Ms. O’Neill describes him as her ideal president, and views his seemingly disparate political stances as a kind of sui generis forerunner to a politics bubbling up among many conservatives of her generation.
The proposal that best shows his political vision is the PRIME Act, which would allow small farmers to process meat at local facilities, rather than at large slaughterhouses that have the funds to pay for a full-time, on-site U.S.D.A. inspector. This offers a way to sidestep a meat production system dominated by an oligopoly of four gigantic corporations whose environmentally destructive, deeply cruel processes barely resemble the act of farming as we once understood it. It’s a small but real example of how at least some deregulation could help regular people exist closer to the land, a half-step or so freer of the corporate systems that order so much of our lives today. “I think that done right, regenerative agriculture can make a big difference,” Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez of New Mexico, a Democrat who signed on to co-sponsor the bill, told me. “We need to be smaller and for those small farms to be profitable.”
Ms. O’Neill was just one of any number of young, often eco-minded conservatives who were surprisingly willing to talk about Mr. Massie with me. “I find Massie compelling in part because he’s so legible to me,” said Micah Meadowcroft, an editor at The American Conservative who grew up in Washington State and half-jokingly calls his own political vision “Bison Nationalism.” “Growing up in the Pacific Northwest,” he told me, “skepticism of the federal government and corporate power went together with a desire to live at as human a scale as possible. That characterized all the conservatives I knew.”
Mr. Massie has “been very savvy about figuring out how to take his ideological and intellectual commitments and making them relevant for an audience that might not necessarily share all of them,” Mr. Carl said.
That audience, perhaps surprisingly, includes both conservation-minded conservatives and localist-minded environmentalists. “The sphere is basically people who are concerned about the state of society and looking for ways to thrive that don’t require widespread social, economic or political control,” said Ashley Colby, an environmental sociologist and former long-haul trucker who now runs a sustainable agriculture school in Uruguay. Even some environmentalists, who until recently would have considered themselves liberals, have come to distrust large-scale systems of almost every kind — including, for many, the systems we would use to enact global-scale climate policy. Ms. Colby described them as “a coalition of moms who are frustrated with the school system, moms who don’t trust mainstream food, and it includes some of the Right Wing Bodybuilder types.” (The Right Wing Bodybuilders are a largely online community that sees local agriculture and natural lifestyles as a path to resist a supposedly oppressive globalist order.)
Some of these Right Wing Bodybuilder types — a growing and influential part of young conservative culture these days — are self-described racists, which points to a thorny problem in localist conversations these days: For a slice of the online right, building up local agriculture and a lifestyle in tune with nature goes hand in hand with a project of keeping the American landmass from being overrun by dark-skinned immigrants. Mr. Massie himself has never made much of the immigration issue, aside from the usual Republican pronouncements on hoping we “secure the border,” and I know of no reason to think that he is caught up in the nativist tendencies swirling around the online right today. But people often look at him and see what they want to see. “Massie is such a chad,” an anonymous small-scale rancher and well-known Right Wing Bodybuilder messaged me recently, using online shorthand for a powerful, handsome male. “Please quote me.”
Ms. Colby, who does not consider herself right wing, has often been attacked online by people in the Right Wing Bodybuilder subculture. She discovered Mr. Massie by watching the “Off the Grid” documentary. “With Massie there’s this kind of Wendell Berry-style pride of place,” she said, referencing the Kentuckian novelist, environmental activist and farmer whose writings have become canonical American expressions of rootedness and connection to place. “This thing of ‘I’m from this area, I built this home with stone that came from this land,’” she said. “That deeply resonates with people beyond a political level.”