Some $15 million are being spent to oust Thomas Massie today, and no one in congress is more close to those of us in the real food movement than this man.
Massie himself is a grass-fed off-the-grid farmer. My friend John Moody profiled his farm here.
The farm is powered by solar panels and Tesla batteries with a house the Massie family built themselves out of logs they cut from their own woods and with stone they quarried from their own land. The home is heated from the same wood, and water comes from a well that Massie dug by hand with his neighbor.
They grow peaches and apple trees, raise pastured chickens with an automatic tractor, and raise grass-fed cattle.
Massie once admitted to Moody he used Google Maps to spy on Joel Salatin to get new ideas for his farm.
No one paid me to write this. Massie has never given me any money but I have donated to his campaign.
Massie originated and championed the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption “PRIME” Act.
Crafted by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, in turn founded by Sally Fallon Morell of the Weston A. Price Foundation and others, this act is meant to remove the USDA as an impediment to small farmers.
Small, locally run custom slaughterhouses are all over the place in the United States. USDA slaughterhouses are vanishingly rare and often at great distances away from farmers. The custom slaughterhouses are used by homesteaders and hunters who eat their own meat. The PRIME Act would allow them to be used by small farmers who sell their meat to the public, provided that they comply with local health regulations and don’t sell their meat across state lines.
The regulatory burden to get a slaughterhouse inspected by the USDA is huge, and the number of USDA-inspected slaughterhouses is dwindling. Farmers often live 15 minutes from a custom slaughterhouse but have to haul cattle hours in trucks to a USDA site. Even then, USDA slaughterhouses are often booked for two years in advance.
This all favors massive producers over small, local producers. They simply set up near a USDA facility and get treated with priority. Imagine trying to start a small new farm when the slaughterhouses are booked out for two years!
After ten years of championing this bill, Massie finally got a major part of it passed by the House as part of the Farm Bill on April 30 of this year. The bill itself passed 224-220.
Massie jokingly calls this version the “Subprime Act” because it allows direct sale to consumers but not sale to restaurants and grocery stores. The Senate still has to pass its version of the Farm Bill later this year to make the PRIME Act “pilot program” law.
This is a massive step forward for decentralizing food production.
Massie led major efforts to protect the rights of local governments to regulate AI data centers.
Without Massie, you probably would have lost your ability to fight any AI data centers being put in your backyard.
Massie used his seat on the Judiciary Committee to directly kill the Protect American AI Act, which would have granted privileges to AI datacenter permits. He opposed it on the basis that no industry should get special treatment.
The original “Big Beautiful Bill” had a provision that would prevent state and local regulation of data centers. Massie exposed this on X, and that played a major role in the popular opposition that got it stripped in the Senate.
After Trump introduced an executive order making glyphosate production a matter of national security and therefore protecting it with legal immunity, Massie introduced the “No Immunity for Glyphosate Act.” That so far has gone nowhere.
Around the same time, the Farm Bill came in with provisions that struck down states’ ability to regulate pesticides inside their own borders and gave pesticide manufacturers legal liability against state-mandated warnings.
Chellie Pingree, a Democrat representing Maine, introduced the “Protect Our Health” amendment to strip these provisions. The House Rules Committee rejected it, then Massie co-sponsored it. They rejected that, then Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican representing Florida, submitted her own version that achieved the same thing. The Luna version was was allowed through committee, it was voted on and passed, and the provisions have been stripped from the Farm Bill.
Massie doesn’t own this issue the way he can claim to own the Prime Act, but he played an important role in it.
Massie was one of three people who spearheaded the legalization of hemp after 60 years of federal prohibition that occurred in several stages from 2014 to 2018, and he single-handedly obstructed the DEA from confiscating legally used hemp seeds during that period.
In addition to real wins like this, Massie is a voice for food freedom and elevates the conversation.
Ron Paul had introduced the Unpasteurized Milk Bill in 2011 to reverse the FDA’s 1987 ban on transport of raw milk between states.
Massie picked up the torch when he arrived in Congress. In 2014, he led a coalition of 20 lawmakers to introduce the Milk Freedom Act of 2014 and the Interstate Milk Freedom Act of 2014. The latter would open up transport between states that had already legalized raw milk and the former would open up transport across any state lines. He reintroduced these bills in 2015.
In 2018, he got them attached to the Farm Bill, which forced an open floor debate about raw milk. Industrial dairy groups lobbied against it hard, and it lost 331-79.
He reintroduced the bills in 2019, 2021, 2022, 2024, and 2026, but the bills have not gone anywhere and the open-floor debate in 2018 was so far its greatest achievement.
In March of 2024, in response to the Amos Miller legal battle, Massie introduced a Constitutional Amendment:
The right of the people to grow food and to purchase food from the source of their choice shall not be infringed, and Congress shall make no law regulating the production and distribution of food products which do not move across state lines.
Why is there 15 million dollars trying to push Massie out today?
Because Massie co-introduced with Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing California, the Epstein Files Transparency Act in July 2025.
This bill was blocked by Republican leadership and Massie took the nuclear option.
He filed a discharge petition, which allows the House leadership to be overridden with 218 votes, something a congressman almost never does against the leadership of his own party.
The White House signaled that signing this would be “viewed as a very hostile act to the administration.” Massie was one of only four Republicans to sign, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert.
Exposing the Epstein files was Massie’s unforgivable sin.
The impact could endure for decades. Because he got it signed into law, the law itself would have to be reversed to end its impact. Until then, the files kept hidden are done so illegally and this can be prosecuted later. This surely is part of why his sin is so unforgivable.
The primary vote is TODAY.
Here’s what you can do:
Donate to the Massie Money Bomb. Every last dollar counts in the early morning of the election day. That day is TODAY.
If you live in KY-4, vote!
If you know someone in KY-4, tell them to vote!
If you have an audience, tell them to do all of the above!
Don’t let the Epstein billionaires take away our greatest advocate!
Epilogue
Massie lost 55/45, winning only his home county of Lewis where he got two thirds of the vote, and Mason county, where he won by a slim margin.
Based on polling, Massie likely won the 18-55 vote in a landslide, but lost the election overall due to much better turnout of the >55 vote.
Massie slightly choked up as he raised a glass of raw milk to toast his late wife.
He told the story of how in 2018 the dairy lobby went hard against his amendment to legalize transport of raw milk across state lines.
His wife had said, “I didn’t realize the lactose lobby was so intolerant!”
Crowd chants “Rhonda! Rhonda! Rhonda!” in honor of his late wife.
Massie says they need to figure out what God is telling them, and says he “won’t make any announcements” tonight.
Before and after this, repeatedly the crowd had been chanting, “2028! 2028! 2028!
The final time he says “Oh I know what you mean. You want me to run for congress again?”
They start chanting “President! President! President!”
He says “You made a compelling argument but I need a medical margarita. We’ll talk about it later.”
I watched Massie explain the building of his home. I was in awe. This guy is the real deal. I also watched how he took matters into his own hands and fixed the boiler in the local jail he was responsible for (before going into federal government). Okay I have the details incorrect. But he saw it needed fixing and he had the skills, wanted to save money and got it done. We have lost our way in government. Massie is a guiding beacon of what is right. We need many more Massies in this world.
This is the Constitutional Amendment that America needs:
"The right of the people to purchase goods and services from the sources of their choice shall not be infringed. Congress shall make no law regulating the production, distribution, or sale of any goods or services.”
There have been hundreds of thousands of laws passed, most of them in the last 100 years, virtually all contrary to the ethos of the Founders. Focusing on a small portion of them, each issue individually, has been the defense.
How’s that worked out?