How tech billionaire Peter Thiel promotes right-wing hardliners

Phoenix and Washington Around a hundred members of the Republican Party celebrate in a stuffy hall in Phoenix, the capital of the US state of Arizona. It smells like stale beer, nobody wears a mask here. Instead, the hooters are all the louder when a guest picks up the microphone.

One could almost think that Donald Trump speaks personally, some sentences sound so familiar. But the speaker is Blake Masters, who wants to move into the US Senate for the Republicans.

The tech entrepreneur is 35, has a boyish face, and wears a jacket with jeans and a t-shirt. He denounces the “brainwashing of the corrupt public education system” and railed against the “globalist elite” who betrayed American interests. It is all the more important to “crush” the Democrats in the important congressional elections in autumn 2022, he says. There is applause, the audience lifts plastic cups of alcohol into the air.