Thomas Massie Deserves To Lose

It’s hard to imagine anything more blatantly disqualifying for an elected official than to falsely accuse random citizens of heinous child sex crimes, then once the citizens you’ve accused are confirmed totally innocent, not even have the decency to apologize — and instead blame others for your spectacularly egregious behavior. But that’s exactly what Thomas Massie has done for the past three months. So desperate was he to proclaim that he had discovered the mythical “coverup” he presumed must exist in the “Epstein Files” he’d so doggedly campaigned for releasing, that he and his cohort Ro Khanna couldn’t even take two seconds to properly contextualize the “files” they were knocking themselves over to screech about. And so they rushed before the cameras to declare, as Massie did, that these four men in New York City with zero public profile — who had absolutely nothing to do with Epstein — were “likely incriminated” in pedophile sex-trafficking crimes, the mere suggestion of which is enough to utterly destroy anyone’s reputation. Especially if you’re just a lowly auto mechanic or IT technician, like the men Massie wasted no time castigating. His buddy Ro Khanna then ran to the House floor and read their names aloud, like he was revealing some momentous government secret, and denounced them as “powerful men” the DOJ was shamefully conspiring to protect. Soon enough, Massie and Khanna were shown to have defamed these thoroughly “non-powerful” men as depraved child-sex criminals, but the two Congressmen proceeded to blame everyone but themselves. To my knowledge, neither Massie nor Khanna have ever bothered to apologize to the men. Instead, they both barrel forward with their stream of uninterrupted Epstein theatrics, as if they have absolutely nothing to be sorry about.

For this and many other reasons, Massie richly deserves to lose his GOP primary race in Kentucky tomorrow. Which does not mean that those contriving to oust him deserve to “win.” As the tedious cliche often goes, “two things can be true at the same time.” Massie has plainly engaged in a host of discrediting conduct, which is more than sufficient to render a judgment that he is worthy of electoral defeat. At the same time, the crude donor-class intrusion into his congressional primary, now the most expensive in history at $36 million — which is probably a lowball estimate — is impossible to endorse. His nominal ghostlike opponent, Ed Gallrein, has pathetically ducked debates, barely does any real interviews, and almost nothing is known of his background beyond that he was hand-picked by Trump. When he does occasionally deign to speak, Gallrein loves to give himself tough-guy credit, claiming the details of his vaunted military service are too “classified” to inform voters about. So he’s basically just relying on a massive influx of outside cash to muscle his way to an ignominious victory.

It’s also true that Massie’s opponents appear to disdain him for reasons that have nothing much to do with the reasons he so richly deserves defeat. Everyone knows Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and the other filthy rich donors pouring in astronomical amounts of money are doing so because they perceive Massie to be intolerably unsupportive of Israel. And they would’ve harbored this disdain whether or not Trump had declared Massie persona non grata. But his Trump feud presents the donor clique with a rare opportunity to oust a meddlesome incumbent, because ordinarily the built-in advantages of incumbency make this nearly impossible. Trump, however, commands such outsized influence with Republican primary electorates that if he’s already fuming mad about Massie — enough to wage an electoral jihad against him — the pro-Israel donors have every reason to swoop in and capitalize.

Trump’s repeated posts on Truth Social intimating that something vaguely nefarious went down with the timing of Massie’s marriage to his second wife is gutter-level stuff — but nothing particularly new for Trump, whose premier skill has always been knowing exactly what “buttons to push” with his political foes. Nothing is off limits when he really wants to make it hurt. He’s even been promoting a new set of “allegations” against Massie, related to a bunch of similarly vague intimations of supposed misconduct with a woman Massie purportedly dated after the death of his first wife. The whole thing looks incredibly flimsy. But no, the idea that Massie now karmically deserves to be slimed with cheap innuendo, because he’s been flinging similar nonsense in all directions for the past ten months, is not a logic that can be countenanced, as it validates the idea of meritless rumor-mongering, so long as the target can be deemed sufficiently “deserving,” according to whatever criteria anyone wants to invoke to make that inherently subjective determination. Still, eleventh-hour flimsy accusations against Massie do highlight that he might’ve been well-advised to exercise greater caution before hurling evidence-devoid attacks at others, especially if he and his supporters would like that courtesy extended to him. Bear in mind, the “allegations” against Massie, such as they can even be ascertained, are trivial compared to the allegations Massie has gratuitously leveled against the many alleged sex-trafficking “associates” of Epstein.

One tragedy of Massie is that for years, he really was an anomalously independent-minded member of Congress — otherwise a body that puts a premium on relentless conformity. I’d say he was even one of the very few members I would have personally reported having any degree of admiration for. Take, for instance, his nimble intervention in April 2024 to marginally impede passage of the TikTok ban, which Speaker Mike Johnson had tried to fast-track using the existing legislative vehicle of a pending National Security Supplemental bill. Massie could not block the measure entirely, and it did end up getting passed, but his quick-thinking efforts at least helped to galvanize public awareness of Johnson’s sneaky maneuver, and a significantly larger number of his colleagues joined him in voting NO than had been anticipated. Massie was always unusually adept at monitoring the arcane minutiae of legislative procedure, including the extra-arcane workings of the Rules Committee, on which he previously sat — and which most members of Congress can barely explain, nevermind the average citizen. Massie consistently performed a useful public service by elucidating various inside-baseball machinations in a manner the general public could comprehend. He’s also been known to make a point of explaining every vote he casts, rather than just coasting on the assumption that a critical mass of his constituents will never pay attention to the ins-and-outs, which is what most members of Congress bank on.

Massie’s willingness to vote against the slew of performatively “pro-Israel” resolutions which endlessly lard up the House agenda is one of his more praiseworthy traits, so of course, that’s what he is now being attacked for in the ads swamping his district. It remains an open question how many Kentucky GOP voters even care about this issue, but the messaging may be effective among older Evangelicals who watch a lot of TV — perhaps the most reliable GOP voting bloc. Conversely, Massie’s refusal to grovel for “pro-Israel” nonsense could conceivably nudge other segments of the electorate toward a more pro-Massie direction, although those potential voters are unlikely to be watching the TV stations where the ads are being aired. “Spots” assailing Massie for failing to support the Iran War could have a similarly uneven impact, but the Republican Jewish Committee strategists placing the ads are probably clever enough to discern which demographics to target. The ads’ emphasis on Massie being “disloyal” to Trump, and entering into alliance with the likes of AOC and Ilhan Omar, is probably enough to inflame the id of the median Republican primary voter, whatever their precise views on the Iran “excursion.” Shameless use of AI to generate fake video vignettes of Massie holding hands with AOC/Omar makes the ads especially odious. Despite a cursory “AI” disclaimer, the vast majority of Kentucky GOP primary voters will likely not be familiar with the latest frontiers in AI technology, and will probably just assume the footage real.

So there can be no doubt that Massie is being inundated with an enormous deluge of sleaze, uncorked by his crime of not bowing to Trump, whose pique has invited “pro-Israel” operatives to flood Massie’s district with agitprop. Would it be regrettable if this anti-Massie torrent is effective enough to beat him? Sure, that would be regrettable. But it also wouldn’t magically negate Massie’s own “regrettable” conduct. (Just like AIPAC & co. successfully ousting Democratic incumbents Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush in 2024 didn’t magically absolve them of critique, either.)

Because leaving aside Trump, the “pro-Israel” donors, and every other variable in this race, let the record show that once Massie decided he would dive head-first into the swirling toilet-bowl vortex of Epstein mania, he went completely off the rails.

At the “Epstein Survivors” press conference Massie co-organized last September, one of the “survivors” he loves to venerate so much, Lisa Phillips, famously caused a media sensation when she declared that her trauma sisterhood was going to produce their own “list” of sex-trafficking perpetrators, and hand it off to Massie and/or Marjorie Taylor Greene to then read on the House floor. Massie told reporters after the press conference that he was “encouraged and surprised to hear that they are going to create a list,” and he would be glad to be of service. “We need to start with the list,” Massie said, “and find out who on the list is guilty, and what crimes did they commit.” Which represented a stark inversion of the “presumption of innocence” ideal one might’ve thought Massie would cherish as a longstanding civil libertarian. He volunteered that he’d be happy to “go to the floor of the House and read the list,” thereby condemning unknown men for unknown child sex crimes, with zero corroboration necessary, because thanks to the Constitution’s “Speech or Debate” clause, Massie would personally “not suffer any defamation cases” for doing this, even if he were to falsely incriminate loads of guys. “A list of three dozen names would not be hard to carry to the floor of the House of Representatives and read in five minutes,” Massie explained. “And perhaps read it everyday.”

Of course this prospective stunt never happened — no “list” was ever produced. Which strangely never impelled Massie or his compatriots to reconsider their assumptions as to the veracity of the “survivor” claims. Nor did they revise the certainty with which they had inveighed against the scores of purported child sex-traffickers they assured everyone were being covered up in the “Epstein Files.” Instead, the new talking point became that we mustn’t burden the poor “survivors” (or their profit-seeking lawyers) with any expectations of disclosure, because “it’s not their job to release the names,” as Massie told me in November 2025. He’d go on to repeat this same emotional-blackmail talking point on National TV — a talking point that’d been provided to him and other “survivor” advocates by the Bradley Edwards “victim” lawyer syndicate, with whom Massie and Khanna were collaborating on trauma-informed PR strategy, and even the legislative text of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. It was a gambit that worked out exceedingly well for Edwards & co., as they leveraged the public uproar around “Epstein Files” made possible by Massie’s bill to secure at least two additional class-action settlements, worth approximately $108 million, from which Edwards and his colleagues will receive another generous 30% cut. Who says government can’t create wealth?

After the Survivor-furnished “client list” idea fizzled, by February 2026, Massie eventually took matters into his own hands with a dramatic speech on the House floor in which he demanded the mass-arrest of Epstein confederates, for what he said was the “unspeakable” conduct revealed in the Epstein Files. As per usual, he did not specify what criminal conduct he was referring to — nor did he identify what criminal statutes had been so obviously violated. As I wrote at the time: “Thomas Massie is innovating a fascinating new slant on libertarian philosophy by constantly running around accusing private individuals of heinous crimes, demanding their arrest, pre-supposing their guilt, and calling on the government to disregard basic notions of due process.” It was in this Floor Speech (delivered under the immunities of the “Speech or Debate” clause) that Massie finally named a bunch of men he claimed ought to go down for their complicity in pedo trafficking. One he flamboyantly named was Leon Black, declaring: “You don’t even have to see past the redactions to see that this man needs to be investigated… it’s right there in the files.” For all that Massie loves to self-righteously pontificate about what he claims is right there for anyone to see in the “files,” he clearly hasn’t spent much time actually reading them — otherwise he presumably would’ve known that Leon Black was in fact investigated, by both federal and state prosecutors, for totally fabricated child-sex crimes, as I detailed in my lengthy two-part series last week on the monumental fraud of “Jane Doe” and her enablers.

What might be most galling about Massie’s routine is that he has still never bothered to learn the most basic facts of the Epstein case — the very thing he has staked his political career on, and can’t stop thundering about day after day. Because he’s such a media darling now (just like every Republican who feuds with Trump inevitably is) he was recently interviewed on the BBC, and gravely intoned to this international audience that a vast Epstein Coverup remains in progress: despite millions of records coming out pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act that Massie co-sponsored, the DOJ continues to maliciously conceal “internal memos and emails” related to Epstein’s federal Non-Prosecution Agreement from 2006-2008. “They haven’t given us any of those documents,” Massie told his solemn British inquisitor. It really must be stressed how catastrophically uninformed one must be about the “Epstein Files” to seriously believe this. Like, you must have spent under 10 minutes total looking through the “files” you claim you so desperately wanted to unveil. Because there’s an absolute mega-avalanche of exactly these records available in the public domain — the very records Massie astonishingly claims are missing. Email threads, prosecution memos, and a giant expanse of other records depicting prosecutors’ internal deliberations related to the Epstein federal NPA. Some of the materials had already been public prior to the latest DOJ productions, and countless more were subsequently released. I even made a little explanatory video highlighting a tiny fraction of the “documents” Massie claims were damningly withheld. As usual, it turns out Massie was talking straight out of his “assie.” But you can see why he has to keep the intrigue going. Never will there be a point where he’ll just come out and say, “OK folks, looks like we’re done here!” The sinister coverup, by dogmatic necessity, will have to go on indefinitely.

Massie’s position on the Epstein fiasco has always been a straightforward example of willfully-fallacious reverse reasoning. He kicked off his crusade in July 2025, when by his own admission he had very little knowledge of the facts or evidence underlying the actual Epstein case, and preemptively decided there was a massive child sex-trafficking scandal waiting to be exposed. As he conceded on a February 2026 podcast, prior to last year, he “wasn’t paying a lot of attention” to the whole Epstein thing. But then the infamous DOJ/FBI memo dropped on July 6, 2025, and whammo: social media erupted, re-igniting the controversy on a grander scale than ever before. Massie correctly perceived a political opening he might profitably seize — especially as he was on course for a Trump-backed primary challenge the following year. By that point, Massie had already opposed the signature domestic legislation of Trump’s second term, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” and Trump had already started threatening to primary Massie as early as March 2025. By June 2025, the threats were overt, with Trump announcing he’d begun to assemble the requisite political infrastructure. Given this precarious political predicament for Massie, who had previously lobbied for Trump’s endorsement in 2024, and endorsed Trump himself that year, he now needed to devise an audacious strategy to withstand the coming Trump-backed onslaught. Which would be no small feat, given Trump’s demonstrated ability to pick and choose GOP primary winners on a dime, with something like a 90% success rate, especially in Congressional races — a singular power Trump aggressively wields that is virtually without precedent in modern American history.

And so, with perfect timing, a five-alarm-fire Epstein Uproar drops right into Massie’s lap. You can’t dispute the political logic that led him to leap into the “Epstein Files” sinkpit. There’s no question it has exponentially expanded his national profile — and even made him one of the most high-profile politicians in the entire country. Because it was going to take something extraordinary (in a literal sense) for Massie to have any chance of overcoming the mad Trump vendetta. And it may even work! Massie constantly solicits donations on the basis of his wild Epstein quest, and sure enough, the online contributions have flowed steadily in. It may not rival the billionaire largesse of his opponent, but it’s enough to at least stay competitive. (And all other things being equal, there is something laudable about being “beholden” to a pool of small donors, rather than a narrow cabal of obscenely rich “elites” whose entire political project revolves around a certain Middle Eastern client state. If Massie does manage to fend off the primary challenge tomorrow, it will be one of the most impressive electoral feats in recent times.

But the soundness of the political logic Massie has employed does nothing to negate his substantive free-fall into algorithmic oblivion. Which is a virtual inevitability whenever anybody decides to integrate “Epstein Maximalism” into their public persona. On the same dopey podcast where he acknowledged having little or no pre-existing knowledge of the issue before roughly ten months ago, Massie explained his belief that Epstein is alive — today — because with the help of a shadowy intel cabal, our friend Jeffrey mysteriously “disappeared” from the federal jail facility, and “we can’t find him.” How did Massie come up with this fascinating theory? He admits to basically outsourcing it to his social media followers, having posted a poll on X in February 2026 asking what people really think happened to Epstein — and a solid plurality voted for “He is still alive.” So that’s become Massie’s take, too. The most high-profile champion of Epstein “accountability” in Congress just parrots whatever lunacy floats across his social media feed. Despite the subject-matter expertise one might have thought he’d garnered after so many months as foremost Epstein authority. Because he apparently never got a chance to look through the autopsy photos of Epstein’s dead body, found in the Epstein Files he loves preaching about, to at least clarify how they are consistent with the “still alive” theory he spins out on podcasts.

NOTE: While the volume of ads dumped into Massie’s primary race is insane, outside groups supporting Massie have also gotten rather nasty. Whatever “edgy” and “based” political pro thought it was a genius move to plaster an LGBT flag-colored “Star of David” on a pro-Massie ad was going out of their way to stupidly troll and outrage-farm. Whatever instinct gave rise to this is probably closely related to whatever brain-disease resulted in Massie’s “Money Bomb” fundraiser showcasing the likes of Dave Smith rambling about how we might finally “crack the code” — of pizza and grape soda in the Epstein Files — by electing lots of mini Massies, to which Massie himself responded with a brag that he had personally “uncovered the pedophiles.” Once again, he avoided getting into further detail about which “pedophiles” he claims to have triumphantly uncovered.

On a personal note, I can’t help but point out that after I was ejected from the “Epstein Survivors” press conference Massie co-organized last year, at the direction of Marjorie Taylor Greene and a mob of angry “survivors,” for the crime of asking a question they didn’t like about the chronic recantations of Virginia Roberts Giuffre — who was otherwise being declared an “American Hero” that day for her heroic Epstein victimhood — Massie told me he thought I was “really rude.” I asked him to please elaborate on what he meant, and he kind of just mumbled a non-answer and drifted off. This, after I’d been threatened with arrest for asking a question at a press conference to which I’d been invited by the staff of Ro Khanna! It was sadly emblematic of Massie’s recent devolution into logically-garbled foolishness — a far cry from the version of him I had, until very recently, regarded as among the few examples of laudable Congressional service. Massie has even adopted the tedious sloganeering jargon of “Believing Survivors” and so forth — like he’s suddenly some big hero for “women.” He routinely praises the three female Republican colleagues who joined him in signing the discharge petition for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and accusatorially wonders why his male Republican colleagues refused to follow suit. As if everyone should strive to emulate the sterling political acumen of Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marge Greene.

Would I be thrilled if Massie loses tomorrow? No — the obscene sleaze-fest marshaled against him, and the risible person selected by Trump to take his place, make that impossible. But should he be cheered onto victory, after his nonstop clown-show antics over the past ten months? Also, emphatically, no. Sometimes everyone involved deserves to be tainted with the stench of defeat.

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