End of an Era

Massie’s out: Yesterday, voters in Kentucky made their choice. Ed Gallrein, who is backed by President Donald Trump, defeated longtime representative Thomas Massie, who always skewed pretty darn libertarian. Unfortunately, it was nowhere near a close call; Gallrein won by a huge margin. The age breakdown is fascinating:

KY-04 GOP Primary: Results by Age Group

🟣 Age 17-25: Massie +25
🟣 Age 26-35: Massie +56
🟣 Age 36-45: Massie +38
🟣 Age 46-55: Massie +17
——
🔴 Age 56-65: Gallrein +18
🔴 Age 66-75: Gallrein +35
🔴 Age 76+: Gallrein +33@QuantusInsights | 5/11-12 | 908 LV https://t.co/H7juBRgxXr pic.twitter.com/pjcRguiF4a

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) May 13, 2026

Tons of money—$32 million, to be specific—was poured into this race by Trump and allies to get Massie out; he had earned Trump’s ire by challenging the president on COVID relief bills, inflated spending, his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein (and lack of transparent disclosures), and his penchant this term for foreign adventurism.

“In various ratings systems maintained by groups such as Heritage Action and Conservative Review, Massie has always been an exemplary congressman. Once, that would have meant something,” writes Reason‘s Eric Boehm. “When Massie was first elected to Congress in 2012, the Tea Party era was in full swing, and Republicans were expected to pass those purity tests or be cast out. Now, being liked by Trump is the only test that matters. Gallrein passed it.”

Case in point: Rep. Lauren Boebert (R–Colo.), who campaigned for Massie this go-around, has earned Trump’s ire for her perceived lack of fealty to him. “Boebert is campaigning for the Worst ‘Republican’ Congressman in the History of our Country, Thomas Massie, of the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky, and anybody who can be that dumb deserves a good Primary fight!” wrote Trump on Truth Social. “Even though I long ago endorsed Boebert, if the right person came along, it would be my Honor to withdraw that Endorsement, and endorse a good and proper alternative.”

It’s not really clear what Gallrein is offering voters; this race has been rather light on how the people of Kentucky will be helped and rather heavy on who is (or is not) loyal to the president. It’s a far cry from the Tea Party era Massie came up in, focused on cutting taxes, reining in the debt, and returning to more limited-government principles that have since fallen out of fashion. I’m now old enough to remember when minimizing the size and scope of the government was something Republicans in Congress cared about, instead of promoting feckless one-man rule.

But there’s still something there, some relic of Tea Party DNA that animates maybe not a majority of GOP voters, but a chunk: “For the Republicans with an ideological identity, Thomas Massie is kind of their id,” writes Matt Fuller for MS Now. “You want to talk about the national debt? Massie is just about the last Republican in Congress who takes that issue seriously. You want to preserve individual freedoms? Massie is the one annoyingly pointing out that your government surveillance bill would allow the National Security Agency to collect reams of data about your telephone calls. And, in the case of Epstein, you want to expose sex traffickers? Massie led the charge on the GOP side to release the files. He hasn’t actually run away from Trump. In many ways, Massie is doing something more damaging: He’s pointing out how Trump and Republicans are undermining Trumpism, how they’re betraying their own voters, how Trump’s governing prose is very different—sometimes antithetical—to his campaign poetry.”

Check out this interview Zach Weissmueller and I did with Massie a few years back:

End of an era.

Scenes from New York: When a makeup company can do a better job than the Metropolitan Transportation Authority can:

why is a skincare brand fixing my biggest frustration with NYC transit https://t.co/rrEie1Srct

— kasey (@kaseyklimes) May 19, 2026

Related dynamic:

This is Central Park. Which was in such decay due to the City’s horrible mismanagement that a non-profit took it over the 80s & the wealthy folks on the board did such an amazing job cleaning it up, that Low IQ posters like this enjoy it, without even understanding who to thank https://t.co/f2Nn4aoDib

— Sean Fitzgerald (Actual Justice Warrior) (@IamSean90) May 19, 2026

QUICK HITS

• “There are basically three main elements of long-run fertility change,” writes Lyman Stone as a means of pushing back on Tyler Cowen, who is skeptical that smartphones are a driving cause of birthrate decline in the West (also covered by Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown in her wonderful newsletter). “This is not to say that other things don’t matter, but we can conceptualize fertility change in three components and, when we adopt that conceptualization, my own experience has been that new information is very easy to incorporate with minimal creativity or rationalization. The three big factors are: Selection pressure via mortality and replacement; Recurrent emergence of cultural valuation of selfishness; Changing cost of fertility and especially intergenerational wealth transfer dynamics.” Stone continues: “A demographer in 1700 would probably not have talked about mortality per se as a fertility regulator since low-mortality societies had simply never existed. What will be a big obvious factor the future sees that our historic models miss? To me, the answer is clearly related to the fact that young people are spending way less time socializing independently….Basically everything people do together is in decline. ‘Bowling alone’ but on steroids. What force would simultaneously cause all social life in person to decline?”
• How Brownsville, Texas, has changed since SpaceX moved in
• LFG:

instead of hostile architecture nyc should install public bloomberg terminals. let crazy guy generate shareholder value

— Elena Nisonoff (@elenanisonoff) May 19, 2026

• “Global health officials warned on Tuesday that the number of people infected in an Ebola outbreak in central Africa could be much higher than reported and that the outbreak could last for months,” reports The New York Times. The outbreak is centered in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (a place I’ve actually spent a bit of time, by nature of my youngest siblings being adopted from there), and the likely death toll stands at 130 people. Horrible.
• I think the corrosive thing is that it feels like we’re less in control of our own destinies in a lot of ways, despite having an explosion of options:

In general I think there’s something fairly corrosive about living in a world where all material goods are extremely cheap compared to housing and healthcare, because it feels completely futile to be frugal on the small stuff. https://t.co/3RFAeGTF5o

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) May 19, 2026