Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) delivered a concession speech after losing to challenger Ed Gallrein in the Republican primary for Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE (R-KY): Listen, I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv. I did get the call through, though. I have called and conceded the race. We’ve been honorable the whole time, and we’re going to stay that way. You know, welcome to the most expensive congressional primary ever in the 250-year history of this country. It’s not just the most expensive. This thing went on longer than Vietnam. It started nine months ago, and they didn’t even have a candidate, and they decided they wanted to take me out. I want to start by thanking the volunteers who have put so much effort into this. Some of you came from all across the country. Some of you are homegrown. I love all of you. I see how this is going to work. I’m going to have to not quit talking, or you’ll start doing it. I want to thank my staff, too. Some of my staff have been with me from the very first race in 2012, and they have done so much. You know, we’ve never had, contrary to all the BS you’ve heard, we’ve never had a single ethics complaint filed against me or my staff in 14 years. I want to thank the donors. Now, listen, I’d name them all, but there’s 50,000 donors, okay? We didn’t lose this race because we didn’t have enough money. It is the most expensive race ever. I think when they add it up, right now they can count $ 35 million. I think when they add it up, it’s going to be a lot more than that, because on our side, we know we spent more than $ 15 million, and we were able to go toe-to-toe. There was never a week that we got outspent more than two-to-one in this entire race. Once it got underway, and that’s also, it wasn’t just the grassroots donors. We had a longtime, one of my longest friends, he went through a rough spell, and I never left him. I always supported him, and he actually started the Super PAC, the one that nobody knows who runs it, Cliff Maloney. If you’re around, would you come up here? Maybe I can get him out here to take some credit. If he’s in the crowd, just pick him up and surf him over here. Cliff! Cliff! Cliff! Cliff! Cliff! Cliff! Cliff! Cliff! Cliff! Cliff! Cliff! By the way, I see one of my online influencer heroes, Bobby Sauce, over here. There were a lot of surreal moments in this race, and frankly, in being in Congress, but being in a side-by-side, racing through the woods with Bobby Sauce was definitely on my, it wasn’t even on my bucket list. It was amazing. So, and getting to that point, I want to thank the influencers who came all this way, and produced all the videos, and got out the young vote. I want to thank my family. That’s who we have arrayed back here, my grandbabies, all three of them. She’s clapping, too. It’s a little bit overwhelming for them, but they are what recharges my batteries when I come back from Washington, D.C., these grandbabies. And that’s what we’re fighting for, really, is the next generation and the next generation after that. But I have to especially thank my wife, Carolyn. Her parents knew what they were doing when they named her. Her middle name is Grace. But she’s a fighter. I mean, she’s been tweeted at twice by the chief executive of the most powerful country in the world. She blames me for that because I didn’t invite him to the wedding. But also, she voted this morning, and she came out, and she said, well, that was a wild experience. That was great. I never imagined that would happen. And I said, what happened? She said, I got to vote for my husband and my favorite congressman. I said, that’s practically a thrumple. In all seriousness, walking out here and seeing all of you has really energized me. And it has all along. But why am I hopeful right now? Because if you looked at the crosstab in the polling, and I’m sure if we had exit polling, it would show the same thing. We have the younger demographic. You are patriots, and you will inherit this country, and you will make it better. And I am hopeful because of that. Thank you. We accidentally, I think, I accidentally, I didn’t mean to do this. It started out as an election, and it turned into a movement. I mean, I think people, if you’re not tired of politics, if you’re not jaded, if you’re not cynical, and so many people are, the people that want somebody that will go along to get along, I’ve never heard of that strategy. But that seems to be what the voters want. That’s what’s been promised to them. But not the young voters. I mean, we stirred up something. There is a yearning in this country for somebody who will vote for principles over party. You all don’t like bullies, and you don’t tolerate them, and I love you for it. You also, yeah. They couldn’t, listen. If I had known this speech was going to be this fun to give, I would have come out 15 minutes sooner. Look, for 14 years, those SOBs in Washington tried to buy my vote. They couldn’t buy it. Why did this, why did the race get so expensive? Because they decided to buy the seat. And it got real expensive for them. Look, they used a lot of dirty tricks, but we stayed the course. We did not, we didn’t bend a knee, we didn’t throw a foul ball, we didn’t do any of those things. We didn’t kneecap anybody. We had lots of opportunities to try a lot of stuff like that, and we never did it. We ran a clean race. Hey, and there’s, by the way, after 18 months of blacking, of a blackout, of not letting me on Fox, they finally let me on Fox today, four hours into the election. Hey, hey, their slop, their slop is selling, so they’ll keep selling it. But listen, I got to watch Fox also for the first time in 18 months. And there was the president talking about, by the way, while gas is almost $ 5 and diesel is almost $ 6, they’re talking about this big ballroom they’re going to build, and it looks like the Roman Empire, architecture from the Roman Empire. I see a few analogies there, and people are just trying to make ends meet. But we were promised that Miriam Adelson would pay for that ballroom. She spent so much money in this race, they’re going to have to reduce the footprint of that thing. But here’s one thing I saw on Fox. They were saying, oh my goodness, we’re ready for war. We’re about to restart this war. We were supposed to restart this war today, but we can’t restart this war today. The war can’t start today. They said we got to wait a day. And then it occurred to me, where was the Secretary of War yesterday? He was here. Listen. Wait, wait, wait, wait. No. Look on the bright side. Guys, knock that off. You’re going to make me feel good about losing. What I wanted to do was give you all credit. When they saw the influencers here, they panicked. They sent the Secretary of War here, and you stopped the war for a day. All right. We know we don’t want a war, and we know why young people are, and middle-aged people are against the next war, because we’d be the ones fighting it. They’re trying to bring back the draft. Screw that. We’re not going to fight some other country’s wars, are we? No. What else do we stand for? We don’t want to send our money overseas. Okay, I’ll go for that. I’ve got a bill to do that. I’ve also got a bill to end the Ed in the Department of Education. Rand Paul says he wants to pass a law that you need one day to read 10 pages of every bill. I asked Rand, what are you going to do about my bill that’s one sentence long to end the Department of Education? That would be like five minutes to read that bill. By the way, do you know how many pages the Epstein-Files Transparency Act was? Two pages. We’re tired of meddling overseas. We can’t afford it. Our empire will collapse if we keep sending our money to other countries. I never picked a fight with the country that’s tried to take me out here, but I’ve never voted for foreign aid to any country. We’ve got to take care of America first. America first. By the way, you remember that organization that Klaus Schwab started called the World Economic Forum? They said you should eat bugs. Do you want to eat bugs? They said you’ll own nothing and be happy about it. You want to do that? Well, guess what happened? Guess what happened to Klaus’s CEO? He was in the Epstein-Files. He had to resign. We took out the CEO of the World Economic Forum with a two-page bill. What else are we for? Look, for years I’ve been standing up for the Second Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Tenth Amendment. I just realized the Seventh Amendment is under attack. It’s because I serve on the Judiciary Committee. The Seventh Amendment is your right to a jury trial. They’ve taken it away for vaccines. If you get hurt, you can’t sue for vaccines. They’re trying to take it away for pesticides. They’re trying to take it away for these data centers. No. We’ve been fighting that back. That’s an amendment that, frankly, I didn’t think I was going to have to fight for, but I’ve been fighting for it in D.C., and we need to keep fighting for the Seventh Amendment, too. These corporations want get-out-of-court free cards. We’re not going to give them one. What else is part of our coalition? Cutting doge. Cutting spending. They ran doge out of town. Elon Musk found out it was easier to land a rocket backwards. It was easier to get a car to drive itself. It was easier to put Internet on Antarctica than it was to cut $ 100 of spending in Washington, D.C. It’s a tough problem, but we’re not going to give up on that either. Maha. Is anybody here for Maha? Does anybody want to eat poison? Do you want the government telling you what to eat? Do you want the government telling you to put a needle in your arm? I don’t either. That’s why I’ve been fighting all of that stuff. We need food freedom. We need medical freedom. We need all of those freedoms. And we need basic decency. We need basic decency. That’s what the Epstein-Files Transparency Act was all about. By the way, today is the six-month anniversary of the Epstein-Files Transparency Act. We’ve taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture. And that was just six months. I’ve got seven months left in Congress. Hey, when did bipartisanship become a dirty word in this country? It never should be. By the way, I’m not even sure that I’m bipartisan. Bi means you like both. I might be trans-partisan. Because I can’t identify with either some days. That’s the great thing about the polls being closed. They can’t run an ad where I claim to be trans. Trans-partisan, thank you very much. I don’t know which cloakroom to go in. Sorry. But, look, if you know, I bet you’ve been through, some of you have studied political science. By the way, that’s not a real science. I’m a political science denier. If you’re already halfway through that degree, double major in theater and call it political theater. Then you can serve on the oversight committee, the judiciary committee. You can be on the whip team. What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a member of the whip team? The used car salesman knows when he’s lying. They go around telling everybody, Oh, that good stuff’s in the bill. Oh, that bad stuff’s not in the bill. I don’t blame them. They haven’t read the bill. They’re not lying. They don’t know they’re lying. Anyways, bipartisanship. We need to bring this country together. There’s too much of the uniparty in Washington, D.C. What we need is a unity party. Look, we ran a race that you can be proud of. You don’t have to apologize to nobody tomorrow for anything you did. And we kept smiling the whole time. When I was called a moron at the prayer breakfast, I said, I’m glad I’m in his prayers. That would be my advice to you all. Don’t dig in. Don’t get mad. Don’t even try to get even. Just stay on your course. Get our stuff done. Get the things you care about done. We weren’t really running against Ed Gallrein. We weren’t running against Donald Trump. We were running for what we believe in. Listen, if you always vote with the president, if the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king. If the legislative branch always votes whichever way the wind is blowing, then we have mob rule. But if the legislative branch and the representatives and the senators that serve with it always follow the Constitution, we have a republic. USA. Why are all the loud ones in the front? I could have heard you in the back. Listen, I want to leave you with this. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. I want to have a toast. Does anybody have their glasses? I saw a few glasses. Okay. This is the one scandal they never figured out on me. I get my milk from the Amish cartel. And I don’t pay for it with Federal Reserve notes. I trade peaches, peaches for dairy. And what I want to do is, this is a toast in honor of my late wife. I introduced the raw milk bill, and a milk lobby came after me viciously. They said there wouldn’t be enough hospitals for all the kids that would be sick and dying if we had raw milk. The problem with that is, it’s already legal in a bunch of states, and I’ve been drinking it for years. So my late wife’s Google alerts were going off. She was getting all this bad press about me up there in Washington, D.C., and she was worried for me. And I’ve got a pretty thick skin, but she texted me one of those stories, and she said, OMG, I didn’t realize the lactose lobby was so intolerant. So let’s have a drink. I decided before today that we were going to win or lose today, and we would win either way, whether… Because… You know, when I try to tell my grandson to be quiet tonight, he is not going to listen. He’ll probably be saying, Merci, merci. Here’s what I want to leave you with. We won. We won because we started a movement. We showed people that if you’re under 50, you want to save this country. But what happened today was God’s will. It couldn’t happen if God didn’t want it to. So our job, and I’m not going to make any announcements tonight. I’m going to go back, have me a medical margarita. I’ll hang out and party with you all. You know I don’t drink recreationally. I have medical margaritas. I even have a medical margarita card. But what happened today, what happened tonight, was God’s will. And we have to figure out what was the purpose of having the biggest fight ever. Biggest fight ever. Why did it converge on one of 435 congressional seats right here in Kentucky? What was God’s purpose? What is he showing us tonight? We’re just getting started. I like that. What happens in 2028? Oh, you want me to run for Congress again. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Alright, well, you’ve made a compelling argument. You spoke your piece, but I need a medical margarita right now. And we’ll talk about it later. Thank you and God bless.

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