Thomas Massie, a Republican, is not the type to smile for the cameras and count his words carefully. He is a mechanical engineer who loves precise calculations, and it seems that he calculated them well when he said: “I will not vote to send your tax money abroad.” A simple phrase, but enough to spark a funding war against him from Israel’s biggest supporters in America.
Massie, the engineer who dared to say what was not said in Washington: AIPAC’s influence is not a sacred destiny, and he entered Congress carrying his belief in small government and lower taxes. He found himself facing a huge financing machine whose strings were held by the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson. After purchasing the Dallas Mavericks for $3.5 billion, it is now moving toward a different kind of deal: buying a seat in Congress, Massey says.
A $20 million campaign launched by Adelson to remove him from the path of her favored candidate, Ed Gallerin, in the 2026 Kentucky Republican primary, according to Bloomberg, was launched because Massie “refuses to send taxpayer money abroad.”
However, Massie was no ordinary candidate in an lopsided battle. Facing the money of billionaires, the man collected donations from 13,000 ordinary citizens. Not from the major funds, but from the pockets of young voters who found in his battle a rare test of the slogan “America First” at a time when this slogan has become merely an electoral banner.
Massie is one of the few members of Congress who has spoken frankly about Israeli influence in American politics, and is famous for his criticism of the American Israel Affairs Committee, known by the abbreviation “AIPAC.”
He defines himself as a constitutional conservative, a liberal Republican and a member of the Tea Party movement, a believer in intellectual property and believes it is necessary to stimulate innovation.
Enter the world of innovation
Thomas Massey was born in Huntington, West Virginia, in the United States, in 1971, but grew up in Finnsburg, Kentucky, where his father was a bar distributor.
Massey earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1993. He received a master’s of science in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.
During his university studies, Massey participated in the MIT Solar Car Club, which qualified him in 1992 to win the MIT Prize. It was very rare for a non-mechanical engineering student to win in this competition.
The following year, Massey and his wife, whom he met in high school in Finnsburg, started Sensabelle Appliances. The company was re-established as Sensabil Technology, and in 1996 raised $32 million in venture capital, had 24 patents and another 70 employees.
In 1995, Massey won the Melson Award for the Institute of Technology’s Student Inventors Award and the David and Lynsey Morganthaller Grand Prize in the 6th Annual Entrepreneurial Business Plan Competition. Soon he and his wife sold the company to enter the world of politics.
Congressman from Kentucky
In 2010, he was elected to the office of judge-executive in Lewis County, and he also campaigned for US Senate candidate Round Bull, all of which culminated in his election in 2012 as a member of Congress for the Fourth District in Kentucky.
Massey took positions contrary to the mainstream in the Republican Party throughout his legislative career. In 2017, Massey expressed doubts about the role of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack. He was the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against sanctions imposed on North Korea. Massey also joined lawmakers opposing a bill imposing new economic sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Massie was a frequent and harsh critic of US President Donald Trump in his second term, including criticizing him for blocking the release and publication of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, which prompted Trump to publicly support the primaries against him.
Earlier, Massey said that AIPAC exercises a very large influence on Congress. For example, “If you look at the Israel lobby in Congress currently and examine the publications of members of Congress, you will find them all an exact copy and everyone is repeating the same message: We must support Israel, and we must do that.” According to who was nominated for him.
An internal poll conducted by Up Swing Strategies showed that the support provided by pressure groups loyal to the Israeli occupation, led by AIPAC, has become a burden on candidates in the US states in the primary elections, in light of the increasing popular discontent with the occupation after more than two years of the bloody and brutal war on the Gaza Strip.
Massey’s position on AIPAC and its influence on American politics may have been clearly noticeable in the recent period. In an interview conducted with him in 2024, he revealed that “every Republican member of Congress has someone from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee directing them to vote in line with the positions of this organization.” In the same year, he also boycotted a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before Congress, describing it as “political theater,” and he was the only Republican to do so. As Massey later wrote.
Not only that, he published an opinion poll on his “X” account asking his followers whether AIPAC should be forced to register as a foreign agent, and 94.9% of respondents voted “yes.” He should register on the list of foreign agents in America.
Opponents of Israel
Massie joined 8 Democrats in 2021 in voting against $1 billion in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, saying at the time that he opposed all foreign aid because of concerns about the national debt.
The only Republican House member in 2019 to vote against condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement known as BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement) among the reasons he cited for voting against the resolution, Massie stated that he did not support “federal efforts to condemn any type of private boycott, regardless of whether the boycott is based on bad motives or not” and that “these are matters that Congress should properly leave to the states and the people to decide.”
He was also the only Republican to vote against the House resolution guaranteeing US support for Israeli military actions in Gaza on October 7, 2023. The resolution passed by a vote of 412 to 10.
Massie continued his uniqueness by standing against his party’s consensus. Also in 2023, he was the only member of Congress to oppose a resolution affirming “Israel’s right to exist and equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.”
He summarized his position on the war on the Gaza Strip by saying, “Nothing justifies the number of civilian casualties, tens of thousands of women and children, in Gaza over the past two years. We must stop all American military aid to Israel now.”
Mamdani model
Massie is the clearest and most prominent form of the state of rebellion taking place within the Republican Party and reveals the conflict over the American policy supporting the occupation, which contradicts Trump’s slogan “America First.” It appears that Miriam Adelson, who paid $100 million to President Trump to move the American embassy to Jerusalem and supported Trump’s first and second election campaigns, constitutes a clear embodiment of the interference of a “foreign country” in American internal affairs and foreign policy, which will be present in the renewal elections for the US Congress. Massie will also be present by rejecting AIPAC’s dictates and accepting the very dangerous challenge to Adelson’s influence and the influence and control of the lobby.
Many American elites have declared their positions on Israeli interference in American politics, and Zahran Mamdani’s victory as mayor of New York has encouraged many to run without courting the money of the Israeli lobby in Washington.