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Thread: ‘I Don’t Know Why He’s Not More Famous.’ Meet the Man Republicans Can’t Get Enough Of.

  1. #1

    ‘I Don’t Know Why He’s Not More Famous.’ Meet the Man Republicans Can’t Get Enough Of.

    ‘I Don’t Know Why He’s Not More Famous.’ Meet the Man Republicans Can’t Get Enough Of.
    By James Pogue - March 10, 2023

    The self-proclaimed “greenest member” of Congress is a Republican from rural Kentucky. He lives in an off-the-grid home he built himself, using timbers cut and rock quarried from his family cattle farm. He pipes in water from a nearby pond, and powers the home with solar panels and a battery from a wrecked Tesla that he salvaged and retrofitted.

    But while he lives on, and even makes part of his living from, the land, very few people would call him an environmentalist. The car he drives back and forth from Washington has a license plate advertising his support for coal. He likes to lean on his experience as a robotics engineer to argue against precipitously switching over to renewable energy, claiming that rapid changes could crash America’s power grids. And he once mocked John Kerry, who has a degree in political science, in a congressional hearing on climate threats: “I think it’s somewhat appropriate that someone with a pseudoscience degree,” he said, “is here pushing pseudoscience.”

    Mr. Kerry stumbled, visibly surprised and angry. “Are you serious? I mean, this is really seriously happening here?”

    It was hard to say. From the outside, Thomas Massie can look like yet another congressional gadfly courting controversy by, for instance, introducing a one-sentence bill that would abolish the Department of Education, or posing for a Christmas photo with his wife and children, each of them holding a weapon, from an M60 to an Uzi, or speaking at the 60th anniversary celebration of the far-right John Birch Society.

    But Mr. Massie is not just another loony G.O.P. backbencher. Outside the public eye, he has been quietly advancing what for a Republican politician is an unusual set of stances: evincing deep opposition to the national security state, resistance to the influence wielded by corporations and interest groups over our policymaking, and a sense that Americans need a better, more sustainable relationship to the land. It is a politics almost always built around the idea of scaling back, making systems smaller, simpler and more local. That’s an odd kind of politics for a Republican, or any major elected official, but it suddenly seems to have appeal even beyond the G.O.P.’s narrow base, and it has already made Mr. Massie the closest thing the party has to a cult hero lawmaker.

    “I absolutely love Massie,” Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio told me recently. The conservative talk show host Candace Owens recently called him her “favorite congressman,” a description that I’ve heard a half dozen or so times in the past year or so. “After 30 years of interviewing members of Congress,” Tucker Carlson told me, “I expect them to be conventional bordering on stupid, because most of them are. Massie’s the opposite. He’s thoughtful and interesting as hell. I don’t know why he’s not more famous.”

    One of the reasons Mr. Carlson seems to appreciate Mr. Massie so much is that he shares his skepticism of mainstream climate policy. Mr. Massie has emerged as one of the G.O.P.’s most dedicated critics of liberal climate plans. He wants solutions to happen at the local level and often hints that powerful international forces — technocrats, multinational corporations and organizations like the World Economic Forum — are coming together to constrain the American way of life, uproot our national culture in favor of a bland, globalized liberalism and turn us into compliant and pliable consumers, easy to govern and control. It is a view that will do much in the coming years to shape not just fights over climate policy, but also the future of American conservatism.

    “Their plans are based on political science” Mr. Massie recently told Mr. Carlson, referring to world leaders pushing mainstream climate policy.

    Mr. Carlson agreed. “It seems like an intentional effort to drive down — dramatically drive down the standard of living for average people,” he said. “Why would they want to do that?”

    “They want a lower quality of life,” Mr. Massie replied. “You’re gonna have nothing, and you’re gonna be happy about it, you know?” he said. “That’s their motto.”

    The Republican Party is in a moment of flux, which in mainstream political media is often simplified as a conflict between the party’s neoconservative “establishment” and Trump-aligned populists. But this factional division obscures a much deeper conversation over the future direction of the party. A debate has emerged over what it means to be a conservative party today. Many on the right have concluded that the Republican Party that embraced corporate-led globalization and wars abroad, without any apparent effort to stop environmental degradation, did not actually conserve anything about the American way of life Republicans claimed to hold dear. This has helped push politicians at the highest level of Republican politics, from Donald Trump to Ron DeSantis, to rail against “globalist” forces and institutions, the same ones Mr. Massie was winking at on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” The true conflict in the G.O.P. today is about whether the party can — or should — reshape itself in response to the antiglobalist ferment.
    ...
    But Mr. Massie’s lifestyle and brand of politics, the same brand that once marked him as a quirky outlier, have aligned with the current political moment — when many on the right and left are looking to pull back from the hyper-complex systems that govern the modern world, and move toward a more rooted way of life. Today, many on the right are even growing more boldly critical of the disastrous environmental effects of corporate malfeasance all around them, best seen in the outrage that developed on right-wing media over the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

    Mr. Massie’s politics are very much at odds with the interests of the Republican Party’s traditional donor class and leadership. But the party, torn between corporatist neoconservatism and inchoate MAGA, has faltered in two national elections in a row, which may explain why Mr. Massie seems to be drawing attention as an idiosyncratic voice for an alternate future of Republican politics. “There’s an energy around Thomas now,” said Jeremy Carl, a former official in Mr. Trump’s Department of the Interior, who has known Mr. Massie for years, “just like there was an energy around Trump.”
    ...
    But even if he never rises further than that committee, he could still help shape the future trajectory of his party, grafting his unusual mixture of political stances into its DNA. His politics don’t really have a name. But there’s something a little Jeffersonian about them — as if Mr. Massie is channeling the third president, whom he often invokes and whose desire to build an America of small farmers and producers he shares. If he and his younger fans gain the money, influence and institutional backing to help shift the party in his direction, they may well reveal a conservatism capable of appealing to many now disillusioned by the party. Mr. Massie has already gained many supporters outside traditional Republican circles: neo-homesteaders, hippie back-to-the-landers, cranky libertarians and self-described “marginalized environmentalists.” They are part of a sphere that has grown quickly since 2020 — one of people worried that our economy, environment and government are spinning out of control, and gripped by the fear that our society is becoming an unfree dystopia ruled by bureaucrats and technocrats.
    ...
    Once in Washington, he alternately annoyed and endeared himself to members of both parties. He is loudly anti-abortion, despite his libertarianism. But he’s quick to denounce the military-industrial complex, and more than any other Republican in Congress, proved willing to join antiwar Democrats in trying to end American involvement in overseas conflicts. He voted against disaster-relief bills, but also introduced legislation to reduce some federal prison sentences and reform civil asset forfeiture. He fought to repeal the Patriot Act and introduced bills to allow for legalized hemp production and the sale of raw milk across state lines.
    ...
    As perhaps the G.O.P.’s most vocal opponent of Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates, he came off as a kook to a national audience that largely knew little else about him. But his dogged vaccine skepticism and anti-lockdown activism endeared him to many young conservatives — like Catharine O’Neill, a 20-something veteran of the Trump State Department, who moved to Wyoming in 2021 to operate a cattle business. Mr. Massie is “the one who really fought the vaccines and the Covid tyranny, for lack of a better term,” she told me. “In some cases against Trump.”
    ...
    Mr. Massie has “been very savvy about figuring out how to take his ideological and intellectual commitments and making them relevant for an audience that might not necessarily share all of them,” Mr. Carl said.

    That audience, perhaps surprisingly, includes both conservation-minded conservatives and localist-minded environmentalists. “The sphere is basically people who are concerned about the state of society and looking for ways to thrive that don’t require widespread social, economic or political control,” said Ashley Colby, an environmental sociologist and former long-haul trucker who now runs a sustainable agriculture school in Uruguay. Even some environmentalists, who until recently would have considered themselves liberals, have come to distrust large-scale systems of almost every kind — including, for many, the systems we would use to enact global-scale climate policy.
    ...
    Food politics is rapidly becoming a new dividing line. People in the localist sphere are now at bitter odds with prominent climate activists like the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who advocates a “#farmfree” future where most of humanity’s food will be grown in labs.

    This vision is exactly what many on the antiglobalist right fear to be the endgame of climate policy — a world where people “live in the pods and eat the bugs,” as the oft-repeated shorthand has it, and technocrats and bureaucrats force people to cram into dense cities, ban them from driving cars, and force them to eat food they have no power to produce themselves. “When people who would abort a baby the day it’s born, threw kids under the bus during the pandemic, take kids to drag shows, and saddle our children with crippling debt,” Mr. Massie tweeted in October, “tell you how to live because they’re concerned about sea levels in 100 years, hide your children.”

    It’s a debate that cuts to the heart of American politics. Mr. Massie’s version of being the “greenest member of Congress” is an explicit throwback to a Jeffersonian vision — of America as a country of people who live and work close to the land, with minimal government interference and a maximum of personal responsibility for the future of the nation. It is also a vision of rugged self-reliance that has long informed back-to-the-landers on the left, but that many on that side of politics now regard as the most insidious of American political poisons, one that has made collective action on issues like climate change impossible to achieve in this country.
    ...
    “Independent, green, sustainable, frugal — those overlap,” he said. It’s a vision that combines libertarianism, environmentalism and antiglobalism into one lifestyle package. It’s also one with great appeal to conservatives who think that the systems that order modern life present as grave a threat to our future as a warming planet does. And on that warming planet, Americans may need to learn how to fend for themselves.
    ...
    More: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/o...can-party.html
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.



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  3. #2
    It's really amazing to watch Massie's rise. It took a few years, but he's really become the intellectual leader in Congress - acknowledged on both sides of the aisle. And because he's "real", it's VERY hard to attack him on anything. And every time they try, it backfires. (remember the Christmas family picture)


    Massie is the new Ron Paul. Makes me want to move to his district.
    "And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat

    "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire

  4. #3
    Caution: It's a hit piece, and a very subtle and well planned one at that. There is poison buried in there.
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    Caution: It's a hit piece, and a very subtle and well planned one at that. There is poison buried in there.
    Ah yeah I kinda just glanced at it.

    Brought to you by the people who think cow farts are going to destroy the planet. Thanks for saving me the time reading it in detail later.
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    This is getting silly.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    It started silly.
    T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men

    "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato

    We Are Running Out of Time - Mini Me

    Quote Originally Posted by Philhelm
    I part ways with "libertarianism" when it transitions from ideology grounded in logic into self-defeating autism for the sake of ideological purity.

  6. #5
    The author also wrote this article. Note the similarities. The author's MO appears to be to create (negative) associations.

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023...ight-civil-war
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by nobody's_hero View Post
    Ah yeah I kinda just glanced at it.

    Brought to you by the people who think cow farts are going to destroy the planet. Thanks for saving me the time reading it in detail later.
    FYI, I didn't include the whole article, or the hit portion. You'd have to read the original.
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    FYI, I didn't include the whole article, or the hit portion. You'd have to read the original.
    Archive link for those who don't want to give their info to NYT: https://archive.is/hQVeC
    The Bastiat Collection · FREE PDF · FREE EPUB · PAPER
    Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

    • "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law."
      -- The Law (p. 54)
    • "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
      -- Government (p. 99)
    • "[W]ar is always begun in the interest of the few, and at the expense of the many."
      -- Economic Sophisms - Second Series (p. 312)
    • "There are two principles that can never be reconciled - Liberty and Constraint."
      -- Harmonies of Political Economy - Book One (p. 447)

    · tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ·

  9. #8

    Post NYT does feature article on Thomas Massie

    [IMG]https://static01.********/images/2023/03/10/opinion/10Pogue-Topper/10Pogue-Topper-superJumbo-v3.jpg[/IMG]



    ‘I Don’t Know Why He’s Not More Famous.’ Meet the Man Republicans Can’t Get Enough Of.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/o...can-party.html
    ‘I Don’t Know Why He’s Not More Famous.’ Meet the Man Republicans Can’t Get Enough Of.
    __________________________________________________ ________________
    "A politician will do almost anything to keep their job, even become a patriot" - Hearst



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Matt Collins View Post
    [IMG]https://static01.********/images/2023/03/10/opinion/10Pogue-Topper/10Pogue-Topper-superJumbo-v3.jpg[/IMG]



    ‘I Don’t Know Why He’s Not More Famous.’ Meet the Man Republicans Can’t Get Enough Of.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/o...can-party.html
    ‘I Don’t Know Why He’s Not More Famous.’ Meet the Man Republicans Can’t Get Enough Of.
    Geez, do a search, Matt...

    http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...-Get-Enough-Of
    "And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat

    "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by CaptUSA View Post
    Dude this is The Collins official thread. You will have to delete the other one. Get a clue.
    The wisdom of Swordy:

    On bringing the troops home
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    They are coming home, all the naysayers said they would never leave Syria and then they said they were going to stay in Iraq forever.

    It won't take very long to get them home but it won't be overnight either but Iraq says they can't stay and they are coming home just like Trump said.

    On fighting corruption:
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Trump had to donate the "right way" and hang out with the "right people" in order to do business in NYC and Hollyweird and in order to investigate and expose them.
    Fascism Defined

  13. #11
    The other thread was poorly labeled
    __________________________________________________ ________________
    "A politician will do almost anything to keep their job, even become a patriot" - Hearst

  14. #12
    Massie is a Great American in a time when there are few left to take the Thankless job he is excelling at. The state of Ky is represented better than others with Massie and Sen Paul.
    Do something Danke

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Matt Collins View Post
    The other thread was poorly labeled
    No, it wasn't. The thread name even duplicated the article name. All you had to do was search for keywords from the article title (e.g., "famous", "republicans", and "enough"), or even just the name of the article's author (James Pogue). A search for either of those would have caught this thread as its first result.

  16. #14
    Massie is a genius. Very rare individual

  17. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    No, it wasn't.
    Yes it was, because you couldn't tell what it was about just by skimming the subject line.
    __________________________________________________ ________________
    "A politician will do almost anything to keep their job, even become a patriot" - Hearst

  18. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by Matt Collins View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Matt Collins View Post
    The other thread was poorly labeled
    No, it wasn't. [...]
    Yes it was, because you couldn't tell what it was about just by skimming the subject line.
    If your technique for avoiding duplicate posts is "skimming the subject line", then you are doing it wrong.

    For one thing, an item may not have been posted as a thread OP. If so, then the subject line of the thread isn't going to tell you that, no matter how it's worded. (This alone is why "skimming the subject line" is a lazy and lousy way of avoiding duplicate posts.)

    For another thing, in this particular case, the subject line was the title of the article - so unless you're going to claim that you didn't even know the title of the article you were about to post, there is no sensible reason for you not to have "skimmed" for it (instead of some vague, general, and/or arbitrary phrase like "NYT does feature article on Thomas Massie").

    For yet another thing, even if the item was posted as a thread OP, and even if the thread title happens to be sufficiently similar to whatever arbitrary phrase you've decided to "skim" for, there is still no assurance that the thread will even be among those in whatever list (e.g., "New Posts") you are "skimming". This is why you should do a search using keywords or phrases from the article title (or body), the name of the article's author, etc. As lousy as RPFs' search function may be, it will still do a better job than such "skimming" will.

    Or don't. If you prefer to be lazy and/or rude, then just post whatever item it is you want to post without even bothering to "skim" for duplicates at all (after all, what's the point of half-assing it like that?). But if you do that, and if you end up posting a duplicate, then you don't get to absurdly criticize the duplicated thread's title for being "poorly labeled" when it exactly replicates the item's title. That's just silly and obtuse.



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  20. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Todd View Post
    Dude this is The Collins official thread. You will have to delete the other one. Get a clue.
    Yeah. That.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  21. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    If your technique for avoiding duplicate posts is "skimming the subject line", then you are doing it wrong.
    Here is what I do.... I look at the new posts since my last visit. If what I am wanting to post isn't listed in the thread title, then I'll start a new thread and post the subject material I'm looking to share. Obviously I'm not going to duplicate threads, but I'm also not going to waste a bunch of time searching the exact phrases for everything I want to post before I post it.
    __________________________________________________ ________________
    "A politician will do almost anything to keep their job, even become a patriot" - Hearst

  22. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Matt Collins View Post
    Here is what I do.... I look at the new posts since my last visit. If what I am wanting to post isn't listed in the thread title, then I'll start a new thread and post the subject material I'm looking to share. Obviously I'm not going to duplicate threads, [...]
    And yet, duplicating a thread is exactly what you did ...

    Quote Originally Posted by Matt Collins View Post
    [...] but I'm also not going to waste a bunch of time searching the exact phrases for everything I want to post before I post it.
    You didn't have to "waste a bunch of time searching the exact phrases for everything [you wanted] to post" [1]. All you had to do was "skim" for the title of the article you intended to post - it was right there in the title of the thread you duplicated. Your excuse that the thread was "poorly labeled" is asinine.



    [1] I even explicitly said this in the last paragraph of my previous post (which you snipped from your quote of me):
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    Or don't [do such a search]. If you prefer to be lazy and/or rude, then just post whatever item it is you want to post without even bothering to "skim" for duplicates at all (after all, what's the point of half-assing it like that?). But if you do that, and if you end up posting a duplicate, then you don't get to absurdly criticize the duplicated thread's title for being "poorly labeled" when it exactly replicates the item's title. That's just silly and obtuse.
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 03-14-2023 at 11:38 AM.

  23. #20
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11



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