First off, I’m always in favor of kicking them when they are down:
Arizona’s Republican attorney general recently lashed out at hecklers who repeatedly interrupted him for not prosecuting 2020 election fraud cases more aggressively, telling them the “truth hurts.”
“I know people are upset. But you know what? We’re conservatives. The Constitution matters,” Mark Brnovich, who is running for U.S. Senate, said at a GOP primary debate in Phoenix on Thursday.
As he defended his office’s work to protect against election fraud, people continued to shout at him, leading him to tell the audience: “Please respect me and let me finish my answer.”
“If the truth hurts, then just shut the hell up, all right?” he added, according to AZ Central and footage from the event posted on social media.
Donald Trump endorsed one of Brnovich’s opponents, venture capitalist Blake Masters, earlier this month. The former president told supporters: “Blake knows that the ‘Crime of the Century’ took place. He will expose it and also, never let it happen again,” referring to the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Trump also accused Brnovich of not supporting “clean and fair elections, or law and order” and called him a disappointment because he wouldn’t do more to fight the results.
Want to know more about the GOP frontrunner? From The Daily Beast:
Republican senatorial candidate Blake Masters enjoys the financial and political support of his longtime friend, mentor, and billionaire business partner Peter Thiel, who is gay. But Masters, who attended Thiel’s wedding, also apparently believes Thiel’s marriage should be illegal.
“It’s not just Disney, you know—‘follow your heart,’” Masters said at a campaign event earlier this year. “It has a point.”
That “point,” he said, is making children. And since there’s no procreation within same-sex marriages, Masters reasoned, those unions don’t have a point—and therefore should be banned.
Masters, 34, shared this perspective in February with an audience at a Republican Women’s Club event in San Tan Valley, Arizona, where he’s running for Senate. The 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, he told this group, amounted to “squinting and making up so-called rights in the Constitution.”
“The Supreme Court should not be deciding gay marriage. If this country wanted to legalize gay marriage or recognize it, what you would do is you would have a Constitutional amendment. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to be hard for a reason,” he said. “Frankly, the Supreme Court just squinting and making up so-called rights in the Constitution—the right to privacy that was for abortion, the right to gay marriage—I disagree with that.”
Masters then pivoted to Thiel’s wedding for a real-world example, saying “I wish him well,” while in the next breath declaring that Thiel’s marriage should be against the law.
“My, you know, former boss and mentor Peter Thiel is gay. I went to his wedding like, you know, I’m—it was great, I wish him well. I don’t think the Supreme Court should have decided that case that way,” Masters said. He added that while he doesn’t think gay marriage is “the live issue right now,” he believes “marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Masters has the back of TFG:
Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters released a video on Monday showing him alongside former President Trump, who repeatedly praised Masters’s candidacy.
Trump endorsed Masters earlier this month in his August primary race against four other Republicans, with the winner facing incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in November in what is expected to be a close race.
“Blake Masters is an incredible person, a very smart guy and an ‘America First’ fighter,” Trump said in the video. “I endorse Blake because he will protect our border, he stands for life and he’s strong on election fraud. Frankly, he’s strong on everything needed to keep Arizona first.”
Trump’s mention of Masters’s anti-abortion stance comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday that overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.
In Arizona, providers have stopped providing abortions since the landmark case was struck down, citing a pre-Roe law still on the books that bans most abortions. A separate Arizona law that bans abortions at 15 weeks is set to soon go into effect.
Trump in the video took aim at two of Masters’s most formidable opponents, businessman Jim Lamon and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
“Mark Brnovich and Jim Lamon on the other hand will only let you down,” Trump said. “Blake Masters has my complete and total endorsement.”
Also:
A Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate in Arizona suggested privatizing Social Security on Thursday, arguing the safety-net program will be long gone by the time he reaches retirement age.
"We got to cut the knot at some point though because I'll tell you what, I'm not going to receive Social Security," GOP Senate primary candidate Blake Masters said at a primary debate hosted by the conservative group FreedomWorks. "I'm a millennial."
Masters argued it was time to overhaul the popular program. "We need fresh and innovative thinking, maybe we should privatize Social Security," he said. "Private retirement accounts, get the government out of it."
Social Security provides retirement monthly cash benefits to elderly and disabled people. For many years, Republicans advocated to slash spending on programs like Social Security and Medicare to rein in the national debt. But President Donald Trump prevailed on Republicans in 2016 to abandon that piece of their economic agenda and instead campaigned on preserving it, though he occasionally floated ideas jeopardizing the program's future.
Masters is floating a proposal that dealt a bruising political defeat to another Republican administration two decades ago. In early 2004, President George W. Bush embarked on a major push to privatize Social Security, laying out a plan for people to open their own private retirement accounts and providing the option to redirect payroll taxes into them.
FYI:
Also, in the Governor’s race:
Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona governor, was far from happy on Monday when Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked her about a report that linked her to drag queens.
The interview, which was fairly tame on Baier’s end, began with Lake falsely claiming that the 2020 election was “fraudulent” and that President Joe Biden is “illegitimate.” Baier responded by playing a tape of Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers testifying before the House Jan. 6 committee last week that the election was not “rigged,” as she believed.
“He is a Republican,” Baier said. “He is a Trump supporter. And that’s what he said.”
“He is a RINO,” Lake replied. “And he hopefully will be defeated. He is an absolute RINO.”
“I understand what you are saying,” Baier said later. “But there have been, as you know, more than 70 court cases where there was not evidence and there was not any state legislature or governor that failed to certify an election, including your own Republican Doug Ducey.”
After Lake insisted that “we now have evidence” that the election was somehow fraudulent, Baier moved on to a story from last week in which Phoenix-based drag queen Rick Stevens claimed that Lake often went to a club where he performed. Lake, he also claimed, hired him to perform at her home for her birthday.
“She’s friends with drag queens,” wrote Stevens, who provided photographs to Arizona Central as evidence. “She’s had her kid in front of a drag queen. I’ve done drag in her home for her friends and family. She’s not threatened by them. She would come to shows constantly. To make me be the bogeyman for political gain, it was just too much.”
Baier asked if Lake would like to respond to the story.
“I actually do care to address that,” Lake said. “But I’m really shocked. I’m actually appalled that Fox News would take a defamatory story like that—and we are pursuing legal action against this drag queen—I’m appalled that you would bring that up when you have not talked about our stolen election.”
“We just spent three questions talking about this,” Baier shot back.
“I’m really disappointed in Fox,” Lake said later. “I thought you were a little better than CNN.”
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