Your source of self-destruction

Let’s check on Masters, of Peter Thiel’s puppet fame:

Two years before Democrats had settled on “weird” as the most effective criticism of Republican politics, Blake Masters was the unwitting face of it. A former Silicon Valley venture capitalist with Peter Thiel’s backing who ran for Senate in Arizona, Masters chilled audiences with his extreme political stances on issues like abortion and with front-facing videos and TV ads where he did creepy things, like whispering while firing a pistol with a silencer. (He paid handsomely to put that on TV himself, voluntarily, too.) It didn’t help that he looks sort of like a young Mr. Burns.

Masters lost the Senate race in 2022, despite $15 million from Thiel, swamped badly by the Democrat, Mark Kelly. Two years later, he ran in a Republican primary for an Arizona House seat with an even more extreme playbook—and with more tacit Thiel money. He said creepy things this time around too. Like, that his opponent was unqualified because, without wife and kids, he had “no skin in the game.” His super PAC insinuated that his opponent (another right-wing MAGA candidate) was a “terrorist sympathizer.” Last week, Masters lost that race.

It’s sort of an amazing turn of events for a man who was handpicked by Thiel, alongside J.D. Vance, to advance a sort of Trumpian tech-bro politics of regressive social attitudes and protectionist economics. And the result is yet another blow to the rapidly weakening Vance brand, who, since his elevation to the Trump ticket, has proved to be overwhelmingly toxic to voters. The result is yet another showcase of the weakness of weird.

It seems inconceivable that someone could be too much of a creepy reactionary to lose a Republican primary in Arizona, but here we are. Pete sure can pick ’em! Maybe he can bring Glem back from Brazil to run for something next.