Corporate Media Are Afraid Of Blake Masters, So They Published His Decade-Old Emails

Samuel Mangold-LenettSeptember 8, 2022

The Huffington Post recently published a “trove” of emails sent by Blake Masters — the Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona — while he was in college. Allegedly, the emails illustrate Masters’ “embrace of contrarianism and devout libertarian ideals.”

HuffPost reported, “The messages were sent to the group email list of Columbae, a left-leaning vegan co-op at Stanford University where Masters lived and where the housemates made decisions based on a collective basis.”

The “trove” notably features messages in which he encourages his peers to be skeptical and not blindly buy into government narratives surrounding 9/11, tells them not to vote, and says NASCAR is “lame.”

So what?

Everybody changes and grows. Isn’t it likely that Masters — who at the time of this writing is 36 years old — has changed his outlook on life from when he sent those emails as a 19-year-old college student?

Obviously, he does not hold the same beliefs now that he did then. For instance, HuffPost cites an article Masters wrote for his school’s student paper in which he argued that “your vote is meaningless and it will not affect the outcome [of an election].”

Since Masters is now on the ballot in a statewide election, one can reasonably conclude that his views have changed in the nearly two decades since the article’s publication.

But more to the point, HuffPost’s piece is nothing more than a bad-faith attack on a candidate who is popular among “MAGA” Republicans and is within striking distance of a vulnerable Democratic incumbent.

Why would a leftwing outlet such as HuffPost mention that a Republican candidate thought NASCAR was “lame” in 2006? Because they think Republican voters are stupid and won’t turn out to support a candidate who — more than a decade ago — thought a sport popular among them was “lame.”

The piece also attempts to frame Masters’ encouragement of skepticism as though he is a crackpot conspiracy theorist who believes 9/11 was an inside job.

In one of the emails provided by HuffPost, Masters wrote, “The story we’ve been told about 9/11 may indeed be correct, but blindingly accepting it would be an error (as would accepting ‘conspiracy theories’ without reasonable possibilities/evidence presented).”

If skepticism about the government’s narrative of 9/11 is wrong, why did more than half of Democrats once believe that “people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks”?

What about the still widespread skepticism surrounding the 2016 election? In 2022, long after the Russia-collusion narrative was exposed as a hoax, 47 percent of Democratic voters still believe Russian interference changed the election’s outcome. Is this skepticism — peddled by the media and intelligence community — better, worse, or the same as a 19-year-old telling people they should question government narratives?

Prior to winning the Republican Party’s nomination for Senate in Ohio, text messages sent by J.D. Vance to an old roommate in 2016 surfaced in which the candidate likened Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. These comments made their way across social media with the express purpose of discouraging Ohioans from supporting Vance, who, shortly after their surfacing, secured Trump’s endorsement.

Nobody actually cares about Vance’s comparison or that Masters called NASCAR “lame.” The surfacing of these comments and the corporate media’s attempts at proliferating them are solely about keeping Republican voters — and independents — from supporting their party’s nominee in the upcoming midterm elections.

Instead of engaging voters on the issues that matter to them and their families, Democrats and their lackeys in the corporate media are doubling down on passing remarks made by people who weren’t even involved in politics at the time.

These tactics show that candidates like Masters are effective; why else would they try to scare people over emails he sent as a teenager?

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.