By: Charles Romans
Carter County Times
U.S. Representative Thomas Massie may have lost his primary last week, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s done with politics. Massie, who represents Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District, was in Greenup before that primary where he spoke to a gathering of Republican supporters and was introduced to the crowd by Kentucky Senator Robin Webb.
Webb told the crowd that she was glad to be there and was excited about the upcoming primary. “I’ve known him for many years,” Webb said of Massie. “And our families go way back.”
Like the former Democrat, who parted ways with her party because of fundamental differences in values she said they no longer reflected, Massie acknowledged that his convictions and priorities weren’t always easy to pigeonhole and sometimes put him at odds with the administration. But despite this, he emphasized his conservative bona fides – noting that he only broke from the party when he believed their actions hurt working men and women.
“I have been accused of not always going along with the party,” Massie began his speech. “I try to do everything I can for the party, but when the party is wrong, I don’t go along to get along.” Massie said that he does vote with the party ninety percent of the time, but that it was more important for him to vote for what is right than what the party wanted.
“Because,” he explained, “ten percent of the time they are wrong.”
“The problem isn’t that ten percent of the time I vote against Republicans in DC,” Massie told the crowd. “The problem is, in that ten percent of the time, they are voting against you. They are voting against your way of life. It’s a Uni-Party up there too frequently. Look at these big Omnibus Bills,” he said as an example. “They all pass with a bunch of Republicans and a bunch of Democrats. It’s the Uni-Party.”
“What we have to get away from is putting everything in one bill,” Massie said. “That is how they hide the crap. They put that on page 523, and they are trying to put things in there like special privileges and immunities for data centers, special immunities for pesticides and chemicals so that if one of them harms you, you couldn’t sue them. I have worked and got both of those stripped from those big bills.”
“You want to know why there are three billionaires spending 20 million dollars on this race that have never been to Kentucky?” Massie asked the crowd. “There is an organization called the World Economic Forum. It was founded by a German man named Klaus Schwab. You may not know of those two, but you have probably heard there are some people who think that you should eat bugs and not beef. There are people who think you should have nothing and be happy about it. They think that the future of not just the country but of the entire world is communism.”
“It’s called the World Economic Forum. Their CEO had to resign because I got the Epstein Files released,” Massie said. “That’s the guy (the CEO) that goes to dinner with these billionaires that are also in the Epstein Files. These are the billionaires who are funding this race against me. This is the most expensive race, which will be $35 million when it is done.”
“I would run for president if I knew we could get that much money,” Massie added and laughed – foreshadowing the tease that would follow his primary concession.
“It is $20 million against me, and $15 million for me,” Massie explained. “It’s the most expensive congressional primary in the history of this country.”
Massie told the crowd that the money for his campaign came from tens of thousands of donors, thousands of those donors from Kentucky.
“My opponent has reported less than a hundred donors in Kentucky,” Massie said, adding that his Kentucky donors aren’t rich people, not millionaires or billionaires, but regular Kentucky citizens. The largest occupational group that supports him are retired citizens, he said, who want to protect their way of life.
Another issue that concerns him directly impacts his supporters, and that is inflation, he said, which is exacerbated by unchecked government spending.
“When the government spends too much money, we can’t even find people to loan it to us anymore,” Massie said. “We are paying a trillion dollars of interest every year to banks and foreign countries who own our debt. We spend twelve times as much as what we spend on our roads and bridges.”
Massie said that when a government spends in this manner, and can’t borrow money, they print it. “That makes the value of your dollar go down,” he said. “And that’s why I am voting against these giant bills that are bankrupting the country.”
Massie said his opponents have been trying to buy him for 14 years and have never been able to do so.
“Now they are trying to buy a seat here in Kentucky,” he said.
And, if you ask Massie’s supporters, they were successful. Massie, the Republican incumbent, lost in the primary against Trump endorsed challenger Ed Gallrein. In a speech reported by the Associated Press, Massie addressed the issue.
“We stirred up something. There is a yearning in this country for someone who will vote for principles over party,” Massie was quoted as saying in a speech that lasted over twenty minutes.
In the same speech Massie drew a clear picture of the issues.
“If the legislative branch always votes whichever way the wind is blowing, then we have mob rule,” he said. But if lawmakers follow the Constitution, he noted, “We have a republic.”
But is Massie considering a run for President of that republic?
According to the Associated Press, Massie signed off by teasing a run in 2028, saying, “We’ll talk about it later.”
Contact the writer at charles@cartercountytimes.com
