute control,” he continued.
As for the future of the nation if good Republicans don’t win the 2022 and 2024 elections, Masters says that it “ceases to exist in the sort of continuous fashion [in which it’s existed] since our Founders; I think that grand experiment will be over.”
Listen here:
Check back with The Daily Wire on Sunday for the full Blake Masters interview.