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By James Pogue
Mr. Pogue is a journalist covering politics and land.
The so-called “greenest member” of Congress is a Republican from rural Kentucky. He lives in an off-grid space he built himself, cut wood and rock from his circle of relatives’ farm. He carries water from a nearby pond and materials into space with solar panels and a battery from a destroyed Tesla he rescued and improved.
But while he lives off the land, and even earns a portion of his livelihood, very few people would call him an environmentalist. The car driving from Washington has a license plate indicating its help for coal. He likes to draw on his past as a robotics engineer to oppose the rushed shift to renewables, arguing that immediate adjustments may cause the collapse of U. S. power grids. UU. es suitable for someone with a degree in pseudoscience,” he said, “to push pseudoscience here. “
Mr. Kerry stumbled, visibly surprised and angry. ” Are you serious?I mean, is it serious here?”
It’s hard to say. From the outside, Thomas Massie would likely resemble other controversial courtiers of congressional gadflies, for example, by presenting a bill for a prayer that would abolish the Ministry of Education, or by posing for a Christmas photo with his wife and children, each. they with a gun, from an M60 to an Uzi. or speaking at the 60th anniversary birthday party of the far-right John Birch society.
But Mr. Massie is not just another Republican congressman. Out of the public eye, it quietly complexes what a Republican politician sees as an uncommon set of positions: an apparent deep opposition to the national security state, resistance to the influence of corporate and interest organizations in our policymaking, and a sense that Americans want bigger, broader politics. a more lasting relationship with the earth. It is a policy almost based on the concept of reducing, making systems smaller, easier and more local. It’s an odd kind of politics for a Republican or any other primary elected official, but it has appeal even beyond the narrow base of the Republican Party, and it has already made Mr. Massie the closest thing the party has to a cult hero.
“I love Massie,” Senator J. D. recently told me. Vance of Ohio. La conservative TV host Candace Owens recently called him her “favorite congresswoman,” a description I’ve heard in part a dozen times over the past year. “After 30 years of communicating with members of Congress,” Tucker Carlson told me, hoping they’re conventional, even stupid, because most of them are. Massie is the opposite. It is regarded and attractive as hell. I don’t know why he is not more famous.
One of the reasons Carlson likes Carlson so much. Massie is that he stores his skepticism about conventional climate policy. Massie has become one of the most faithful critics of the G. O. P. Liberal’s weather plans. It needs answers to be discovered at the local point and suggests that tough foreign forces (technocrats, multinationals, and organizations like the World Economic Forum) are coming together to restrict the American way of life, to uproot our national culture in favor of soft, globalized liberalism, and to make us docile and flexible consumers. Easy to govern and control. It’s a vision that will do much in the coming years to shape not only battles over climate policy, but also American conservatism in the long run.
“His plans are political science-related,” Mr Massie told Mr Carlson, of the world leaders pushing classic climate policy.
Mr. Carlson agreed. ” It seems like an intentional effort to reduce, to drastically decrease the lives of average people,” he said. “Why would they have to do that?”
“They need a lower quality of life,” Mr. Massie replied. “Maybe you don’t get anything and you’ll be satisfied with that, you know?” he said. “That’s their motto. “
Climate Change Around the World: In “Postcards of a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate substitution is transforming truth everywhere, from the endangered coral reefs in Fiji to the disappearance of oases in Morocco and beyond.
The role of our leaders: Writing in late 2020, Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, discovered an explanation for why to be positive in Biden’s presidency, a sentiment perhaps shown through the passage of primary climate legislation. That’s not to say there hasn’t been criticism. For example, Charles Harvey and Kurt House argue that subsidies for the generation of climate captures will ultimately be wasteful.
The worst climate hazards, mapped: In this role, choose a country and we’ll break down the climate hazards you face. In the case of the Americas, our maps, developed with experts, show where excessive heat causes the most deaths.
What other people can do: Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey describe the kinds of local activism that might be needed, while Saul Griffith explains how Australia is leading the way in rooftop solar. particular way to reduce emissions, writes Carlos Gamarra.
The Republican Party is in a moment of change that, in mainstream political media, is simplified as a clash between the party’s neoconservative “establishment” and Trump-aligned populists. But this factional divide obscures a much deeper verbal exchange about the party’s long history. Directing leadership. A debate has arisen about what it means to be a conservative party today. Many on the right have concluded that the Republican Party, which has embraced corporate-led globalization and foreign wars, without any obvious effort to prevent environmental degradation, has, in fact, retained none of the American way of life that Republicans claimed to appreciate. This has helped push politicians at the highest levels of Republican politics, from Donald Trump to Ron DeSantis, to rise up in opposition to the same “globalist” forces and institutions. , the same ones Mr. Massie was a nod to in “Tucker Carlson Tonight. “The real clash in the G. O. P. today is whether the party can, or deserves, to reshape itself as a reaction to the anti-globalization effervescence.
Thomas Massie, who sent a polite note refusing to speak for this article, will almost never be president, and it is unlikely that he will even need to participate in the Senate. Podcasts of settlers or libertarians, it turns out that he does not like being a politician. He calls his farm “the Shire” and Washington “Mordor. “He does not appear to be the representative of a motion, unlike Mr. Vance, who lives across the Ohio River from M’s neighborhood. Massie in Cincinnati, and who proudly aligned himself with nationalists and populist critics of globalism around the world. country and around the world.
But Mr. Massie, the same logo that once marked him as an outlier, has aligned with the existing political moment, as many on the right and left seek to withdraw from the hypercomplex systems that rule the fashionable world and evolve into a more entrenched way of life. Today, many on the right are criticizing even more boldly the disastrous environmental effects of corporate malfeasance around them, noted in the outrage that has arisen in the right-wing media over the derailment of the exercise in East Palestine, Ohio. .
Mr. Massie’s policies are absolutely at odds with the interests of elegance and classic Republican Party donor leaders. But the party, torn between corporatist neoconservatism and incomplete MAGA, failed in two consecutive national elections, possibly explaining why Mr. Massie turns out to be attracting attention as an idiosyncratic voice for a long-term Republican policy election. “Now there is a power around Thomas,” said Jeremy Carl, a former Interior Ministry official. Trump, who has known Massie for years, “just as there was a power around Trump. “
Massie already anticipates the possibility of exerting more influence than ever. He supported the election of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House, despite their ideological differences, and other people who know him well have pointed out to me that, recently, he has been well behaved even with the most classic members of Congress, renouncing to be a “bomb thrower,” as M. Carl. Il now on the tough House Rules Committee.
But even if it never goes higher than this committee, it can also help shape its component’s long-term trajectory, grafting its strange combination of political stances into its DNA. His policy doesn’t really have a name. But there is something a little Jeffersonian about them, as if Mr. Massie is channeling the third president, whom he invokes and whose preference he stores to build an America of small farmers and producers. If he and his enthusiastic young people gain the money, influence, and institutional help to help move the component in their direction, they may reveal a conservatism capable of seeming pleasing to many who are now disenchanted with the component. Massie has already gained many collaborators outside of mainstream Republican circles: neo-colonialists, return-to-earth hippies, grumpy libertarians, and self-proclaimed “marginalized environmentalists. “They are part of a sphere that has grown rapidly since 2020: other people are worried that our economy, our environment, and our government are out of control, and worried that our society is becoming a dystopia without freedom, run by bureaucrats. and technocrats.
In this world, it is so much the way of life of M. Massie as his policies won him admirers. She grew up in the small town of Vanceburg, Kentucky, and went to MIT, where her best friend from school soon joined. he. Together, they founded a truly virtual company while still students. Massie now holds about two dozen patents.
They sold the business and returned to Kentucky, beginning painting in their isolated home in 2003. “We wanted to raise our kids the way we were raised,” he told an interviewer who filmed him for a 2018 documentary called “Off the Grid,” which helped make him a niche celebrity at a time when many other people are suddenly throwing themselves into farming, preparing and cultivating to do it themselves. They began painting in their strangely majestic home while living in a one-foot cell home, building it as much as possible with fabrics obtained directly from the land that belonged to M’s wife’s family. Massie for generations “has to be exotic,” he said, as he chiseled a piece of limestone. “I need a space that comes out of the floor and belongs here. “
He ran for county office in 2010 as a supporter of libertarian-minded Senate candidate Rand Paul, campaigning in part by playing banjo on local bluegrass jams. “I guess part of what made me love them is that I’m not that good. “Said. Both men won their careers and Mr. Paul approved M. Massie in his first race in the United States two years later.
Once in Washington, he annoys and represses members of either party alternately. He is fiercely against abortion, despite his libertarianism. But he is quick to denounce the military-industrial complex and, more than any other Republican in Congress, has shown a willingness to join antiwar Democrats in trying to end U. S. involvement in conflicts abroad. It voted against aid expenditure in the event of a crisis. , however, he also introduced laws to reduce some federal criminal sentences and reform the forfeiture of civilian property. He fought to repeal the Patriot Act and introduced spending that allowed for the legalization of hemp production and the sale of raw milk across state lines. He remained strangely independent of Donald Trump, who once called him a “grand third-order stander,” and was part of the organization of seven conservatives in the House who, while expressing concerns about inconclusive voting disorder, voted to certify the effects of the 2020 presidential election. election.
As perhaps the Republican Party’s vocal opponent of Covid restrictions and vaccination mandates, he presented himself as crazy, before a national audience that largely knew nothing more about him. fall in love with many young conservatives, like Catharine O’Neill, a 20-year veteran of Trump’s State Department, who moved to Wyoming in 2021 to run a farm animal business. Massie is “the one who fought vaccines and the tyranny of Covid, for lack of a broader term,” she told me. “In some cases he opposes Trump. “
O’Neill describes him as his ideal president and sees his likely disparate political positions as a kind of sui generis precursor to a policy that is emerging among many conservatives of his generation.
The proposal that best demonstrates his political vision is the PRIME Act, which would allow small farmers to process meat in local facilities, rather than large slaughterhouses that have the budget to pay for a USDA inspector. This provides a way around a meat production formula ruled by an oligopoly of 4 giant companies whose environmentally destructive and deeply ruthless procedures look a bit like the act of farming as we once understood it. It’s a small but genuine example of how at least some deregulation can only help other people exist closer to the ground, move a step or so away from the corporate formulas that govern much of our lives today. New Mexico, a Democrat who signed on to co-sponsor the bill, told me, “We want to be smaller and make those small farms profitable. “
Ms. O’Neill was just one of many young conservatives who were involved in the environment and who were strangely willing to talk to me about Mr. Massage. “I find Massie compelling in the component because he’s so readable to me,” said Micah Meadowcroft. , editor of the American Conservative who grew up in Washington state and half-jokingly calls his own political vision “bison nationalism. “hand in hand with the preference to live on as human a scale as possible. That was a characteristic of every conservative I knew.
Massie has been “very smart about figuring out how to make his ideological and intellectual commitments and make them applicable to a percentage that doesn’t necessarily represent them all,” Massie said. Carl.
This audience, perhaps surprisingly, includes conservationist-minded curators and localist-minded environmentalists. “economic or political control,” said Ashley Colby, an environmental sociologist and former long-distance truck driver. Even some environmentalists, who until recently considered themselves liberals, have come to reject as true large-scale systems of almost all kinds, including, for many, the systems we would use to adopt climate policies on a global scale. Ms. Colby described them as “a coalition of moms who are frustrated with the school system, moms who don’t accept farm food as true, and that includes some of the right-wing types of bodybuilders. “oppressive globalist order. )
Some of those types of right-wing frame-builders, an influential and developing component of today’s young conservative culture, are self-proclaimed racists, underscoring a thorny challenge in localist conversations in those days: For a portion of the online right, building local agriculture and a lifestyle in keeping with nature goes hand in hand with a plan to prevent the landmass of the world’s USA. UU. se go anywhere. or invaded by immigrants with oscura. Sr skin. Massie himself has never given much thought to the issue of immigration, aside from the same old Republican statements about hoping we will “secure the border,” and I see no explanation for thinking that he is caught up in the nativist tendencies swirling around the online law. today. But other people look at it and see what they need to see. “Please quote me. “
Ms. Colthrough, who does not consider herself right-wing, has been attacked online by other people from the right-wing bodybuilder subculture. He discovered Mr. Massie while watching the documentary “Off the Grid. “”With Massie, there’s that kind of pride à los angeles Wendell Berry,” he said, referring to the Kentucky novelist, environmental activist and farmer whose writings have become canonical American expressions of rootedness and connection to the Angelesce. area, I built this space with stone that comes from Los Angeles,'” he said. “It resonates deeply with other people beyond the political level. “
“There’s this lack of kinship and connection to the position that other people feel now,” he continued. Massie, he said, is one of the few American politicians who can exploit that feeling.
The challenge for Mr. Massie, or anyone building an ecological philosophy through bringing Americans back to earth, is climate. Productive way to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. Massie disagrees with the diagnosis and cure.
During congressional hearings, he tends to make explicit a trend toward “climate genuinism,” which, on the right, has largely replaced outright denial that the planet is warming. According to him, we will have to continue exploiting American fossils. fuels for decades, and the genuine explanation for why we switch to renewable energy is to become “independent,” whether on a personal or national level.
Massie alludes to criticism raised even by left-wing environmentalists. “Is my car greener because they mined cobalt somewhere?I’m not sure,” Mr. Massie. I didn’t do the math. “It was a clever way of posturing the option that a transfer to “green energy” would do nothing to prevent habitat destruction, or to slow the spiraling cycle of consumption that produced the climate crisis in the first place.
Massie even opposed the American Wildlife Recovery Act, a law that would be a big step toward preserving the hunting and fishing way of life so costly to so many conservatives, possibly because it referred to excessive government spending. And he opposed plans like Green New Deal for the same reason. His implicit argument turns out to fit perfectly with the corporatist wing of the Republican Party: that mitigating — and preparing for — global warming is a burden Americans will have to shoulder as individuals. in order not to build regenerative assets off the grid, one will have to believe, like Mr. Massie, that the predictions of the “climate alarmists” are greatly exaggerated.
The fact is that a long-term “green” would indeed require greater adjustments to our politics and way of life than Mr. Massie or many global decision-makers seem to be in a position to accept. “The least talked about and deserves to say that the maximum is to reduce energy demand,” eminent meteorologist Peter Kalmus recently told me. He advised that it would be highly unlikely that “another eight billion people on a finite planet” would build a long-term green while maintaining our formula of rampant consumption of curtains.
It’s something world leaders don’t like to communicate about, which has left debates on the sidelines. He advocates a long-term “#farmfree” in which most of humanity’s food is grown in laboratories.
This vision is precisely what many on the anti-globalist right worry will be the end game of climate policy: a world in which other people “live in herds and eat insects,” as the oft-repeated shortcut puts it, and where technocrats and bureaucrats force other people to crowd into dense cities. Prohibit them from driving cars and force them to eat food they don’t have the strength to produce for themselves. “and burden our children with crushing debt,” M. Massie in October, “tell you how to live because you care about the point of the sea in a hundred years, hide your children.
This is a debate that goes to the heart of American politics. Massie’s edition of being the “greenest member of Congress” is a particular return to a Jeffersonian vision: America as a country of other people living and working close to the land, with minimal government interference and ultimate private responsibility for the nation’s future. It is also a physically powerful view of autonomy that has long informed supporters of the left, but which many in this aspect of politics now see as the insidious peak of American political poisons, the one that has made collective action on problems like time replace in achieving this country.
“If Thomas Jefferson had simply had solar panels on Monticello, he would have had solar panels,” Mr. Massie told libertarian economist and broadcaster Matt Kibbe in 2019. “The less you have to go to the store and shop, the less dependent you are at Walmart — not only are you greener, but you’re also more independent.
“Independent, green, sustainable, frugal — those elements overlap,” he said. It is a vision that combines libertarianism, environmentalism and anti-globalism into a set of single lifestyles. It’s also a charm to conservatives who believe that systems that control elegant life pose as serious a risk to our future as a warming planet. And on this warming planet, Americans might have to be informed to fend for themselves.
“Do you have solar panels on your house?” he rhetorically asked Mr. Kibbe about liberal members of Congress. “I think they would possibly have a little bit of guilt. They know they’re not strong enough to do it alone,” he said. on your own. “
James Pogue (@jhensonpogue) is a journalist covering political and land issues. He is publishing an e-book about the state of Jefferson, a rural area stretching from northern California to southern Oregon.
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