Blake Masters is running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Sen. Kyrsten Sineman, D-Ariz. He is a conservative conservative who is running on a platform that is much different than the typical Republican presidential candidate. In this episode, we talk about his path to the Senate seat, why he s running, and why he thinks Joe Biden should go home.
00:04:10.160And I think Republicans just got complacent and they got comfortable playing defense.
00:04:16.020And it was just sort of George W. Bush, you know, like I'm a good guy and we'll just we'll have some good faith disagreements.
00:04:21.800And in retrospect, I think the George W. Bush administration was really bad.
00:04:25.860Like we got the Iraq War and trillions in spending and they centralized education policy, you know, with no child left behind in D.C.
00:04:33.800And we didn't even get a whole lot of cultural or social conservatism because it just led to Obama.
00:04:39.480And so with the Republican establishment that's just content to play defense and just kind of more or less mindlessly repeat whatever Reagan said in his time, I think the party just kind of fell asleep at the wheel.
00:05:40.260But the media, the blue checks, the sort of credentialed, you know, corporate media, they want to gaslight us and insist that this was the most perfect election of all time.
00:06:22.500They were priming the country to accept the chaos, you know, that would come after the election.
00:06:29.500And then, of course, you had big tech censorship.
00:06:31.760I wrote an op-ed with J.D. Vance in the New York Post about this.
00:06:36.000Facebook and Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.
00:06:40.280Just saying 100 million Americans couldn't read that anymore because that's misinformation.
00:06:45.000They did that three weeks before the election.
00:06:46.500But that's true information from a true newspaper that was bad for Joe Biden.
00:06:51.740And the official margins in this 2020 election were so thin, were so small, that I think even that one brazen act of corporate censorship could have swung the election.
00:07:01.580Let alone Mark Zuckerberg personally spending $420 million on allegedly neutral election administration, right?
00:07:07.720You look at how that money was farmed out.
00:07:24.880And if you look in Pennsylvania, for instance, the use of widespread mail-in ballots in clear violation of the state constitution, no matter what the state Supreme Court has to say.
00:07:33.280I mean, there were all of these problems.
00:07:35.960If three billionaire oligarchs led by hipster Rasputin, Jack Dorsey, if they're going to control speech in a republic, they're not just controlling one aspect of the society.
00:07:46.960They're controlling the whole way that the government is administered, right?
00:07:51.420We govern ourselves by persuading one another and communicating.
00:07:57.020And the fact that you're willing to risk being called an insurrectionist terrorist or whatever nonsense, you know, the blue checks are going to say, I think that that shows a lot of courage.
00:08:08.140But one aspect of your campaign that has not gotten a ton of play, and I think it should, it's not just a relitigating what has happened in the past, but you are looking down the line on issues that will affect the country, not just a year or two from now, but decades and decades from now.
00:08:25.320You're looking at the collapse of the American family and what it is that we as Republicans or conservatives or Americans broadly can do about it.
00:08:34.560Yeah, I mean, I'm a super pro market, super pro business guy.
00:08:41.760But I think markets are tools for human flourishing like the free market is not some some ultimate goal.
00:08:50.280You know, the free market is one of the most powerful ways we have to achieve the ultimate goal, which is human flourishing, which is successful human families, right, which is a strong American middle class.
00:09:00.760And I think for too long, again, Republicans got stuck in this rut where they would just repeat sort of Reagan economic orthodoxy and you, you know, they bury their head in the sand and it's like a bunch of ostriches just with their head in the sand and you're failing to pay attention to the consequences of your policies.
00:09:17.480Well, with all the offshoring, you know, with all the sort of pro big business policy that we've had in the past few decades, I think big business has done great.
00:09:29.100Increasingly, big business is left wing and it's sort of fused with, you know, with state power in very problematic ways.
00:09:35.520But the middle class has not done great.
00:09:37.220The middle class has been hollowed out and it's harder and harder to start a family.
00:09:49.600And this is kind of a disaster because I think if you can't participate in an economy and, you know, actually have a reasonable expectation of getting married and having kids and raising a family starting in your late 20s, then like what's good?
00:10:02.800That's GDP may be like super high, but what good is it for if the middle class in America is just getting hollowed out?
00:10:09.460You know, this reminds me of a point that the English writer G.K. Chesterton made, which is one of the things that's gone wrong in the world is not that the vices have run wild.
00:10:49.580That means making sure – actually, this is another point that you've brought up that sent shockwaves through the Republican establishment.
00:10:56.020You think that – you think we ought to go back to the old-timey terrible days when a family could support itself on one income.
00:11:04.640It's amazing to me that that's always so controversial whenever I say it.
00:11:08.660All I say is in America, you should be able to raise a family on one single income, right?
00:12:49.280And so what happens is you have to send the kid to daycare very shortly after the kid is born in a lot of cases.
00:12:55.560So that I, my wife needs to go out and work for some other guy so that she can make money so that I can pay some other woman to raise our kid.
00:13:05.360Does that seem like the most efficient way, the best way to have a family in the United States?
00:14:43.460Well, all too often, you've seen conservatives become these egghead, spreadsheet-loving theoreticians who are pushing a vision and a narrative that is really divorced from the reality on the ground.
00:14:58.240You know, for so long, especially in the last 20 years, you'd hear Republicans say, everything's going great for the middle-class Americans.
00:15:25.360Senator Masters makes it to Washington, D.C.
00:15:28.460What is the first sort of legislation that you start pushing?
00:15:31.980Day one is just close the border to illegal immigration.
00:15:36.380You know, Bernie Sanders used to be free to talk about this.
00:15:39.020He knew that unlimited illegal immigration actually depresses the wages for working-class Americans.
00:15:45.820For the last five or ten years, he hasn't really been able to talk about that because the left wants open borders, I think, for maybe electoral purposes later down the line.
00:15:54.540But, you know, stop the glut of illegal immigration.
00:15:58.040I think we probably have too much legal immigration, too.
00:16:00.460Most people are shocked on the campaign trail when I tell them that we actually accept more than one million legal immigrants every year, you know, with various kinds of visas.
00:16:09.940And I've seen in the Silicon Valley context, the H-1B visa system is completely abused.
00:16:15.560You know, of course, Facebook would love to import tens and tens of thousands of software programmers from India and pay them less money than they would have to pay, you know, a U.S. citizen to do those jobs.
00:16:27.240But I think we've got to, you know, drastically curtail, if not, like, end that program because I think American jobs, by default, should go to American citizens.
00:16:35.780But broadly, you need policies that, A, raise wages and, B, cut costs.
00:16:40.060You know, the costs of health care and education and housing, this step just goes up and up every year.
00:16:45.280We start to think of it as like a law of physics.
00:16:48.260But actually, when you zoom in on these industries, there's a lot of regulation, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of sort of cartel-like, monopoly-like behavior.
00:16:55.520And I think if you go in with the sort of machete and you intelligently sort of hack through the brush, there's a lot we can do to make sure that we can build more housing, that we can deliver health care in less bureaucratic and less expensive ways.
00:17:09.700So if we can get people's wages to rise and costs to fall, all of a sudden, you know, five or ten years from now, I think you can get back to a place where you can raise a family on one single income.
00:17:51.440It was a Harvard-Harris poll around 2019 that asked people their views on illegal immigration and legal immigration.
00:17:59.360And the phrasing of the survey was such that they were just talking about numbers.
00:18:04.420And because, as you know, most people don't realize how many immigrants are pouring into the country every year.
00:18:09.060When they were asked what number seemed about right, people settled on around half a million legal immigrants coming in every year.
00:18:16.560Now, of course, we know the real number is much, much higher than that.
00:18:18.980And so the survey concluded that the majority of Americans, that includes many Democrats and includes many independents, want to drastically reduce legal immigration as well.
00:18:29.000So why is there such a huge divide here between an issue that is very popular among the American people and unheard of among the political class in either party?
00:19:46.840But I think that's honestly probably, like, 10,000 to 50,000 people a year.
00:19:50.400And that's not just, it's not 500,000, it's not a million.
00:19:56.220And so I think we just need to radically reform these systems because I don't think they work to the benefit of the average American.
00:20:01.680And that should be the fundamental litmus test of any immigration policy is does this policy make things better for the average American?
00:20:08.420If it does, it's probably a good policy.
00:20:10.260And if it doesn't, then throw it to the curb.
00:20:12.700Now, this lens, which makes sense to me, this lens is not very common in the Republican Party.
00:20:19.320At least it hasn't been in recent years, which is you're saying what I'm going to do is I'm going to push for good policy and I'm going to oppose bad policy.
00:20:27.180And I'm going to push for things that make the real lives of Americans better.
00:20:30.020And I'm going to oppose things that make the real lives of Americans worse.
00:20:33.160Because it seems to me the lens on the Republican Party, in the Republican Party for the past couple of decades is deregulate.
00:21:21.680But even the social and cultural institutions look at the look at the church, look at formerly neutral institutions or center right institutions like the military.
00:21:29.980You know, you've got General Milley up there testifying about white rage and how he reads Mao and Marx and he's teaching soldiers about critical race theory.
00:21:37.900And meanwhile, like they forget how to win wars.
00:21:40.640You know, I think it's just such a disservice to the service members, actually.
00:21:45.460But the progressive left is ascendant and they intend on concentrating power on monopolizing it.
00:21:55.820They really do want a sort of one party, I think, totalitarian state like that's that's what they want.
00:22:02.820And so if they're going to use political power, you know, they have no qualms about that.
00:22:06.720They don't care about the Constitution.
00:22:08.040They don't care about the rule of law.
00:22:09.340We do care about that stuff on the right, except, like you said, most Republican politicians, they just don't want to do anything.
00:22:16.500And if you just play defense, if you don't want to use state power to actually, you know, make a safe and functioning society for people and the left is just going to use that power, then you're going to lose.
00:22:27.340And that's why the left has taken over.
00:22:29.580And so this sort of libertarian Republican thing, I'm sympathetic to it because I don't, you know, I'm cautious of government power, unlike the left.
00:22:37.680But if we don't stand up and defend ourselves, they will take over this country and they tell us what they're going to do.
00:22:42.480They're going to add states to the union so they can get a lock on the Senate forever.
00:22:45.860They're going to pack the Supreme Court.
00:22:47.480They're going to federalize elections.
00:22:49.620We have to be willing to use power to prevent them from being able to do that.
00:22:53.280Otherwise, there's no USA in just 10 or 20 years.
00:23:06.640Culturally, something in common makes a nation, but the left wants to tear apart the things that we hold in common.
00:23:14.240And very often that the kind of libertarian strain in the Republican Party has also pushed back against the ideas that we have anything in common, that we have mutual obligations to one another, that we actually ought to have some things that are unifying us as a country.
00:23:28.480One of the topics that's come up a lot recently is whether or not the country is just going to crack up.
00:24:26.740It's the opposite of this crazy, toxic left-wing stuff that they're teaching in schools, like the 1619 history curriculum, which is actually in some school districts in Phoenix.
00:24:36.060It teaches that the country wasn't founded in 1776.
00:24:39.300It was founded in 1619 when the first slave ships came.
00:24:41.860And kids learn that our Constitution is discardable and, you know, evil because the founding fathers were racist.
00:24:49.240And I just think that's the biggest difference between the progressive mind and the conservative mind.
00:24:53.500The progressive sees that, okay, the past wasn't perfect.
00:24:56.400And so you throw out everything or the, you know, society is not perfect today.
00:25:01.740I think it's the best that's ever existed, but it's not perfect.
00:25:04.280And so they want to say, because it's not perfect, burn it all down.
00:25:06.800And that's the Bolshevik mentality, whereas the conservative says, yeah, it's not perfect, but let's work to make it better.
00:25:12.400And let's keep and understand and respect everything good that's come before us, right, that tradition, those bonds.
00:25:18.800And so that's the fundamental goal is which way do we break here?
00:25:21.280But that's why I think, you know, my campaign and my political mission, it's this war on progressivism because I do think it's destroying America.
00:25:31.320And if we don't do our jobs in 10 years, yeah, America is still here.
00:25:34.340I mean, the White House will still exist, but, you know, it'll be a one-party totalitarian state.
00:25:38.860It'll be California, just worse, and it'll be managed decline like Western Europe.
00:25:43.600And I think America in its sort of spiritual sense will be gone forever.
00:25:47.440Well, and you've hit on this issue of education.
00:25:49.840You're seeing that rot go all the way down.
00:25:52.600This education issue just cost Terry McAuliffe the governorship in Virginia.
00:25:57.420Yeah, I mean, by the end of that campaign, it was all about do you, the parents, have the right to raise your kids or do I, Terry McAuliffe, have the right to raise your kids and fill their heads with critical race theory and transgender ideology, neither of which are being taught in schools, but both of which are really great and we should teach them in schools.
00:26:13.540They kept going back and forth on their line there.
00:26:33.260Why is education becoming the new grassroots issue-driven movement?
00:26:39.320Well, I think it's one consequence, one of the only maybe good consequences of the COVID pandemic was for the first time parents actually saw what was being taught to their kids.
00:26:50.020It's like, my kid's listening to that crap for eight hours a day.
00:26:54.020And so, you know, you see this sort of reaction against that.
00:26:57.840Whereas before, I think the bias is to always think, oh, the bad stuff is happening in other schools.
00:27:35.780You know, I think school choice is sort of the civil rights issue of our time.
00:27:39.540You should not be relegated to some failing school just because that happens to be, you know, your zip code or your state assignment.
00:27:47.360I think that if, you know, if you're paying dollars into the education system, but you prefer to homeschool your kid, I think you should be able to get all that money back.
00:27:56.060Or at least a lion's share of it so that you can homeschool.
00:27:58.620And if you look at the polling, more people would want to homeschool if they could afford it.
00:28:03.320And again, you can't really afford it because we live in a society where you need two incomes to make ends meet.
00:28:07.980But if parents could afford to, more people would do it.
00:28:10.900More people would create sort of neighborhood schools.
00:28:13.200We want to decentralize, you know, the system as much as possible and put power back in the hands of parents.
00:28:18.660Again, maybe hard to do, but that's the goal.
00:28:20.960And then policies that work towards that are almost, by definition, good.
00:28:24.080Well, and so I guess this leads into the broader picture too.
00:28:28.440You know, yes, there are some concrete ways to do it, but it's going to be an uphill climb.
00:28:33.440What about the broader political problem?
00:28:35.940We touched on it a little bit at the top, this problem of election integrity.
00:28:38.780But really, we call it the swamp or the blob or this ugly connection between the government and big tech.
00:28:47.140You know, it used to be public versus private enterprise.
00:28:49.900Now, it's a little bit of a blurrier line between those two and the universities and the media and the whole liberal blob working in concert with one another.
00:28:59.980How is one guy, sharp though he might be, focused though he might be, how is some senator from Arizona going to help to drain that swamp?
00:29:09.520You know, I think just going in with clear eyes about it, I know how hard it's going to be.
00:29:16.340Like, I know it's, you know, it's probably literally impossible, of course, for me to do it by myself, but I'll try to be a leader and recruit others to the cause.
00:29:25.800You know, I do think one individual senator actually has so much more power, even legislatively, than people think.
00:29:30.860There's all sorts of interesting procedural rules and hacks that you can really familiarize yourself with.
00:29:37.880You have a lot of power in that chamber.
00:29:39.580Most people don't use it, right, because the whole pressure is to go along to get along, you know, just do whatever leadership says.
00:29:47.660And I definitely don't intend on doing that.
00:29:50.320So I think I can actually be quite effective.
00:29:52.100I also want to use the cultural power of the Senate seat.
00:29:56.180You know, I think most, there's a handful of examples that do this, but most don't do this.
00:30:01.080And part of it is, yeah, can I inspire a new generation of people to run for office or to get involved?
00:30:07.700Can I be a messenger for the right kind of ideals?
00:30:10.760We can learn from the left, like the left advances statement legislation, you know, that might look really crazy or really radical one year, like it's not going to pass.
00:30:19.960But then they introduce it the next year and the next year and the next year.
00:30:23.080And pretty soon they move the Overton window so that that idea is sort of more legitimated in the public mind.
00:30:28.760And then all of a sudden, seven years later, boom, it's law.
00:30:30.940Like, look, I think the Green New Deal is still really crazy.
00:30:33.720But it was, but everybody knew it was crazy when AOC first came on the scene and started blabbering about it.
00:30:38.860And now, you know, they just kind of beat people down and we're at risk of passing that.
00:30:44.800And I think Republicans don't use those same tactics, but we absolutely can.
00:30:49.400And so I think you could just get me and J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz.
00:30:53.780Like, we've got a core group and you throw a few more and all of a sudden there's sort of a new balance of power in the Senate.
00:30:59.340I think that could be very, very interesting.
00:31:00.940You know, I'm so glad you brought up the Green New Deal example.
00:31:03.580I remember when AOC came out with the Green New Deal, Mitch McConnell said, well, we need to bring this to the floor for a vote immediately.
00:31:10.340This is the craziest thing I ever saw and we're going to get you on the record.
00:31:17.160It remains crazy legislation, but through that persistence, through that willingness to wield power, the power that I guess her constituents sent her to Congress to wield, it has been normalized.
00:31:28.220And they have moved, as you say, the Overton window.
00:31:30.140And I think you are demonstrating a clarity of vision here, even among your potential future colleagues who will be more amenable to that view as well.
00:31:41.060There is a lot of power, actually, in the Senate.
00:31:43.660And Republicans, a lot of Republicans have just derelicted their duty and given that up for ideological reasons or for cowardice or for ignorance or whatever.