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To Small but Growing Group, This Congressional Backbencher Is a Cult Hero - The New York Times [1]
['James Pogue']
Date: 2023-03-10
In this world, it’s as much Mr. Massie’s lifestyle as his politics that have won him fans. He grew up in the tiny town of Vanceburg, Ky., and went on to M.I.T., where his high school sweetheart soon joined him. Together, they founded a virtual reality company while they were still undergrads. Mr. Massie now holds about two dozen patents.
They sold the company and moved back to Kentucky, beginning work on their off-the-grid home in 2003. “We wanted to raise our kids the way we had been raised,” he told an interviewer who filmed him for a 2018 documentary titled “Off the Grid,” which helped to make him a niche celebrity in an age when lots of people are suddenly getting into homesteading, prepping and do-it-yourself farming. They began work on their surprisingly stately house while living in a 900-square-foot mobile home, constructing it as much as possible with materials coming directly from land that had been in Mr. Massie’s wife’s family for generations. “I think there’s this notion that if something’s available locally it’s not as good, that it’s got to be exotic,” he said, while chiseling a piece of limestone. “I want a house that’s coming out of the ground and belongs here.”
He ran for a county office in 2010 as a disciple of the libertarian-minded Senate candidate Rand Paul, campaigning in part by playing banjo at local bluegrass jams. “I guess part of what endeared me to them is that I wasn’t that good,” he said. Both men won their races, and Mr. Paul endorsed Mr. Massie in his first U.S. House race two years later.
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. He remained surprisingly independent of Donald Trump, who once called him a “third-rate grandstander,” and joined the group of seven conservatives in the House who — while voicing concerns about supposed issues with the vote — voted to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.
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.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/thomas-massie-republican-party.html
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