One of the things about Senator John McCain that you could always rely on was that he would deny saying something that he said for which there was video, and then reporters would play “let’s go to the video!,” and only then would Johnny sheepishly admit, “OK, you caught me,” with a “what’s the big fucking deal? So I lied” attitude.
Does Blake Masters also not know that video and audio exist? Isn’t he supposed to be some kind of Big Tech guy who should know these things?
Blake Masters is busy trying to erase everything he has ever said and done and trying to create a fictional character, or an avatar if you prefer, with which to lie to the voters about who he really is.
See, Peter Thiel’s Puppet Blake Masters Now Trying To Hide His Extremist Views On Abortion From Voters.
Oops! He did it again!
CNN’s K Files reports, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters scrubbed language on campaign website saying the 2020 election was stolen from Trump:
Arizona Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters removed language from his website following his primary win that included the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, along with a section arguing the country would be better off if Trump was still the president.
So the candidate who got Donald Trump’s endorsement and won his primary by being the Big Lie election denier candidate is trying to erase eveything he just said and put into print in the recent primary, and is counting on short-term memory loss in the electorate? Good luck with that failed strategy!
A review of Masters’ website by CNN’s KFile showed he also removed controversial language saying Democrats were trying to “import” a new electorate – language that has drawn fire for mirroring far-right conspiracies that Democrats are trying to weaken the power of native-born Americans of European descent through mass immigration of non-White immigrants.
Both stances were on Masters’ website on August 1, the day before he won the Republican primary to take on Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in the closely watched Senate race. The sections were gone by August 26, according to screenshots from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Masters’s new campaign posturing comes as a flurry of Republican candidates nationwide attempt to distance themselves from unpopular or divisive policy positions, particularly about abortion and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, ahead of the midterm election this November.
NBC News first reported last week that Masters attempted to tone down his position on abortion by removing from his website his support of a “federal personhood law” and a several other strict anti-abortion positions while releasing a video in which the Republican nominee took a softer stance on the issue.
A person close to Masters told CNN last week that the Republican candidate designs, codes and updates his website himself – and that his recent updates to the abortion section reflect his desire to use his policy section as a “living document” rather than an immutable record of his positions.
WTF? Are we talking about constitutional theory of a “iving constitution” versus “originalism,” or are we talking about a campaign website? What is “immutable” is what this fool actually believes, not the lies he posts on his website to fool the voters.
It’s unusual for candidates to update their issues pages on major issues, and CNN has reached out to Masters’ campaign about the modified language about the 2020 election.
Removed sections on immigration and election 2020
In early August, the page “The Masters Plan,” read, “We need to get serious about election integrity. The 2020 election was a rotten mess – if we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today and America would be so much better off.”
The page now only says, “We need to get serious about election integrity.”
Do you know who else had a “Masterplan”? Hitler’s Masterplan. This is the Peter Thiel influence, who also has a “masterplan” for world domination by an elitist Big Tech oligarchy.
In another section of Masters’ website regarding immigration, Masters wrote, “Joe Biden and Mark Kelly caused this crisis. They canceled the Border Wall construction. They invite illegals to come here and give them housing and cash. The Democrats dream of mass amnesty, because they want to import a new electorate.”
Masters removed the last line, which nods to the great replacement conspiracy theory.
Also a Hitler/Peter Thiel thing.
Website removed from archiving in 2018
Masters’ website was removed from the Web Archive temporarily at his request, according to a spokesperson for the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Any person can request their content be removed from the Wayback Machine and Internet users flagged its removal on Friday following NBC’s report. Though the removal sparked cries that Masters was trying to hide changes to his campaign website, the exclusion of his page was actually requested in 2018 before he was a candidate.
“Blake Masters sent us a request to exclude blakemasters.com from the Wayback Machine in 2018, well prior to his campaign,” the spokesman said. “We were not aware he would become a candidate for public office and excluded the site. We have presently re-enabled access to archives of the site for the time period after Masters’ campaign became public.”
The Republic’s Laurie Roberts writes, Blake Masters is scrubbing his website again. Is anybody buying Blake’s sudden makeover?:
The Blake Masters’ 20-Day Cleanse to Moderation continues. [Maybe he should try a colonic?]
First, he scrubbed his Senate campaign website of both his vow to be “100% pro life” and his call for a national abortion ban.
Now, CNN is reporting that Arizona’s main MAGA man has pulled on some rubber gloves to wipe away a mention of Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election.
I picture Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward, falling over in dead faint.
Masters was a political unknown who emerged from a crowded field of Republicans to win the Aug. 2 primary after snagging Trump’s endorsement.
From all accounts, he’s a smart guy. A Stanford educated venture capitalist who apparently thinks that moderate Republican women and independent voters are pushovers. Either that, or they have the attention span of a goldfish.
Just say it, Laurie: “he thinks you’re stupid ike the MAGA/QAnon cult who voted for him.”
Clearly, Masters is in a full-out scramble to try to win them over, understanding that they are his ticket to knocking off Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona’s Senate race.
Too late: Momentum grows as more Republican leaders back Mark Kelly’s campaign:
In July, we launched “ Republicans for Kelly”, a coalition of nearly 50 Arizona Republicans and Independents who’ve come together to support my re-election campaign. Today [8/22/22], I’m proud to announce that our coalition is growing, and I’m honored to have the support of over 40 additional Republican and Independent leaders.
Here is what the old Blake Masters said on his campaign page waaaay back on Aug. 1, when he was wooing conserative Republican voters: “We need to get serious about election integrity. The 2020 election was a rotten mess— if we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today and America would be so much better off.”
And here is what post-primary Blake Masters says on his campaign website: “We need to get serious about election integrity.”
The old Blake Masters sounded the alarm that Democrats are intentionally scheming to open the U.S.-Mexico border to illegal immigration in order to replace us.
“Joe Biden and Mark Kelly caused this crisis,” he wrote, on his pre-primary election campaign site. “They canceled the Border Wall construction. They invite illegals to come here and give them housing and cash. The Democrats dream of mass amnesty, because they want to import a new electorate.”
The new Blake Masters makes no mention of importing a new electorate — a vague reference to the Great Replacement Theory which holds that non-white immigrants are invading our country to take it away from the white people who rightfully live here.
I picture state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who has built a national following by spewing such racist trash, in a full-on face plant.
Masters’ latest campaign cleanse comes just days after NBC reported he has scrubbed his website clean of the hard-line abortion policies that were his hallmark when he was pitching himself to the Republican primary voters.
Gone is his claim to be “100% pro life.”
Gone is his pledge to “support a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed.”
Now he’s vowing to “support a law or a Constitutional amendment that bans late term (third trimester) abortion and partial-birth abortion at the federal level.” You know, when abortions hardly ever happen.
The old MAGA Masters vowed to support “the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” which would make performing an abortion at 20 weeks a crime.
The new and supposedly improved Masters eliminated any mention of that vow.
The old Masters vowed to “vote only for federal judges who understand that Roe and Casey were wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion.”
Until last week, when that statement, too, went missing from his campaign website.
I picture the Center for Arizona Policy’s Cathi Herrod, joining Rogers and Ward – and a fair number of Republican voters – wondering what the heck happened to Masters. How could a guy so quickly abandon his core beliefs?
Funny, I picture a fair number of saavy independents and moderates wondering the same thing.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Paul Waldman writes, “The great Republican abortion backtrack has begun”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/republican-abortion-backtrack/
Do you want to know how frightened Republicans are by the sweeping turn abortion politics has taken since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in late June? Just look at what their candidates in swing states and districts are doing.
It amounts to a collective assertion that, well, maybe they didn’t really mean what they said.
A number of Republicans in tough races seem to have hit upon the same strategy to put them on the right side of public opinion.
Here are the new rules: First, stop saying you’re “100 percent pro-life.” That might be what Republican primary voters once wanted to hear, but now it’s radioactive.
Next, make the absurd and unsupportable claim that nothing has really changed when it comes to abortion. Instead, say that the realization of a decades-long Republican goal is less a legal revolution than an opportunity for some heartfelt, respectful conversation.
Then, stress your deep commitment to the welfare of all women. Stop talking about any particular pieces of legislation or constitutional amendments to ban abortion that you used to support. And if you have to say anything at all about policies and particulars, talk about the exceptions to abortion bans you support — even if you didn’t used to support them.
Finally, say Democrats are the real extremists by pretending that they support babies being aborted literally during delivery, something that, by the way, never happens.
The award for fastest U-turn on abortion goes (so far) to Arizona Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters, who scrubbed his website of statements saying he’s “100 percent pro-life” and erased any sign of his advocacy of a fetal “personhood” amendment, which would effectively make all abortions at any stage of pregnancy an act of murder.
Under fetal personhood, there would be no exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the pregnant woman. And it isn’t entirely clear when an abortion could even be performed to save the life of the woman, because the life of the fetus would legally be of equal value to hers.
That and other specifics are now gone from Masters’s site. In an ad, he now says “I support a ban on very late-term and partial-birth abortion” — and says no more.
Masters isn’t the only one taking an eraser to his record.
[O]ther candidates haven’t actually changed their positions or scrubbed their websites, but they are taking pains to strike a more modest pose than they had during the primaries.
[It] took no great insight to predict that once the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade there would be a political backlash; there were probably more than a few Republicans who hoped it would happen after the election so the threat to abortion rights wouldn’t seem so urgent. But those candidates often insisted to primary voters that their opposition to abortion was fundamental to their values and beliefs.
Now that those rights are being dismantled, they have to confront the fact that most voters never wanted abortion to disappear. They’ve chosen to do so by evading, distracting and misleading. But one suspects that voters will take them at their word — or at least what used to be their word.