A trove of emails Trump-backed Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters sent while in college have been made public, revealing he called the US “fascist” and defended conspiracy theories around the September 11 terror attacks.
HuffPost obtained the emails signed by Mr Masters, a Republican candidate funded by libertarian businessman and Donald Trump ally Peter Thiel, while he was attending Stanford University in 2006. They were reportedly included in an email list kept by Columbae, a leftist vegan co-op at the university that Mr Masters lived in.
The messages paint a picture of Mr Masters as a radical libertarian ideologue, sharing divisive opinions such as his belief that the Unabomber was an "underrated" thinker. He also toe-dips into conspiracy theories like the idea that the "Houses of Morgan and Rothschild" were partially the cause of the US entry into World War I.
Regarding conspiracy theories, Mr Masters said "there is absolutely nothing wrong with being a 'conspiracy theorist' or a 'revisional historian,'” calling them "ad hominem" attacks intended to "discredit anyone considerably outside the mainstream account."
He also questioned official accounts of the 9/11 terror attacks, sighting the sinking of the Lusitania that prompted the US's entry into WWI as precedent.
“The story we’ve been told about 9/11 may indeed be correct, but blindly accepting it would be an error (as would accepting ‘conspiracy theories’ without reasonable possibilities/evidence presented),” Mr Masters wrote.
“When something like 9/11 happens, you’ve gotta ask, ‘who benefits?’ There are a couple of different answers to the question, and we ought to evaluate them all, including our alleged protectors. Especially when the U.S. government has shown in the past that sacrificing citizens for political goals is something that its willing to do.”
He also claimed that the US under the administration of former President George W Bush was a "fascist" state and advised his peers to abstain from voting, calling the act immoral as "most people are voting to increase coercion against others" through taxation or "aggression against innocent people."
“Economically speaking, you’re wasting your time at the polls,” Mr Masters wrote. “Sure, you can get all patriotic on me and claim some subjective inner fulfillment of your duty as a good citizen and all that mumbo jumbo. Fine. I can’t argue with you there. But your vote is meaningless and it will not affect the outcome. Period.”
Mr Masters responded to the email leak by handwaving his words away, chalking them up to youthful idealism.
“The left-wing media, of course they were going to try to smear me, call me a racist and a sexist and a terrorist,” he said in a Twitter post. “They’ll pore over whatever I may have written as a teenager, try to twist it all out of proportion.”
