What Was Sold Last Night: A Letter to My Children on the Defeat of Thomas Massie

My children:

I have started this letter and stopped, started it and stopped, because there are some things a father does not want to be the one to tell. But the news will reach you in time, from every side, and if you are going to hear it from a hundred sources I would have you hear it first from me, and hear it plainly, because the truth is what I owe you, and because there is no one else in the world who loves you the way I do.

Last night, on the nineteenth of May, in the year two thousand twenty-six, a man in Kentucky named Thomas Massie lost his seat in the United States House of Representatives. He had held it for fourteen years. He represented the Fourth District of his state, which is, by the constitutional bargain we were all born into, the only part of America he was elected to serve. He lost to a man named Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL endorsed by the president; and that, in another country and in another year, might have been the whole of the story, and it might have been a small one. But there is more to tell you, and you must know it.

The race that defeated Thomas Massie cost more than thirty-two million dollars. It became, by that figure, the most expensive primary election in the history of the United States House — more than any race for any seat for any reason in any year since the republic began. Groups organized in support of a foreign country put more than fifteen million dollars into the contest, against one man. AIPAC’s super political action committee, the United Democracy Project, spent more than four million dollars by itself. The Republican Jewish Coalition’s victory fund spent close to five million more. The largest single donor to the super PAC formed expressly to remove Massie was Paul Singer; the donor Massie named most often himself was Miriam Adelson. Almost none of this money came from the Fourth District of Kentucky. Most of it did not come from Kentucky at all.

I want you to understand what that means, because the headlines will not make it clear, and the men who write the headlines will not, in many cases, want it to be clear.

It means that the people of one congressional district in this country did not, last night, decide who would represent them. A foreign-policy lobby — an organization whose stated purpose is to advance the interests of a foreign government in the councils of our own — did. It means that the price of a seat in the people’s House has been publicly named, and that any future congressman who steps out of line with that lobby now knows what will be spent against him. It means that the most ancient and modest defense a free people have — that we choose the men and women who govern us — has been put on the auction block, and we know now what the auction looks like, and we know now what it sells for.

You will be told, by people who would rather you not think too hard about this, that the money does not buy outcomes. You will be told that voters decide; that the lobby only persuades. Do not believe them. The people who poured fifteen million dollars into Kentucky did not do it for the love of persuasion. They had a vote they wanted to remove, and they removed it. AIPAC said so itself. “Our community,” they wrote on the morning after, “was proud to support Gallrein and help ensure Massie’s defeat.” That is not the language of persuasion. That is the language of a hunt that has been brought to its conclusion.

I do not want you to grow up afraid. I want you to grow up clear.

So hear me clearly. What happened last night is alarming, and it is terrifying, and it is a significant concern to our democracy — and I want all three of those words spoken plainly, because all three of them are true. It is alarming that one lobby has this much money. It is terrifying that it has the will to spend it on a single seat. And it is, finally, a significant concern to our democracy because if it can be done to Thomas Massie — in a district he had carried by wide margins, election after election, for more than a decade — it can be done to anyone. That is the report I am required to make to you. I would shield you from a great many small things, but I will not lie to you about this.

There is one more piece of the story, and you must hear it too, because it is the piece that explains the rest.

In the year nineteen sixty-two, the United States Department of Justice ordered an organization called the American Zionist Council — the lobby that was then doing the work AIPAC does now — to register as a foreign agent under a law called the Foreign Agents Registration Act. That law is older than I am, and older than your grandfather; it was written in 1938, when the country had learned, late and at great cost, that foreign powers will try to influence American politics through American front groups, and that the modest decency owed to a free people is that those groups must say, out loud, who they are working for. The American Zionist Council did not want to say it. So the work was moved into a new shell, organized in 1963 under a new name — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and the disclosure was never made, and the order was, in time, allowed to lapse. The lobby that ended Thomas Massie’s career last night is the lineal heir of the organization that was once told by its own government that it must register, and never did.

Days before he was voted out, Massie introduced a bill to require it to register at last. He called it the AIPAC Act. He will not be in the next Congress to see that bill move. It will, in all likelihood, never move at all.

Now, my children. Hear me.

I am not telling you these things because I want you to grieve. There is nothing in grief, by itself, that builds anything. I am telling you because you are going to grow up in a country in which a sitting representative can be unseated by a foreign-policy lobby for the price of a midsize office building, and you must know it, because if you do not know it you will be helpless against it. The first defense a free people have is not their courts, and not their guns, and not even their votes — it is their plain refusal to be lied to. It is their plain insistence that things be called what they are. AIPAC is an organization. The United Democracy Project is a political action committee. Money is money. What was done last night was done in the open. You will not hear most of your countrymen call it what it was. That does not change what it was.

So here is what I require of you.

I require you to know your country well enough to know when it has been sold around you, and brave enough to say so when it has. I require you to read the paper trail. I require you to refuse the small comfort of pretending that the people who took Thomas Massie’s seat are anything other than what they are. I require you to vote — and to do more than vote — for the disclosure that was refused, and for the sovereignty that was given up, and for the simple, almost humiliatingly old idea that the men and women who write our laws should be answerable to the people they were elected to serve, and to no one else, and to no other country, ever.

You will be told that this is impossible. You will be told that the lobby cannot be unwound, that the money cannot be pulled back, that the country has always been like this and there is no use in fighting it. None of that is true. The country has been like this for a long time, but it has not been like this forever, and it does not have to be like this when you have children of your own. The men who built the system can be made, by your generation, to unbuild it. Stranger things have been done in this republic. Read your own history; you will find them.

I love you. I will love you when I am dead and you read this again. I have loved you from before you could speak, and I will love you in the country that has been left to you, whatever it becomes.

Take care of each other. Take care of the truth. And remember, when they tell you the seat cannot be bought back, that the seat was never theirs to sell.

Your father,

Earl