Former Blue Dog-turned-Steve-Bannon-acolyte Tulsi Gabbard has always been a rot-gut conservative. I’m sorry, Bernie and Bernie followers who fell for her bullshit. I never did— not for one nanosecond. Her voting record has always been really right wing and really ugly— first in the Hawaii state legislature, where she LED the attack on LGBTQ civil rights and later in Congress where she was nothing but an establishment hack with a Republican Party perspective and a love of Fox News celebrity. And then, a vice chair of the DNC, she got into a personal turf war with another creep, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The result was that she quit the DNC and to spite Wasserman Schultz— a repulsive Hillary supremacist— by announced her support for Bernie, with whom she had virtually nothing in common with policy-wise other than a few weird coincidences in foreign policy and a professed commitment the Green New Deal. It was at a time in the campaign when Bernie needed any straw to grasp onto— she was the first congresswoman to endorse him— and he grasped onto this one in a major way— and so did his followers. She gave the nominating speech putting his name forward at the 2016 convention, something that sickened me. Gabbard never felt so much love in her entire hateful career. She bathed in it and subsumed herself in it and actually played the role of a Berniecrat, even signing on as a co-sponsor of Medicare for All. I never believed it for a second— and said so.
At a Berniepalooza in Burlington she asked a mutual friend to set up a meeting between us and at it asked me to be “fair” to her while she ran for president. She made a decent case and I agreed. Her presidential run was a farce—her only substantial endorsements were from the KKK’s David Duke and Nazi Richard Spencer— and over almost as soon as it began, as she was credibly accused of being a Kremlin asset and then endorsed Joe Biden before gravitating back towards MAGA-world again, and especially back to her virulent homophobia— did I say virulent?— and Islamophobia. She was furious that she wasn’t invited to the convention and became a Republican in all but name— until today, when she finally quit the Democratic Party formally. Religionist fraud and fellow bigot Franklin Graham was one of the first to celebrate with her.
She often went on Tucker Carlson’s, Sean Hannity’s and Laura Ingraham’s shows as a token Democrat to rail against Pelosi, impeachment (she was one of 3 Democrats to oppose it) and Adam Schiff (whom she calls a "domestic terrorist") and to cheer on all kinds of reactionary MAGA positions. In her press release today, she wrote that she could “no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party– which is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness. The Democrats of today divide us by racializing every issue, stoking anti-white racism, and are actively working to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. The Democrats of today are hostile to people of faith and spirituality. They demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans. The Democrats of today believe in open borders and weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents. Above all else, the Democrats of today are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war. I believe in a government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people. Unfortunately, today’s Democratic Party does not. Instead, it stands for a government of, by, and for the powerful elite. I’m calling on my fellow common sense, independent-minded Democrats to leave as well. If you can no longer stomach the direction that so-called woke Democratic Party ideologues are taking our country, I invite you to join me.”
No Democrats have taken her up on her invitation.
Over the weekend, leading up her announcement today, she had tweeted, disingenuously, that “The Biden Admin does not care about the American people. Permanent Washington loots us to serve the interests of the arms-manufacturing global oligarchy while we struggle to pay for gas/food/rent and our soldiers go on food stamps.”