Former presidential candidate and recent Democratic Rep from Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard appeared on Fox's Tucker Carlson Tonight on Tuesday to discuss her decision to leave the Democratic Party. Gabbard, who has proudly served her country in uniform (and still is with the Army National Guard), announced the very morning of her appearance on Tucker's show that she's exiting the Democratic Party after serving in Congress (Hawaii) from 2013 to 2021.
At a moment Gabbard was already subject of intense pushback and online hate for her contrarian stance on the Russia-Ukraine war, she blasted the Democratic Party as "an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness" in a prior Twitter video post. She went on to tell Carlson in the evening appearance that these same leaders are "actively pushing us to the brink of a nuclear holocaust."
Hitting on the familiar "Chicken hawks" theme that Ron Paul has long emphasized, she continued "they may have their bunkers where they'll be safe..."
"But we the American people will have no shelter, no place to go, no place to hide and face the consequences that could destroy all of humanity and the world as we know it."
That's when she detailed reasons for being fed up with the Democratic party, explaining she's seen first-hand that Dem leadership despises the Constitution and is essentially at war with the Bill of Rights-enshrined concept of freedom of speech.
"It speaks to the whole environment of fear that those in power, these elitists in power, have fomented to where people are afraid to speak the truth," Gabbard continued.
"[People are] afraid to exercise their right to free speech because, hey, you might lose your job, you might be canceled, you might get trashed, and God forbid in Washington, you might not be invited to the cool kids' party."
Gabbard herself has long been subject to repeat smears of being "pro-Kremlin" or also an "Assadist" (given she met with Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in a controversial 2017 trip at the height of the war) for her principled stance of 'non-interventionism' and longtime criticism of the post-9/11 Global War on Terror.
This shit has been going on for years. DC neoliberal elites have assigned themselves license to lie and defame anyone who dissents from neoliberal orthodoxy as "Russian agents" or "Kremlin assets."
At least McCarthy and Hoover would hold hearings to do this. They just assert it. pic.twitter.com/rwrRtPLWMA
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 11, 2022
Without doubt, her latest words to Tucker Carlson in affirmation of her formal exit from Democratic Party membership will only heighten the intensity of the ongoing Left-Centrist outrage targeting her. Many within Republican Party leadership also have mounted political attacks against her.