“If you’re not using any political power to shore up a good society that follows the rule of law,” Mr. No longer doctrinaire libertarians, they see coercive state power as an indispensable tool for achieving conservative ends: mandating patriotic curriculums in schools, supporting the formation of “native-born” families, banning abortion and pornography, and turning back the rights revolution for L.G.B.T.Q. Masters is unmistakably a figure of the New Right: militant, internet-savvy culture warriors who position themselves as insurgent challengers of the sclerotic establishment in both parties. To close followers of conservative politics, this message may sound familiar. Juxtaposing pastoral serenity with masculine violence, his ads conjure a latent darkness - an eagerness to subdue through coercion and threat - undergirding the American dream. Masters is trying to strike a similar balance. “Nostalgia,” he said, “is a powerful feeling it can drown out anything.” Instead, he wanted the film to feel like “a fairy tale, outside time.” This, he hoped, would “take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality.” Malick once told an interviewer that in filming “Badlands” - a movie set in 1958 about young lovers on a killing spree - he tried to minimize ’50s-era visual cues. Masters has said that his ads, which mingle scenes of wistful domesticity with bellicose rhetoric and stark vistas of Arizona wilderness, were inspired by the films of Terrence Malick, the enigmatic American director. “This is a short-barreled rifle,” he says. Masters stands in the desert cradling a gun. Masters and his family hiking at the golden hour. The camera floats above the ground, drifting after a boy’s legs running over the dunes and peering upward at Mr. The angles are wide, and the focus is deep. “And if we want to keep it, we’ve got to fight for it.” “The truth is, we can’t take America for granted,” he says.

Masters, a 35-year-old venture capitalist and, as of early Wednesday morning, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, delivers a monologue in voice-over. Blake Masters’s first campaign ad opens with a shot of the Sonoran Desert.

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