After Fifty-Nine Years

The Latest Political Victim of the Israel Lobby

Last month a seven-term Republican Congressman from Kentucky named Thomas Massie lost his primary, and he will be leaving office at the end of the current session of the House. Climate CO2 Hoax - How... Keenan, Mark Gerard Check Amazon for Pricing.

Except in the case of severe personal scandals, such primary defeats were once extremely rare in our political life, and no such scandal had ever attached itself to Massie’s name. Instead, his votes and his ideology seemed to fit his rural district like a glove, and the MIT-educated engineer had never previously faced a serious challenge for renomination, winning his last few primaries with 75-80% of the vote, sometimes against well-funded opponents.

As a staunch libertarian-leaning conservative in the Ron Paul mold, Massie had long made a name for himself by sometimes being at the short end of near-unanimous House votes on various issues. But I think that he first came to my attention when he was interviewed by Tucker Carlson a couple of years ago.

Rep. Thomas Massie doesn’t care what you think of him, which is pretty great.

(3:19) Where Does US Debt End?
(10:32) Why Massie Voted 15 Times Against Funding Israel
(14:53) AIPAC
(34:04) Mitch McConnell
(42:25) Area 51
(50:32) Massie’s Relationship with Trump
(57:09) Kill… pic.twitter.com/VBOiWjq056

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 7, 2024

In that two hour discussion Massie explained that although he had always been friendly towards Israel, as a staunchly conservative libertarian he refused to support foreign aid to that country or any other, and he was also a strong opponent of our ongoing military involvement around the world.

The Attack on the Libe... James M. Scott Best Price: $4.00 Buy New $13.99 (as of 04:23 UTC - Details) One of the very surprising facts that Massie revealed in that conversation was that virtually all Republicans in Congress had accepted the presence of “an AIPAC minder,” someone who would direct their votes on matters considered important to the Zionist State, and he assumed that the same was probably true of the vast majority of Democrats. However, Massie firmly rejected that demand, instead believing that his undivided loyalty should be to the constituents who elected him, the interests of America as a whole, and his own conscience. His political disclosures received very widespread attention and they naturally enraged the Israel Lobby.

During his 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump had campaigned on a promise to release all the government files regarding the activities of Jeffrey Epstein. But once in office he completely reversed his position, apparently under pressure from Israel and its partisans who feared that Epstein’s close ties to Mossad would prove hugely embarrassing. This led Massie to co-sponsor the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress and was enacted into law over Trump’s strong opposition.

As a result, the Israel Lobby and Trump marked Massie for defeat in 2026, and Carlson interviewed him shortly before his primary. Polls showed that Massie enjoyed overwhelming support from the younger Republican voters in his district but this was completely reversed in the case of their older counterparts, whose knowledge of the world largely came from the intensely hostile coverage in FoxNews and the rest of the legacy media.

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Probably the most outrageous attack on Massie had been the heavy broadcast of a television ad suggesting that he was having an adulterous affair with left-liberal Democratic Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Ilhan Omar, including fake AI images showing him checking into a hotel room with both of them simultaneously. To older, less technologically sophisticated Republican primary voters, “seeing was believing” and I don’t doubt that almost all of them were sure that the faked images were absolutely real.

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A few weeks later, Massie lost by a wide 10 point margin in the most expensive Congressional primary in American history. A total of $30 million was spent in the small, relatively cheap media market of rural Kentucky, with the bulk of the massive funding against him coming from three Zionist billionaires.

Carlson devoted another show to the implications of Massie’s defeat, which he believed had completely destroyed the MAGA movement once championed by Trump. Instead, it was clear that American political life was overwhelmingly under the control of AIPAC and other elements of the Israel Lobby.

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With the 250th anniversary of our original Fourth of July Independence Day now just a couple of weeks away, Carlson recently went so far as to declare that America had now obviously lost its own national sovereignty.

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Massie’s striking defeat by pro-Israel forces was merely the latest in their very long series of political victories, a pattern that had stretched back for decades.

In the 2024 election cycle, prominent left-wing black Democrats Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman had been viewed as insufficiently deferential to the demands of the Israel Lobby, even expressing some public sympathy for the innocent civilians of Gaza as they suffered horrific massacres at that hands of the Israeli military. Therefore, both were targeted and defeated in their primaries by massively funded challengers, with those two primary races becoming the most expensive in Congressional history. Remember the Liberty!:... Phillip F. Nelson, Ron... Best Price: $12.75 Buy New $10.00 (as of 07:20 UTC - Details)

During the gradual rise of the Israel Lobby to its position of near-total political supremacy, in 1974 it had played a central role in unseating Sen. William Fulbright, our longest serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and in 1984 it had done the same to Sen. Charles Percy, one of his Republican successors. A very long list of other political victims litters American history over the last couple of generations.

Rep. Paul Findley had been a highly regarded 11-term moderate Republican from Illinois, known for strong opposition to the Vietnam War and as co-author of the landmark 1973 War Powers Act. When he had suffered the same fate in 1982, he published They Dare to Speak Out, with that 1985 book describing the growing stranglehold of the Israel Lobby over the American political system.

Although I avidly followed domestic American politics during that period, tight media control ensured that I only had the vaguest awareness of Findley or his book. Perhaps based upon the very brief and extremely negative review in the New York Times I had always regarded the latter work as apparently rather disreputable and dishonest. Therefore, I was quite surprised when I bought and read it nearly twenty years ago, finding it very solidly documented and soberly written, while also discovering the notable Congressional achievements of its author.

A quarter-century after the appearance of Findley’s book, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University had published their 2007 bestseller The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy. Although I had already been long aware of nearly all the material it contained, I was impressed that two such notable scholars had been willing to put it all into print.

But although all these books and political developments certainly drew the attention of the thin slice of Americans who followed such things, I doubt that any of this much penetrated into the bulk of our population. The mainstream media almost always avoided all those issues, and it constituted the overwhelming source of most public information.

Although Mearsheimer’s 2007 book had become a national bestseller, the bitter hostility of the Israel Lobby that he and his co-author had discussed led to his complete exclusion from mainstream outlets, and by the tenth anniversary of its publication in 2017, I suspect he wondered whether it would ever have any long-term impact. Erasing the Liberty: T... Gahary, David R Check Amazon for Pricing.

However, over the last decade or more the growing power of the Internet and social media networks began offering entirely different channels of information. These were especially used by younger Americans, and in recent years these changes have been further magnified by the growing number of podcasters taking advantage of YouTube and other video platforms, whose technological maturity has allowed them to increasingly replace the traditional electronic media.

So although the Israel Lobby still reigns politically supreme, Mearsheimer and others of similar views have become ubiquitous across the alternative media outlets whose growing popularity is steadily eclipsing the mainstream media as our primary source of information. Many topics previously confined to furtive remarks by anonymous individuals on obscure websites are now readily discussed on shows attracting many millions of viewers.

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