CLAY: Big battleground state for the United States Senate is going to be Arizona. And we are talking now to a candidate for the seat there in Arizona, Blake Masters, who is also incredibly accomplished in worlds of business and finance. Blake, appreciate you joining the Clay and Buck show. How is the campaign going? What are you seeing on the ground from voters in Arizona?

MASTERS: Well, thank you. It’s going well. People are fired up, you know. It is an election year now. I saw the shift in energy as we crossed from 2021 to 2022. You know, my campaign’s up and to the right. I’m beating my opponents in fundraising and getting out there and being bold in the media, and I think we’re gonna crush it this year.

BUCK: You know, Blake, the jobs numbers have come out, and they are, to put it mildly, not good right now for the Biden regime. (chuckles) “Companies…” This is CNBC headline from earlier today: “Companies Unexpectedly Cut 301,000 Jobs in January.” Now, the Biden talking point on this continues to be they had more “job creation,” they call it, in 2021 than at any time I think in the post-World War II era or something crazy like that.

What they mean is they’re counting jobs that came back online because of shutdowns before it. So, really, it’s just the end of shutdowns means there’s jobs that people weren’t allowed to do in restaurants, et cetera. What do you see really happening right now with the economy? ‘Cause it feels like the Biden team is running out of talking points.

MASTERS: Yeah. And that just shows you how desperate they are to cling to anything that they could call success, because they know it’s not going well. We feel it. We see it every day. It’s not going well. You know, Biden, at this point, is making Jimmy Carter look like JFK. And unfortunately for the country, you know, he doesn’t know how to manage anything. And I think we’re, you know…

We’re nominally inflation right now, they say, it’s 6 or 7%. I actually think it’s double digits, like the actual Costco basket of goods, you know, the people stuff — the stuff people need to buy every day to live. I think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. It’s why we need a change in leadership. Biden is just failing.

CLAY: Blake, you obviously have a lot of experience in the business world working with Thiel Capital, and you just referenced what’s going on with inflation. Buck just hit with you the overall numbers of jobs that are continuing to decline. What should be happening, in your mind, as a business guy in order to get the country back to the employment levels that it was in February and March before we shut down for covid?

MASTERS: Well, I think we need to stop paying people not to work. If you’re gonna lock down, obviously you need to support the small businesses that you’re forcibly closing. But we probably never should have locked down in the first place, you know, and right now, the business community is looking for some stability. They’re looking for some future they can be confident in.

And when the government is pursuing all of these reckless spending policies, paying people not to work — you know, print four or five trillion here, another trillion there — pretty soon, that’s real money. It adds up and it creates this inflationary spiral that I fear we’re just in the beginning. So I think literally reversing everything that Biden is doing, going back to President Trump’s America First economic policies, that would be a hell of a start.

BUCK: Speaking to Blake Masters, COO Thiel Capital, and he’s running for a Senate seat in the great state of Arizona. Blake, you also have been vocal on the issue of specifically illegal immigration and our wide-open southern border. There’s been a lot of stuff that’s come out in the last few days. Of course the Democrat-aligned media is suppressing most of it because it looks so bad for the Biden White House right now.

They had about 180,000 illegal — encounters with illegals — in the month of December for which we just got data. We’ll have the January data from DHS in a couple of weeks and everyone I’ve talked to — and I’ve been speaking to folks from Border Patrol, and I spoke to the former chief of Customs and Border Patrol yesterday — say that they expect that this year might be even worse.

Last year was close to two million illegal crossings. This year they think could be an even greater degree of a violation of our sovereignty. What do you think is gonna happen here, and what do you think should be done about the poorest — to put it mildly — really, the open southern border we have?

MASTERS: Well, it really is impeachable. There’s no other word for it. I mean, it’s criminal. Biden has thrown the whole southern border open. He’s basically ceded all of that sovereign U.S. territory to the Mexican drug cartels — and it’s not just drug cartels, right? These are professional criminal racketeering organizations. They’re trafficking, yeah, fentanyl. But also weapons, also women and children.

And, yeah, 200,000 that we know about every month. This is more than two million people per year. Over four years of Biden and Harris, you’re talking about eight or nine million illegal immigrants, and that’s more people than live in Arizona. So I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is an invasion. It’s outrageous — and he caused it, right?

It wasn’t perfect under President Trump, but it was pretty darn good. And all Biden had to do was nothing. Instead, he just reversed all the policies that were working. He invited millions of people to come here and — surprised, surprise — when you the invite the world to come into the United States, they will and we’re all paying for it.

CLAY: We’re talking to Blake Masters, candidate for the United States Senate in the state of Arizona. I’m sure you saw this story, too, Blake: Army soldiers who refused covid vaccine are going to be immediately discharged from service. That’s despite the fact — I’m sure you’ve looked at the data – that covid shots do not stop soldiers from getting Omicron and also these are, for the most part, young and healthy people that are being discharged from our services. What should happen, in your mind, with that policy?

MASTERS: Again, I think that policy is just criminal. And it’s obviously not about health. You know, the Democrats will say, “Oh, we want to, you know, maintain health and wellness in the enlisted ranks.” No. Like you just said, covid doesn’t hurt these young, healthy soldiers. If anything, you know, they shouldn’t get the shot, probably. It should be an individual decision but, like, why would a young and healthy soldier want the covid shot?

Probably doesn’t make sense for most of them. And so this, to me, is about power, right? The Biden administration is looking for an excuse — some pretext — to fire all of the people who don’t want to go on board with their agenda, and it’s really dangerous for our Armed Services.

BUCK: What is the top of the list for you of what…? If we have Republicans, if you’re part of a Republican majority Senate starting next year, what’s the top priority? What do you want to get done?

MASTERS: Well, we have to close the southern border and actually, you know, remember illegal immigration’s illegal. The correct amount of illegal immigration is zero. You know, but I wouldn’t just want to stop there ’cause, okay, you close border. Congratulations. What about election integrity? You could have a sealed border, but if you don’t have safe and secure and fair elections, you live in a banana republic.

But then gun rights are important too. You know, we can’t let our citizenry be disarmed because then we’ll have a totalitarian police state like Australia — and, you know, you could fix all those problems but if the government is just printing $6 trillion every year pretty soon inflation will be so bad you almost won’t have an economy so I almost don’t know which issue to pick because there’s like 10 that are existential and we’re going the wrong way on all of them.

BUCK: Blake Masters, candidate for Senate in Arizona COO of Thiel Capital. Blake, always enlightening, my friend. Thanks for joining us here.

MASTERS: Greatly to the chat with you. Thank you.