[As most readers of these pages have seen, Ryan McMaken wrote a succinct and sound election-night deconstruction of Massie’s defeat. See also the Power and Market podcast. What this essay would humbly like to do is add some larger historical context, courtesy of Murray Rothbard, and consider a way forward. As we will see, some of the people most fervently celebrating Massie’s political demise are in for a brutal reckoning. Massie’s only real crime was trying to save them from it.]
The last libertarian of the Ron Paul-Harry Browne stripe in Congress, Thomas H. Massie is now gone. Trump cultists and war hawks have been steadily celebrating since election night. On Polymarket, Massie looked as if he were headed for a decisive win as late as May 16 (62 percent versus 39.7 percent). Just two days later the probabilities had completely flipped for the Trump-endorsed amorphous shadow going by the name of Ed Gallrein (61 percent versus 39 percent).
Obviously Trump’s Truth Social attacks on Massie took a toll. Then came the three billionaires—Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson—funding the dissemination of ads containing confabulations to outright lies about Massie. The slanders were then propagated by Trump influencers who obediently parroted them with a Stepford-wives conformity.
Never out of the mix of political treachery, as when it was routinely spreading despicable defamations about Ron Paul, was the Fox News Channel. Top prize goes to Laura Ingraham—the career-first, never-married “Catholic” single mom who now sits in the Fox Culture Warrior seat (faith, family, and relationships guru) last occupied by the serial sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly.
Laura has had Massie on her show several times for glowing interviews. On election eve she was all-in on Gallrein, giving him a prominent set-up infomercial and softball interview. Besides letting Murky Ed flagrantly lie that The New York Times endorsed Massie, the spin of the segment was that Massie is an un-American traitor because he was receiving support from Americans outside Kentucky. This was as laughable a chutzpa as chutzpa can get, as anyone with a normally functioning brain knows that multiple millionaires and billionaires in New York and Israel were steering millions of dollars to Gallrein.
Nevertheless, Ingraham and the rest of Fox’s comely anchors are billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s eye candy for white-haired Boomer men, and despite their mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to second-stage Alzheimer’s, got the message—Massie: RINO, secret member of Hamas, sexual predator—and showed up in sufficiently large numbers to ensure a Massie loss. As Ryan McMaken averred, Massie solidly won age-55-and-under voters.
Massie’s defeat will be one of the most pyrrhic victories ever for the establishment since—ignoring Ed Rollins and Sarah Palin’s warnings—it viciously trashed Ron Paul in 2012, then frantically tried to undo the damage for Mitt Romney too late before Romney was solidly beaten by Obama.
Past is Prologue
Thomas Massie—a rock-solid principled, unswervingly honest, and seven-term congressman representing the fourth district of Kentucky—ends his career smeared as a jihadi, sexual predator, and traitorous crook? Where did this surreal nonsense come from? The ultimate answer to the latter question goes back to the earliest roots of the military-industrial state.
The National Defense Act of 1916 shifted production from government-owned and government-run arsenals and ship-building firms to private industry. Vast private capacity was effectively and perversely nationalized by cost-plus contracts (cost plus a fat fixed profit). Next came the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 (signed in March, well before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor) where Britain, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union (which murdered 20 million people), and China were provided military aid. This marked the crucial turning point of the military takeover of private industry. After World War II ended in 1945, a substantial amount of former consumer-production capacity still produced military aircraft and tanks instead of reverting back to consumer goods as it had after World War I. Two years later economist Winfield Riefler coined the term “military-industrial complex.”
All of this was fine with the progressive American establishment. The problem was the American “right” (more precisely, anti-statists), where a number of prominent and influential writers and theorists still promoted the vision of the founding generation, especially James Madison, on the myriad menaces of a federal peacetime permanent military that would do little else but spur higher taxes, higher debt, more tyranny, and unnecessary wars. They also echoed George Washington on the perils of abandoning neutrality and having allies.
Among these true philosophical heirs of the US founding were Frank Chodorov, Albert Jay Nock, Felix Morley, Suzanne LaFollette, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston. The most popular columnist in America at the time was the fiercely anti-war libertarian John T. Flynn—the absolute bête noire of the progressive establishment who wanted Flynn gone.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created in 1947 with one of its chief missions to use any and all means (especially control of mass media) to clear away the last resistance to the massive military-industrial-domestic spy state it wanted.
At Yale University, Willmoore Kendall (1909–1967) recruited Yale student William F. Buckley (1925–2008) to the CIA. Buckley graduated in 1950 and in 1951 published the first conservative movement book, God and Man at Yale. Four years later, National Review—the flagship organ of American conservatism—was founded by four CIA operatives: Buckley, Kendall, James Burnham (1905–1987), and William Casey (1913–1987). In 1966—30 years before the creation of the Fox News Channel—the conservatives had acquired a mass medium through the television show Firing Line. By then, with Lyndon Johnson’s progressive Great Society program (1964–1968) halfway in place, the foundation of the modern American welfare-warfare state was essentially complete.
Lessons from Murray Rothbard: Conservatism and Conservatives are the Real Enemies
Economist Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) not only exposed Buckley’s sham spook-formed “freedom movement” (American conservatism), but revealed the perfect symbiosis between progressives and conservatives, who separately and alone could never put together the full military-industrial-security-welfare state of today. The progressive half was comprised of social programs that enabled the ruling class to purchase public obedience and grow dependency, bureaucracy, and voting constituencies.
The conservative half—fulfilling James Madison’s worst fears—has little if anything to do with defending the homeland against actual enemies but instead creates endless foreign bogeymen (e.g., North Vietnamese [1955], Iraqis with phantom nukes [2003], Iranians with phantom nukes [2026]) as a pretense for infinite foreign entanglements that enrich the military-industrial-state security complex and establishment elite.
The relatively recent alleged conversion of many conservatives to war skepticism (e.g., Ingraham) is a recent phenomenon supposedly conveying that they learned their lesson from Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This is a farce on par with supposed conservative concerns about the size of the national debt, all while they continue federal spending like drunken sailors. As with Ingraham, when the bombs started dropping on Iran on February 28, most went from alleged skeptics to, at the very least, reluctant supporters.
Finally, the demise of the anti-statists left one other interesting phenomenon. Besides an incoherent political philosophy and contradictory economics (e.g., National Review contributor Ernest van den Haag was a fervent Keynesian), conservatives and their movement cultivated cultural absurdities going way beyond career-first, never-married “Catholic” single moms posing as faith, family, and relationships authorities.
Whereas the George W. Bush cult of 2002 merely served up memes on FreeRepublic portraying George W. Bush as King David wielding a blood-drenched sword while slaughtering throngs of “towelheads” after 9/11, today’s Trump cult just rotely replaces Jesus with Trump healing the world as messiah. In Emily Compagno’s Under His Wings (2024), bombing, maiming, and droning are all condoned by God if done in furtherance of the American empire. At a “Christian” worship service, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth read fake scripture (“CSAR 25:17”) not based on the Bible (as he claimed) but on a ritual speech given by a hitman whenever he executes enemies in the movie Pulp Fiction. Franklin Graham, at a recent White House Easter lunch, endorsed the current war on Iran as blessed by God.
The Future
Thomas Massie was doomed by all of the special interests committed to maintaining the gravy train of the welfare-warfare edifice, from military contractors and their bought politicians to Zionists who want an endless flow of US support for Israel to the mainstream legacy media who make a living reporting on the endless machinations of leviathan. War is great for Nielsen ratings and browser clicks.
The glue that holds the dual state together is of course the Democratic-Republican duopoly. No lasting success in recovering a true representative republic will ever occur before the two-party cartel is dissolved. An important first step would be Massie running for the presidency in 2028, first as a Republican in the GOP primary (which will surely be rigged against him) and then as an independent or libertarian in the presidential election. Ron Paul would have been an absolute terror to the establishment had he done this back in 2012, but at 76 years of age he was understandably tired of it all and returned to Texas. Massie is much younger at 55 and should have a lot more energy and years left to educate younger generations. The good news is that he has already filed for the 2028 congressional race and can decide on a particular federal office to pursue later. The beginning of retaking the country back from corrupt special interests lies in a starkly different alternative based on the founders’ philosophy and one outside the ruling duopoly.
