Three out-of-state neocon billionaires are funding the PAC created to oust Kentucky’s Republican Congressman, Thomas Massie. The legislator claims they’re coming after him because of his opposition to foreign aid for Israel.
The backers behind MAGA KY are John Paulson, Paul Singer, and the Preserve America PAC, whose primary financier is Miriam Adelson, according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Massie brought attention to the PAC’s financial backing on Friday in an X social media post.
Massie’s 12-year run in Congress will end next year if President Donald Trump has his way. The independent Republican congressman has bucked the president’s wishes one too many times. Just days into the new year, Massie cast the sole Republican vote against Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the Speakership vote. The Kentuckian also stood alone in March as the only Republican to vote against the continuing resolution budget measure. And then a couple of months later, he voted against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — twice (he had some company when he cast those votes). Massie was also among the few Republicans to correctly label Trump’s unilateral decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites as unconstitutional.
Right after the Kentuckian rained on Trump’s bombing parade, news broke that MAGA KY had emerged on the scene. In late June, the PAC released a takedown ad laden with lies about Massie.
Key Trump advisors Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio helped launch MAGA KY. It has raised $2 million since its June premiere, according to the FEC filing. Half of that money comes from hedge fund manager Paul Singer of Manhattan, New York.
Singer has supported the presidential candidacies of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, and Rudy Giuliani. He also has given millions to the gay “rights” agenda. The New York Times reported on August 27, 2010 that “Mr. Singer has given more than $4.2 million to groups supporting gay rights and same-sex marriage, like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund.” He held a fundraiser in support of the lawsuit that challenged California’s Proposition 8, which had banned “gay marriage.” Proposition 8, despite being approved by voters, was eventually voided by the courts.
Singer is also a big supporter of strong U.S. relations with Israel and general intervention in the Middle East. The Militarist Monitor, a publishing project dedicated to analyzing individuals and organizations that promote interventionist policies, published this about him:
Singer is deeply involved in a network of right-wing, “pro-Israel” organizations. He serves on the boards of Commentary magazine, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and the Manhattan Institute, where he chairs the board of trustees. He is a former board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like the Middle East Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and — along with Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson — is among the largest funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was also connected to the pro-Iraq War advocacy group Freedom’s Watch.
Singer also has a loose connection to the Steele Dossier, the fake opposition research document that, according to recent revelations from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, was used to justify the false accusation that Trump was elected in 2016 because of Russian election meddling. In 2015, news website the Washington Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS, the research firm that ultimately churned out the dossier. The Singer connection is via the Free Beacon, which he funded. But the news outlet told Fusion to stop research on Trump after he clinched the nomination. That’s when Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee stepped in to make sure that Fusion GPS continued its mission.
The second-largest chunk of money to MAGA KY comes from the Preserve America PAC. Preserve America has doled out $750,000 to the cause of firing Massie. Its major donor in the 2020 and 2024 election cycles was Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, who died in 2021. Sheldon was the former CEO and chairman of casino company Las Vegas Sands. In 2022, Las Vegas Sands divested its Vegas properties and sold them for $6.25 billion. Yet Miriam Adelson and her family own “more than half of the New York Stock Exchange-listed gambling empire, which has casinos in Singapore and Macao,” according to Forbes. Adelson also owns a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks, the pro basketball team.
In addition to sports and gambling, Adelson dabbles in news publishing. Her family owns Nevada’s largest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She is also publisher of Israel Hayom, “a Hebrew-language free daily newspaper distributed widely in the country where she was born that is friendly to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” according to The Associated Press.
Like Singer, Adelson has donated significant sums to the presidential candidacies of Romney and Rubio. She also gave half a million dollars to “a legal defense fund set up to help aides to President Donald Trump that are involved in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.” Although a major GOP backer, Adelson disagrees with the Republican anti-abortion stance. But no one party is perfect, she said, adding that “supporting a free-market society and Israel are more important issues.”
Adelson is a physician who was born in Tel Aviv to Jewish parents who fled Poland before the Holocaust. She grew up in Haifa, and received her education in Israel. In 1986, she moved to the United States to attend Rockefeller University, where she specialized in drug addiction.
Adelson is very proud of her heritage, and considers the defense of Jews a primary cause. She gives $200 million annually to Jewish and Israeli causes, “the largest by far of any existing private foundation with that aim,” Wikipedia noted. Hadassah magazine characterized Jewish causes as the “core of [Adelson’s] philanthropy.” Adelson is a major donor to Birthright Israel, which provides free trips to Israel for young Jews. In 2022, she promised the organization that she and her family would remain its biggest donor. According to Israel Hayom in 2022, the Adelsons “have contributed nearly $500 million to Birthright Israel in the past 15 years.”
Adelson is rumored to have been the main push behind Trump’s 2018 relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump talked about the Adelsons’ pro-Israel lobbying during an event hosted by the Israeli-American Council, saying:
Miriam and Sheldon would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody, outside of people that work there. And they were always after — and as soon as I’d give them something, always for Israel — as soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else. I said, ‘Give me a couple of weeks, will you please?’
John Paulson contributed $250,000 to MAGA KY. He is a hedge fund manager who was born in Queens and later founded the investment firm Paulson & Co. His big break came when he bet in 2007 against the U.S. housing market. He shorted mortgage-backed securities and turned $147 million into $15 billion. That move prompted accusations that he misled investors. Reportedly:
Paulson and Goldman [Sachs] created the Abacus 2007-AC1 investment vehicle and kept Paulson’s bet against the underlying assets hidden from people who purchased it. Paulson escaped indictment because his firm maintained that it was always transparent about its view of the mortgages that had been securitized and that the assets were not without risk.
Paulson has contributed to both Republicans and Democrats, which is not uncommon for wealthy donors. Like Singer and Adelson, he supported Romney. He also supported all three of Trump’s presidential runs.
Also like the other two, Paulson has been recognized for contributions to Israeli organizations. Paulson, whose mother was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Romania, was presented with an honorary doctorate degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his contributions to the Jerusalem Campus for the Arts and a gift to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. In 2023, he gave $27 million to start the Paulson Bar-El Building for Computer Science and Engineering at the school.
Paulson serves on several boards, including those of New York University, the Partnership for New York City, Harvard Business School, and the Council on Foreign Relations, the subversive think tank that has worked for more than a century to convert America’s once-noninterventionist foreign policy to the highly meddlesome one of today.
These are the people behind the campaign to get rid of Massie.
Israel has become a particularly fractious issue in right-wing politics as of late. While the young Left has become known for its violent anti-Israel, anti-Jew, pro-Hamas stances, a loud segment of the Right is building intellectual opposition in protest of what it perceives as an American foreign policy massively influenced by Israel. The movement has become so pronounced that Trump recently told a Jewish donor, “My people are starting to hate Israel,” according to a June 30 Financial Times report.
Massie has been among the few legislators who has publicly said that pro-Israel lobby groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) exert great influence on American legislators to create and perpetuate a U.S. foreign policy approved by the nation of Israel. Legislators including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have denied that AIPAC has much influence.
Some have tried to paint the Right’s growing discontent with U.S. foreign policy as antisemitic. But, as Massie has repeatedly pointed out, the core issue isn’t Israel so much as it is an American foreign policy that doesn’t prioritize American interests. If America’s Founding Fathers would have their way today, there would be no foreign aid to any country. There would be no foreign wars at the behest of other countries. Massie is raising questions of whether the Trump administration is truly America First. And for that, the most consistently constitutional member of Congress might get fired.