Transcript of Rep. Thomas Massie on The Tucker Carlson Show

That’s very impressive. So what’s the message of it?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: The message is this is urgent. It’s hard to comprehend 14 digits of debt. But when you see the last five digits are moving so fast you can’t perceive them with your eyes, then you kind of understand, whoa, we got a problem here. I mean, it’s $100,000 a second, roughly. So imagine we had this catapult, and we were launching Cybertrucks once a second into the ocean. That’s how much debt we’re taking on continuously.

Now, there is some good news. I noticed last month it went down, and I’m like, is my debt clock broken? Why is it going down? And then I realized, oh, it’s April 15th. Everybody’s paying their taxes. So the good news is we balanced it for a month. The bad news is April 15th is the only reason that happened. And now the debt’s going back up again.

TUCKER CARLSON: So maybe it’s when it gets so big, it becomes something that you have to ignore. It’s almost like if you fall off the wagon from drinking, you binge. If you fall off your New Year’s diet, you just eat the pizza and a quick Ben and Jerry, like, why do you care? You sort of go crazy. And it feels like we’re there.

Congressional Spending Habits

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I am trying to make people feel very uncomfortable. I wear this on the floor of the House, and people literally, they’ll press the button that says yay or nay. I’ve argued we should relabel the voting button. Spend and don’t spend. They’re red and green. If you got that far and can’t read, I say it’s like stop and go. But I’ve seen people press the spend button, then turn around and look at my debt badge and ask, did it just go up? But I want them to realize there are consequences to what they’re doing, because they have been, I think, as you said, just ignoring it, putting it off to the side.

TUCKER CARLSON: It almost feels like it’s so big that why even deal with it?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: That’s where we are. I think a lot of lawmakers are apathetic. You’re like, well, we can’t fix it. We’re not going to fix it. We might as well indulge in it and I’ll see what I can get.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, exactly, yeah. So where does it end?

The Dollar as Reserve Currency

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right now, we’re able to finance it because we’re the world’s reserve currency. And when we print more money, which we’re doing all the time the Fed is doing that, we’re actually taxing the world. Everybody in the world who holds dollars gets, like a 3% transaction fee. I say we’re kind of like the credit card at the gas station that gets 3% because you’re using that credit card. Well, we get 3% from inflation we cause because the world is using our currency. And we can do that as long as they use our currency.

But I think it’s going to end at some point. They’re going to quit using our dollars as reserve currency. I mean, I watched your interview with Putin, and one of the things, whether you hate him or not, one of the things he said that is true is when we sanctioned him, before we sanctioned Russia, 70% of their transactions were in US dollars. And after the sanctions, it’s less than 20%. 20% of their transactions are in US dollars.

So what we’re doing with all these sanctions, ironically, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. Every time we sanction a country and say, you can’t use our currency to have a transaction, we’re taking away our ability to charge them 3% for that transaction. Because when we print 3% more dollars, we’re just taking that money and we’re…

TUCKER CARLSON: Also sending a really clear signal which is the dollar’s not safe for you.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the reserve currency because it’s a safe haven, because it’s a stable country. It’s the most stable country in the world. And we’re not going to weaponize the dollar, because that would be shooting ourselves. But suddenly we are.

Seizing Foreign Assets

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And they’ll tolerate like 3% because we’re not backed by dollars, we’re backed by aircraft carriers right now. So they’ll sort of tolerate that 3%. But one of the things we recently did in Congress, we passed something called the Repo Act where we said we’re just going to seize all of Russia’s sovereign assets in the United States.

Well, it turns out a lot of that is treasury debt that they’ve agreed to buy so that they can hold dollars. And here’s the problem with that. When people see that we’ve seized their money that they gave us in exchange for these treasury notes, then other countries won’t want to buy our debt. It’s already happening. And the price of a long-term bond that the treasury puts out will go, it’s already gone above 4%. It’s like over 4.5%. They don’t want to buy them anymore because, you know, we probably wouldn’t seize Great Britain’s assets, but I could see us seizing China’s assets.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would… I mean, that seems like theft. Just like take a country’s assets, I mean, that belongs to the people of the country, right? It’s not just Putin, it is theft.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Like it’s immoral. But even if you’re okay with the amorality or immorality of it, it’s shortsighted because eventually it’ll catch up with us.

TUCKER CARLSON: So do any of the dumbos you work with understand that? Did you say, wait a second. If we do this, first of all, it’s wrong. And if we’re going to be a beacon of light and order and justice in the world, we should abide by those principles. But even if you don’t care about that, even if, as you said, you’re amoral, like it’s self-defeating to do this, do they understand that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Some of them understand it, but it doesn’t matter. They’ll still vote for something like the Repo Act anyway because it’s popular.

TUCKER CARLSON: With whom?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: With voters. They think, yeah, take Russia’s money. Like, you know, let’s take, yeah, that’d be great, let’s take their money and use it in a war against them. It kind of feels good, but the problem is it’s not moral in the long run, and it won’t work in the long run, even if you were okay with it.

Foreign Wars and the Military-Industrial Complex

TUCKER CARLSON: Why are we in a war with Russia? I’ve never figured that out. Why Russia? It almost seems like they picked it off a map. Like, why would it be at war with Russia?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You know, what’s interesting is we were in Afghanistan, and I was tracking this. I talked to the Special Inspector General, John Sopko, about twice a year about the money that was being wasted in Afghanistan. It was about $50 billion a year. And I was glad to see us get out of Afghanistan. But kind of like feathering the clutch and shifting gears, we just went from second gear to third gear, because as soon as we quit spending $50 billion a year in Afghanistan, we started spending more than $50 billion a year in Ukraine.

There’s a military industrial complex. They call it the defense industrial base now in the United States. They say we have to… they’re hungry and we got to keep them fed. And since we don’t have any of our own wars and we don’t have a reason to deplete our stocks and our bombs and weapons that we have, we engage in these other things to keep them healthy and thriving.

In fact, the Biden administration even made that argument in a letter to Congress for why we should do this supplemental foreign aid to Israel, to Ukraine, to Taiwan. They made the argument that the defense industrial base needs to be strong, and so we need to spend this money. And they gave a list of all the states in the United States that would benefit from this spending. And that’s why they said we should do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: If… I mean, look, everyone who lives here wants to be proud of the country. I always have been, and I’m proud of its people still. But if your main export is death, you know that…

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I mean, it doesn’t work in the long run. I mean, there is a blowback.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wrong.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We’re engendering a lot of ill will. Look, 10 years ago, even more recently than that, the only way we could get to the space station was on a Russian rocket, right? And we had a collaboration with them. We were able to get to space that way, and now we don’t.

And the bad thing, that’s in the Middle East, Israel’s creating tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who are going to hate the United States, and they’re going to hate Israel also. But because we’re giving Israel the weapons to do what they’re doing, we’re creating a lot of people who hate us in this country.

TUCKER CARLSON: We’re told that it’s essential to our national security to do that. Do you believe that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, I don’t see that. I mean, one of the reasons, like I said, the Biden letter said, well, we need to keep our industrial base strong, so let’s fund all these weapons and send them over. But I don’t see how it’s strengthening our country. In fact, we’re getting weaker by doing it.

Voting Against Foreign Interventions

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’ve been, I think, the lone Republican to dissent from a lot of these votes. How many votes have there been on this question and where have you voted on them?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Oh, I’ve tried to keep track. There were something like 18 votes on Ukraine and I voted against every one of them since, like 2014 when we started saber rattling. We do these non-binding resolutions, whereas Russia’s evil and whereas we support democracy now. Even then we knew that Ukraine was just corrupt as hell.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like the most corrupt country in Europe by far.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. So I started, there’s been 16 or 20 votes on Ukraine. I’ve been against all of those. Just in the last seven months there have been probably 30 votes on Israel and the Middle East. 30. There were somebody…

TUCKER CARLSON: How many votes on the US border during that time?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Maybe, maybe four show votes that we know they’re going nowhere in the Senate. Look, we haven’t named 30 post offices. Last month we voted like 15 or 16 times on issues related to Israel. And I’ve been hit because I voted no on all of those.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because you hate Israel or is there another reason?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, because I’m against sending our money overseas. I’m against starting another proxy war. I’m against sanctions because it’s going to weaken the dollar. I’m for free speech. Like all of these resolutions run afoul of those things and that’s why I can’t vote for them.

Free Speech Concerns

TUCKER CARLSON: Tell us what the free speech part of it.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So recently they brought a bill to Congress and this was actually a binding bill, not a non-binding resolution. Like this was going to have the effect of law and people would get prosecuted if they engaged in antisemitism on campuses. And the problem with this bill is they used some international definition of antisemitism on a website somewhere. My first question, why don’t you just put the definition in the bill? Why are you pointing to somebody’s URL in a piece of legislation?

TUCKER CARLSON: You are the Congress, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right. We are the Congress.

TUCKER CARLSON: Write the laws.

Defining Antisemitism and Free Speech Concerns

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We should be. Instead, we’re referencing a website that’s not even hosted in the United States. So I went to this website and it’s got a fairly short definition, but it’s also got examples of things that would be considered antisemitism. And some of these are actually passages in the New Testament that would be banned by this international definition of antisemitism.

For instance, saying that Jews killed Jesus, which is in the Bible—he was not welcome among his own people. That would be antisemitism. And if you engaged in that on campus or just offered that as a thought in a classroom, you would be antisemitic and would run afoul of the Department of Education and some federal laws.

There were other examples in there that were hard to believe. For instance, comparing the policies of Israel to the Nazi regime would be antisemitic. But the question is, what if their policies ever became the same? Is this a static definition or what?

TUCKER CARLSON: If we just have different opinions and your opinion is now a crime?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right. I mean, even if it’s abhorrent, even—

TUCKER CARLSON: If it’s wrong and stupid.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. It’s still legal. It should be.

TUCKER CARLSON: You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalists. Right, left. The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It’s between good and evil. It’s between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side. That’s why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network, and we invite you to subscribe to it. You go to tuckercarlson.com podcast. Our entire archive is there, a lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running. TuckerCarlson.com podcast. You will not regret it. So your colleagues, I think it passed, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Oh, yeah, it passed with flying colors. But at least a few people woke up to this.

TUCKER CARLSON: But the members of Congress who, you know, go to church on Sunday, who just voted to ban the New Testament on campus, make it illegal to quote from the New Testament, the Christian Bible, like, how did they square that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think their voters let them get away with it. I mean, they don’t have to square it unless they’re—

TUCKER CARLSON: But why would they want to do something like that?

The Influence of AIPAC in Congress

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Because there’s a lot of pressure in Congress to vote for these things. And our Republican leadership thinks they’re so smart. You know, we’re in an election year, and they want to bring up issues. They want to put them in front of Congress and make us vote on them, whether they’re going anywhere in the Senate or not. And they want to split the Democrats. They want to show that Republicans are united and then split the Democrats. That’s one of the reasons they do it.

Another reason they do it is there’s a foreign interest group called AIPAC that got the ear of this current speaker and demanded 16 votes in April on Israel or the Middle East. We haven’t had 16 votes in April on the United States in Congress.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what’s AIPAC?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. And they didn’t start out as a PAC in the sense of a political action committee, but now they have a political action committee. Ostensibly, it’s a group of Americans who lobby on behalf of Israel. They’re for anything Israel, and they’re a very effective lobbying group.

They get in there, they try to get me to write a white paper as a candidate, for instance, for Congress. They almost get on what… on Israel, and I wouldn’t do it. And they said, why? And I’m like, I don’t do homework for lobbyists. I didn’t like writing term papers in college. I’m not writing one for you.

TUCKER CARLSON:  What did they say?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They said, oh, well, here, just copy Rand Paul’s term paper and put your name on it. We’ll accept that. And I’m like, no, I’m still not cribbing somebody else’s homework to do homework. I’m not turning in my homework for you.

You’re laughing. But you know what? I bet I may be the only Republican in Congress who hasn’t done homework for AIPAC. And it’s just what it is. It’s conditioning. They want you to do something very simple and benign. And, you know, for them, they don’t really grade your term paper. They just want to know that you’ll do something for them. And if you’ll do something for them as a candidate, you’re more likely to do something for them as a congressman when you get in there. So this rift started out in 2012 when I refused to turn in Israel term paper.

TUCKER CARLSON: How do you respond to that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, they kind of got in my race a little too late there in the beginning, because it was hard to tell that I was actually going to win. And when they saw I was going to win, that’s when they tried to get me to do the term paper. They didn’t have a political action committee at the time. They couldn’t spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars against me at that time. It was just sort of like a whisper campaign to try to, hey, don’t vote for him, blah blah, blah. Because at that point they sensed I wouldn’t do what they wanted when I got in.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what did they whisper against you? What were they saying about you?

AIPAC’s Influence on Evangelical Churches

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, they would do it through, for instance, churches, evangelical churches. They’ve got an organization called Christians United for Israel where they sort of co-opted evangelicals. People think it’s a grassroots movement in Kentucky. It’s actually a top-down movement from AIPAC, so that people who aren’t even Jewish will feel like they’ve got to support Israel no matter what. And even if it’s a secular state that funds abortions, they just sort of forget that part and we’ve got to fund Israel. So they have networks, so it’s more than just about the money.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you get elected despite their efforts and then what happens? Do you talk to them after that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And by the way, let me just put a little footnote here. I’m not against Israel. I’ve never voted to sanction Israel. I’ve never said anything particularly critical of Israel, other than, for instance, right now they’re bombing, they’ve killed 1% of the civilian population in Gaza. That’s concerning to me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, you get elected 2012. Do you hear from them?

AIPAC’s Campaign Against Massie

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Again, I vote my conscience, which they won’t tolerate. So they ran with their 501C4 before they had a super PAC. They were running educational advocacy ads against me saying that I’m bad on Israel. They didn’t say don’t vote for him. They just said he’s a bad guy.

And so I said, all right, well you’re not welcome in my office anymore because for years I invited them into my office. Let’s talk this through. Let me explain to you. I’m a libertarian leaning Republican. I don’t vote for foreign aid for anybody. So don’t be offended when I don’t vote for your foreign aid. I don’t vote for wars anywhere, so don’t be offended if I do that. I’m for free speech even if it’s abhorrent.

And you know, we used to talk but now they’re banned from my office. The situation went from bad to worse this election cycle. They spent $400,000 against me, $90,000 last fall running TV ads in my district and Facebook ads and whatnot, trying to equate me with the squad. And then most recently, in fact, as I’m speaking to you today, even though my election is over, they’re still running hundreds of thousands of dollars of negative ads.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a little weird though, because as you said, you’re probably the only Republican in the House who hasn’t done homework for them, who isn’t on their side. And that’s okay. I mean, you can have, you know, you’re a libertarian oriented Republican from Northern Kentucky. You’re probably not going to single-handedly determine our foreign policy. So I think you should, but you don’t and you’re not going to. So why do they care? Why not just let Thomas Massie be Thomas Massie in Northern Kentucky? Like why the need to crush you?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t know. I think they don’t want one horse out of the barn. If one person starts speaking the truth, they’re afraid it could be contagious, perhaps, or it’s like a new car. They go to Mike Johnson and they say, we want a Cadillac Escalade with pearl white paint. And here’s the rims we want. And Mike Johnson puts that bill on the floor. It passes with a unanimous vote, except for one guy votes no.

And I think they feel like it’s a scratch on their car. They wanted a brand new car and it got scratched by this guy named Massie. They were going to drive it over to the Senate and ask for unanimous consent. But now the senators are saying, wait, why? This wasn’t unanimous in the House, why should we do it unanimously in the Senate? And it starts raising questions and I think that’s why they get mad.

TUCKER CARLSON: What I find interesting is it’s not just that they disagree with your views, which they do. And I think they have an absolute right to disagree with anybody’s views. We all do. But they’ve called you a bigot and they call you an anti-Semite and say you’re a hater and try to destroy your character. That seems like a very different level of response to me.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right. There’s no need to do that. I’m not anti-Semitic. I don’t have an anti-Semitic hair in my head. I mean, I don’t like AIPAC anymore. Like I used to be neutral toward AIPAC. But I have no antagonistic feelings toward Jewish people. I am the last thing—I think I’m probably the least xenophobic person in Congress.

I mean, these are the guys—my colleagues want to sanction everybody, declare them terrorist states, come up with these strongly worded resolutions. I don’t vote for any of that. Unless somebody does harm to me, I’m not going to call them anything. So I get called names just for staying out of all of this political posturing.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s disgusting, though, isn’t it?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You know, I guess character—

TUCKER CARLSON: They can disagree with your views, right? But to call you like the worst thing you can be in America, like, that’s disgusting.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You know, I have a thick skin, apparently. And here’s the good news, Tucker. My constituents aren’t falling for it. Two weeks ago, I just had a primary and got 76% of the vote with AIPAC running hundreds of thousands of dollars of ads. So it’s not working against me. I think it’s shortsighted on their side to do this. They’re just burning money, but they’re trying to make an example of me.

TUCKER CARLSON: But they’re also exposing their weakness.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think they are. I think they’ve exposed a real weakness here. And it used to be just me voting against some of these resolutions, but recently where they tried to ban passages in the New Testament, I think we got like almost two dozen Republicans who said, wait, hold on there.

FARA Registration Questions

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s a fundamental question. So the Biden administration has put a bunch of people in jail for violating something called FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, 1936-ish. It’s been on the books for, you know, 90 years. And it’s never been enforced ever, until recently, until really the Trump era and Biden era.

But the law requires people who lobby on behalf of foreign governments to register. It was that simple. And this is the largest lobby, the most effective lobby in the United States on behalf of a foreign government. Are they registered with FARA?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They’re not, but they should be.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, how can that be? How can they put Paul Manafort in jail, which they did on a FARA violation, and a bunch of other people in jail on FARA violations. But the largest and most effective and most feared foreign lobby working for a foreign government doesn’t have to register under the law. That’s insane.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Oh, man. Don’t make me take their side. But I’ll explain as best as I can what they’re arguing.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they should take their side.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, I’m going to agree with you in a second, but let me at least offer what I think is their argument. They would say we are Americans, the members of AIPAC are Americans and that they have the right to free speech.

TUCKER CARLSON: Paul Manafort’s an American, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right, yeah. So there’s the good rebuttal as FARA applies not to foreigners, to foreign agents of foreign principles, agents of foreign principles.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign governments.

AIPAC’s Influence in Congress

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct. So AIPAC is exactly what FARA is meant for. Now, they would say we have a First Amendment right. Okay, well, I agree with you there. But we also have election laws. It’s disclosure. FARA doesn’t say you can’t say Thomas Massie’s an ignorant hillbilly. You’re allowed to say that if you want to. But we just want to check where your money’s coming from. Tell us where it’s coming from, what you’re spending it on, and if you are lobbying on behalf of a foreign country.

They should be registered with FARA. This is what FARA is – where there’s a gray area where it’s an American representing a foreign country. Let’s look and see if you’re getting any money from that foreign country. Are you a dual citizen with that foreign country? Are you being directed by, for instance, is Netanyahu speaking to your group, advising you on your next move? Are you getting money from the military industrial complex?

To understand AIPAC, I think it’s easiest to model them as a military industrial lobby. Their biggest thing is they want more equipment, more military equipment from the United States going to Israel. In fact, when they used to be allowed in my office, the argument they would make is, “Oh, we’re just stimulating the US military industrial complex because every single penny of the 3.8 billion that Israel nominally gets goes to US Military contractors.” Now, that didn’t make me warm and fuzzy, but that is their argument.

If you notice what they advocate for, I think sometimes they advocate for things that even Israelis wouldn’t advocate for. I believe that they would be okay with a war with Iran, like an all-out apocalyptic war with Iran. Whereas there are people in Israel who say, “Whoa, hold on a second, we’d rather not have a war with Iran.” But AIPAC does things that lead us in that direction.

They’re kind of like what the NRA is to gun owners, AIPAC is to Israel, or what the Farm Bureau is to farmers. They represent a faction, but usually a corporate faction. And they’re using the imprimatur of grassroots that they’ve deluded or confused into bullying congressmen. And the NRA does that and Farm Bureau does that. I’m picking on some other right-wing groups here for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: And by the way, I think there are probably a lot of things that AIPAC is for that I’m for. And Farm Bureau, NRA, same thing. The idea of a foreign government playing in our political campaigns openly, openly in…

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: That they’re showing you they’re doing it, but opaquely in that you can’t track it because they’re not registered.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is there any other Republican who has your views on this?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, I have Republicans who come to me on the floor and say, “I wish I could vote with you today. Yours is the right vote, but I would just take too much flack back home.” And I have Republicans who come to me and say, “That’s wrong what AIPAC is doing to you. Let me talk to my AIPAC person.” By the way, everybody but me has an AIPAC person.

TUCKER CARLSON: What does that mean, an AIPAC person?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s like your babysitter, your AIPAC babysitter who is always talking to you. For AIPAC, they’re probably a constituent in your district, but they are firmly embedded in AIPAC.

TUCKER CARLSON: And every member has something like this?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Every… I don’t know how it works on the Democrat side, but that’s how it works on the Republican side. When they come to DC, you go have lunch with them and they’ve got your cell number and you have conversations with them.

I’ve had four members of Congress say, “I’ll talk to my AIPAC person.” And it’s clearly what we call them. “My AIPAC guy. I’ll talk to my AIPAC guy and see if I can get him to dial those ads back.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Why have I never heard this before?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It doesn’t benefit anybody. Why would they want to tell their constituents that? They’ve basically got a buddy system with somebody who’s representing a foreign country. It doesn’t benefit the Congressman for people to know that. So they’re not going to tell you that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Have you seen any other country do anything like this? Like Russia? Russia obviously determines the outcome of our elections. We keep hearing that. Does anyone have a Putin guy that they talk to?

Foreign Influence in Congress

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Not only do they not have a Putin guy, they don’t have a Britain guy, they don’t have an Australian guy, they don’t have a Germany dude. It’s the only country that does this, that has somebody uniformly matched with congressmen. I guarantee there’s some spreadsheet at AIPAC where the AIPAC dude who’s matched up with the Congressman is there and then all the Congressman’s votes on the issue.

Oh, has the Congressman been to Israel? They pay for trips for congressmen and their spouses to go to Israel. I may not be the only Republican who hasn’t taken the AIPAC trip to Israel, but I’m probably one of a dozen that hasn’t taken that trip, and the other ones just haven’t got around to it.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the trip like? Do you know?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s kind of like, I think, vacationy. You go see the Wall, you go see the sites, things like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s such a great, I must say, it’s such a great country. Jerusalem especially is just such a wonderful place that’s got to have a big effect.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You go swim in the Dead Sea.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I’ve done that.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Not on an AIPAC trip?

TUCKER CARLSON: I paid for it myself. No, I mean, it’s just funny. I am a legit lover of Israel, of the place Israel. I like the people and I love the food and the whole thing is so great.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Look, they have…

TUCKER CARLSON: But that’s distinct from the government of Israel, which is a foreign government.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: My sense is the people are very entrepreneurial.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: That they’re publicly minded. You know, they care about their country, that they’re generally good people.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s certainly been my experience in trips there. For sure.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s great.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just that’s… I mean, I think it’s probably one of my favorite, maybe my all-time favorite place to go with my family. But that’s just a completely different thing from taking orders from its government.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right. I mean, right now, again, they’ll say these are American citizens who are coordinating all this…

TUCKER CARLSON: Just… Again, this is almost a rhetorical question. But in your 12 years in Congress, have you ever seen any indication that Russia is influencing election outcomes or candidates or members?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Not in a quiet way. You know, they’ll put out statements. Russia obviously has Russia Today, RT.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I think it’s been banned, but…

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. You know, Kentucky Fried Chicken, of which I’m a big fan, being from Kentucky – they realized that “fried” became sort of a pejorative and people didn’t want to eat fried food, so they changed the name to KFC so you don’t have to say “fried.” Russia Today changed their name to RT, so you don’t have to say “Russia.” But there’s a strong analogy there.

There are efforts. You’d be a fool to think that they’re not trying to influence things here, just like we are there. We have Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. We spend well over a billion dollars on foreign propaganda that’s out in the open that we know about. So there are foreigners spending money on propaganda over here as well. I don’t want to say they’re not involved, but people don’t say, “Oh, I need to go talk to my Russia guy.”

TUCKER CARLSON: But you’ve never, like in the cloakroom or on the floor or at dinner, you’ve never heard another Republican member say, “I’d love to vote for this, but Putin doesn’t want me to.”

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I have never heard that.

TUCKER CARLSON: You haven’t. What about China?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, there’s… I mean, unless it’s a spy sleeping with a Democrat. There’s some of that going on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but that’s not in public. So how do you think… It’s just interesting because you’re clearly not a bigot. I think it’s very obvious. And they’ve called you one and they’ve spent millions of dollars against you over the years, and it has had no effect. You get reelected in the primary in the 70s, so why are they still spending against you in your state, statewide? And can you just continue to serve in Congress while disobeying?

Political Dynamics in Kentucky

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, they say that they don’t want me to run statewide. They’re worried that I’ll run for McConnell’s seat, and so they’re trying to send me a message. That’s what they would tell you.

TUCKER CARLSON: But why?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t know what the message is. Maybe it’s a little presumptuous to decide. I’ve never said that I’m running for the Senate. I’m pretty much disinterested in it personally and publicly. But just in case, they’re running ads statewide now. Mind you, there are six congressional districts in Kentucky, and I only represent one of them. They’re running the ads in all six congressional districts, just in case.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing. What do you think of Mitch McConnell after all these years of being in the delegation with him?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: He’s a shrewd guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: He’s quick. Let me give you an example of how quick he is. We had a Congressman, Jamie Comer, who’s now chair of the Oversight Committee. He got elected in a special election, which means you come in in the middle of a term and you have to boot up with no staff. So it’s kind of disorienting.

Mitch McConnell had an event for Jamie Comer on his first day in Congress. It was in a townhouse with like 200 lobbyists. By the way, I’m never going to get invited to one of these now that I tell you the story. And so Jamie’s there, and McConnell goes, “I believe Jamie took his first vote tonight.” And that is such a perfect imitation.

I wasn’t supposed to speak, but I interrupted Senator McConnell, who was at the time the majority leader, and I said, “Yes, Senator McConnell, he did take his first vote, and I know he has no staff, so I advise Jamie, when you walk into the chamber, look at how I vote and then vote the other way, and you’ll be just fine.” And 200 lobbyists thought it was a pretty good joke, and they were laughing.

And as the laughter died down, McConnell goes, “Well, Thomas, I’m glad you and I are giving Jamie the same advice.” And then the place just… the walls almost collapsed. He’s good. He’s so funny.

But I think it’s time for new leadership in the Senate. I mean, it’s way past time, and this is just a fact. I’ll say it. I’ll get in trouble for saying it. You know, in races in Kentucky, we poll things – we poll Trump’s popularity, we poll the senator’s popularity. Senator McConnell’s favorabilities are lower among Republican primary voters than our Democrat governor’s favorabilities.

TUCKER CARLSON: Seriously?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Lower than Governor Beshear?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Beshear is around 40% among Republican primary voters, and McConnell’s around 30%.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well deserved. Well deserved. So I’m glad to hear that because I like Kentucky and I think its voters are sensible. What do you think accounts for, in the final months and years of his public career, his public statements that all that matters is Ukraine? What is that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I have no idea. By the way, I have so many fights in the House that I try to avoid every fight in the Senate that I can. And you’re trying to draw me in and I love you and I’ll indulge these questions, but for 12 years, my strategy has been pick my fights in the House smart. Let Rand Paul and Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and J.D. Vance, Rick Scott, let those guys figure out the Senate because I haven’t been able to fix the House. So I’m damn sure not going to be able to fix the Senate.

Rep. Thomas Massie on Ukraine Policy and Congressional Dynamics

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s just interesting, okay, taking McConnell out of it and even the Senate out of it, but some of the committee chairmen in the House, for example, seem like Ukraine is all that matters to them. And there’s, of course, the question, as you noted, of donations from Lockheed, etc. The Military Industrial complex. But it almost seems messianic to me. It seems heartfelt to me. It seems sincere that they think that this is all that matters, winning this war against Russia. Do you have any sense of why they feel that way?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t. And the hardest ones to understand are people like Mike Johnson, who used to be against sending more money to Ukraine, but now that he’s the speaker, like you said, he seems strongly convicted that we should be sending money there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Almost like it’s a religious calling or something. I mean, it seems totally real to me. It doesn’t seem fake.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I’ve heard the argument. I think it’s immoral, but I’ve heard the argument that, oh, this is a great deal, we just spend money and we’re grinding up Russia’s capacity to wage war, particularly lots of Russians are dying. And so we’re told that’s a good thing. You know, since the Cold War began, we’ve been taught that it would be good for Russia to be diminished. But they’ve go so far as to say Russians dying to the tune of 300,000 casualties, they say is just such a great thing that we need to keep this thing going.

And my answer to that is, why don’t you tell us the Ukrainian casualties? I have been in classified settings with CIA, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, not their assistants, but those people in the room, and they’re bragging about how many Russians have died and been injured and I asked them how many Ukrainians have died and been injured, and they claimed they didn’t know. I mean, that’s just a flat out lie. And they said they would get back to me, and they’ve never gotten back to me.

Like, not only are Americans being fed propaganda about this war, Congress is being fed propaganda by our State Department and our Secretary of Defense and our intelligence agencies. And you can just ask a few questions in these classified hearings. If nothing else, my colleagues should be convicted of a lack of curiosity. Like, they sit there and they believe everything they’re told because these are supposed to be the authorities and they know things we don’t. But you can expose them with two or three questions like, how many Ukrainians have died? And they refuse to answer.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve asked that very same question to Mike Johnson, actually, directly. But I’ve also asked him and a number of committee chairmen, just in personal conversations. Do you believe your intel briefings? Because only a child would believe an intel briefing. Take it at face value, there may be truth in there, may be largely true, but you’re being spun. You’re being manipulated. And if you don’t know that, then you’re a moron. But they seem to believe them.

The Reality of Classified Briefings

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Because they have no other reference. And then here’s what else happens, Tucker, when you go into a classified setting, like a SKIFF, you lock up your phone, you take off your Fitbit, you take every electronic device. They even make me take off my debt badge.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, I know.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you feel naked?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I feel exposed. I do feel naked. If I’m not wearing this, I’ve been wearing it for a year, every day of my life. Okay, but they make you. They strip you of every outside reference. Okay? And now your staff is not allowed in that meeting either.

Remember, Congressmen, our primary roles are, like, raising money, being friendly to constituents, you know, putting on a good face, campaigning. And then, you know, once a day or maybe twice a day, we roll in there and press the vote buttons based on what staff advises you.

Well, when you go into a SKIFF, you don’t have your smartphone, so you’re not very smart. They start using acronyms that you don’t know. Remember what the acronym stands for? You can’t just like, okay, what are… What’s the IDGFBZ? I don’t know, man. I must be stupid. Like, but, you know, if you were in a regular setting, you just pull your phone out and like, oh, okay, that’s what that is. I know what that is.

And then you also can’t ask your staff a question while you’re in that setting. You know, we have legislative staffers who handle certain specific areas. Of course, you can’t bring them in and then when you go back to the office, you can’t tell them what you heard. So it’s really quite an experience. It’s sort of, it’s, you know, it’s a deprivation experience of any outside reference.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s designed to produce Stockholm syndrome, it sounds like.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes. And when you get in there, they really don’t give you classified information. I say there’s three levels of classification in the SKIFF. There’s Facebook level, there’s Twitter level, and there’s New York Times level. Like, and the New York Times level is the highest level of classification. I mean, it’s… You’re getting to the good stuff when they’re telling you what’s in the New York Times that week.

TUCKER CARLSON: Have you ever heard anything you thought was genuinely secret?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Occasionally, just a few times, and obviously I can’t say what that is, but they slip up and commit candor occasionally in there. And you’re like, whoa, I didn’t know that. You know nothing like, what’s at Area 51? Right. But occasionally you’re like, what?

TUCKER CARLSON: What do people think is at Area 51, by the way?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t know. I’m not a…

TUCKER CARLSON: You guys passed this law, the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, and then they never disclosed anything.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: What is that? Not my area of expertise.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: But do members of Congress ever say, wait a second, we’re a co-equal branch, we’re the legislative branch. We have as much power as the President collectively. And you can’t keep this stuff secret from us. You’re not allowed to do that.

Congressional Oversight Challenges

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But see, like, I have this in hearings all the time. They’ll say, I’ll ask the ATF director, this happened just last week, Dettelbach. Or I’ll ask Merrick Garland something, or Christopher Wray. Like, I’ve asked all them this and they give you the same answer. It’s long standing DOJ policy not to comment on ongoing investigations. And you know what, that’s fine to tell a reporter, but you can’t tell the branch of government that created you that, that funded you. You can’t tell them that.

That’s why the omnibus was so disappointing to me, is the only way these three letter agencies are going to come to heel is if we cut their funding in some specific area. I’ve joked we could just withhold one toner cartridge for one printer at the FBI and they would come over with a whole binder full of information. But we can’t even bring ourselves to deprive them of a toner cartridge. So we put $200 million for new FBI building in the omnibus bill. And to their credit, Jim Jordan and Jamie Comer wouldn’t vote for that. And they’re chairmen of committees, but they are completely frustrated with the fact that the FBI just thumbs their nose.

TUCKER CARLSON: So is that the speaker who allowed that to happen?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Oh, he absolutely allowed it to happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: So to what extent are members of Congress, committee chairmen, leadership controlled by blackmail?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I really don’t think there’s much blackmail. Like, if there is, I’m not aware of it. I have people come up to me. You know, I travel around the country to Texas and, you know, other states and speak to groups, food freedom groups, you know, First Amendment, Second Amendment groups. And they come to me and they say, why did my congressman sell out? Like, I’ll just… Bob was such a great guy and I campaigned for him, I made phone calls, I put up signs. And then we sent Bob to Congress and he votes the wrong way every time. Why is it, did he have his kids in a basement somewhere? Does he have kiddie porn on him? Like, what is it? Why did Bob go bad?

And I have to look him in the eye and say, Bob just wanted to be liked. There is a gene inside of congressmen. I think if you look for a common denominator, they like people and they want to be liked for the most part. And they’re likable. If they’re not likable, it’s hard to get elected. Okay, so this self-selects for likable people. But likable people want to be liked and they’re not surrounded by their wives and children who usually give them plenty of like, right?

When they’re in D.C. it’s like, who am I going to go to dinner with tonight? Well, I want to eat food with somebody that likes me, right? So if you’re not going to eat alone and you have to be liked and you generally have to be liked to get elected to Congress, you better be liked. And, and so it’s literally, it’s almost like kindergarten when somebody says, I won’t be your friend anymore if you don’t, you know, give me your lunch. Congressmen fall for that. You know, they’re in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and they fall for that.

TUCKER CARLSON: How do you… It’s interesting. You like people. I’ve asked around. You don’t seem to have any real enemies in the Congress. I don’t even think AIPAC hates you. They just want you to obey. But it’s not… It doesn’t seem personal, right? You don’t seem to be in a personal war with anybody. That’s my take. So you like people. Obviously you’re not some weird autist who doesn’t care about other people. You like other people.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I love people.

TUCKER CARLSON: I can tell. And your colleagues say that, but you also don’t feel like you need to fit in, right? At the same time. Like, what is that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s a mutation. That chromosome, the liking people and likability chromosome, usually has another gene on it right next to it, which is the need to be liked. And I’m missing the need to be liked gene. I don’t know what happened.

I can go like on the CARES Act, okay? This was under President Trump, the 11th day to slow the spread of 15, right? They said, we’re going to pass a $2.2 trillion package and you all just stay home. It’s dangerous. Like, we’ll just do it by unanimous consent. And it was 11pm, I’m sitting in my living room and they send us this message and I’m like, wtf? This is twice the size of the omnibus bill, right? This is going to cause massive inflation. The policies in it are going to cause shortages. And if we don’t show up to vote, we’re sending a message to all 50 states that you don’t have to show up to vote in this election.

So it was like I got to do… I got in my car and I drove eight hours. I slept one hour in a rest stop because I knew I had to be there by 9am. This was March 27, 2020. Actually the 25th is the day I got to Congress to stop it. And I got there and I said, it’s not going by unanimous consent. And I was literally sleeping in my wife’s SUV eating those peanut butter filled pretzels. Like I had a big jug of those.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re good.

Standing Up for Constitutional Principles

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. For my three days of nourishment, I’m sitting in SUV eating that big tub of pretzels with peanut butter in the middle. Like waiting, just waiting for them to try to call it in session and sneak this bill passed. And they’re like, “Massie’s going to do it.” So they loaded up Congressmen, you know, the airports were shut down for the most part. There were some planes coming from California. They only had two passengers and they were both Congressmen.

So they roll them all back to Congress. It takes them two days to assemble a quorum. Because I went to the parliamentarian and they’re like, “Is there any way around this?” He’s like, “Nope. Massie’s right. The Constitution requires a quorum. If one shows up, objects, and says, there’s no quorum here.”

So they brought everyone back. I go to the floor. Everybody was hating me. I mean, everybody did. You know what it’s like to be in a room of 434 people and they’re all staring at you? I had maybe 10 friends who were looking at me like, “That guy is dead. We’ve never seen hate carry like this.” They were worried for me, but the rest of them hated me.

They would come up to me and say, “I live with my mother and when I go back home, you’re going to cause me to take Covid to her and she’s going to die, and I’m blaming you for this.” And they said that to my face. Oh, yeah. It wasn’t just one. It was like when one was done, there was a line of people. I just stood there and they’re all coming to hate on me.

And I was like, “But what about the guy that’s going to the grocery store and bagging your groceries and carrying them out to the car? Does he live with his mother, too? What about the trucker who’s out there driving and interacting with people in order to get the goods to where you need to be? What about the nurse who’s going to work every single day taking care of people? Is she going to kill her parents? Why are you special?”

They carved a hole in the side of a mountain in West Virginia for us in the case of emergency. But the sad but realistic thing is now they don’t have a place for us. We’re so useless. It’s like, “Well, here’s where we were going to keep them if things hit the fan. But now we’ve realized they’re useless. We can declare war without them in the event of a nuclear strike.” So, you know, they’re just a rounding error in the three branches. We can operate with two.

So anyway, these are the kind of people who are supposed to respond in an emergency. And they all wanted to stay home. They all hated me for recognizing our constitutional duty.

And Trump called me three times on the floor of the House while I was getting ready to make the motion to object. And I let it go to voicemail three times in a row, which is probably not good. But I couldn’t leave the microphone because I was asking people, “Would you make this motion?” If I go to the restroom, they’re like, “Oh, no, no, not me.”

So I sat there. Finally, they yielded time for debate. I go off the floor and called the White House switchboard back. I didn’t have his number. I just called the number you’d call if you want a tour of the White House. And the intern is like, “Oh, is this Congressman Massie? I’m putting you through to Trump right now.”

And so he comes on, he goes, “I’m coming at you like you’ve never seen, never in your life before have you seen the way in which I will come at you. I’m more popular than you in Kentucky and you know it. I’m backing your primary opponent and you’re going to lose.”

And I’m like, “Oh crap, I probably will lose.” I mean, he had 95% popularity among my Republican electorate, who I had to face in about eight weeks in my primary. And I had a well-funded opponent. And here now Trump was mad at me.

So he screamed at me for two or three minutes. I kept trying to talk and he just screamed louder. Then he repeated it all. He goes, “No, this is the second time you’ve done something like this. And they talked me out of it before, but not this time. And then you’re going to lose.” And he hangs up.

The thing is, he said he thought it was the second time I’d done that. I’d done it like eight times since he was president. He just started realizing it’s the same guy. The time before that was on war with Iran. The Democrats were in the majority and, you know, he had just vaporized Soleimani.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And we were worried that he would attack mainland Iran without a vote of Congress. So the Democrats actually, insincerely—there aren’t too many anti-war Democrats left, I’ve noticed—but they realized this was a chance to make a statement. So they put a bill on the floor saying, “Trump, he can’t go to war with Iran without a vote of Congress,” which is constitutionally obvious.

So I had to vote for it, but I was only one of three Republicans to do it. So he remembered that time, but he didn’t remember the fake Obamacare repeal and some of the other things that I was kind of, you know, the turd in the punch bowl on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did it change your views at all?

Standing Firm Under Pressure

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No. The President tweeted that I was a third-rate grandstander and that—like, this is before I got back to my seat. I go back from the Speaker’s lobby to go to my seat to get ready to make the motion. And one of the congressmen was like, “You better look at your phone, Massie. Look at your Twitter.”

And I turn it on. He’s tweeting hard and heavy against me, said I should be thrown out of the party. Then—the best one is I’m chairman of the Second Amendment Caucus. So his third tweet was, “He’s terrible on guns.” It’s like, what? Where did that come from? Have you seen my Christmas card picture?

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s your Christmas card picture?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, it’s a little infamous.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I’ve actually seen it, but just for the benefit of those who have not.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So, you know, I got my family together for Christmas and we got bluegrass instruments out. We play music together and we took a Christmas card picture with bluegrass instruments. And I said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be kind of neat if we just changed these all out for machine guns and took a picture?”

And that was supposed to stay on my phone for eternity, but I had had a couple medical margaritas one night. I don’t do medical marijuana, but I had a few medical margaritas and I looked at that picture and I thought, “Well, that’s a pretty good picture. It’d be a shame if nobody ever saw it.” And I tweeted it and I caught all kinds of hate for that.

The Archbishop of Canterbury condemned it. This is the head of the Church of England condemned my tweet.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, my God, are you an Episcopalian?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I’m Methodist.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good. So you can ignore him.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, he’s a disgrace.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So anyway, we’re talking about the need to be liked. If I had that, I would have been devastated that day. If I had needed to be liked, I couldn’t have carried that through.

And I walked out of that chamber. Everybody’s hating me in the chamber. Nancy Pelosi called me a dangerous nuisance. CNN called me the most hated person in DC. John Kerry called me an asshole or something. And President Trump called me a third-rate grandstander. This is all in the course of a few minutes.

I walk out of the chamber of the House and the reporters swarm me, like they do. And I’m just trying to run back to the SUV with the pretzels with peanut butter in them and get out of there. And the press said, “What do you have to say for yourself? Your own president just called you a third-rate grandstander.”

And I paused for a second and I said, “I was offended. I’m at least second rate.”

Relationship with Trump

TUCKER CARLSON: So what happened to your relationship with Trump?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It—you know, I think he respects people that stand up.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Even if he disagrees with you.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s correct.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And two years later, he did endorse me.

TUCKER CARLSON: No way.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you get along with him okay now?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. I mean, I did endorse Ron DeSantis. Not out of spite or animosity because we had already patched things up. Just because I served with Ron DeSantis for six years and he and I were really good friends. We talked about bills.

When he was in Congress, he and I fought over who was going to introduce the bill to eliminate congressional pensions. And he won and I co-sponsored it. Now I’m the sponsor now that he’s a governor. But I knew he was a good person and he thinks things through and he was smart, so I endorsed him. But you know, I have what I call natural immunity. I have Trump antibodies at this point. They may wear off at some point.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think if you did run for, say, just pulling this out of a hat, but Governor of Kentucky, do you think Trump would endorse you?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t know. He’d probably do some polling and see who was winning.

TUCKER CARLSON: Fair. Fair. Totally fair.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I wouldn’t turn down an endorsement.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So, are you at war with anybody in the Congress?

Working Across the Aisle

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, I get along with everybody. And people try to use this against me. You know, when AIPAC was running those ads that say I always vote with AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, so I introduced an amendment and forced a vote on eliminating the kill switch in automobiles that’s mandated.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, thank you.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. Well, I was losing Republicans on that. I lost like 20 Republicans, so I knew I needed some Democrats.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just to be clear for the people who don’t know what you’re talking about. In new vehicles, this has been the case for years. They can be turned off remotely by the authorities, which is like the most North Korean thing ever to happen. That’s what you’re talking about?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. By 2026, every new automobile sold has to be able to turn itself off if it doesn’t like your driving. So I’m like, how do you appeal this conviction at the roadside? Maybe you swerved to miss a deer or pulled over for an ambulance and you got your kids in the car.

TUCKER CARLSON: And did anyone vote for something that evil? I don’t understand.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Because, again, they know that I’m right, but they’re worried about, for instance, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Or they don’t have the bravery.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, we just let in millions of illegal aliens who are allowed to drunk drive.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Biden has told us that drunk driving is not a big deal. It’s not grounds for deporting you. So who—Mothers Against Drunk Driving, as far as I know, has said nothing about this. Like, who cares what they think?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I know. But there may be, let’s say, one constituent in your district who gets a hold of you, and they lost a child to drunk driving, which is terrible. And they say, “You know, you don’t care about me if you vote for Massie’s amendment.”

And that Congressman doesn’t have the fortitude or knowledge to say, “Look, this technology can’t work. I really care about your child. I think drunk driving is a scourge, and I want to fix it, but this is a false promise, and it’s only going to increase the price of automobiles and give the government more control. So I’m going to vote with Massie.” They don’t have the courage to say that.

So, long story short, I lost 20 Republicans. I needed some Democrats, so I went over to AOC, who I get along with just fine. Don’t hate me for saying that. And I said, “AOC, they’re running ads right now that say I always vote with you. Just once, could you vote with me? Could you vote for my kill switch amendment? Since they’re running ads the other way.” And she did. She voted to defund the automobile kill switch for me.

Congressional Dynamics and Voting Patterns

TUCKER CARLSON: So she ran. It’s interesting. I mean, obviously I don’t like her, but I think she’s talented. She is definitely talented. But she ran as a radical, as someone from the outside, which I’m, of course, very sympathetic to. But she doesn’t seem to actually be that person. So, like, for example, on the foreign aid stuff, how often does she vote with you?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Quite frequently. But I had a funny moment. You know, this 15 or 16 votes we had on Israel in April. Well, the squad and I. I know this is going to be used in the next ad against me, this clip from Tucker. But sometimes most of the squad voted with me. I noticed AOC wasn’t always there with me. So I went over to the squad on the Democrat side of the aisle.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do they literally sit together?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They hang out together. Yeah, it’s really cliquish. The Freedom Caucus sits together. The Texas delegation sits together. There are different cliques. The appropriators sit together. The military guys, the intel guys sit together. Sometimes it’s by state, sometimes it’s by clique. A lot of the Congressional Black Caucus sits together. I can’t get the Second Amendment caucus to sit together. That’s my caucus.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re too independent.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Too independent. But so I go over to their—

TUCKER CARLSON: This is just high school cafeteria.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s high school cafeteria. That’s what it is. They need to be liked, right? They don’t want to sit next to people they don’t like or who don’t like them. So I went over to the squad a few weeks ago and I told AOC in front of the squad, “We’re going to kick you out if you don’t keep voting with us more consistently.”

TUCKER CARLSON: What did she say?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: She laughed. She thought it was funny. I mean, she has a sense of humor. These people are humans. There are 435, I call them goldfish in the aquarium. You have to get 218 of them to pass a bill. So it doesn’t benefit me to hate on any of them. Someday, they may vote with me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, there are also people, and if you can help it, you shouldn’t hate people, period.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We’ve formed coalitions on the First Amendment, on the Fourth Amendment, on war, sometimes like to eliminate cluster bombs, delivering cluster bombs. Even though the Democrats almost to a person, actually to a person, want to give Ukraine more aid, some of them are like, “Well, the cluster bombs, maybe we shouldn’t do that.” So you can form coalitions. I try to do that when I can.

The Changing Politics of War

TUCKER CARLSON: But why aren’t there anti-war Democrats since it was the anti-war party for like 40 years?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t know. And we’ve lost a lot of them on privacy and free speech as well. I think with Russia, there’s this element that I didn’t answer before. It’s sort of a proxy against Trump for them now in their file folders, in their brain. Trump and Russia are in the same file folder.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Even though that’s a false narrative that’s been dispelled long ago, it’s still in their same file folder. So when they see Ukraine is fighting Russia, they use that as a proxy for their hate for Trump, and so they’ll vote for that. And they did. They waved Ukrainian flags after Mike Johnson put the bill on the floor, and every Democrat voted for it. This was premeditated. Somebody had to go buy 200 Ukrainian flags and hand them out.

I filmed it, which you’re not supposed to do, but you’re also not supposed to wave flags of other countries on the floor of the House. So I thought, “I’m going to expose this.” I filmed it and put it on Twitter to show the humiliation that Mike Johnson brought upon us by bringing the Democrat bill to the floor.

Even if you’re a Republican and you’re okay with sending money to Ukraine, that’s a leverage point. Do something for our country and require that as a condition. But he gave up all the leverage.

I put that video on Twitter. Three days later, the Sergeant at Arms tracks down one of my staffers in Kentucky because we’re no longer in session and says he needs to delete that video from Twitter or they’re going to take a fine out of my congressional salary. So Mr. Stafford told me what they had just said. I said, “All right, I’m retweeting it.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Oh, yeah. And it got like 8 million views. It went from 4 million to 8 million. Sometimes you just got to double down. And the speaker had to announce on Twitter that I wouldn’t be fined for that.

TUCKER CARLSON: But no one was considering finding any member who waved the flag of a foreign nation on the floor of the House Representatives.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right. And they were taking selfies with their foreign flags, too. And none of them got a phone call. Only I got a phone call because I exposed the humiliation. It wasn’t just a humiliation of those of us in Congress. It was a humiliation of our country.

It’s one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and they got everything they wanted. And the Democrats are waving the Ukrainian flag even though they’re the majority. And we just have to sit there and take that.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was horrible. Do you think any—I mean the leader of Ukraine is not elected anymore. His term has ended, he’s not having a new election. He’s the unelected maximum power. In some places we call that a dictator. And yet they’re still hitting us with pro-democracy talking points. Have they thought this through at all? Are they just lying? What is that?

The Ukraine Funding Controversy

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They’re lying. I mean they know it. And the good news is some Republicans are waking up to it. Remember when we started voting on these Ukraine resolutions, as soon as the war started, I was the only—there was like this open-ended promise in a non-binding resolution that said we’ll give them whatever they need. And there were only like two other Republicans that joined me. But now we’ve got a majority of Republicans in Congress saying, “Wait, they aren’t using this money like we thought they were.” And we’re giving them money to fund pensions of retired politicians in Ukraine who were most certainly corrupt.

TUCKER CARLSON: But most Republicans don’t support it. So that means that your speaker, the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is working for the Democrats.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, it’s that simple. And that’s one of the reasons we went through with the motion to vacate. Paul Gosar and I co-sponsored Marjorie’s motion to vacate. There were ultimately 11 of us who voted for it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Motion to vacate would be to fire him.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: To fire Speaker Johnson, just like they had done to Kevin McCarthy. Although I thought inappropriately and at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons, they did that to McCarthy. But here we had Speaker Johnson who was doing all of the things people were afraid McCarthy might do.

They pre-convicted McCarthy for things they thought he would do. And here Mike Johnson came and did all these things. He put an omnibus on the floor, he passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, re-upped that without warrants, built the FBI a new building and gave Ukraine all this money.

What Marjorie and I and Paul decided ultimately is we needed to expose the uniparty. And never before have you had Democrats vote for a Republican speaker. That’s why we forced the question. Nancy Pelosi voted for him. Hakeem Jeffries went on national TV and said, “Why would we want to get rid of him? He’s given us everything we want.”

The uniparty has never been so exposed as it was when we called that motion to vacate. I know some people got mad at us, said we shouldn’t have done it. But it’s a long game. We certainly hope that he doesn’t become speaker next January. And hopefully people will have seen with Nancy Pelosi rushing to Speaker Johnson’s aid, that he’s not the speaker you want when Trump wins the White House.

TUCKER CARLSON: If we keep the majority, do you think he will be?

The Speaker’s Role and Loyalty

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: A lot of this depends on what the people want and if they can see it. Hopefully also Trump sees it, that Mike Johnson would be even worse than Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan, while we were still in the majority, sent like a dozen CRs or omnibus bills to President Trump’s desk because they didn’t have any money for a wall. He had no intention of ever funding a wall.

I think Mike Johnson is going to be similarly the same way. He’s basically working for the Deep State at this point and the uniparty.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did that happen? Do you have any idea?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: The Paul Ryan bit or…?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, Paul Ryan is a change, you know, is a sinister person, I happen to know, but also not just kind of not a genius and an ideologue at the same time, which is like a bad combination. Dumb ideologues are the scariest. But Mike Johnson seemed like kind of a moderately conservative, kind of sincere, decent guy. You know, maybe he would babysit your kids and do an okay job, unlike Paul Ryan. But then he immediately just becomes a tool of CIA and Jake Sullivan and the Biden administration. How did that happen so fast?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, one of the things he claims, which I don’t believe is true, and I have reason to say this, is that he says he went in a SCIF. He’s had some 180-degree turns on some things, like whether you need a warrant to spy on Americans using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 702 program. He used to be on Judiciary Committee with me and Jim Jordan trying to reform that.

TUCKER CARLSON: So he understood what it was.

FISA and Surveillance Concerns

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: He knew completely what we were talking about. He’s an attorney, too. And he knows the Constitution. He knows this is required. But he claims he spent time in a SCIF and learned things that changed his mind. SCIF is a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility where we go. We have to leave our phones locked up, no staff in there.

Here’s the problem, Tucker. I was in the SCIF with him. We had DNI. Not just the current DNI, but the former DNI, John Ratcliffe, Trump’s DNI. We had CIA, we had FBI, we even had a FISA judge in there. And we spent three and a half hours. It was a four-hour meeting. After three and a half hours, it was basically a psy-op where they’re just trying to beat you down.

They didn’t give us one example of any time ever since FISA was created that getting a warrant would have kept them from solving or preventing an act of terrorism. They gave hypotheticals, but they had no specific—

TUCKER CARLSON: And I think FISA has been in place since 1978, since the 70s. Right. So almost 50 years. And they couldn’t give you one example?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Not one example. Now they also expanded it after 9/11 to do the program to spy on civilians. Actually, that product came out of the Judiciary Committee.

Here’s another place where the speaker betrayed us. FISA 702 was created by John Conyers and Jim Sensenbrenner. Conyers was the chairman and Sensenbrenner was the ranking member. What Mike Johnson said this year was, “Well, even though the Judiciary Committee created this and is responsible for overseeing it, I’m going to let the Intel Committee bring the bill to the floor without warrants.” It wasn’t even their jurisdiction. They have jurisdiction over FISA as long as it’s for the CIA, but not for the FBI. So that was frustrating.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s shocking. It’s shocking.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It is shocking. So he said—

TUCKER CARLSON: End of civil liberties level stuff. But it’s not like he learned new information in the SCIF.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, I was there.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what? So that’s a lie. That’s the problem, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: The fact that I was there. Right. So that’s telling people on your show that I was there for three and a half hours. And Mike Johnson, go ask Mike Johnson, he’ll say, “Yep, he was there three and a half hours.”

Mike Johnson’s Leadership

TUCKER CARLSON: So what is the truth? What do you think changed?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I think he’s kind of a lost ball in tall weeds. I think he’s in a position of power he never imagined he would get to at this point in his life. He’s not done anything in private practice or political arena that’s prepared him for this. He took the job with a very small staff. He didn’t have people to put in all positions on the field and he had to accept a lot of suggestions in areas he didn’t know a whole lot about.

Although he gets no pass on FISA. He gets no pass on Ukraine, because he does, as you pointed out, he doesn’t even know how many casualties have been incurred on the Ukrainian side. I mean, he’s the second person in line for president after Kamala Harris. This is scary to me. He’s basically getting moved around.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s crazy. You said nothing he did in his life before this prepared him for it. But that itself may be kind of a more charitable explanation, because I’m trying to be charitable.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I mean, I got to go back.

TUCKER CARLSON: To working in your life, prepared you for this. So just for those who don’t know, you went to MIT. Your high school girlfriend joined you at MIT. You married her while she was still there, and then together, you started a company based on a very sophisticated invention that you came up with maybe the first of about 30 patents that you now have. You ran this company for a long time, then you moved back to Kentucky, and a lot of things happen, and you end up running for Congress. So that’s not the background.

Business Experience and Moral Principles

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, so nothing in the political arena, but in my private life, I raised $32 million of venture capital, and I swam with the sharks. I had lots of moral dilemmas in the course of creating that company. I could have taken money off the table and gone and done other things, but instead, I felt a commitment to my staff and to other investors.

I had investors who said, if you’ll just get rid of that guy you hired as president, we’ll double our investment. And I’m like, no, he’s my partner. I’m not going to abandon him. He helped me get to this point.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good for you.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And so, you know, I had experiences in life and then also just put my hands in the dirt on my farm.

Off-Grid Living in Kentucky

TUCKER CARLSON: So you live. Tell us about how you live and where you live, because I think it’s one of the most unusual things about you.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So I grew up as a hillbilly in eastern Kentucky.

TUCKER CARLSON: What county?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Lewis County.

TUCKER CARLSON: Lewis County. How many people in your town?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: 13,000 people. 13,000 cattle. It’s a huge land mass, and it’s a great county. It’s one of the 21 counties that I represent. It’s actually the poorest county per capita income that I represent, but it’s the one I grew up in. So it’s very unlikely that the congressman for the district would come from the poorest county.

So I grew up as a little nerd. I loved taking stuff apart because I was bored. There were no malls. You couldn’t ride your bicycle to any store. And if you did, you didn’t have any money. So I had to find things to do at home. I took apart things, built things, entered science fairs, built robots, made it to the International Science Fair as a little hillbilly. Won an award from NASA there.

And at the age 15, I won the high school level awards and got into MIT. Never visited the campus, didn’t really have the money to go visit it, but I read about it. There was no Internet. Seemed like a good place. I got there. I’d lived in a town of 1900 people all my life and I was there for six hours in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I crossed Massachusetts Avenue. They had a crosswalk and a stoplight, you know, never really seen two of those things together. I’d seen crosswalks and stoplights. So I walked through the crosswalk and a car honked like that short little Boston honk. And I thought, oh my gosh, I’ve been here six hours and already run into somebody from Kentucky. And I turned around and waved at the car as big as I could.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was it people from Kentucky?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t think so. I think they had one finger up, waving back. People are like, that’s not a true story. Not only is it true, it took me a month to quit waving at cars that honked like it was just 18 years of conditioning.

TUCKER CARLSON: You thought beeping was hey, hey there.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I mean, that’s what we thought that little thing in the middle of your steering wheel was for. If you saw somebody and they couldn’t see you through the windshield, just toot the horn. Then you throw your hand up and wave and they roll down the window. That’s Bob. And if you didn’t wave, I mean, you were pariah. You were probably an axe murderer who was in our town, right? Or you were just a jerk. So I didn’t want to be either. So I waved at that car in Massachusetts and kept waving for about a month.

But anyways, long story short, as you said, I invented a virtual reality device that lets you touch three dimensional objects. Started a company, raised venture capital, did that for 10 years, moved to the live free or die state.

TUCKER CARLSON: New Hampshire.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: New Hampshire. My company was in Massachusetts. I couldn’t move the center of gravity too far out of Cambridge. I got it up to 128 on Woburn, and then I commuted 40 miles every day. So I could live in a state that let you have machine guns and old cars and, you know, cool stuff. Redneck sports. The best sports.

TUCKER CARLSON: So why’d you move back to Kentucky?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: After 10 years of doing it, we had three kids, and we wanted to raise them like we were raised in Kentucky, and we wanted to be near their grandparents. Like, both my parents were still alive. Both my wife’s parents were still alive. And you learn so much from your grandparents because your parents are really busy just trying to earn a living or whatever. And if you’re lucky enough to have a relationship with your grandparents, that’s where I think the generational stuff carries on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And I had a great relationship with my grandparents, so we wanted our kids to live in that environment. And we came back, we bought the farm that my wife grew up on. We built a house off the grid. It runs on a wrecked Model S Tesla battery. It’s been running continuously for six and a half years.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you built the house? Like, who built the house?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I did. We had an ice storm, and a lot of trees fell down.

TUCKER CARLSON: How big is the property?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s 1500 acres, and it’s wooded. Almost all woods. And it’s too steep. I don’t want you to think this is, like, valuable Iowa farmland.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know the part of the state.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. Pack your lunch. If you’re on the ridge and you fall off the ridge, because you’re going to be hungry by the time you get to the bottom, you’re going to be grabbing, like, tree roots and stuff to keep from sliding. But it grows trees, and some of it is flat in the bottom.

TUCKER CARLSON: But this is not plantation land.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, these are hollers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

Kentucky’s Political History

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So, in fact, interestingly enough, it’s been a Republican county since the Civil War, even though all the counties around it have been Democrats since the Civil War.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because the geography.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Because the geography, the topography did not allow for consolidation of farms. So there was no scale at which slavery made sense. Basically, in your holler, you only had enough land that your family, if you had enough kids, could farm.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And so that’s the way people grew up. And by the way, it’s kind of libertarian. You know, I’ll do my thing in my holler. You do your thing in your holler.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: If you need some help, let me know. I’ll come over and help you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Southwest Virginia’s like this. West Virginia’s like this.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. Because the topography. It’s the reason West Virginia was Republican and seceded from Virginia. So by the way, half my family’s from West Virginia and half my family’s from Kentucky. My Mamaw, who’s 97 right now is still alive. Her grandfather was Union soldier.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Isn’t that crazy?

TUCKER CARLSON: From West Virginia.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: From West Virginia, yeah. She still lives in West Virginia, but we’re not that far away from the Civil War.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I know, I know.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You can talk to people who were alive when people who fought in the Civil War.

TUCKER CARLSON: I worked with a guy when I was at the newspaper in Arkansas. The guy shared a desk with Bob Sali from Texarkana, Arkansas. He said I knew Confederate veterans. It’s in my lifetime I knew a man who knew Confederate veterans or Civil War veterans. That’s just absolutely crazy.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But my whole point of that was she’s a Republican. She’s been Republican, my Mamaw, since the Civil War. And nobody marries into our family if you’re a Democrat. You gotta go see Mamaw. And she’ll either approve or disapprove. And she’s had pretty good luck at sniffing out the liberals.

Building a Timber Frame House

TUCKER CARLSON: So you had an ice storm. There was an ice storm on your property. How does that figure into your house?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So I already had a bulldozer, so I got a winch so I could drag these trees out. I got a sawmill, cut these into timbers, built a timber frame house.

TUCKER CARLSON: What kind of wood?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s 17 kinds of wood because it was whatever fell down in the ice storm. We’ve got oak, yellow poplar, hickory, beech.

TUCKER CARLSON: So hardwood.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Hardwood, yep. And then we wanted to be self-sustaining.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did you know how to timber frame?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I found a class on eBay for $500 in Tennessee and I bought it now and I drove to Tennessee and took a one week class and we built a little shed, slash cabin. And I called my wife from a pay phone and I said, I want to do this instead of going to get a job. We had just ended our company after 10 years of working there and we’d moved back to Kentucky and I said, I want to just build a timber frame house full time. Woke up every morning, had my coffee and started chiseling away or going up in the woods and dragging more trees out that had fallen down.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you built your house full time, like as a job? Every day.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And this is what our kids saw too. Like the flooring for our kitchen came out of the creek. We call it a creek.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you mean? The flooring came out of the creek.

Building a Self-Sufficient Homestead

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: There are rocks in the creek that are flat, that look like the stuff you buy at Lowe’s. That’s fake. And I’m like, oh, this is what they modeled the fake stuff after. It’s free. Let’s just go pick it up. Now we probably have—we’re paying ourselves about $3 an hour compared to if we’d just gone to one of the box stores and bought it in terms of harvesting it. But our kids, I think, in addition to being with their grandparents, learn a big lesson that, wow, mom and dad are growing our food. They are collecting the materials for the house here from the environment. You don’t have to rely on external systems for everything.

Neighbors are good though, right? We actually sent them to public school, which was—and we let them ride the bus. It was only three miles away. But we figured the bus ride was important too, because when you get to school, they sort of separate you. But you’ve got can be 15 terrifying minutes on the bus where you interact with everybody.

I remember my son. He was like 10 years old. He traded some Yu-Gi-Oh cards on the bus for this, like, awesome, the best Yu-Gi-Oh card ever. And he showed it to us. It was a little plastic thing. And we’re like, well, did you want to take out plastic? “No, no. He told me to leave it in here,” and we take it out. And it was a fake. And he was so mad. But it turns out his dad had sold me a leaky bulldozer and said there was no leaks in it. So, like, it ran in the family. The same kid who stiffed my son stiffed me on this dozer. These are life lessons, right? They didn’t lead a sheltered life. And so they grew up there.

TUCKER CARLSON: What percent of the timbers in the timber frame came from your property?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: All of it. Never left the farm.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really? So you milled it there.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Milled it there, chiseled it there, made the mortise and tenons and the dovetails. It was a lot of work.

TUCKER CARLSON: Personally. Yes. How did you—you know, cutting a mortise and tenon, cutting a dovetail joint. These are—having done it, very difficult. How did you learn to do that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I kept telling myself, look, farmers without calculators pulled this off 200 years ago. And so surely if I’ve got a computer and some, you know, electricity, I should be able to do this as well. Just dint of will.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you’d been like a software programmer, right? Not nothing that scale.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. I mean the only thing I built before that was a tree house. Right. And even that didn’t get finished.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I mean some of that stuff is very complex, like actually complex timber framing. Some of the joints are difficult to cut and the design itself is complicated.

Traditional Timber Framing Techniques

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. You don’t like, hold the timber up there like you would a two by four. “We need a saw. It’s not balloon framing. Oh, that 45 needs to be a 42 degree angle. Let’s saw off a little bit more.” You can’t do that while you’re up in the middle of the air on scaffolding trying to get two pieces to fit together. It’s actually a fun math problem. So I enjoyed it. But is there something honest about it? Because all the fasteners are wooden too. So it’s one medium that you learn. There’s no like bolts.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s all pegs.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: All pegs. And once you realize that.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then there are no metal fasteners in the frame?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: None.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I mean we had to nail the floor.

TUCKER CARLSON: I got it.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And the walls on it. But the frame itself, the structure. And it’s 46 feet tall.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s 46 feet tall.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes. From the basement slab, which I timber framed the basement too. I still don’t even know how to stick frame. Like I’m like, well, I’m going to build one house.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m going to learn one technique, the framing that your—if you’re watching this, it’s stick frame.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So I was like, well, let’s build the basement timber frame too. And the dormers. Like if you paid a company to build timber frame, they would stick frame the dormers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, of course. Or buy them and just bolt them on.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right? Yeah, I timber framed that. And just like, let’s just be pure the whole way. And there’s—as an engineer, I thought, well, I want to build a house with timbers. I like how timbers look, but you know, we’ll just bolt them together. We’ll use iron brackets. That’s the best way to do it. But in the course of this one week class, I came to realize, wow, if you just let go and make everything out of wood, it solves problems that you would create when you start using metal fasteners. Like wood shrinks.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It takes like six or eight years for a big timber to fully dry out. So how do you deal with metal fasteners and shrinking wood? Well, the metal fasteners can rip out, but if you build your fasteners out of wood, it can all work.

TUCKER CARLSON: It moves together.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And there’s, you know, if you go to Germany, there’s homes that are 4 or 500 years old to show that it can work.

TUCKER CARLSON: So all the timbers came from the property. What about the stone? There’s a lot of stone in the house.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yep. We got some of it out of the creek. We dug some of it out of the ground. All of the stone is from the property.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did you dig it out of the ground? What does that mean? You started a stone quarry on your own property?

Resourcefulness and Self-Reliance

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: In my front yard. It’s now a pond. But there was an old logging road and the erosion had exposed this layer of rock. And I thought, well, that layer of rock must go pretty far. So I started digging using a backhoe. I started digging the dirt off of that layer of rock. And I’m like, wow, there are lots of rocks here. And I just, I almost giggled out loud when I shoved on that layer of rock with my backhoe. And all these rocks started rolling out in front of the blade. And they looked like rocks you could buy at the store, you know, like, well, why would I go buy them? Like, I can just shove three tons of them out of here in a few minutes. And then I had people coming and visiting. Obviously we looked like a bunch of weirdos building this timber frame house up on the hill. And people would come up and where.

TUCKER CARLSON: Were you living at this point?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We lived in a mobile home. Like, we just pulled in a mobile home and we—I told my wife we’d only live in it for like six months. We ended up two years in a 900 square foot mobile home with four kids.

TUCKER CARLSON: No way.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But I mean, it’s actually not that bad. You get to know your family really well. You can hear—it’s like being on a boat. You try to go to the bathroom. And if you’re gone for more than five minutes, like, the wall between the kitchen and the bathroom is so thin, you’re just enjoying private moment there on the throne. Trying to read a magazine about timber framing or something. And you can hear the kids at the dinner table saying, “Where’d daddy go? Where’d daddy, where’s daddy?” And then start trying to find daddy.

Anyways, it was a good, comfy experience. And now we actually kept the mobile home and we leased it to deer hunters. It’s a double wide, so it’s full of deer heads and bunk beds now. And the hunters call it the lodge, which we find amusing. My wife calls it the double lodge, since it’s a double wide.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you have a lot of deer on your land?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We have—yeah. Trophy deer all over.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you charge to rent it? Just in case people are interested.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We—we’re booked up. You don’t want any weird Internet people.

TUCKER CARLSON: So how long did it take you to finish this house?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s not finished. I’ve been criticized, you know, in campaigns. People try to use this against me. Some guy goes, “He doesn’t even have doors on all these rooms. He’s some kind of weirdo.” Great. Well, we haven’t made that door yet.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re making the doors?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We have made a few of them, yeah. We’re kind of breaking down now and buying a few doors now that the kids are gone.

TUCKER CARLSON: So this—that was like, your kids—wait, so what year did you start? How long has this process been?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So we started in 2003, so we’re 21 years. And we’ve been off the grid that long, too.

Living Off the Grid

TUCKER CARLSON: Now, when you say off the grid, what do you mean?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We’re not connected to any public utility. Not electricity, not water, not sewer, not phone. The house is totally disconnected from everything.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you build those systems yourself?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, using—a lot of it’s off the shelf stuff, but some of it’s improvised, field expedient. So, like, for the Tesla battery, the car battery that runs the house, you can’t buy that out of catalog. You go to a junkyard and say, how much do you want for that wrecked Model S? And like, “Well, I’ll sell you the battery for $15,000.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Why not? Why can’t you just buy the battery separately?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They won’t. Like, Tesla wouldn’t sell me a Powerwall. I would—I tried to buy one for years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Because it has to be connected to the grid. For some reason, their business model involves that. So I was like, all right, well, I’ll get a battery. How much different can it be from the batteries in their car? So I drove to Lake Lanier, Georgia, with a little trailer, landscaping trailer. The battery weighs, I think, 1,200 pounds. But here’s the funny thing. It’s considered hazardous material if you pull it on a trailer, but if it’s in a car, it’s just fine. So I hurried up and got back to Kentucky with the trailer. I don’t have a hazmat license.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it was a wrecked Tesla Model S. And you pulled the battery out of it?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And what’d you do with it?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Disassembled it. Paid $15,000 cash. But this is like, you know, I’m—this probably like 15 or 20 years. Hopefully it’ll last. And so I brought it home, took it apart. Actually, I made a YouTube video of this. And what’s kind of funny is I had these big rubber gloves that a friend who had worked on power lines, you know, they were leftovers, and he gave to me. And so, like, in the YouTube video, I try to make sure, like, I’m using big rubber gloves and stuff. And I did like, this fast forward, you know, of the disassembly of the battery. And I forgot, like, my two little boys are in there helping me, and they don’t have the gloves on.

TUCKER CARLSON: They haven’t earned a right to have gloves.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Don’t put stuff on the Internet. Like, I once—I have a Tesla Model S, one of the very first ones made, and I’ve got Friends of Coal license plates on it. Like, in Kentucky, you can get Friends of Coal. It’s a totally.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, coal.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: C-O-A-L. Yeah. So. Because in Kentucky, that’s if you plug into the grid, that’s likely where your electricity is coming.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where I would think. Yeah.

Off-Grid Living and Energy Systems

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So I’m driving this thing back from D.C. This was when gas was getting close to $5 a gallon. It was over $4 a gallon. And I stopped in West Virginia to charge my Tesla at a supercharging station just to kind of troll people on the Internet. I made sure to get a picture of my friend’s coal license plate. And I said, “I’m just charging up with coal here in West Virginia.”

Within 30 seconds, I knew I’d made a mistake because somebody had zoomed in on the picture and my tags were expired. And they started tagging the Kentucky State Police, my local sheriff, the DMV, Kentucky. They were trying to get me in trouble. And I’m like, there’s no way to stop this now. They were relentless. But then somebody realized they had been expired for 18 months, that I’d actually made it a year without paying taxes and was maybe likely to get out of a year of taxes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s your win then.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, but in Kentucky, I think they make you go back and pay the old taxes anyway. What I learned there is, search everything in the picture before you put it on the internet.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, yes, and others with zestier personal lives than you have learned this the hard way.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, it doesn’t seem you’ve got enough minor tax evasion issue here.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t have time to be too weird. So you get the Tesla battery back to your off-grid house and what do you have to do? Because it’s not made for this. It’s a car battery.

Repurposing Tesla Batteries for Home Power

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s a car battery. It’s made to run 400 volts. All of my existing system was made to run off 48 volts, but there were 16 modules each, only 25 volts. And I realized if you put two of those in series, you could make 50 volts. So I put eight sets of two in series and paralleled eight sets of two in series so I got 50 volts at a lot more amperage than what the Tesla car would normally draw. It was capable of doing that.

And how hard is that to do? Well, I mean it took a few days, but it’s lasted for six and a half years. I wouldn’t advise doing this at home. That’s why I put it in an outbuilding. I mean if it catches on fire, it’s probably like Chernobyl, that miniseries. Like don’t look at the reactor. God created lithium ion, but he can’t put the fire out if it starts. So I would not attach it to your house. Mine is like…

TUCKER CARLSON: Is it attached to your house?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Kind of, yeah. It’s like a basement room that’s not under the house. I don’t want to get into everything under my house right now. My wife says our house is my science project and she’s the mouse and she doesn’t mind that, but I keep rearranging the maze on the weekends when I come back from D.C. and then she has to find the cheese while I’m in D.C. But she’s more like the astronaut, I think, in a rocket.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s exactly…

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: She’s the only…

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the same trust level, right?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Required, correct? Yes. She trusts me while I’m in D.C. and I trust her to fly the house while she’s in Kentucky.

TUCKER CARLSON: She’s also an MIT graduate, so I assume she kind of understands some of the stuff.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Oh yeah, although she would like to have just one thing in the house where if something went wrong she could call somebody, but she can’t. She’s got to call me. And then I walk her through it. By the way, it’s good marriage security. But it’s just like if we ever broke up, or if, let’s say she put something in my coffee and I didn’t wake up the next day, she’d have a hard time running the house.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you put the modules, which is basically separate batteries, right? Within the…

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Within the big battery. Then I put a computer on it, a Raspberry Pi, and I made a little graphic screen. And the Raspberry Pi, using an Arduino, talks to the CAN bus, which is a proprietary Tesla communication system. So I use the battery management system that’s native to the Tesla battery modules. If there’s a nerd listening to this, this makes complete sense. And they’ll be like, “Oh, well, why wouldn’t you do that?” And everybody else is going to be like, he’s just BSing.

TUCKER CARLSON: So did you have to add new software to this to run it?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I had to write software from scratch. Yeah, but it’s fun. Like, this is what I do. Look, I’ve been in Congress since 2012. My brain has atrophied to the size of a walnut, actually, to a raisin, and it expands to a walnut if I can go home and do these projects, and then I go back to D.C. and it’s back down to the raisin.

TUCKER CARLSON: I believe that. I don’t understand how these projects work, but I know what brain atrophy looks like, and I know that Congress induces it.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s not a worm. It just shrinks.

TUCKER CARLSON: So how does it work?

Solar Power and Off-Grid Living

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It works great. We can run the air conditioner. For the first 11 years, we had lead acid batteries, and they didn’t work that great. You had to add water to them. They put off hydrogen gas, which is explosive. They put off a sulfide gas that can kill you. Lead acid batteries are bad, and they’re like over 100 years old.

But by the way, I love solar panels. Republicans look at me like, “You have solar panels, you have an electric car. Are you sure you’re one of us?” And I’m like, well, the solar panels are rocks that make electricity. They are amazing things. They take sunlight and turn it into something we can all use. I tell Republicans, you can hate the subsidies, you can hate the bailouts, you can hate the mandates. I hate all of those things as well. But don’t hate solar panels.

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t hate the technology.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right. Because it’s actually given me and can give other people a license to be independent.

TUCKER CARLSON: So let’s get specific about it. So you have this Tesla battery that allows you to do everything a normal house can do. You can run air conditioning, you’ve got a dishwasher, you got washer dryer. I’m assuming all this.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Four deep freezers. Refrigerator. Four deep freezers full of peaches, beef.

TUCKER CARLSON: And chickens running continuously.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Continuously.

TUCKER CARLSON: So your power draw is significant on all those appliances, obviously.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And the battery handles it fine. How much propane or how much diesel or what? I assume you have a generator to recharge, backup generator.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Backup occasionally in the winter, but I keep every time.

TUCKER CARLSON: So your solar panels recharge the battery?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, for nine months out of year. The backup generator doesn’t run. Except for its test run every Friday.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, exactly.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: When we bust out the machine guns, like who’s in the driveway? Okay, back down to level one. That’s just the backup generator.

TUCKER CARLSON: So your electricity is… I mean as long as you know how to operate the system, which apparently only you do. But if you can do that, then you’re just living a completely normal life with electricity. How do you do heat? How do you heat your house?

Sustainable Heating Solutions

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So in one of the greenest ways possible. I think the whole carbon thing is a scam.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course it’s a scam.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But if you do care about carbon neutrality… I wish we had more carbon. We need more CO2 and at periods in Earth’s history we had more CO2 and plant life was doing better. And we’ve seen plant life, we’ve seen the coverage of green on the globe increase as CO2 levels go up, crop production goes up as CO2 levels go up.

But if you did care about CO2, I am using wood on my farm, like just trees that fall down. I’m not even going out and cutting a living tree. There’s enough trees falling down – deadfall – that if I don’t get to them, the termites do and they turn them into CO2 and methane. But I can get to them and cut them up and bring them to my house and burn them in a wood gasifying boiler, which is super efficient. By the way, once you start cutting wood for heat efficiency, like if you figure out a boiler is twice as efficient, you can cut half as much wood.

TUCKER CARLSON: So would… Can you? Because anyone who’s made it this far in the interview is probably interested in wood gasification. Can you explain what that is? How is it different from a normal wood fired boiler or wood stove?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, in a normal wood stove you put the wood in there, it can be green. You light it on fire, you get it going, and then you control the air that goes to it to keep it from getting too hot. And a lot of smoke comes out, especially when it’s idling because it’s an inefficient combustion process and it’s at a relatively low temperature under, let’s say, 1,000 degrees.

But in a wood gasifying boiler, you get the fire started and it basically turns the wood into charcoal and drives the gases out of it into a secondary chamber that’s ceramic because it’s burning at over 1500 degrees.

TUCKER CARLSON: How do you get wood to burn that hot?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You just deprive it of oxygen at first and get it hot and then you drive all the gases off and you put more oxygen in that secondary chamber and it looks like it’s burning gas. Like it’ll be a blue flame and then it’ll turn into a yellow flame.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just Oak, Maple, Beech. This is just conventional firewood.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I burn near wood. Nearest wood to the house. I don’t remember that. Near wood. Yeah, nearest wood.

TUCKER CARLSON: You burn softwood in it.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You can. But the BTU, again, if you’re doing this yourself, care about efficiency. Like, if you look at the old timers, they were the greenest people on the planet. They didn’t waste a thing and they figured out the most efficient way to do things because it was minutes out of their lives.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So you start figuring out how to be more efficient when you’re trying to be self-sustaining. So I’ve got on my Twitter bio, I used to say it may still say this on there, “greenest member of Congress.” That doesn’t mean I just got there and I’m green. I never got any of the fact checkers to come after me on that. Nobody wants to fact check me because I probably am the greenest member of Congress who has self-sustaining food. Self-sustaining without externalities. Self-sustaining power, self-sustaining water.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you heat with wood. How much wood do you burn?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Would you say a season the size of this table? Maybe four stacks of wood the size of this table.

TUCKER CARLSON: So this is about a cord. This is about a cord is four by four by eight. So like roughly that. So four cords a year. That’s not much. That’s impressive. How do you get hot water?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: We’ve got three ways to make hot water. When our geothermal unit’s running in the summertime doing the air conditioning, it takes the heat out of the living room and puts it in the hot water tank. So we have free hot water from like May until September when the air conditioner’s running.

And then in the winter when the boiler, the wood boiler is running, that makes hot water. And then if there’s ever not the air conditioner running or the boiler running, we have an on-demand – this is where we cheat – on-demand propane hot water heater that makes up the difference.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing. But you could pretty easily set up a wood fired outdoor…

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You could, yeah. But in the summer, again, you get it for free from the air conditioning. I actually have a fourth way to make hot water too. So when we’re not connected to the grid, a lot of people who have solar panels are connected to the grid. And if they have extra power, they sell it back.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

Off-Grid Living and Energy Management

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I’m always depressed when I have extra power. My solar panels just turn off and I’m like, run around, turn on some lights, you know, turn on something. I don’t want to waste this free electricity. So I got extra hot water heater elements, elements that run on DC so that when the sun, when our house is full, the first thing it does is it tries to charge the Tesla that’s sitting in the garage. So the Tesla’s sitting there at half full and a solid state breaker in my breaker box comes on and starts the Tesla charging. Then when the Tesla gets full and the house battery is full, I create hot water with the electricity. So I’ve got like a fourth way to make hot water. Hot water is almost as good as water. I mean, if you’ve ever gone without water, you know it’s bad. But going out without hot water is almost just as bad.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I have experience with that. Yes. Where do you get your water?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So I dug a well.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not drill dug.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: There are lots of old dug wells on our farm. So I knew it could work.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: The way they would do it, they would dig a big pit.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: They didn’t dig it just straight down. They dug a big pit and then they laid up stones in a circle. You know the stones you see when you look in an old well, but then they backfilled the pit with stones so that extra area becomes like a reservoir. And then they put dirt on top of that so that, you know, when a raccoon poops next to your well, it doesn’t necessarily go right into the reservoir. So I did a very similar thing, but I hit bedrock and I borrowed a friend’s jackhammer and spent a day inside of that hole with a jackhammer trying to get even deeper through the bedrock. I finally took my friend’s jackhammer back and said, okay, that’s deep enough.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was the jackhammer like?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I mean, that’s the best argument for public health care because I have a new appreciation for somebody that’s running a jackhammer. Those would wear your body out quickly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really quickly.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you lose a crown?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I did not lose a crown.

TUCKER CARLSON: So does the well, the dug well work?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It works. One month out of the year. We’re kind of short on water.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So. Yes. August. How’d you know that? Have you ever.

TUCKER CARLSON: I have a dug well.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Lived in this situation.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, I have a dug well. So I’m aware of that.

Resource Conservation and Smart Utilities

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But again, you conserve, right. Of course, if you’re connected to city water and it seems what’s on the other side is opaque to you, you just use as much as you want. And what happens is during those peak periods, that’s when the utility company has to work extra hard. That’s when the price and the inefficiency goes way up. Is in those peak periods when people aren’t cutting back in response to the supply because the actual cost of producing it isn’t known. When you’re making it yourself, it’s known.

But I’ve argued that water and electricity, even when they come from, especially when they come from utilities, should have variable pricing based on the instant cost at that very instant to produce it. And then you could have appliances. Not mandated, but smart appliances. If you’re rich, you don’t care when the price of power goes up, you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t know what it costs.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You don’t know what it costs. If you’re poor and you got a little screen, it says the power just went up, you’ll go, turn it off, right? You’ll say, we’ll do the dishes tonight when it’s cheaper. And if you’re middle income, you probably… Eventually the market will respond to this and automate these things so that if you know the price of electricity, your appliance can know the price. I don’t want the utility company to know what you’re doing with it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course not.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But you could have these smart systems that make a lot more efficient use of our resources.

TUCKER CARLSON: So because you’re not connected to the grid, to any public utility at all, I mean, you’re actually independent in a way that no one outside of Alaska I’ve ever met is. And it sounds like you’re not giving up anything. You’re not living in a.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Not too much. There are some sacrifices like, well, you know, if it’s cloudy for a lot of days and hot, we may turn the thermostat up just so we don’t have to hear the backup generator run.

TUCKER CARLSON: That doesn’t seem like a crazy sacrifice.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: There’s some people would think the instant they had to turn the thermostat from 72 to 75 was be, screw it, I’m out of here, I’m going back to the grid.

Independence from the System

TUCKER CARLSON: But it means that the state kind of has no control over your land, correct.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Or me. So when I go to D.C. and they threaten me or try to bribe me, it’s like I know once Friday comes I’m going to be back on my farm and I don’t need them. Like, it’s not that I don’t want to do things for people. I help my neighbors and my neighbors help me and I want to, you know, do public service, but because I have this comfort level that I’m going to go back home to this, I don’t need the job. We’re self sustaining. It gives you an extra dimension of independence, I think when you’re in D.C.

TUCKER CARLSON: What about food? Can they starve you out?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t think so. Like they can cut off my fish supply because we don’t raise fish and we don’t raise pork, but we raise chicken, you know, meat and eggs, we raise beef and we usually raise a pretty good garden. And I have an orchard. Peaches, lots of peaches. My first peach is going to be ripe here in a few weeks and my last peach will be ripe in September. So I’ve planted 14 kinds of peach trees so they get ripe different weeks and they taste nothing like the cardboard peaches you buy at the supermarket.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you don’t need to leave actually your farm.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No. Are you trying to talk me out of like, I mean, this is a crisis. I have some weeks. I bet. Oh man. On Mondays it’s like, you know you’re going to get hit with a two by four as soon as you walk in the door in D.C. it’s like, is it weird?

Skills and Self-Reliance

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I guess what I’m struck by. I don’t live off grid though I do have an off grid camp. But the amount of skills you need to build something like that is really, really striking. Like you actually have to know how to do things, complex things. I mean timber framing is another level but electrical, plumbing, masonry, agriculture, heavy equipment operation. Like you can do all of that, obviously. So is it weird to be in a room with 434 people who can’t do shit, who can’t operate a micro? I mean they’re like actually incapable and maybe that’s why they’re in politics, so they can externalize their self loathing. Is that weird?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I don’t, I really don’t think about it that much. Good. I don’t think about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where’d you pick up plumbing skills?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So my rule is buy three books for everything because you can go to a hardware store and buy a book on plumbing, but I don’t trust one book. So you buy two books and then if the two books disagree, what are you going to do? Well, you got to have a third book. So I’ve got three books on plumbing, three books on wiring, three books on septic systems.

TUCKER CARLSON: You do your septic too, Roofing.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yep, three. I get three books on everything.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you read them and I read them.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And then there’s the code book which is like, you know, it’s almost like international housing code thing that some municipalities have adopted and you have to abide by. I just look at that as like a suggestion manual.

Building Codes and Industry Interests

TUCKER CARLSON: So do you think now we’re way in the weeds? I don’t know if anyone’s watching, but they’re like four handymen, carpenter, general contractors are still in this. But do you think that code which really determines how people live in this country, the code, it’s not up to code. Is it, is it real? I mean, is it knowing what you do about all those different trades. Does the code protect people? Actually.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It protects the contractors.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I know that.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And so they help write it. The unions do. So for instance, the roofers union and the plumbers union, I think have conspired to put as many holes in your roof with plumbing as possible.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because all the venting. Yeah.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: All the vents. Right. If you try to build a house to code, you likely to have four or five perforations in your roof.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve noticed.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And that keeps the roofers busy. Like they’re guaranteed to get a call every few years to fix that leak. And it’s also very expensive. It’s fairly cheap to do roofing. But it’s all the exceptions that cost money. And then if you’re a plumber, that’s one more thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like all the flashing and all the. Every time you have an aperture in a roof.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like that’s a vulnerability.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So my roof has no holes in it. Like, I’ve looked at this. I’m like, well, that’s a good suggestion, but who benefits if I believe.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you vent your stove at the side of the building, not the.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, no holes in my roof. No holes out the side. Have you seen that Opera House in. I think it’s Sydney, Australia. Is it Sydney or Melbourne?

TUCKER CARLSON: Sydney.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, there’s no holes in that. There’s bathrooms in there. How do they do it? They have the one way admittance valves like you have under your kitchen counter. They have giant ones of those that work for the whole system and they’re not to code. But I think that’s stupid because why would I want to put a bunch of holes in my roof?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I couldn’t agree more. I’m interested in this topic, so.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But nobody else now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, but for the four people who are. I’ve always wondered that why with wood stoves, where I live, everyone has lots of wood stoves. And some of them, I have wood stoves that vent out the side of the building, like next to a window and then do an L up. It’s not quite as efficient, you know, because you’ve got to turn in the run. But you don’t have a hole in your roof. And in a climate with like lots of snow, for example, you don’t want any holes in your roof. But how do you vent your furnace, for example?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So that I just run in a typical flue and it goes up in the chimney with my pizza oven flu, my wood cook stove flu, and my Rumford fireplace flu. So I have four flues through the.

TUCKER CARLSON: Chimney on the gable end.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: No, there in the middle of the house. I put the chimney in the middle of the house because it’s a big thermal mass and I wanted to smooth out the changes in temperature in the house. And so there’s where I did accommodate one hole in the roof is the chimney. Because if you put a big stone mass on the side of your house, there’s no way to insulate it from the outside.

By the way, let me say something like, I know there are some women watching this wondering, like, I want to live in a house like that. That sounds like a lot of fun. Talk to my wife first. Occasionally we have like some crisis that I have to solve and become MacGyver. So the first time I got elected to Congress, for instance, the day before I went to go get sworn in, the well pump failed. And I’m like, I can’t leave my wife and four kids at home without water. And we have a very unique well pump.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you mean by that?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Well, I didn’t buy the one at the hardware store, so you couldn’t go replace it. So I went down there.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did you buy?

DIY Solutions for Off-Grid Living

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s like in a catalog somewhere. The engineer in me found the best one. It’s not the most common one, but I had to fix it. So what I did is I found one of my drills, you know, like you drill holes with. And I took it down to the well and I took the motor off the well pump and I chucked the drill to the well head. And because it’s not submerged, it’s off the side in a pump house. And I wired this, you know, had an outlet on it, but I just wired it into the well pump wiring and the drill pumped water for our house. I believe that long enough for me to go get sworn in.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve seen that. I’ve seen drills run winches.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes. Well, I forgot it was there. Like, I did my congress thing for you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Had it on continuously.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. And then the accumulator in the basement that controls the pressure would turn the drill off and on whenever it needed more water pressure. And so it ran continuously. I forgot about it. I just got busy. And like a year later, the freaking water quit working again.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because the Makita died.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right. It was absolutely a Milwaukee hole. It was the whole hog. You know, one of those.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, I totally do what they handle on the side.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Those are cool drills.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Last night. I just want to end with this. Last night we were having dinner and. Which was really one of the most interesting, amusing dinners I’ve ever had. But you made reference to a story. But we didn’t get it. You didn’t get a chance to finish it because I interrupted you. But about putting new plumbing in a county jail. I think we can tell that story.

Getting Into Politics

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. So quickly I got into politics because we were living off the grid. And I read this little newspaper and it said they were going to raise our taxes to fund this cronyism in the county. The conservation district, which was building stuff for themselves and not for other farmers. They wanted to tax other farmers to help their farm. Right. It wasn’t really about conserving farmers. Farmers are the biggest, best conservationists there are. So let’s don’t punish them anymore.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good call.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: So I fought that tax, and then I actually fought zoning in our county. They wanted to zone our county. I mean, zoning is to keep the smokestacks out of the cul-de-sacs. Right. My county didn’t have any smokestacks and didn’t have any cul-de-sacs. We didn’t have the neighborhood in E.T. you know that movie where the kids ride their bikes through the neighborhood. We didn’t have neighborhoods like that, so we didn’t need zoning. But somebody thought if we zoned a county that we would get prosperity because they saw all the prosperous counties had zoning. It’s cargo cult. Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, totally. It’s like saying we should import some homeless because then we’ll have banks.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right, right.

TUCKER CARLSON: J.P. Morgan will move here because in midtown, they’re homeless.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Right. So that was. I was fighting that and writing letters to the editor. And then finally I quit fighting. The guy who was doing all this, he’s called the county judge executive in Kentucky, like the mayor of the county. And I decided to run against him.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’ve never been in politics?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Never in my life. Also, there was this guy named Rand Paul who was inspiring, who was taking on the establishment. It was his first run for Senate and had decided to get involved in his race too. So just like with my house, I didn’t go in partway. I went in all in. Okay. On politics one fall, actually one spring, because I had to win the primary. And Rand did too. And so actually did a fundraiser for Rand at my house when nobody wanted to do a fundraiser for Rand Paul because he was running against the establishment. My house wasn’t finished. We weren’t even living in it yet. Sorry, little sidebar.

TUCKER CARLSON: Traipsed up from the double wide.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes. We went to the double wide and we said, for a hundred dollars, you can come to our pizza party. I did have the pizza oven working.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so you built the pizza oven before the bedrooms.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Priorities.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: That’s right. Had to test it out, make sure it was inhabitable. So the funny thing, too, we didn’t have doors on the bathrooms at the time. We had no doors. So we ran to Lowe’s the day before Rand Paul came and put a door on the bathroom.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good call.

The County Judge Executive Experience

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Because I was like, look, this guy could be a senator someday and he might need to go to the bathroom. And we need something more than a curtain here. So we call it the Rand Paul door on the bathroom. It’s the one room that had a door from the very beginning.

Anyways. We did, by the way. Also, this was in January, and Rand is cheap as hell. He had a two wheel drive SUV, so I had to plow all my driveway so that he could get up there. And the problem is it’s gravel. So I had to plow all my gravel off practically just to get. So for what it cost to upgrade to the four wheel drive for Rand Paul, my gravel costs way more than that.

Anyways, I went all in on politics, helped Rand get elected in his primary. I was on the ballot the same day in 2010, the primary, May 22, 2010. Rand was on the ballot and I was on the ballot. But I was running for this little county executive seat, trying to take a Republican out because he’s trying to raise our taxes and bring in more government. And so I won the election.

And it was the most terrifying thing when they handed me the key to the courthouse, like it’s a small town and if the janitor didn’t show up to open the courthouse and start the boiler, which looked like the African Queen, right? It was like you had to kick it and do all this stuff to get it started. The sheriff’s office wouldn’t be heated, the clerk’s office wouldn’t be heated, and my office wouldn’t be heated if I couldn’t get the African Queen to start.

So anyways, it was like the dog that caught the bus. And I had promised I wouldn’t raise taxes. And I was immediately confronted with all these problems that had accumulated over the years in our county government. And the jailer came to me, who’s an elected official in Kentucky. His name’s Chris. And he got elected the same day I got elected. And he was all in on my, let’s reform this county.

But he had some bad news for me, by the way. The state government had sold the county government a bill of goods. They said, if you’ll keep our state inmates, we’ll pay you $32 a day and you’ll make all kinds of money. The county was a million dollars in debt because this did not work out. And I wasn’t going to spend another penny, you know, on this, throwing good money after bad. But we had 30 state inmates who go out and pick up trash and, you know, mow around the courthouse and they get real sweaty. And the hot water heater had quit working at the jail.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ooh.

The Hot Water Heater Story

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: And so the jailer, Chris, comes to me and says, judge. They call me judge even though I’m not an attorney. It was the county judge executive, you know, said, judge, I got some bad news. So what’s that? He said, well, hot water heater quit working on the State inmate side. And I can’t mix state inmates with local inmates. You know, you get murderers along with non-support, you know, from child.

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally in DUI cases.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah, it’s like this. We can’t have them taking showers together. It’s not going to work. And I said, okay, we’ll just buy another hot water heater. And he said, well, I tried that. I got a quote. We only had one licensed plumber in the county. And I said, well, what was the quote? He said, $12,000. I said, I mean, this is a small county for a hot water heater. For a hot water. Like all of our property taxes together were like $400,000. I mean, $12,000 for a hot. I’m not paying $12,000 for a hot water heater. You tell that guy to get lost. And he said, well, what are you going to do? I was like, I’ll go buy one at, you know, the hardware store or something.

So I go look at this hot water heater at the jail. It is not the kind you buy at the store. It’s like a boiler almost, and it’s fairly involved. It’s got like inch and a quarter copper lines. It’s not household plumbing. But I had plumbed. I had three books on plumbing, right? I felt fairly confident. I said, well, if I can find one of these, I’ll put it in myself.

So I got on eBay and I looked for this model hot one. There was one. Buy it now for $5,500. And I’m like, I can save the county like $6,500. So I called an emergency meeting of our fiscal court, brought in the magistrates, noticed it to the newspaper, did it all legally, and made a motion to buy it now on eBay. Then I hit the button.

I bought this hot water heater. They bring it in a tractor trailer. I didn’t pay extra for the lift gate because I had inmates. The inmates take this thing out of the tractor trailer and we go in and we take the old hot water heater out. And there were three inmates in that closet, right, working on that hot water heater, just demolishing everything. So they dragged that thing out of there.

And I had to go in the closet with the inmates to put the new one in. I’m like, I only want one inmate in that closet with me. The hot water heater needs plumbed. I don’t need plumbed. So the other two inmates that were smelling pretty rank at this point, I said, you guys go strip the old hot water heater I want anything of value on that. Besides, you’re in here for stripping copper and other things. Like, you’re good at this. We can do this, Judge. We know, we know. Short irons. Bringing this tins, bringing this copper will bring this aluminum. They could quote every price at the salvage.

TUCKER CARLSON: Seriously?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Yeah. So they. I leave the two inmates stripping the old hot water heater, and it had a computer on it and stuff. And I’m installing the new hot water heater. And I noticed, for instance, even like the plumber had left off this water trap that keeps gases from escaping like a safety device. So I made sure to do it completely safe by the book or by the three books that I had.

And I come out of the closet, by the way, there’s like 30 inmates I had to walk by the rec room that had a piece of glass, and they could all watch me changing this hot water heater. And there’s like 30 inmates, like, in disbelief with their hands and faces pressed to the glass. Like, we have never seen a county judge executive get a callous on his hand or do anything.

So I go back out and the inmate said, we got everything of value. There was this hulk of an old hot water heater sitting there. They had stripped the copper. They had stripped all of the useful iron off of it. And I said, guys, you left the most valuable thing on it. And they said, no, Judge, we’ve done this all our lives. We stripped these things. There’s nothing on here. They’ll bring anything down. At Livingston’s, that was the junkyard place, recycling place.

And I said, no, you left the most valuable thing. I said, come over here. And they walk over and I said, you see this lime green inspection sticker? Get it wet and peel it off and glue it on the new hot water heater. Remember I refused to hire the only licensed plumber in the county. They go, judge, you could go to jail for this. I said, I’ll have a hot shower, won’t I?

You actually did that? I did that. And the only reason I’m telling you this publicly is this was. How long was it? Like 15 years ago or something? And no, 14 years ago. I think the statute of limitations, you know, practicing it without a license as a plumber on a public building is probably expired. If not, the DOJ will be at my house as soon as this airs. But they have also since closed down the jail, like a few years later.

TUCKER CARLSON: They.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It was a good move.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did they take the water heater with them?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: You know, it’s on my bucket list. It may still be in there.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what are they using it for now?

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s. I think it’s just vacant. Maybe they’ll use it for drug rehab or something at some point, which would make more sense.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did it work? Did your hotel.

Fixing the Jail’s Hot Water Heater

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, it booted up. The computer came on and everybody got… I mean, 30 inmates just waiting to take a hot shower. And it worked and worked and worked until they shut the jail down.

TUCKER CARLSON: So incredible.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: But anyways, that set the tone. Like, you could say, well, you’re the executive of the county and you shouldn’t be wasting your time on that. But I mean, I had four hours of effort in it, and I saved the county $6,500. And I’m like, no, this is worth my time. And it also shows the inmates, like, okay, we’re buying you $1.50 lunches instead of the $2 lunches now because we fired the crony who was doing the food system.

And they were less likely to complain when they saw that the judge himself was actually willing to change the hot water heater. But it also set the tone for the sheriff and the county clerk and everybody else who sees that. And it’s like, man, he is a cheap bastard. Like, I’m not going to go ask him at the next fiscal court meeting for anything.

Standing Up to Lobbies

TUCKER CARLSON: Why don’t you tell the story to AIPAC and maybe they’ll leave you alone.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: It’s like, it’s not personal.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not against you or your country. I just don’t want to spend more money.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: By the way, I’m sure there would be some plumbing lobby against me next week after they see this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the one thing I know for a fact is that you will bravely stand up to the irate plumbing lobby.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I will. One more story about lobbies. So I introduced this raw milk bill in Congress. And you know, food freedom empowers small farmers. It’s more nutritious. I thought there was nothing to hate about it. I got 20 co-sponsors. I put it in the hopper. I got my HR number.

And that day, the milk lobby comes after me. Like, they said there wouldn’t be enough hospital rooms for all the children who were going to die from raw milk if my bill passed. And this is kind of weird. You’ve got a lobby going against its own product, the milk lobby.

So my wife saw all these things come up on her alerts, on her phone, and she texted me. She was worried about me. And she says, “OMG, I didn’t realize the LACTOSE lobby was this intolerant.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, that’s brilliant you said that. That’s pretty awesome, Thomas Massie. Thank you.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: Hey, thank you, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing. Thanks for watching our YouTube channel. We hope you’ll subscribe to it. And by the way, you can hit the little bell on there and get notifications every time we produce a video. We hope you’ll do that also.

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