Blake Masters, a Republican candidate running for US Senate from Arizona, sure hopes his endorsement from Donald Trump will get him the votes he needs to oust the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Mark Kelly. Masters, president of Rich Fuckwad Peter Thiel’s foundation, got the chance Saturday to show off just how perfectly he embodies the Trump Ethos when he was captured on video shoving a 73-year-old protester to the ground in an altercation at a GOP event in the Tucson exurb of Green Valley, Arizona.
To be sure, the protester, Peter Jackson (probably no relation to the Star Wars In Middle Earth director, who’s only 60), went to the event with the aim of peacefully making a scene, and good for him. He was wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and a “Jail Trump” hat, as well as an N-95 mask and a button saying “Fully vaxed,” so yes, he was in full trolling mode, and recording his visit with a cellphone in one hand and a GoPro camera in the other.
As will happen when dangerous radical troublemakers show up at a Republican event these days, members of the party that advocates tirelessly for free speech and against cancel culture all grudgingly put up with his presence, because after all, it would be hypocritical to eject him just for wearing a message they disagree with.
Haha, we are lying of course! They got in his face, called him a baby killer, and eventually one woman hauled off and punched him. He blocked her next punch, and then Masters came out of nowhere and knocked Jackson right on the ground for being a communist Black Lives lover, or, as Masters insists, for “hitting” the woman whose second punch he deflected.
Oh look here is the video Jackson recorded. It gets pretty shaky at moments, what with the nice Real Americans slapping and jostling and grabbing for Jackson’s cameras (in self defense; he was trying to terrorist them), but you get a pretty good sense of how things escalated from “Sir I’m asking you to leave” to THUD and Jackson being dragged outside.
Dan Shearer of the Tucson Sentinel blog interviewed Jackson, who said he considers today’s GOP a lot like 1930s Germany, which might explain how he got the Munich Beer Hall treatment at their little gathering.
“I went in hoping to be allowed to witness the event and listen to the candidates and possibly share the video I was obviously taking,” he said. “Post-event, I would like people to see that they’re not rational people. They’re really violent people. They’re people Americans should be concerned about.”
For reasons we can’t discern, Shearer calls that “hyperbole.”
After Jackson refused to leave, a number of people called 911, and one nice lady shoved her phone in his face to give Jackson a taste of his video recording medicine. Shearer narrates what comes next, and it matches what you see in the video; the screenshots below are Shearer’s, from Jackson’s video:
At one point, and just inches from his face, the woman reached out and shoved him in the side. Then she balled up her fist and delivered a right hook that snapped Jackson’s head back. […]
[The] video started getting a bit wobbly. But it’s clear enough to see that [Jackson] put out his hand and pushed hers away. He did not strike her, according to the video I saw. It was clearly a move to protect himself.
Then out of nowhere comes Blake Masters, a U.S. Senate candidate who’d been glad-handing in the background.
Masters lunged at Jackson, put both hands around his neck and pushed him backward.
Jackson falls down, after assaulting Masters’s hands with his neck there, and is physically dragged out of the building by several guys, while the loudest guy in the room — who’d been calling Jackson a baby killer and saying Jackson was “harassing everybody” just by being there — went on to accuse Jackson of assaulting the woman whose fist he deflected. “He attacked a woman! That’s what he’s doing! He’s attacking women, just like they attack innocent children!”
It’s all very like Rashomon, at least if Kurosawa had shot the movie in a single take and Toshiro Mifune had been a fat loudmouth with a cane. Darned if we can remember what that movie’s about.
Eventually, Pima County Sheriff’s deputies showed up and arrested the assailant: Jackson, because all the Republicans agreed he’d attacked the pink phone lady. In addition to one count of simple assault, Jackson also caught a trespassing charge. His initial court date is July 1, assuming the charges aren’t dropped first in light of the video.
When Shearer asked the Masters campaign about the video that “shows their candidate with his hands around an old guy’s neck,” he received a statement explaining, as if Masters had written it,
A left-wing activist came to a Republican event, started harassing people, and then hit a woman. I intervened and put an end to that. He was subsequently detained by the police and cited for assault. Let me be clear: if you come to an event I’m at and attack a woman, it’s going to be a bad day for you.
Gosh, he’s tough, intervening to protect a damsel from that mean man twice his age! And it was truly rude of Jackson to not let the damsel try to punch him in the face a second time. Masters also memorialized his heroism in a tweet showing him regaling a crowd with the story of how violent leftists who attack women will get what’s coming to them.
Oh, yes, also on Wednesday CNN reported that an audio recording has emerged of Masters telling rightwing activists at an IHOP in Phoenix earlier this year all about how he thinks the FBI secretly did January 6 as a false flag operation to make Trump supporters look crazy and violent, as if they needed help with that.
“Don’t we suspect that like one-third of the people outside of the Capitol complex on January 6 were actual FBI agents hanging out,” Masters asked at the GrassRoots Tea Party Activists of Arizona event. “What did people know and when did they know it? We got to get to the bottom of this.”
You might think that, plus the casual racism, plus the video showing him assaulting an old guy, would be the sort of things that would disqualify Masters from any possibility of being elected to the Senate.
Heck, from what we’ve seen of Masters, he might even agree: They make him look downright presidential instead.
[Tucson Sentinel / CNN]
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