Remember Jack Dorsey? He was the founder of Twitter, exiting the company well before Elon Musk took over the social media site and renamed it X. Back in the day, Jack came under furious attack from any conservatives owing to the perception that his very liberal site was aggressively censoring the right’s speech. Of course, what we didn’t quite know at the time was that Twitter faced tremendous pressure from government agencies to moderate content — and that even liberal Twitter employees were privately uncomfortable about what the government wanted them to do.
The problem wasn’t the site’s moderators, or Jack Dorsey: the problem was jawboning.
Well, in the years since Twitter became X — and became a very, very different place — Jack Dorsey has kept a relatively low political profile. But he resurfaces from time to time, and yesterday, he made quite a bold political statement: Thomas Massie for President!
Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, most of you know, is a libertarian-leaning Republican who has occasionally clashed with President Trump because he doesn’t just support America First, he actually votes to implement America First. That makes him different than most other elected Republicans, who often do not stick to principle.
Massie has continued to pursue Jeffrey Epstein disclosures even as many other prominent Republicans have lost interest in promoting the kind of transparency they vowed to foster if they ever returned to power. Massie is also skeptical of the U.S. getting dragged into foreign conflicts, whether it’s with Iran or Venezuela. And he knows that the administration claiming for itself vast new powers to issue tariffs is going to hurt working people and small businesses.
In other words, he’s my kind of Republican. He’s not an unthinking partisan, and he doesn’t reflexively side with or against Trump. He has an ideological core that matches our founders: limited government, free markets and civil liberties.
It’s too bad he’s not running for president. In his response to Dorsey, he wrote on X: “I doubt I’ll run for POTUS, but I appreciate the support @jack. I’d be happy if we could just get 4 or 5 more voices in Congress who don’t always just do what their party tells them.”
Wouldn’t that nice? Right now it’s pretty much just Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House and Rand Paul in the Senate. Paul, by the way, had a perfect explanation for why he doesn’t support either the Republican plan or the Democratic plan to fund the government. Let’s watch:
“The way I look at these votes is they are determining the spending level. So the legislation doesn’t say, ‘Do you want to keep government closed or keep it open.’ … Even though I’m not with the Democrats, I didn’t vote for the Democrat spending bill, I didn’t vote for the Republican spending bill because the spending levels lead to an enormous amount of deficit. The Republican bill will lead to $2 trillion in deficit next year, the Democrat bill $3 trillion in deficits, so I oppose both.”
But of course, independent thinkers like Paul and Massie aren’t being celebrated for their fealty to principle. They’re under attack! Massie in particular has attracted Trump’s ire — the president even endorsed a primary challenger to Massie, despite the fact that that challenger has yet to enter the race.
And of course, AIPAC has targeted Massie and is spending money against him, for the crime of believing that America First means putting America First, not Israel first. Massie opposes giving financial aid to a country with a lower debt to GDP ratio than our own. How dare we.
The attacks on these three — Massie, Paul and MTG — just go to show that there’s no reward for consistency in Washington, D.C. The swamp is eager to sublimate heterodox politicians and force them to bow to the Democratic establishment or the Republican establishment. As for me, I’m with Jack.
Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.
