It is in my nature to like troublemakers. It’s part of why I always liked Rand Paul. I don’t agree with him all the time, but I like his spirit and perseverance, and he has conviction. Thomas Massie was a reasonable enough facsimile in the US House, but he didn’t lose because the GOP is done with liberty.
Massie’s loss is all on Massie, from what he decided to make the race about to the new “media allies” he didn’t rebuke.
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times became Thomas Massie’s best friends, which isn’t going to play well with most Republican primary voters. And it didn’t. It resulted in a brutal and embarrassing defeat. And while you can’t help who writes about you, you can respond to it and make sure your voters hear you. Massie didn’t, which suggests he was leaning into their embrace of him as a fellow Trump hater, whether that portrait is accurate or not.
In other words, if anyone killed Massie’s political career, it was Massie. This pull quote from Daniel McCarthy at The Spectator sells that pretty well.
What happens when a Republican congressman turns his primary election into a referendum on Donald Trump? What happens when he turns it into a referendum on Israel?
The answer to those questions should be stunningly obvious. There was never a reason to expect Kentucky to return a different verdict than anywhere else. Quite the contrary – it’s a staunchly red state. Asked to choose between Trump and a congressman who’d lately been garnering favorable coverage in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Republican voters were not about to abandon the president. The very things Thomas Massie’s newfound friends liked about him made him unacceptable to the people who actually vote in Republican primaries.
By the end of Massie’s re-election campaign, his coalition of supporters beyond his own congressional district included Democrats, anti-Zionists and anti-MAGA libertarians. Even neoconservatives developed a strange new respect for Massie.
The GOP didn’t kill Massie; that’d be Trump voters in Kentucky who also happen to be pro-Israel and anti-Iran.
You have to wonder if Massie’s voters grasp that there are more pieces on the board than a default anti-war attitude can account for. I have no idea, but you have to ask. What if the “war” in Iran ends wars in the Middle East for a few generations? What if it approaches the notion of liberty for Persian women and turns the Middle East into something other than a globalist conflict fantasy that endlessly drains resources that could be put to better use?
Sometimes you need to punch the bully in the nose and not trust the doomers and black-pillers telling you Trump is anyone’s puppet and this is another globalist forever war ATM. Anyone who has spent even just a few minutes with the guy knows that no one tells him what to do, that he listens and considers everyone’s counsel, and that he’s certainly not dumb enough to fall for the conspiracy theories that cost Massie his seat in Congress.
I’m not going to revisit all the layers here, but regular readers know. Being anti-war and anti-Israel right now, when Trump has 86%approval among Republicans, is giving your House seat to someone else because you are too stupid to hang onto it. Massie went left on the Jew thing. I mean, way Left, and even after he lost all, he could do was be a bitch and blame the Jews.
Rule # 1. If it looks like identity politics and smells like it, there are Proglodytes baking narratives. If you line up at that buffet, it’s on you. And that’s the new lazy, supposed rebel, right?
And I’m not saying you can’t criticize Jews or implicate them in awful things, from Communism to pedophilia, but the pool you put your toe in when you do that is filled with neo-Nazis, racists, cultural fascists (if not truly political ones), and lots of democrats. You are paying lip service to the intolerant left, and you are welcome to do that. There is a strain of fringy Libertarianism that has no problem dining with Jew-haters, and I can’t say if Massie went down that rabbit hole, but it sounds like he did.
Ironically, Massie’s defeat may be the beginning of something – a birth pang of a new coalition. His campaign showed that neocons, libertarians, and the establishment center-left can put aside their differences in a grand anti-MAGA alliance. That alliance was soundly beaten by the Republicans within the Republican party, but it may have better prospects in Democratic primaries, where hating Trump and/or Israel is already a requirement.
I’m not sure why Massie thought the Jewish conquest of the planet conspiracy was going to play well with rural Kentucky Republicans when we know it plays well with Southern Democrats.
As for all his chatter about Jews buying an election, Massie raised and spent over 4 million dollars to protect his incumbency. Ed Gallrein raised just over 2 million and spent less than one. Over 65% of all the money raised in that race went to Massie.
Apparently, the Jew Lobby money was more than four times as effective as the gentile money, which makes for a great conspiracy in itself. Hitler would have been all over whatever sorcery made that possible.
‘Good’ Company
Massie’s defeat puts him in an increasing group of soon-to-be former members of Congress and those whose aspirations were dashed on the rocks of a MAGA movement that does something you don’t typically see from rank-and-file Republican voters. They show up and support their President.
You don’t have to love Trump, but if you can’t see the chess moves from day one to today, the problem isn’t’ Trump, or Republicans, or Liberty, it might be an outdated political paradigm. The past 16 months have been a master class in unraveling the globalists and their war on the American Republic (foreign and domestic). If Republicans can keep Congress through the midterms, you’ll see something more. More accountability. More arrests of fraudsters and Deep State crooks. More peeling back the bureaucratic super-state, neutering of global interests and allies, and maybe even some meaningful high-value convictions.
Trump is pushing our enemies out of the entire hemisphere, making deals and securing real estate to keep them out. He waged an actual war on drugs that is having a real and meaningful impact. The war on crime has set records and made America safer from sea to shining sea. The war in Iran is about long-term stability in the Middle East for everyone, not just Israel, and an affordable energy future for all.
Trump has spent a lot of time building alliances and trade and investment deals across the region; these same people are not going to want them blown up.
If you sleep better thinking it’s all about Israel, may your narrow-minded pointy head rest easier.
I’ll admit that the Iran thing is probably dragging on longer than planned, but neutering Iran is key to so many great things in our future, and that of the world, that getting pissy about 4$ gas is just petty. If it all plays out well, gas and electricity could be cheap for decades thanks to Trump, and not just because of Iran.
And I’m sure Massie and Trump agree on a lot more than they disagree, but the former picked a fight at the wrong time with the wrong guy for the wrong reasons, and it cost him, and he isn’t alone.
Massie screwed up, but on a bright note, he was an asshole about losing. It makes it easy to dismiss any warm feelings I ever had about him.
