Let me begin with a confession: American democracy is not dead. That would be too clean, too dramatic. What has actually happened is considerably more embarrassing. American democracy has slowly, enthusiastically, and with enormous donations been converted into the world’s most expensive online fandom. A place where, much like fans arguing over musicians or movie characters, citizens obsessively champion or attack political figures. Instead of discussing favorite albums or movie scenes, the debate now rages over whether, for example, a Kentucky congressman is a globalist just for asking where the money was going.

Welcome to the United States of the Discourse, a nation of 335 million people who have collectively decided that governance is for bureaucrats, but vibes are eternal. We have taken the boring machinery of representative democracy, such as committees, hearings, amendments, reconciliation bills, the deliberate, unglamorous sausage-making of self-governance, and have now replaced it with something far more emotionally satisfying: a sprawling, interconnected identity system that functions almost exactly like a medieval religion, if medieval religion had algorithms, a merch store, and a fucking podcast network.

See, every functioning religion needs three things: sacred texts, infallible saints, and a reliable system for identifying and punishing heretics. American political tribalism, particularly in its current MAGA incarnation, though the left has its own colorful liturgies and its own saints who may not be questioned, has achieved all three with remarkable efficiency, and without any of the architectural beauty of actual cathedrals. The sacred texts are whatever was said at the last rally or speech, or even tweet, provided it hasn’t already been contradicted by what was said at this rally. Contradictions, when they occur, are not acknowledged. They are absorbed. The movement inhales inconsistency like oxygen, processes it at a theological level, and exhales certainty. Consistency is not a requirement. In fact, the ability to hold two contradictory positions simultaneously (and to attack anyone who points this out) has become something of a spiritual achievement, available only to the truly devoted! Man, I wish I could do that!

The saints are infallible. This is non-negotiable. A saint is someone whose supporters have collectively decided that criticism constitutes a personal attack on each of them individually, their family, their truck, their sense of American identity, and possibly their Second Amendment rights. Point out that the saint once held the opposite position on, say, the deficit, and you will be informed at length that you are brainwashed, a globalist, probably European, insufferable at dinner parties, and almost certainly on someone’s payroll. You may also be ratio’d. The ratio is the modern excommunication: swift and deeply satisfying to the mob. The sinners are anyone who asks follow-up questions. This category is larger than it used to be and growing daily. I won’t elaborate further on this; we all understand.

Thus, in this beautifully irrational ecosystem, imagine introducing a congressman from Kentucky who seems to have genuinely read the Constitution, believes it meant what it said, votes accordingly, and does not particularly care which party is annoyed by this on any given Tuesday. A man who opposed COVID spending under a Republican president. Who strongly opposed surveillance expansions regardless of which party proposed them. Who voted against foreign military adventures regardless of who was running them. Who had the truly unhinged gall to ask where, specifically, the money going to other countries was actually going, and whether it was strictly necessary.

This is, of course, Thomas Massie, Republican congressman from Kentucky’s 4th District, who served from 2012 until his defeat in the May 2026 primary at the hands of a Trump-backed challenger, following a campaign that consumed an astonishing $32 million in spending, in a district that had previously treated Massie as functionally untouchable.

In a healthier political culture, Massie would be regarded as something close to a useful eccentric, like the kind of principled irritant that democratic systems actually need to function, a man who is occasionally inconvenient but whose obstinate consistency at least proves that some people in Washington have morals. Earlier this year, he partnered with California Democrat Ro Khanna to push for transparency on the Epstein files, spearheading the Epstein Files Transparency Act and going directly to the Department of Justice to force the public unmasking of wealthy and powerful names that had been hiding behind heavily redacted government documents. He voted against farm bills, defense bills, spending bills, omnibus bills, and probably several bills he hadn’t technically read yet on general constitutional principle. He was, in the technical sense, a pain in everyone’s neck, across party lines, with admirable impartiality.

He was also, in the current theological framework, a heretic. Not because he disagreed on policy, disagreement on policy is fine; it’s practically a lifestyle brand now. The problem was that he publicly disagreed consistently, without apology. Including about the Leader, Donald “Dumbass” Trump. Once you do that, you are no longer a political opponent. You are a threat to the movement’s emotional architecture. You are someone who keeps behaving as though politics is supposed to make sense, and in a fandom, that is genuinely destabilizing. His defeat, after a brutal, historic campaign, was described by some as a political loss this morning. However, it was, in fact, a ritual of some sort. An American civilization that is now publicly demonstrating where the line is and what happens when you cross it repeatedly and without remorse.

Donald Trump is often analyzed purely as a political figure, which misses the more interesting phenomenon. “Trumpism” (i.e., MAGA, etc.)operates more like political mythology fused with religious revival than it does like a conventional political movement, and understanding it as the latter will leave you perpetually confused about why policy arguments never seem to land. It’s comical too because this religious-influenced movement, its leader, is not religious. lmafo.

Trump presents himself not merely as a candidate but as a redeemer figure within the American nationalist imagination. His supporters frequently frame him in explicitly messianic language: persecuted by corrupt elites, betrayed by false allies, fighting shadowy enemies on behalf of real Americans. His rallies function as revival meetings as much as campaign events: there is testimony, call-and-response, collective catharsis, the shared experience of being a persecuted righteous remnant in a wicked world. Within systems organized this way, loyalty becomes sacred. Not loyalty to an idea, or a platform, or a set of policy preferences, but loyalty to the person (i.e., the ideal of truth), the movement, the feeling. This is why Massie’s greatest sin was not disagreement on policy. It was public disobedience. He violated the movement’s emotional structure by refusing to submit entirely and by appearing comfortable with it. Once he criticized Trump’s military actions and continued resisting party orthodoxy on spending and foreign aid, the conflict stopped being legislative and became theological. This is why Trump’s attacks on Massie before this primary election carried such moral intensity. Calling him “the worst Republican congressman in history” was not really a political assessment. It was excommunication. It was a public ritual announcement: this man is outside the community of the faithful. You may not listen to him. You may not nod when he makes sense. You must reject him entirely, or the integrity of the faith is compromised. Like a fucking pope, oh, wait, he already posted that picture. Nice!

Modern digital politics amplifies every element of this Trump dynamic to its logical extreme. Social media does not reward careful constitutional analysis. It does not elevate nuance, internal consistency, or the admission that a situation is complicated. Algorithms reward enemies and traitors, dramatic betrayals, and the ecstasy of the public pile-on. Nuance dies first, usually somewhere around the second reply in a thread.

One of the genuinely spectacular ironies of modern American conservatism is watching the America First coalition, a brand built explicitly on skepticism of foreign entanglements, foreign aid, foreign wars, and basically anything foreign that wasn’t a luxury resort in Gaza, become extremely agitated when someone applies those principles to a particular foreign country. Massie, who, if you don’t know by now, I really liked, opposed foreign aid packages. All of them. Including Big Brothers (Israel). 

This is called consistency. 

In the current political taxonomy, this particular form of consistency is classified as a moral failing, specifically, the moral failing of prioritizing the wrong things in the wrong order. America First, it turns out, has extensive fine print. The fine print is updated quarterly, is not available to the public, and retroactively reclassifies previously held positions as never having been taken. To be fair, America First was never a precisely defined philosophical framework so much as an emotional brand with a very good design team. For some, it meant economic nationalism. For some, it meant border security. For some, it meant skepticism of military adventurism abroad. For some, it meant a different set of military adventurism abroad, just involving different countries. Massie had the misfortune of interpreting the slogan literally, America … First … and Only, which, in the current political culture, is considered aggressive naivety, like showing up to a costume party in an actual historical costume and being stared at because everyone else is dressed as their favorite podcast host or in some bullshit NFL jersey over a sweatshirt.

The whiplash this has created among younger conservatives — particularly the online, chronically online, extremely ideologically serious segment of Gen Z that had found in Massie something approaching a coherent worldview- has been significant. Gen Z was promised anti-interventionism by Trump’s administration in the lead-up to this second term. What they got is selective anti-interventionism, with exceptions TBD by donors. MAGA turned out to be MIGA.

Speaking of MIGA, let’s discuss the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, which poured extraordinary sums into defeating a congressman whose primary offense was expressing opinions about where American money goes. AIPAC is, technically, a domestic lobbying organization. It is not required to register as a foreign agent under FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, because it is incorporated in the United States and, suppsodely, does not receive direct formal instructions from the Israeli government. It simply has, as its singular animating political purpose, the alignment of American foreign policy with the strategic interests of a foreign government. Which is, apparently, a completely different thing. The logic here is genuinely impressive. It is the same logic that would allow you to incorporate a small LLC called Definitely American Pizza Company, use it exclusively to deliver calzones according to your Italian cousin’s specifications, pay your Italian cousin for all the recipes, coordinate daily with your Italian cousin on menu decisions, and then explain to regulators that you are not working for your Italian cousin because the checks are technically written to Definitely American Pizza Company.

To be very clear about what is being argued here: Israel is a country. Countries have interests. Countries lobby for those interests in foreign capitals. This is normal, legal, and practiced by essentially every significant nation on earth. What is less normal, and what becomes genuinely uncomfortable when examined in daylight, is a lobbying apparatus of this scale and sophistication operating under a domestic designation that insulates it from the transparency requirements that would apply to a foreign agent. I won’t get into the stats, but in short, AIAPc and its affiliates donated and spent a combined $126.9 Million during the 2023–2024 election cycle.

This is why FARA exists. It exists because Americans, with some historical justification, decided they had the right to know when political pressure on their elected officials originated from foreign interests. The registration requirement was designed to let voters evaluate that information and decide how much weight to give it. The question of whether AIPAC meets the functional definition of a foreign agent, regardless of how it has structured itself legally to avoid the formal one, is not antisemitic as many claim. Instead, it is a question about transparency in a democracy. These are different things, and the conflation of the two has historically done a great deal of work to prevent the question from being asked. But I’m fed up with it not being asked.

What made the Massie race particularly clarifying was the sheer scale of the intervention. $32 million flooding from primarily Israel lobbying groups into a congressional primary in Kentucky. 

Over foreign policy positions.

In a district where voters were, one imagines, primarily interested in roads, jobs, healthcare, and the general texture of their daily economic lives.

The message this sends (not just to Massie but to every other congressman watching) is precise, unambiguous, and intentional: having the wrong position on Israel aid is not a matter of political opinion. It is professionally fatal. God, that pissed me off writing that.

For younger Americans watching this, a generation already experiencing record levels of institutional distrust, who grew up watching the 2008 financial crisis, the Iraq War accountability vacuum, the surveillance revelations, the pandemic, and are currently paying rent that consumes 40 to 50 percent of their income, this was not a complicated political signal to decode. It was proof of what they had already suspected: that the interests actually governing America are instead Israeli, and have limited overlap with the interests of American voters, and that the gap between those two things is maintained, in part, by enormous amounts of money. There is nothing worse than Israel’s influence in our government, and it has ruined the American ideal. Washington would be sad.

However, there is a deeper contradiction worth naming: the religious one. Large segments of the American right publicly profess biblical values, supposed humility, peacemaking, care for the poor, skepticism of earthly power, the Sermon on the Mount, the whole jawn. These are not obscure theological positions. They are the central teachings of the Christian Deity.

And yet: many of the same evangelical and Christian nationalist spaces that invoke these teachings most loudly have become the most enthusiastic supporters of a political movement defined by the accumulation of power, the humiliation of enemies, the punishment of disloyalty, and the celebration of the strong man. The contradiction is not subtle. It is, in fact, the defining theological story of what happens when Christianity fuses with state power, which is a story that has played out many times in history and never ends particularly well for Christianity.

Early Christianity was a critique of the empire. Jesus was condemned to death under the authority of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate and was crucified by Roman soldiers. The Sermon on the Mount is, among other things, an extended argument against this specific domination system (cf. Matthew 5:39; Matthew 5:44; Matthew 5:5; Matthew 5:10; Matthew 5:41; Matthew 6:19; Matthew 6:24; Matthew 7:12). The early church existed largely outside political power structures, often in active tension with them. This is not a fringe interpretation. This is church history. What happened over subsequent centuries, as Christianity became the official religion of various empires, is that the faith gradually shifted from resisting power to blessing it. The cross, which began as a symbol of imperial execution of dissidents, became the decoration on the emperor’s shield. This is the shape of the problem, and it is not new. Watching it unfold again in real time in 21st-century America is either fascinating or horrifying, depending on where you’re sitting.

Massie’s anti-interventionist positions, his skepticism of military spending, his opposition to foreign wars, and his insistence that American treasure should not be sent abroad while Americans struggle have now echoed the older Christian critiques of empire. Ironically, many of the religious communities that once championed exactly this kind of anti-establishment, anti-imperial rhetoric instead joined efforts to politically destroy him. A culture that once feared Caesar now, in many corners, loves the one they have. Theological irony is at the center of the current moment.

What makes the Massie race historically significant may not be who won, but who noticed. And who noticed, in enormous numbers, was Gen Z.

Gen Z is growing up inside what can only be described as a permanent institutional crisis: post-2008 economic distrust, pandemic trauma, collapsing faith in media, algorithmic propaganda, political polarization, climate anxiety, the AI disruption of labor markets, loneliness epidemics, and student debt that makes the promise of education feel increasingly like a con. These are not background conditions. They are the formative experiences of an entire generation, and they produce a very specific political psychology: less ideological, more authenticity-oriented, hypersensitive to manufactured consensus, and deeply, reflexively skeptical of systems that spend enormous sums to produce particular outcomes. Massie, for all his faults and policy positions one might reasonably disagree with, came across as someone who genuinely believed what he said. In an era dominated by consultants, scripted messaging, brand management, and politicians who A/B test their personalities, genuine belief, even in things you disagree with, registers as radical. In the attention economy, it is genuinely scarce.

This is why many young people, including those who strongly disagreed with Massie’s specific positions, felt disturbed by the scale of the campaign mounted against him. It was very fun waking up to such comments today. Moreover, it did not look like persuasion. It did not look like a democracy. It looked like enforcement. It looked like the thing that happens when you step too far outside the approved range of positions, not because you’re wrong, but because you’re inconvenient to certain people. Gen Z grew up watching influencers fake authenticity for sponsorships, corporations fake activism for quarterly reports, and politicians fake populism for clicks. They are, as a result, extraordinarily good at identifying when something is manufactured. And when $32 million in outside money suddenly converges to destroy a congressman in a local race, the interpretation that most of them reach instinctively is not “the democratic process is working” but “someone important doesn’t want this person asking questions.”

Whether or not that interpretation is entirely fair is almost beside the point. The point is that it is the interpretation, and it is spreading, and the institutions that benefit from a less suspicious public are not doing anything particularly convincing to change it. It is here that the theological irony is that the coalition that destroyed Massie has perhaps not fully processed: systems that overuse force against internal critics tend to produce martyrs rather than obedience. This is one of the most reliably documented patterns in the history of political and religious movements, and it continues to surprise people every single time it happens.

Massie inside Congress was an annoying, occasionally gridlock-causing, constitutionally pedantic libertarian with a focused obsession with government surveillance, civil liberties, and asking where the money was going. He was infuriating to leadership on both sides. He was the congressional equivalent of the person at the meeting who keeps asking follow-up questions after everyone else has moved on. Massie, outside Congress, having been destroyed by a $32 million national campaign for the crime of ideological consistency, is a symbol. Clean, uncomplicated, useful for anyone who wants to point at something and say, “That is what happens when you ask the wrong questions.” That is what the system does to people who don’t comply. His defeat has handed him precisely the cultural power that twelve years of principled voting never quite achieved, and the movement that excommunicated him did it for free.

Martyrs are significantly harder to primary than congressmen.

We are not, as a nation, governing ourselves. We are, as a nation, being governed by external forces: tribes, algorithms, cameras at rallies, and cameras in our pockets. We have outsourced our collective political judgment to loyalty hierarchies so rigid they would embarrass a medieval guild, and done so while congratulating ourselves on living in the world’s oldest democracy. The fix is, theoretically, available. Treat politics like governance again. Ask what the money is for. Require foreign lobbying organizations to register as what they functionally are, regardless of how they’ve structured their domestic incorporation. Ask why a $32 million national campaign is being waged over a Kentucky congressional primary, by whom, and in whose interest. Ask whether America First means anything when applied selectively. Ask, in general, more questions. Questions are free. They are available to everyone. They are also, in the current political climate, the single most dangerous thing an elected official can do.

Thomas Massie asked questions consistently across twelve years, without apology, across party lines, including about the King. He pushed for transparency on the Epstein files. He wanted to know where the foreign aid was going. He thought America First meant what it said. He voted that way every single time.

The system spent $32 million to make sure he won’t be asking anymore.

The rest of us, presumably, will learn the appropriate lesson and post something supportive instead. The algorithms are watching. The synod is in session. The ratio waits for no one. And somewhere in Kentucky, a soon-to-be-former congressman is probably reading the Constitution again, just out of spite.

Excuse the grammar, and/or spelling, this was a quick write.

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I hope all is well,

Colin