The former rising star of the Democrats may be wrong on some points, but her main reason for ditching Team Blue is sound
Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard announced on Tuesday that she had left the Democrats, one of the two major American political parties. According to her, today’s Democratic Party “is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms that are enshrined in our constitution…”
She went on to criticize the party for being hostile to people with religious convictions, against the police, supporters of criminals, in favor of open borders, OK with weaponizing the national security state to target political opponents and lurching the world closer to nuclear conflict. The former congresswoman and former presidential candidate has since been doing the rounds on right-wing media, primarily Fox News.
There’s quite a lot to break down in Gabbard’s statements, some being, in my opinion, true and some not so true. I was involved in Democratic Party politics when I lived in Kentucky. I saw how the national party engages with what they see as backward people in rural America, and I think their strategy is monumentally stupid. I’ve also experienced the bureaucratic backstops at the local party level to disempower independent thinking and encourage rigid party allegiance and careerism.
Two examples spring to my mind. The first was in 2016 when I was selected as a delegate to the state party convention for Senator Bernie Sanders, whom my local party officials despised. But, unfortunately, those same party officials didn’t even inform me that I was a delegate, meaning I couldn’t cast my vote for Sanders and then-eventual Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could coast to an easy victory.
This experience aligned with the blatant party corruption we saw unfolding during the primary elections leading up to the 2016 presidential election. The conspiracy was later made public by WikiLeaks just around the time of the national convention, and that’s when the idea of Russian interference in the election first sprang up, with Clinton and her supporters taking zero accountability and simply focusing on the source of the leaks. (The party bureaucracy would turn against Sanders again in 2020, even after restructuring).
The second example was when I worked on the Amy McGrath congressional campaign during her bid for Kentucky’s sixth congressional district in 2018. I joined her campaign exclusively to knock out billionaire and former mayor of Lexington (now the secretary of transport of Kentucky) Jim Gray during the primary election. We accomplished that feat, and not long after, the national party, through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, stepped in.
That was when things got especially weird. Senior staff told us to secure all communications if “the Russians” tried to hack us. They informed us that one of our challengers, Geoff Young, might be a Russian spy because he called McGrath, a former marine jet pilot, a CIA plant. Also, someone, allegedly from Russia, was supposedly trailing the campaign. I was familiar enough with their lack of serious opposition research to know that all of this was complete nonsense and obfuscation of the fact that parts of our candidate’s mythology didn’t line up, which the press would reveal later on its own. I left the campaign and the United States shortly after all of this.
I never ascended to the ranks of someone like Tulsi Gabbard, becoming a member of Congress or a presidential candidate. But my experiences largely conform to her primary message that the Democratic Party is not a viable vehicle for change in the country. Instead, it is mainly designed to subvert any serious challenge to the elite’s death grip on power and replace symbolic action with substantial progress. I am intelligent enough to have discerned that shortly after the time I finished college.
Moreover, Gabbard is correct in saying that the party is warmongering and driving us closer to nuclear war. Just look at what the ruling Democratic Party is doing. It continues to funnel weapons to Ukraine, reducing the chances of effective peace negotiations while Americans suffer untold destitution. Never mind the effect this has on our “allies” in Europe. At the same time, it’s the Democratic Party leading the charge in sparking a conflict with China over the Taiwan issue – evidenced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s latest Taipei excursion.
Gabbard also points out that Democrats weaponize the national security state to attack their political opponents. I’ve witnessed it – and she and I are on the same US-sponsored list by the so-called Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation. But, of course, everyone the Dems don’t like is a Russian propagandist, which is a convenient excuse to throw out when you’re caught doing unsavory things.
All of this is reason enough to depart from the Democratic Party. If you are someone who values organized human life as we know it, certainly voting ‘blue no matter who’ is a strategy you should avoid. But then, many of Gabbard’s points are incredibly tedious and appear to be grifting to secure a career in right-wing media.
For example, her insistence that the Democratic Party is bent on “wokeness,” racializing every issue and anti-white racism. Let me be obvious: There is no anti-white racism in America. There isn’t. None. Zero. To suggest that there is, is truly the height of ignorance.
Furthermore, claiming that the people experiencing racism are making things about race is stupid. Let’s also be clear about another item in the historical record: Black people didn’t invent race. White people did. These legal concepts apply to the American census and laws still in effect today in our country. ‘White’ and ‘black’ are, in this sense, political distinctions meant to categorize and divide people, primarily by granting certain rights to some while taking them away from others.
James Whitman wrote a fascinating book entitled ‘Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law’, which describes this process and how the Nazi regime even used US race law to create its own, including how to define a Jew. To get mad at minorities for ‘making everything about race’ – a concept that was shackled on them – is the height of historical ignorance. Race is an unfortunate reality of American society created by the powerful.
Gabbard makes similar errors on several of her points, including saying that Democrats hate the police, want open borders or hate religious worshipers. This summer, President Joe Biden, a Democrat, instructed states to use federal pandemic funds – some $10 billion – to bolster police forces.
Democrats have also not passed any major immigration reform that would facilitate a plan asserted by right-wing media, like Gabbard’s friend, Tucker Carlson, aimed at shifting demographics in favor of their party. On her first trip to Guatemala, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders.”
On balance, the Democratic Party favors religious plurality more than the Republican Party, which is basically just a Trojan horse for Christian supremacy. Conservatives are slamming their ideology down our throats, evidenced by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, and they don’t even pretend to hide it.
The former congresswoman’s points here seem to be right-wing scaremongering designed to amp up white victimhood, which is both non-existent and the requisite precursor to fascist political tendencies. She also likes to, as she did when she sat in for Tucker Carlson on his show in what was an audition, harken back to an idealized past of what our country used to look like. I believe she is positioning herself to have a show on the Fox News network, which carries serious baggage.
