On the day Kentucky Republicans rejected pathologically Israel-obsessed Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) reelection bid, Maureen Galindo, a Texas Democrat, promised to turn an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center “into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.” The new facility, she added, would “also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”
Galindo isn’t some fringe podcaster. She finished with the most votes in the first round of Texas’s 35th Congressional District primary and will be in a runoff with two other candidates next week. Her social media streams are a running sewer of conspiracism and unhinged antisemitism. Let’s just say that Galindo’s outlook, normalized on the progressive Left and on the “woke Right,” isn’t far off from Massie’s. They share a vibe.
A number of Democrats condemned Galindo, who is hardly an anomaly on the progressive Left, for being a bit too enthusiastic about her “anti-Zionism.”
“This is absolutely disgusting,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted. “This bigoted garbage and antisemitism should be nowhere near our politics.”
It’s nice to see Ocasio-Cortez, if I may, for admitting that “anti-Zionism” is just a contemporary form of antisemitism.
Would Democrats have condemned Galindo if she weren’t still in a primary? They have nothing to lose here. Considering recent history, it’s highly unlikely. That fact is, Galindo is the natural progression from the violent rhetoric of Hasan “America deserved 9/11” Piker, or Nazi SS tattoo enthusiast Graham Platner, or the “globalize the intifada” mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani.
And whether Galindo wins or not, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ro Khanna (D-CA), and other socialist Jew-baiters in Congress will probably have reinforcements on the way. Chris Rabb, a Marxist and Hamas apologist with Ocasio-Cortez’s backing, who once suggested that the Bondi Beach massacre of Jewish Australians was a false flag operation carried out by Zionists, won his primary in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District. Abdul El Sayed, who, after a Hezbollah terrorist tried to ram into a Jewish daycare with the intent of massacring everyone, remarked that “hurt people hurt people,” leads the Democratic primary for a Senate seat in Michigan, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Dr. Adam Hamawy, a top Democratic contender to represent New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, was a good friend of the terrorist Omar “Blind Sheikh” Abdel Rahman.
Israel is central to the rhetoric of all these people. One of the big problems for Massie, however, was not only that the Jewish state ranked low on the list of voter concerns in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District but that most of those who cared were probably still inclined to support the only democratic nation in the Middle East.
Yet, the topic was basically all Massie and his army of trolls could ever talk about. In every interview, Massie, who garnered support from virtually every America-hating leftist in the country, brought it back to Israel and Jewish money. In the closing days of the campaign, Massie rejected an interview offer from popular conservative radio host Dana Loesch, appearing instead on bigoted crank Cenk Uygur’s podcast. The day before the election, Massie was seen barbecuing with a Holocaust denier.
And, after being soundly defeated, Massie took a dig at his opponent, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, as a puppet of Jewish interests.
“I would have come out sooner,” he said, “but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”
The classless Massie is enveloped by obsessive Israel conspiracism on social media.
But, does Massie’s defeat show that right-wing “anti-Zionism” is a political dead end because it “already has a home in Democratic primaries, where it fits perfectly with anti-colonialist, anti-Western principle of the left,” as Compact editor Matthew Schmitz argues?
Perhaps. But anti-Zionism also fits pretty comfortably within the isolationist Right’s worldview, which is now anchored to an increasingly pro-Islamist podcaster world. It is evident, unless events change the trajectory, that younger Republicans, bombarded daily by anti-Israel propaganda, are going to be less inclined to support the Jewish state in the future.
But, more than all of that, conservatives shouldn’t fool themselves. Ultimately, Massie didn’t lose because of Jewish donors or Israel or because he’s an overaged groyper. He lost because of Donald Trump.
Trump, like any president, has tremendous sway over his party, and an even tighter hold over primary voters. This isn’t unique. The only Obama-approved candidate who lost a primary race during his presidency was probably Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, who had defected from the Republican Party only a few months before running for reelection.
Trump ran Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) out of the party, he ended Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) career, and he endorsed a corrupt foot soldier, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, over Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). He didn’t do any of it for idealistic reasons. He did it because Trump values loyalty over anything else. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was a barely literate crank her entire congressional career, yet she was ejected from MAGA for disloyalty to Trump. She wasn’t useful anymore.
Massie, a backbencher who spent his career preaching about principles but never even incrementally helped improve policy. For the GOP, a quirky sideshow was fine when Democrats were in power, but a liability with Republicans’ thin majority. That’s just political reality.
Massie’s only real accomplishment was joining cynical leftists to push for the release of the “Epstein files.” It was a very un-libertarian thing to do, forcing the government to release private, uncorroborated accusations and documents to smear people who had never had any due process, much less been indicted for any wrongdoing. But it allowed Massie to throw around the phrase “Epstein class” to smear Jewish Americans.
The problem was that Massie got so caught up in the online praise showered on him by progressives and conspiracy theorists that he decided to charge Republicans with protecting pedophiles. As of this writing, the congressman has exposed no pedophiles.
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But what would have happened if Massie had praised Trump and avoided Epstein, but still embraced Tucker Carlson-style woke rightism? Would the president, who endorsed Massie in 2022, have turned on him? Probably not. And what if Trump weren’t president, would Massie have lost? That seems unlikely, as well.
The ousting of Massie is a victory for normie conservatives. But a cautionary one.