Blake Masters.Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty
The Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona is apparently having second thoughts about his public embrace of2020 election liesas he trails in the polls ahead of the November midterm elections.
Blake Masters, a venture capitalist who’s running to unseat Democratic Sen.Mark Kelly, scrubbed his campaign website clean of false claims that the 2020 presidential race was stolen from former PresidentDonald Trump,CNN reports.
Before Arizona’s GOP primary on Aug. 2, the “Secure Our Elections” section of a page on Masters' site dubbed “The Masters Plan” stated the following:
“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.”
Now, the same section on The Masters Plan reads: “We need to get serious about election integrity.”
In a section on immigration, Masters' site declares, “Our border with Mexico is a disaster.”
Below that, the site previously stated: “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.”
The last sentence of that paragraph — which sounds a lot like the “great replacement” theory — is now gone.
(The Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that monitors activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists,calls the “great replacement” theorya “racist conspiracy narrative falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.")
The changes to sections of Masters' website were noted after he also reportedly changed language about abortion on his site.
According to NBC News, the site recently stated that Masters is “100% pro-life,” but it no longer does. Abortion rights are seen to be a major factor in how people will vote in the upcoming midterms, as underdog Democratic candidates nationwidehave gained in popularitysince theoverturning ofRoe v. Wade.
A line that detailed Masters' support for “a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed” was also removed, NBC News reported.
PEOPLE’s request for comment from Masters' team was not immediately returned.
He said in a JulyNBC News interviewthat he would have objected to the 2020 presidential election certification on Jan. 6, 2021, had he been a sitting senator at the time.
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“What [Sen. Josh] Hawley and, I believe, what [Sen. Ted] Cruz did was right,” Masters said, referring to two senators who did just that.
source: people.com
