If the American people were told in the 1950s that a US election outcome was influenced by a foreign country, there would be mass outrage. We would have had riots and a new war started by the end of the week. Both sides would cross the political aisle to take out this threat to our autonomy and our democracy.
But here we are in 2026. It just happened last week in Kentucky, and the numbers and data are as clear as day. I don’t see any outrage. I step outside and everyone is celebrating Memorial Day weekend as always. They are making memes about how Walmart’s 250th anniversary paper plates have 1776-2026 on them, and that it looks like this will be our last year. This is the state of our humor. This generation has no optimism left.
And why should they?
They can’t afford houses, groceries, or gas. They’ve given up on having families one day. They would rather sit and suffer than go to the hospital, because surgery for a broken bone could make them homeless. And they try to plead with their parents to listen to them and choose better, for the sake of their future, but their parents are so enmeshed in the Media Hellscape that they believe their kids are weak and indoctrinated and the country’s biggest threats they need to vote against are illegal immigrants.
The worst part of this is that there is such a lack of good candidates that are not a part of this machine. If someone managed to convince their boomer dad to vote blue for the first time in his life, can any of us say with confidence that we actually believe anything would change?
This is why individual candidates matter. With the internet, we have the ability to see who is funding each candidate, which proves where their loyalties will lie. For example, JD Vance’s most recent congressional campaign was in 2022 when he ran for Senate. He was funded by several corporate PACs with very sketchy donors. Peter Thiel, who is in my opinion, the scariest human being alive, donated $15 million to the Protect Ohio Values PAC to get Vance elected. There’s also intense speculation that Thiel is the one who got JD Vance picked as Trump’s 2024 running mate, since he had only been in congress for two years at the time of the election.
If you have never researched Peter Thiel, he is the founder of Palantir, the tech company that is used by the Department of Defense to hunt down terrorists. In 2025, Trump tapped them to compile the data of every US citizen and using a combination of government records and social media behavior to build a database. A similar software made by Palantir is being used by ICE and that one uses similar data along with an AI to make a “threat score” on each person of how likely they are to commit crimes, which tells them who they should target. They claim this one for American citizens does not do that, but I am skeptical of that claim.
Anyway, I’m getting off topic. My point is that Peter Thiel basically bankrolled JD Vance’s entire political career, so it should not be a shock that Palantir landed this ICE contract and the one for American citizens immediately after Trump became president and JD became VP. Political loyalties lie with the people who fund them.
Meanwhile, we have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose fundraising comes entirely from regular grassroots supporters like us, with average donations of around $20 each. She also refuses to trade stocks, calling it unethical. Notice how much the media wants us to hate her. They play every single misstep and bad take on primetime, because they want to pad our minds with this so that when someone mentions her name, we think back to these moments instead of her numerous great opinions on things. I don’t agree with everything she believes politically (or anyone else in Congress, for that matter), but during this time where so many congressmembers are owned by corporations, I will always like and respect her for being authentic.
Which brings us to Kentucky.
Even though he’s been a member of Congress for 14 years, Thomas Massie has become a household name in politics in the past year or so. He was always loved in the Republican Party, but he became a polarizing topic when he broke away from the MAGA machine and advocated for the release of the Epstein Files, despite Trump warning him against it.
All the Democrats in Congress pledged their vote to Massie’s bill immediately, but Trump warned Republicans against voting for it, until the public pressure forced him to change his position at the last minute. Then, despite the bill passing, we still do not have the full Epstein Files and we most likely will never bring the offenders to justice.
But the move was political suicide for Massie, and he knew it. It wasn’t long before ads began appearing on every television and phone in Kentucky claiming that he sided with Iran and the Ayatollah, likening him to a terrorist. They accused him of betraying Trump and “cheating” on them with the democrats, since he worked closely with AOC to try to stop the Iran War, and previously on issues where they worked together to try to prevent government surveillance.
Now for Ed Gallrein. He’s a retired farmer and Navy SEAL, and he seems to be a decent guy at first glance. I mean, obviously he is a “yes man”, because Trump would not endorse anything less after being traumatised by Massie’s free-thinking. But the thing is that you can still tell where a politician’s loyalties will lie by looking at who funds them.
Gallrein’s donors made this election the most expensive house primary ever recorded. There was $25 million spent on ads alone. The entirety of funds raised by Massie’s campaign were only $5.5 Million, if that details how uneven the funding was. The problem with this isn’t just the money. It’s where the money originated.
Pro-Israel lobbying groups made up 95% of the funding for Gallrein’s campaign.
I know America has become so desensitized by the propaganda about Israel being our ally for so many years, but they are still a foreign country, so where do we draw the line? Are we going to allow a foreign country to meddle in our elections to this degree?
I know I am a vocal critic of the Iran War because I don’t believe we should spend American money on wars that do not affect us while our people are struggling, which, coincidentally, is the same view that Massie has, but isn’t that a conflict of interest? One of the most vocal critics of the Iran War has been primaried out by funding from the country that we went to war on behalf of.
If the country had been China, Russia, or even an ally country like Great Britain, I feel like there would be more outrage. But, just like the memes about the Walmart plates, we make jokes because we have disconnected ourselves from the reality of our situation because we feel powerless to repair it. We owe it to good candidates like Massie to show up for them on election days, and we owe it to our country to do our own research to inform ourselves of candidates. Because, if we only watch the news, we would end up just like Kentucky.
Taryn Ogletree is a local small business owner and author with previous experience of several years in finance.