When Thomas Massie won his first hotly contested seven-way GOP primary back in 2012, he was the one getting panned as the poster child for out-of-state super PAC money: His campaign got a last-minute $541,000 boost from a super PAC founded by a Texas trust-fund kid looking to fill the halls of Congress with fellow devotees of Ludwig von Mises. “The big winners in Tuesday’s election were Rand Paul, his buddy Thomas Massie and money,” groused Kentucky New Era columnist Al Cross. “The big losers included those of us who don’t like big money warping our elections.”

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Fast-forward to yesterday, when the political ad–tracking firm AdImpact reported that the now seven-term congressman’s primary against former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein had officially clocked in as the most expensive primary of all time, with Gallrein and the constellation of pro-Israel super PACs backing him spending $19 million to unseat the onetime darling of the conservative GOP base. As of 4:30 p.m. Monday, on the eve of today’s primary, some $34 million had been spent flyering doorsteps and airing attack ads in Kentucky’s Fourth District. But that number grows literally every time I google it, and the sums dumped upon the district by pro-Israel dark-money groups now surpass the amount they spent ousting former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) in 2024—in a district where a 30-second television spot costs roughly a tenth of what you’ll spend trying to reach voters in Bowman’s old district just north of Manhattan.

So “where’d that money come from?” as Tucker Carlson asked Massie on a recent three-hour episode of his podcast. “Well, it didn’t come from regular people. It’s come from billionaires,” Massie replied, as Mises surely rolled in his grave.

The seven-term congressman’s primary against former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein is the most expensive primary of all time.

The congressman then launched into a fairly comprehensive tutorial on the perils that await politicians who antagonize Organized Money: how the post–Citizens United rules of campaign finance had created a two-tier system of disclosure that requires a mere candidate like him to report contributions nearly instantaneously, while billionaire-backed super PACs could wait six months; how traditional Israel lobby–affiliated donors were increasingly routing funds through a platform called Democracy Engine to deflect attention from the central role the Israel lobby had played in the movement to “flush me out of Congress”; and how a super PAC financed principally by casino heir Miriam Adelson and hedge fund billionaires Paul Singer and John Paulson had deployed artificial intelligence and a fine-print disclaimer to produce a commercial depicting hidden-camera “footage” of Massie strolling the National Mall, dining out, and then retreating back to a hotel room with Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, while a narrator proclaimed: “Congressman Thomas Massie had been caught in a THROUPLE” and was “cheating on the America First movement” with “the Squad” in a “complete and total betrayal of President Trump and Kentucky conservatives.”

Meanwhile, Massie lamented, with good-natured incredulity, that his opponent Gallrein—whom Trump had famously recruited on the strength of his “warm body”—had turned down eight separate invitations to debate him, declined virtually every request for an interview his campaign had received, and failed to answer any of the questionnaires conservative interest groups had urged him to complete.

Perhaps understandably, Gallrein appears content to rely on the seemingly bottomless sewer of dubious half-baked stories about an ex-girlfriend promoted by Trump and his gleefully unhinged attack dog Laura Loomer to carry him across the finish line.

“It seems like this primary is more than a primary,” Carlson remarked. “It’s a window into what MAGA has become. And it’s a referendum, I would argue, on democracy itself. If in the end some Israeli casino lady can come in and just determine the outcome with [Trump consultant] Chris LaCivita, that’s not democracy. It’s … it’s not even a poor facsimile of democracy. It’s just straight-up teeth-bared oligarchy.”

For more than a year now, the left has broadly dismissed the “MAGA civil war” as an opportunistic battle between two barely distinguishable flavors of fascist—the antisemites against the Islamophobes—wherein the former criticize Trump mainly as a means of salvaging the political ambitions of JD Vance while channeling genuine revulsion over the kleptomaniacal genocidism of Trump 2.0 into a new (and yet also very old) conspiracy-fueled ethnic hatred-based ideology. The Massie primary is probably the clearest and most concise case study that suggests the feud is actually deeper, more substantive, and perhaps even more hopeful for the future of American populism than most on the left would have you believe.

Unlike Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, Massie does not come easily to populism. He is a neoliberal success story, an MIT alumnus from Appalachia who genuinely made a living off his own ingenuity. He built his own off-the-grid house using solar panels and a battery recycled from a wrecked Tesla and founded a virtual reality startup before he got into politics. Since his first term, he has reliably voted against any and all foreign aid and military intervention, making it difficult for even the most devoted pro-Israel propagandists to accuse him of singling out the Jewish state. And for many years, he was a kind of Epstein-class darling, in the sense that the Obama era’s most formidable billionaire cabal was the same Kochtopus that swooned over the banjo-playing, coal industry–boosting Massie.

Back when Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens were bemoaning the Islamization of Europe, Massie’s votes against drone strikes in Yemen and his efforts to repeal the Patriot Act helped make him the darling of a certain kind of billionaire, authenticity-washing the otherwise brazenly plutocratic politics of Libertarian, Inc.

But at some point, Massie’s ideological consistency turned out to be more than a brand management exercise. By the time he decided, with some egging on from his wife, to die on the hill of forcing the Trump administration to release the Epstein files, he had an idea what might be coming. “I’ve pissed off enough billionaires who are clearly amoral people that I might have shortened my expected lifespan,” he told The Atlantic, for a story which also features a telling anecdote in which he gently shames a young staffer for considering a suspiciously timed job offer that would have doubled his salary—if he could start right away, in the middle of drafting the Epstein Files Transparency Act. “Did it ever occur to you that they might be offering you this job to basically make me less effective?” he asked the staffer, who sheepishly replied: “That’s what my mom said.”

While neither Massie nor Carlson has gone so far as to demand public election financing or even the overturn of Citizens United, their fans and ideological allies are ready to have that conversation, as the recovering MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair—probably most famous for having a child, followed by a public feud, with Elon Musk—has made loopholes in post-Watergate election regulation and the ideology of “wealthy corporate men” that “corporations are basically political minorities and money is speech” the subject of a strangely riveting series of TikTok videos in which she applies enormous quantities of makeup while discussing the internal message boards right-wing influencers use to scan for unregulated paid “gigs” shitposting about teachers unions, Palestine supporters, or even companies with which they compete.

Massie’s life story may be multiple light-years distant from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s, but they now find themselves on the same side of the fault line that threatens the cohesion and the future of MAGA. In her farewell letter to her constituents, Greene wrote:

“If I am cast aside by MAGA Inc and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can’t even relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.”

It’s hard to know if this observation resonates quite yet with the voters in Massie’s overwhelmingly Republican, 87 percent white district, which is the richest in Kentucky. One of Massie’s more notorious constituents, the Covington Catholic twerp turned conservative pundit Nicholas Sandmann, is all in on Ed Gallrein. But either way, the Massie stan and local AM sports radio host T.J. Walker posted on Monday that he was “oddly at peace” with the race. “If Massie loses,” he wrote, “it becomes a powerful wake-up call for Americans about how broken and money-dominated our elections are and how much of our foreign policy has slipped out of our control.”

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Maureen Tkacik is investigations editor at the Prospect and a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project.