Tulsi Gabbard is a candidate with genuine crossover support from Republicans and independents and moderates and conservatives. A veteran! A woman of color! The youngest woman ever to serve in the Hawaii state legislature! Come on, establishment, isn’t she everything you told us we should want in a candidate?
– Krystal Ball, The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising
As you know, one of our chief aims at Advanced Citizenship is to highlight interesting populist ideas and candidates from across the political spectrum. The way we see it, there’s no reason that the Populist Left and Populist Right can’t – and, perhaps even more importantly, shouldn’t – make common cause. At least in theory, both factions have a vision for a politics that is centered on the working class and the middle class.
These days, however, we’ll be the first to admit that it’s damn near impossible to identify actual Populist Left politicians (as it pertains to Populist Left pundits, there’s no shortage of great ones out there, including the aforementioned Krystal Ball). Now, granted, there aren’t a ton of real Populists (non-PINO’s i.e. Populists-In-Name-Only) in the GOP, but they do exist and they are some of the most popular members – see Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Ron DeSantis (R-FL) to name a few – of the party. In other words, they actually represent the base. Furthermore, there are some big guns seeking office in 2022 (Blake Masters, J.D. Vance, Joe Kent).
As for the Democrat Party? Now that former Democratic presidential candidate and Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is out of office and former Democratic Party presidential candidate Andrew Yang has left the Democratic party altogether following his unsuccessful bid to become New York City’s next mayor, who is there?
Bernie Sanders definitely fit the bill before he dropped out of the 2016 race and endorsed Hillary Clinton. But since? If we’re being honest? Not so much.
Not “Met Gala” AOC, that’s for sure.
In other words, it’s all eyes on Tulsi. What can we say? She’s one of our favorites and she appears to be back in full force (on September 14th, she tweeted “Aloha! You haven’t heard much from me lately as I’ve been gone for the last 4 months on an active duty tour & deployment to Africa as a Civil Affairs officer supporting a Special Forces mission to go after al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists.”).
If you’re not familiar with Ms. Gabbard, allow us to hit you up with you some highlights.
– A U.S. Army Reserve officer, Gabbard was first elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives at the ripe old age of 21 (!) before serving as the U.S. Representative for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021.
– Gabbard was disinvited to the October 13, 2015 Democratic debate in Las Vegas after criticizing DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s decision to hold a mere six debates during the 2016 primary (compared that to a whopping 26 in 2008) and to exclude any candidate who participated in a non-DNC sanctioned debate from all future DNC-sanctioned debates. This was a turning point for Gabbard, and she has been an outspoken champion of free speech for all American citizens ever since.
– She resigned from her role as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 in order to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination over Hillary Clinton and later launched a petition to end the Democratic Party’s process of appointing superdelegates during the nomination process. The DNC establishment has loathed Gabbard ever since she “betrayed” (i.e. exercised her constitutional rights) it.
– Gabbard is a staunch civil libertarian, a first amendment absolutist (she’s not afraid to go after Big Tech) who has repeatedly gone on record as a defender of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
– Gabbard’s willingness to meet with foreign leaders on Globalist American Empire’s kill list (i.e. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad) as a means of ending our establishment’s insane regime change wars has prompted media figures such as journalist Bari Weiss to label her as an “Assad toady” (without any evidence whatsoever).
– In February 2019, Gabbard officially launched her 2020 presidential campaign as an economic populist with strong anti-interventionist (while remaining a “hawk” on terrorism) foreign policy views.
– Gabbard’s most viral moment to-date came during the first night of the CNN Democratic presidential debate in Detroit, Michigan on July 30, 2019, in which she pulled Vice President Kamala Harris’ card (in likely the spiciest debate moment since Trump told Hillary “Because you’d be in jail” back in 2016) in the midst of a debate about criminal justice reform. Calling Harris out for her abysmal record as district attorney and California attorney general, Tulsi didn’t hold back:
Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president, but I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep to cash bail system in place, that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way … The bottom line is, Senator Harris, when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives, you did not, and worse yet, in the case of those who are on death row, innocent people, you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to do so. There is no excuse for that and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor – you owe them an apology.
– After Hillary Clinton told former Obama adviser David Plouffe that Gabbard was a “favorite of the Russians” that Putin was grooming her to run as a third-party candidate in October 2019 (with absolutely zero proof as it was Clinton herself that “colluded” with her corporate media cronies at The New York Times and CNN in order to run baseless hit pieces on Tulsi calling her a Russian asset and an Assad apologist), Gabbard wasted no time in telling Clinton what, er, time it was:
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
Gabbard sued Clinton for defamation soon thereafter.
– Gabbard supports paid family leave (she co-sponsored the FAMILY act for paid family and medical leave while in office) and introduced a resolution calling for universal basic income when the coronavirus pandemic first began in March of 2020.
– As Krystal Ball has perfectly summated, “for many voters, establishment versus anti-establishment is a more important barometer than the typical left-right spectrum – or maybe authentic versus inauthentic or principled versus pandering.” As such, it’s no surprise that Gabbard has historically done well with independents as well as those who describe themselves as moderate, conservative, and even libertarian – Ron Paul has said, “Tulsi has the best foreign policy…She’s the best of the Democrats.” We can’t disagree.
“People have a hard time figuring me out because I don’t play those games. I don’t fit in those boxes that they set up.” – Tulsi Gabbard, Real Time with Bill Maher
– Predictably, Gabbard’s heterodox views not only make her an enemy of the Globalist American Empire bipartisan establishment uniparty, but the ideological variation amongst her supporters is frequently used by the corporate press (it’s pretty funny/sad to see outlets refer to a Bernie Sanders supporter as a “right-wing influencer”) and hack pollsters as a way to smear her rather than as an indicator that the Left/Right pro-wrestling match that the regime needs the public to buy into is mostly bullshit and that the national electorate is not merely as cut and dry as the DC swamp would like it to be.
As Geoffrey Skelley wrote in FiveThirtyEight back in November 2020:
So what do we know about Gabbard’s base? For one thing, it’s overwhelmingly male —according to The Economist’s polling with YouGov, her support among men is in the mid-single digits, while her support among women is practically nonexistent. Her predominantly male support shows up in other ways, too. An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics found that only 24 percent of Gabbard’s itemized contributions had come from female donors, the smallest percentage of any candidate in the race. Gabbard’s supporters are also likely to fall outside of traditional Democratic circles. Her supporters, for instance, are more likely to have backed President Trump in 2016, hold conservative views or identify as Republican compared to voters backing the other candidates. An early November poll from The Economist/YouGov found that 24 percent of Democratic primary voters who voted for Trump in 2016 backed Gabbard.
Fascinating stuff, especially considering men and women that didn’t support Hillary Clinton in 2016 (Adam Carolla really called this one) or Kamala Harris in 2020 were constantly scolded as being “sexist”, “racist”, or, you got it, sexist and racist simultaneously. Perhaps there are some Americans left that still believe in judging fellow citizens based on the content of their character rather than their immutable characteristics – but hey, what do we know?!
– In May 2021, Gabbard called for racist Chicago Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s resignation after Lightfoot announced that she would not give interviews to white reporters, tweeting “Mayor Lightfoot’s blatant anti-white racism is abhorrent. I call upon President Biden, Kamala Harris, and other leaders of our county—of all races—to join me in calling for Mayor Lightfoot’s resignation. Our leaders must condemn all racism, including anti-white.” In other words, Gabbard abhors woke identity politics and actually puts her money where her mouth is (unlike, say, most of the GOP).
– Gabbard has repeatedly signaled that she’s not at all on board with the Democrat Party’s open borders project (she, like Bernie Sanders once upon a time, knows that it inflicts tremendous damage on the working and middle class in more ways than one) and recently called Biden’s “open-door” border policy a “disaster”.
Quite frankly, we don’t understand why more partisan Democrats seeking actual change in their party don’t get behind Tulsi (just kidding, we know the psychopathic Corporate Dems and their bratty kids run the show – that’s why they smeared her for not taking lobbyist money!). Still, what can we say? It’s kind of bizarre to watch a party that pretended to want “Hope” and “Change” in 2008 go all-in on Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 (got that 50th year in congress coming up next year, Joe!). After all, a series of debates between her and Trump in 2020 would have been far healthier for our country.
If Gabbard decides, like Yang, to ever leave her party, she’d get a ton of support from the GOP base (she already does). And if she ever decided to run for office as a Republican? We bet she’d go a lot farther than she would as a Democrat (at least at the moment). Hell, there’s a reason Tucker Carlson recently told journalist Michael Tracey (one of the good ones) that he’d vote for her in a heartbeat over a Republican like Lindsey Graham, even if they disagreed on eighty percent of policy (they agree on the really important, basic stuff!), if only for the fact that she’s actually honest and authentic about saying what she means and meaning what she says.
Ultimately, we’d be ecstatic to see Gabbard run again – for something, anything – at some point in the future. America could really use more politicians (ugh, such a cringe word) like her. She’s not woke, patriotic yet pragmatic, open-minded yet principled, both a populist and an anti-elitist, as anti-censorship as you can get, and she has a thicker skin than most human beings – man, woman, you name it.
The American people deserve honesty. They deserve leaders who lead with integrity and not those who shy away from their own responsibilities to the American people or look for a lower-ranking fall guy to take the hit. The American people deserve strong leadership that looks out for their best interest and the best interest of our country.
– Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson Tonight (August 21, 2021)
In other words, she’s BASED (as she told Joe Rogan in 2019, “It’s very transparent [how the machine works] if you’re paying attention”).
Regarding why so many Trump voters distrust the media and believe the 2020 election was rigged, @MartyrMade, Host of “The MartyrMade Podcast” and co-host of “The Unraveling” with Jocko Willink, recently dropped Tulsi’s name in some words of wisdom for the record books: “GOP propaganda still has many of [its voters] thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.”
Indeed.
Now go check out Tulsi’s new Rumble channel here and let us know what you think!