BUCK: Senate candidate in the great state of Arizona, Blake Masters, is with us now. Blake, thanks so much.

MASTERS: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

BUCK: So, I just want to have you react to on some of what Biden said yesterday about ghost guns as somebody who has actually built a firearm at home on your own. But first, here’s what Biden said yesterday in his speech.

BIDEN: The NRA called this rule I’m about to announce extreme. Extreme. Well, let me ask you, is it extreme to protect police officers, extreme to protect our children, extreme to keep guns out of the hands of people I couldn’t even pass a background check? Look. The idea that someone on a terrorist list could purchase one of these guns is extreme? It isn’t extreme. It’s basic common sense.

President Biden: “Is it extreme to protect police officers, extreme to protect our children? Extreme to keep guns out of the hands of people who couldn’t even pass a background check? The idea that someone on a terrorist list could purchase one of these guns is extreme.” pic.twitter.com/Jc3qAabnbj

— The Hill (@thehill) April 12, 2022

BUCK: Ah. Do you think it’s basic common sense, Blake, to ban these guns and take these actions? What do you say?

MASTERS: I do not think it’s common sense. It’s what Democrats always say, right, common sense gun control. No, it’s actually just about disarming law-abiding gun owners, right? It’s about making it as hard as possible for you and me and everybody listening to this program to own and use and, yeah, make firearms.

You know, most people don’t realize, but for our whole national history, even before 1776, including the Colonial days, it’s been legal for Americans to make firearms at home. You don’t have to ask the federal government for permission. You don’t have to go pass a background check. You can make guns at home. That’s been legal and now it’s under assault because Joe Biden wants to make it harder to do that. You know, it’s about disarming people. It has nothing to do with crime.

CLAY: Blake, why do you think we spend so much time talking about guns as opposed to the people who actually commit the crimes with the guns?

MASTERS: Well, basically, because Democrats don’t care about crime. You know, if they did — you know, we do have a gun violence problem in this country, it’s handguns, and it’s mostly gang violence, right? It’s gangs in Chicago shooting each other. It’s people in St. Louis, right, all these Democrat-run towns.

And Democrats don’t do that, right, they don’t want to clean that up. They like the George Soros funded prosecutors who don’t want to prosecute anybody. Right? By making it about guns instead of about criminals, it gives the Democrats license to go after me, to go after you, to go after any law-abiding gun owner ’cause ultimately they want us to become Australia, they want us to become Canada. They know that a disarmed society is easier to control.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Blake Masters right now, Senate candidate in Arizona. You are in a border state, as you well know, and things look like they’re gonna get even worse than they currently are when it comes to illegal immigration and the overall lawlessness at our southern border which, of course, includes the massive importation of fentanyl into the United States and other opioids which resulted in tens of thousands of Americans dying of drug overdose last year alone.

What are your expectations for how this is going to affect Arizona? And also, at a political level, what is the Biden play here? Clay and I have been pushing that around on the show trying to figure out, how do they think it’s anything other than an abject political nightmare for them to have up to 18,000 illegal crossings a day?

MASTERS: Well, the first thing they do is they tried to deny that there’s a border crisis, right? And they’re just hoping that they can get all these people in and give them amnesty. I really do think it’s as simple as they like the open border, they like the chaos that it causes, they want millions of people to come here so they can import a new electorate. That’s what Joe Biden is thinking to the extent he’s thinking anything at all.

What’s interesting now is, you know, they’re gonna repeal Title 42 and say if you thought we had a crisis now, just wait ’til May and June. It’s about to get a lot worse.

But, you know, my opponent here in Arizona, Democrat incumbents Senator Mark Kelly, he’s voting for all the open border stuff, but he has the audacity to now pretend to be moderate. He’s saying, “No, please, Mr. Biden, don’t repeal Title 42, that would be bad,” and he’s trying to have it both ways.

You know, they want to deny that their policies are causing this border crisis and then they want to pretend to be reasonable. Most people in Arizona, though, see through it. People are just sick and tired of the open border. It’s literally ruining our country.

CLAY: Blake, you’ve got a lot of experience with companies with running businesses that actually have to make money as opposed to just spend money, which is what our government does. It’s 8.5% inflation today, the highest in 40 years.

What should be done to bring inflation back down where it’s not becoming a tax on anyone out there who is living paycheck to paycheck and isn’t fundamentally destroying many different American lives from an economic perspective?

MASTERS: Yeah, the first thing to do is to just stop the bleeding, right? We cannot keep spending trillions and trillions of dollars. I mean, don’t fund this crazy Biden agenda, right? It’s — you know, Build Back Better, thank goodness they didn’t get it passed but they did get the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package passed, right? Trillions and trillions of dollars. And of course it just makes the problem worse.

They say inflation’s 8.5%, and that’s a high number, but what’s the real number? You know, if they admit it’s 8.5% you and I both know it’s well into the double digits when you actually factor in properly the things that people need like gas, housing, right, food prices, all the stuff that’s double-digit inflation.

And I think as long as you have a Democrat in the White House and a Democrat-controlled Congress, it’s just gonna get worse and worse.

BUCK: Blake, how could this get turned around? I always try to find — especially a day like today, there’s a lot a lot of bad news, a lot of stuff coming in that’s either, you know, awful or disappointing or any number, depending on whether we’re talking about the economy or the violence in New York, there’s so many different things going on at once.

But if we’re gonna turn this around and, you know, the midterm elections are gonna be here before we know it, Republicans won’t be really in a position to pass a lot in the sense that they won’t get it signed by Joe Biden, most likely, but they can at least start to talk about the agenda and hopefully in 2024 be in a position to implement it in a really meaningful way.

On an economic front, what does that look like? I mean, I think it’s clear to everybody the Democrats aren’t good at this. So how can Republicans tell everybody, what will they do that will make them better, that will actually make the situation and the economy improve?

MASTERS: Yep. Well, step one, you know, we retake Congress and make Biden a lame duck and you block his agenda, right? Then you’re just not contributing to the problem. And then we use those two years like you said to really prepare for winning back the White House in 2024 and, you know, present — Trump showed us the way here. His America First economic policies, you know, worked.

You know, not only did we have low inflation, I think it was under 3% every year in the Trump administration, but median wages actually started to rise under President Trump, right? The amount of money that everyday American workers were taking home went up under Trump for the first time in decades.

And so the America First policies, which are pro-business but also pro-worker, right, making sure we have good trade deals, making sure we’re actually making things here in America again and we’re not just, you know, dependent on China for absolutely everything like the Democrats want us to be.

Those sorts of America First policies, you know, they work. They might take two or three years to really get it done ’cause the Dems are causing so much damage, but this stuff work. And if we retake Congress and retake the White House in ’24 I know we can have a successful American future.

CLAY: Blake, we were talking yesterday about the fact that there’s a general consensus now that Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada all will decide 2022 and 2024. You were talking about taking back the House and taking back the Senate.

What are you seeing on the ground in Arizona right now, and how optimistic are you about Republican gains in 2022 in your state?

MASTERS: I’m very optimistic. You know, I do think we’re gonna have some sort of red wave ’cause Democrats, frankly, are blowing it so badly although I always caution people like don’t get complacent, right?

If you think there’s gonna be a red wave maybe you’ll just slack off and not do the hard work that it’s gonna take to create that red wave so we have to act like the underdogs, we have to play like we know the stakes. The stakes that we’re playing for the whole future of the country, right?

But if we work really hard, if we just get so upset and I’m telling you, the voters that I talk to, Republican voters but also independents, they are so upset at what’s happening. If we channel all that and run really strong candidates, I think we’ll be tremendously successful in November and beyond.

CLAY: Blake, I don’t know how well you know Elon Musk, but I know there’s a lot of overlap between Peter Thiel and a lot of the guys that you’ve worked with in your capitalistic career in business. What advice would you give Elon as it pertains to Twitter if he came to you — and maybe he has come to you — and said, “Hey, what should I do now? I’m sitting here with 9.2%. I obviously support,” Elon does, “the First Amendment, Twitter is not a free open marketplace now.

What should be done, what can be done, what would you tell him in terms of Twitter?

MASTERS: Yeah. I love what he’s doing, you know, I hope he increases his stake. Elon came to my book party and it’s called Zero to One, the book that I wrote, you know, one of his favorite books of all time. He’s just a breath of fresh air, you know, and I’m glad, frankly, that Elon decided not to join Twitter’s board.

I think the Twitter board wanted him to join right, it’s kind of like keep your friends close and your enemies closer kind of thing, but now Elon he doesn’t have follow all the rules, right, his ownership isn’t capped like it would be if he were on the board; so now he can just pressure for the reforms he wants and if he doesn’t get them, he’s a very wealthy man, he can buy up more and more of Twitter.

I’d love to see him buy 51% of the country, just control it, and let President Trump back on, right, and free speech. Everybody used to believe in this. Turns out today only conservatives do, only Republicans do. And I think Elon is doing great work here.

BUCK: Blake, if people want to learn more about your important candidacy here for the Senate seat in Arizona, where should they go?

MASTERS: BlakeMasters.com. Very simple, just my name, BlakeMasters.com.

BUCK: That works. Blake, thanks so much, man. Good luck to you.

MASTERS: Thank you. Talk soon.