Is Tulsi Gabbard the GOP’s Dark Horse?

Editor’s word: This text was initially printed on 13 January 2022. It was republished on 27 August 2024 after former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard formally endorsed Donald Trump in his run for the White Home.

Earlier than she left Congress final winter, the previous Democratic consultant Tulsi Gabbard launched two payments: one proscribing abortion; the opposite, banning trans girls from collaborating in girls’s sports activities. The payments, which had no probability of passing, nonetheless despatched a message: the onetime darling of the Bernie Sanders appeared to depart Congress intent on cultivating a right-wing following.

Now her transfer to the correct is nearly full. Gabbard, showing on Fox Information channel’s Hannity in November 2021, declared that the Democratic Party’s social-spending bill, known as Build Back Better, was a part of a deeper downside. The federal government was “too highly effective and too large at the same time as it’s, and this invoice is simply going to make issues worse,” she stated, echoing widespread Republican speaking factors. The feedback earned her reward from the Fox host Sean Hannity, who referred to as her “definitely a conservative”.

Gabbard didn’t object on the air to Hannity’s declare. And she or he didn’t must. She’s fostered a cult of persona amongst her supporters, who both refuse to acknowledge that Gabbard holds right-wing positions or, extra typically, go on to undertake these positions themselves. Recently, Gabbard’s pivot to cancel-culture pundit, full with undertones of worries about anti-white “racism”, has impressed her followers to tackle the identical pet points. They’ve gone from iconoclastic left-leaning upstarts to “American patriots” and not using a blink.

Gabbard and her followers belong to what’s loosely known as the “post-left,” a gaggle of disaffected liberals and progressives who’ve achieved an entire 180 into right-wing agitation, however have saved the linguistic framework of the left. These figures share a unfastened ideology, rooted of their perception that the Democratic Celebration is as corrupt and harmful because the GOP. The pragmatism of the progressive lawmakers who rode the lefty wave to prominence — together with Democratic Representatives similar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib — in selecting to cooperate with President Joe Biden and Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi has alienated individuals who believed that Sanders’ “political revolution” promised an finish to established energy buildings, somewhat than a reorientation of the Democratic Celebration to a extra progressive politics.

Regardless of endorsing Biden in 2020, Gabbard on 12 January condemned the president for feedback — which had been aimed toward whipping Democratic Senate votes to move voting rights laws — that positioned the controversy over voting rights as between individuals who adhered to the politics of Martin Luther King Jr, or George Wallace. “Biden promised to unite us, however he’s doing all he can do [to] divide us,” Gabbard tweeted in what might be the precursor to a public break with the Democrats on her approach to the GOP.

Whereas it’s tempting to giggle her off as a fringe determine, Gabbard has a loyal base. Mixed along with her rising mainstream right-wing legitimacy, that might make her a dark-horse contender for the 2024 GOP nomination — somebody who, like Donald Trump, can promote People on bogus “anti-establishment” positions on warfare and civil rights whereas performing to advertise the pursuits of the far proper. As a veteran, former lawmaker, and frequent Fox visitor, Gabbard is constructing a resume for future success, and never within the Democratic Celebration.

Gabbard has discovered followers on each ends of America’s political spectrum since coming to Washington in 2013. An Iraq Warfare veteran whose tour was bookended by stints in state and native politics in her native Hawaii, Gabbard entered Congress in 2013 as the primary Hindu to function a member of Congress and was seen as a viable up-and-comer within the get together. The millennial congresswoman was the topic of a flattering New York Occasions profile in November 2015 celebrating her “defiance” to president Barack Obama’s Syria coverage and her post-partisan method to lawmaking: “She’s a stable Democrat, however she’s actually sensible by way of how she approaches points and will get issues achieved,” then-representative Kyrsten Sinema instructed the paper.

Months later, Gabbard would make headlines when she resigned from the Democratic Nationwide Committee (DNC) and endorsed Sanders for the get together’s presidential nomination in 2016, citing his “logic” on issues of international coverage. The perceived iconoclastic, party-bucking nature of this choice made Gabbard an prompt hero on the left — and amongst some on the correct — and led her supporters to begin calling for her to run in 2020 even earlier than the Sanders marketing campaign was formally lifeless and buried. 

Since turning into a fixture on Fox Information, she’s expanded her viewers to incorporate the older Republicans who watch the community religiously. In September, she instructed Tucker Carlson, that “Islamist ideology, which is the political ideology that impressed the terrorist assaults on our nation on 9/11, is the best menace that we’re going through proper now on this nation, on this planet,” notably omitting the menace posed by the pandemic that’s killed a whole bunch of hundreds of People.

In October, she fed into right-wing tropes about immigration, telling Fox’s Jeanine Pirro that the “Biden-Harris administration has an open-door coverage on the borders” the place “persons are being let in and crossing the border each single day”. And she or he hasn’t been shy about tying herself to GOP politics extra broadly, declaring on Twitter on 3 November, within the wake of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial win in Virginia, that the end result was “a victory for all People,” as a result of the anti-vaccine-mandate, race-baiting marketing campaign was “a powerful rejection of efforts to divide us by race, the stripping of parental rights, and conceited, deaf leaders”.  

As Gabbard has turn into extra clearly right-wing — and has been making additional inroads to the far-right fringe by way of her content material creation take care of YouTube competitor Rumble, the video web site backed by the libertarian enterprise capitalist Peter Thiel — so too have a few of her most outstanding supporters, together with the political vloggers Niko Home and Jimmy Dore. (Neither Home nor Dore responded to requests for remark for this piece.)

Home is a Florida-based YouTuber who dabbles in far-right conspiracy theories; he additionally maintains a friendship with the journalist and agitator Jack Posobiec, whom the Southern Poverty Legislation Middle states has ties to the white-nationalist motion. Home enthusiastically backed Gabbard’s 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. He sang her praises at marketing campaign rallies in California and New Hampshire. As soon as each Gabbard and Sanders had dropped out of the Democratic major race, Home hosted the previous Ohio state senator Nina Turner, a Sanders surrogate with clout on the left, for a pleasant chat about how Gabbard had been smeared by the media and her fellow Democrats for attacking the then-senator Kamala Harris.

Home’s devotion to Gabbard has not abated as she has turn into extra overtly right-wing. He’s lined her favourably in movies and boosted her profile on social media. On his channel at Rokfin, a video-streaming web site that promotes “free pondering media” figures and the place he posts his vlogs solely now, Home incorporates a image of himself and the previous consultant as his banner. (I ought to point out that Rokfin supplied me an unique paid deal to hitch the channel earlier this yr; I declined.) 

Dore, one of the fashionable podcasters and streamers within the post-left sphere, has overtly mused about allying with the far proper. A slapstick comedian who did a stint on the liberal YouTube community, The Younger Turks, he has tilted additional into conspiracy theories over the previous decade. He promoted the fantastical story that Seth Wealthy, a DNC worker who was murdered in July 2016, was behind the Democratic Celebration emails that WikiLeaks printed and was killed for it. Lately Dore agitates towards public-health mandates and casts doubt on the efficacy of vaccines. 

Dore additionally has almost one million subscribers on YouTube and a strong viewers via Rumble, different streaming platforms, and a syndicated podcast — and was an early Gabbard supporter. He championed her as an anti-war voice with the potential to shake up the system, and he sang her praises as he started to show towards Sanders for being too near the Democratic Celebration’s institution.

As Gabbard and allies similar to Dore and Home lean additional to the correct and make widespread trigger with fringe extremists, they’re positive to sway a few of their base within the course of. Disillusioned progressives, determined for a story that explains why they’ve misplaced electoral floor whereas successful the messaging warfare, are on the lookout for somebody in charge. For Gabbard, the enemy is obvious: liberals and social democrats, whose political undertaking the Gabbardites painting as being disconnected from the pursuits of the working class.

Progressives are beginning to see via this act. However it’s clear that the left is now not her target market. Gabbard has a brand new constituency to courtroom, and she or he’s taking her supporters alongside along with her.

[See also: Everything you need to know about the 2022 US Midterm Elections]