Who’s Funding the Attacks on Thomas Massie—and What Networks are Backing Them?
In the past decade of political upheaval, less than a handful of successful candidates have laid down direct challenges to America’s military-industrial complex. Thomas Massie, the U.S. Congressman from Kentucky’s 4th District, is first and foremost among them. In June, President Donald Trump announced an open season on Massie, for the perceived crimes of having voted against the deficit-busting “Big Beautiful Bill” and opposing Trump’s strikes on Iran because they occurred without authorization from Congress.
“Open season” in this case meant the formation of a MAGA Pac run by Trump’s former co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita for the sole purpose of beating Massie. LaCivita is part of a class of MAGA strategists and lobbyists who live in Washington and on airplanes but style themselves America First frontiersman. They are the 180 degree opposites of Massie, who represents a district where he’s lived for most of his life minus a four year stint at MIT and sometime after. But what these operators lack in authenticity they make up for with capital, which comes not from MAGA but from longer-standing power players who operate with a simple aim: to silence dissent against the American military-industrial complex’s most reliable client and investor, Israel.
On August 1, Congressman Massie tweeted “the group attacking me, MAGA Kentucky, is funded entirely by three billionaires,” whom he emphasized had connections to both Jeffrey Epstein and the Democratic Party.
This is true, and it understates the case. The three billionaires are Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson, and they are part of a group of Zionist operators who have used finance and philanthropy for distinctly political ends since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chameleonic backing of both Democrats and Republicans is integral to their approach, but their political promiscuity flows from an underlying fidelity—to the Zionist state. The inverse of this fidelity is that their enemies are everyone, right or left or libertarian, who oppose America’s commitment to Zionism.
The roots of this group’s influence lie with the creation in New York more than thirty years ago of the Study Group. This was an informal club of a score of financiers (some with connections to Jeffrey Epstein) which had as its purpose channeling Zionist philanthropy to encourage Jewish intra-marriage and identification with Israel. What the Study Group’s co-founder Charles Bronfman and another member, Michael Steinhardt, took from their sessions and other involvements was the idea for Birthright: the foundation which beginning in 1999 funded any American Jew between eighteen and twenty-six who wanted to visit Israel to connect to Zionism.
Read more at The Libertarian Institute.
Photo credit: Flickr, Remy Steinegger