With the retirement next month of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in the face of vociferous attacks from President Donald Trump, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is the only member of any of the three branches of our government who consistently and on principle opposes American empire—and who also opposes the taxes, debt, and interventions that come with it. In a little over a year, he may not be.

For the first time in his seven-term congressional career, Massie is being challenged by a formidable primary opponent. That opponent is Ed Gallrein, a former Navy Seal who during his thirty years of meritorious service earned four Bronze Stars and whose extended family of small business owners is a multi-generational staple of Kentucky’s 4th District. As the last line in Gallrein’s X bio has it, he is “Trump-endorsed to defeat Thomas Massie and Deliver America First for Kentucky”—and, given the popularity Trump still enjoys among Republican voters as well as Gallrein’s sterling military reputation, and despite Massie’s strong endurability, Gallrein may succeed in realizing his goal.

Whether Gallrein’s election would actually mean delivering America first is a very different question. Putting America first presumably means putting the soldiers sworn to protect Americans, those individuals with whom Gallrein so valorously served, first as well. But a closer examination of the agenda Gallrein is running on makes clear that, unlike Massie’s prudent America first constitutionalism, it does not accomplish that goal. Instead it is the latest iteration, this time under Donald Trump, of a long-running play where small networks of ideologues ensconced in Washington’s military-corporate complex use America’s armed forces to run imperial plays for profit and power. The people running this version—connected Zionists tied to Trump’s re-election bid and now to his White House—are using Gallrein’s military service, which one might think would end up aiding our men and women in uniform, as an excuse to do the opposite. They are funding a decorated veteran to act as a front for imperial plays that mis-serve our armed forces and the Americans they’re sworn to protect.

Understanding the conditions that allowed this operation to happen and their consequences means going back to the creation of the current armed forces at the hands of the military-corporate complex after 1945—and tracing its abuses and misuses at the hands of a small number of players whose inheritors are now backing Trump and targeting Massie.

Americans’ rightful and deep respect for the men and women of our armed forces obscures an essential fact about the organization they serve: in its current form, it was never intended to exist. From Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to Dwight Eisenhower, people concerned for our liberties saw a large and expanding standing army and its support systems as inherent threats to our constitutional republic. These men were not unrealistic about the need for an armed forces—Jefferson founded West Point, and Eisenhower commanded D-Day—but they knew that an essentially defensive army equipped for a republic was very different than an aggressive army serving empire. In their view, this latter type of army would become a version of the British Army which Jefferson’s revolutionaries had fought against: an aggressive tool of imperial operators to use for power and profit.

With the start of the Cold War and the beginning of an arms race with the Soviet Union, Jefferson’s and Madison’s and Eisenhower’s fears came true, giving an enormous opportunity to a network that did not share them. Namely, old Northeastern WASPs and their allies who by 1945 had spent 150 years eschewing America’s constitutional politics in favor of building institutions and corporations in and around Washington DC. The Henry Cabot Lodges and the Brothers Harriman, the Rockefellers and the DuPonts and the Bushes, John Foster and Allen Dulles and John Jesus Angleton—these were the financial and corporate and military players who used the Cold War as an opportunity to make themselves into runners of American empire, for their own power and profit.   

At their hands, the American Army became the British Army of a later age, with its own public-debt-fueled corporate outgrowths which purport to be serving our soldiers. In reality, as Dwight Eisenhower said publicly in his presidential farewell address of 1961, the new weapons-for-profit system made its minders into what Eisenhower called in his notes for the speech “merchants of death”: “flag and general officers retiring at an early age take positions in war based industrial complex shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.” And these civilians running the weapons contractors were rotating not just through Pentagon and CIA consultancies and administrative agencies but through America’s new civilian intelligence service, the CIA. There, the profit motive—combined with a high level of ideological zeal—also distorted policy.

By 1961, Allen Dulles, John Jesus Angleton, and the lineup of other old-line WASPs running the CIA outside of meaningful oversight had put America into the Congo, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, and the beginnings of Vietnam. After these came interventions in El Salvador, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Kuwait, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, Palestine, and (again, this year) Iran. These were plays executed with input from McKinsey and Raytheon to Langley and the Pentagon via the Situation Room. They were increasingly run by new networks: once disproportionally WASP, these new networks were disproportionally made up of Jewish Zionists bent on using American empire to protect Israel. Among these were early operators like Henry Morgenthau and Theodore Kollek; and their later inheritors like Martin Peretz and William Kristol, Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Ledeen and Thomas Pritzker, people who in many ways shaped the policies of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden administrations. At their hands, accelerated military corporate cronyism has been the order of the day starting in 1993, when the Clinton administration, which assumed power thanks in part to Zionist backing, pressured the fifty major weapons contractors active during the Cold War to consolidate in the nominal name of cutting costs. The ensuing distortion of our military has occurred via multiple forms, which I reported on for the Libertarian Institute in July.

One distortion has been cost overruns on weapons systems, which contractors feel free to allow or even encourage since no competition exists for their product. This has also allowed errors in construction which diminishes the equipment that’s supposed to serve our troops. Then, as I have reported elsewhere, in response to the overruns came budget cuts and the “fix” of “sequestration,” which reduced these cost overruns by cutting expenditures on the troops, further under-equipping and overstretching personnel. Exacerbating the problem, as I have also reported, were Pentagon-and-contractor funded think tanks, which covered the problem with “social initiatives” via mental health, climate, and DEI, further distracting the Pentagon from the imperatives of readiness and training. All the while, interventions urged by the same financial-military-intelligence networks attenuating the capacity of our armed forces also overstretched them: in Somalia and Bosnia and Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, and (in an “advisory” capacity) Syria and Israel and Ukraine.

The result has not just been surging deficit spending that mortgages the future of Americans; nor backlash from affected populations to our imperial arrangements abroad. It has also, even more dramatically, been a spate of military embarrassments since 2018, most notably crashes of planes at the hands of overcommitted and demoralized troops and their commanders. These have racked up losses to the tune of nearly $500 million per crash and cost the lives of servicepeople. As I reported in January of this year, in an investigation of these crashes and their causes:

“For the Army, [the shrinking of budgets and personnel since the 2010s] meant “cut[ting] 40,000 active-duty soldiers, shrinking [the Armed Forces] to 450,000 by 2017.” For the Air Force, this meant a reduction of active-duty airmen from 333,370 to 310,000.”

“An Air Force report to Congress in 2018 said that, thanks to sequestration, the Air Force was ‘the smallest…it has ever been.’ Active-duty aircrew flying hours had been slashed from 17.7 to 13.2 hours per month. 31 squadrons, including 13 coded for combat, had stood down because of funding pressures. Plans had been announced to eliminate 500 planes, and, according to a Military.com report cited by The American Legion, the Air Force was ‘making do with ‘half-size squadrons.’’ The common refrain today is that hours in the air are even shorter—4.1 hours a month, by one estimate—and that efforts to replace real flying with “on-the-ground simulators” are dismal failures.”

“These shortages of manpower and training had immediate effects that took time to tally….2018, the year after the sequester was complete, saw a spate of plane crashes. In late 2020, Congress found that, in just six years since the sequester began, ‘‘mishaps’ in training flights or routine missions killed 198 service members and civilians, destroyed 157 aircraft, and cost taxpayers $9.41 billion.’ Two weeks alone in 2022 saw three crashes on routine training missions in Alabama and California, costing at least five lives and two injuries. The last few months of 2023 saw four crashes. On December 22, 2024, a navy jet was shot down by friendly fire, and another narrowly avoided being shot down by the same barrage, in the Mediterranean.”

A year ago, given the stakes Donald Trump himself articulated for his re-election (a run against the “deep state”), it seemed unthinkable that Trump would adopt military corporatist priorities wholesale almost immediately on assuming office. But, influenced in part by Zionist operators who swung to support his re-election campaign in the summer of 2024 after pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, he has done exactly that. As I reported for the Libertarian Institute in July, Trump has forgone actually reforming aspects of the military corporate complex to aid our soldiers. Instead he has committed to a “Big Beautiful Bill” that inflates ICE’s budget but does not direct military funding away from corporate cronyism; a surface-level crusade against “wokeness” and “DEI”; a military parade; superficial demonstrations of force in Yemen and Iran and Venezuela; the militarization of law enforcement via ICE recruiting; and the placement of American troops in American cities. He claims to be standing above all for our troops—but in reality he is standing for the military corporate complex that mis-serves them, to the demonstrable detriment of our men and women in uniform.

The most recent example of Trump’s demonstrably detrimental effect on our troops comes from The Washington Post, in a story published December 4, 2025. The subject was a deployment to the Middle East for the benefit of Israel and its Saudi and Emirati allies against Yemen; a campaign prosecuted in the Biden administration and before with the encouragement of Zionists but decisively and unprecedentedly accelerated by Trump in his second term:

“The U.S. Navy on Thursday released its findings from four investigations scrutinizing the significant challenges encountered by one of its aircraft carrier groups over nine months in the Middle East, where several major accidents occurred as the ships battled Yemeni militants.”

“The Truman carrier group departed its home port in Norfolk in September 2024 — and by the time it returned in May, the carrier itself had collided with a merchant vessel; its cruiser had shot down one of its fighter jets, another warplane was lost when it slid overboard as the carrier performed an evasive maneuver to dodge an incoming missile; and a third jet was lost when an arresting cable failed as the pilot attempted to land.”

“In three of the four incidents, investigators determined, either poor training, improper procedures or crew fatigue played significant roles. And while no service members died, those incidents could have led to multiple fatalities, the Navy found.”

All of which raises with some immediacy the question of Ed Gallrein, who was selected to run against Massie after the congressman repeatedly voted, along Jeffersonian constitutionalist lines, against using taxpayer money and deficit spending to benefit Israel. Gallrein’s selector was Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager in 2024 and Trump’s pick to spearhead the anti-Massie campaign, who is working with at least $2 million from an anti-Massie PAC funded by the Jewish Zionist billionaires Paul Singer, John Paulson, and Miriam Adelson. These three operators owe their easy entrée into Washington in part to the military-intelligence Zionist operators linked to the money and power at the origins of the CIA and of the host systems for the merchants of death 80 years ago—just as the decisive momentum was building for the creation of Israel.

And the $2 million they have committed so far on behalf of Israel’s interests has had its effect. At a recent gathering of campaign donors, Massie informed the group that before this primary campaign his approval/disapproval rating in polls was 62-12 (adding together very approved, somewhat approved, etc.) But, he went on to say, after $2 million in negative ads spent in his district, it’s now 51-37. He said personally expects $20 million to be spent against him, but will feel comfortable in his odds if he raises $5 million.

Gallrein was endorsed preemptively by Trump, which is to say before he entered the race, and he is by any measure a shrewd choice for Trump and Trump’s Zionist allies to back. He is not just a decorated veteran with thirty years of valorous service, he is also a fifth generation farmer and the scion of a Kentucky family with deep roots in the 4th District. The Gallrein Family Farm, founded in 1929, became the largest dairy producer in the state; expanded aggressively into tobacco and vegetables and grain along with a subset of trucking; and has now expanded into “agritourism” with weddings and a farmers market, along with a store and lunch counter which sells the farm’s “produce and product lines.” According to his LinkedIn CV, Gallrein worked at the farm from 1962, when he was four, to 1982, when he was 24, rising to vice president; then in 1984 he joined the U.S. Army, where “he served for 30 years and became a Navy SEAL officer…rose to the rank of captain and served in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq.” Since retiring in 2014, Gallrein has experimented with careers: opening a farm and stables as well as two “leadership” and “startup” consultancy businesses, and running in the Republican primary for the District 7 state senate seat, going on to lose the race by 118 votes. He speaks, repeatedly, of his intention to bring the skills he learned during his military service to serve the 4th District.

Gallrein, having never served in office, has no voting record, and his policy platform amounts to loyalty to President Trump’s agenda, which now includes supporting interventions or operations abroad in Yemen, Palestine, Venezuela, Iran, and possibly Nigeria. In public statements this year, Gallrein has doubled down on interventionism, specifically defended our engagements in the Middle East, especially against Iran, as “leveraging” our “power” there and (echoing a favorite line from Trump-supporting media) “playing chess” against our enemies. He uses the authority of his service to help make the case—even to the extent of arguing that what may seem to be the Trump administration’s irresponsible ventures abroad and at home with authoritarian surveillance regimes like the Saudis and Emiratis via the ministrations of Israel are in fact necessary complements to our national security. (“Economic is the centerpiece of national power. [That concept is] called ‘Dime’ as we studied it in the War College.”)

What Gallrein doesn’t emphasize in his interviews is as telling as what he does. What he under-emphasizes is not just questions of taxes and debt and cost of living, which is not a surprise considering that he has said publicly that he “believes it’s his stance on foreign policy that put him on Trump’s radar.” What he under-emphasizes also relates to crucial questions when it comes to his nominal area of expertise, our military. He does not speak about meaningfully reforming our weapons contracting systems or their think tank outgrowths; or about the influence of money on the interventions we make in other sovereign nations. In other words, he does not speak about any actual structural problem in the military corporate complex that hurts the men and women with whom he once valorously served—or about any actual structural reform that would help them. And why would he? His financial and political backers are tied, directly, to those very structures—the military corporate systems and their financial supporters and their think tanks and advocacy groups and the state, Israel, that is their main priority and beneficiary and the beneficiary of our endless interventions.

Not just our sovereignty, but the safety of the people pledged to protect us, are under clear threat when they’re presided over by politicos like Gallrein run by networks, and operators, like these.