Meghan McCain Shreds ‘Bizarre Tech Lord’ Peter Thiel For Trying to Buy Blake Masters a Senate Seat in Arizona

Meghan McCain lit into GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate in Arizona Blake Masters on Friday after Cook Political Report editor Dave Wasserman called the race for incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ).

With President Joe Biden’s low approval rating in Arizona and inflation hitting the state particularly hard, many observers and pundits believed Kelly was vulnerable this cycle, but the choice of Masters as his opponent seems to have helped him secure reelection.

McCain, the daughter of the late senator and Arizona icon John McCain, pulled no punches in arguing that Masters was a particularly weak candidate in a tweet on Friday.

“Maybe it’s a bad idea to let bizarre tech lords like Peter Thiel try and come into states they don’t live in and attempt to buy elections for their socially uncomfortable friends with no political experience whatsoever… Just saying,” wrote McCain.

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski also took a shot at Masters’s likeability on Friday, noting, “Peter Thiel‘s main backed candidate is currently running behind Mark Finchem who claimed that the Clintons murdered actor Paul Walker to stop him from exposing the Clinton Foundation.” Finchem is the controversial GOP nominee for secretary of state, who fervently denies the legitimacy of the 2020 elections and has spread other conspiracy theories.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal, poured in over 15 million dollars into Masters’s primary campaign and helped him secure the backing of former President Donald Trump.

Masters and Thiel have a long relationship as Masters served as chief operating officer of Thiel’s investment firm, Thiel Capital, and also president of the Thiel Foundation.

Thiel and Masters met while the latter was a student at Stanford and the two eventually wrote a book together. Noah Lanard wrote about the political philosophy that underpins both men, noting, “Years ago, the two men’s focus on electoral politics would have seemed unlikely. Earlier in his career, Thiel wrote about creating floating colonies in the ocean, while Masters told people not to vote. Since then, both have had changes of heart about means, not ends.”

While both Masters and Thiel dabbled in libertarianism, Lanard explains they shifted toward a desire to use government power to achieve their goals:

Instead of escaping state control, Masters and Thiel now hope to use its power to solidify the dominance of the founder class and end the technological stagnation they believe could lead to humanity’s extinction.