Taking on Tulsi

Tulsi Gabbard’s appointment to become the next director of national intelligence should be seen as incredibly dangerous — but liberals aren’t taking it seriously. Instead, they’re mostly focusing on conspiracy theories about the former Democratic representative that bring to mind the counterproductive post-2016 obsession with the non-scandal known as “Russiagate.” Their attacks on Gabbard show the party has learned nothing from its failures of opposition during the first Trump administration. And when it comes to the shape and substance of its opposition over the next four years, it’s hard to think of anything that bodes as ill for Democrats as a continued attachment to conspiracism. 

One recent example of this obsession is a Dec. 6 report from NBC News titled, “Democrats and Republicans in Congress worried that Gabbard might leak to Assad regime.” The thinly sourced article quotes unnamed former congressional aides who recount their concerns, first expressed in 2018, that Gabbard, then a Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, might reveal the identity of a defector from the Syrian government. Then as now, the logic underpinning the claim is that Gabbard had months earlier visited Syria on since-deposed President Bashar al-Assad’s invitation. The charges echoed a Dec. 4 open letter from 100 former intelligence officials who warned that Gabbard’s “past actions call into question her ability to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to the President, Congress, and to the entire national security apparatus.”

The NBC article was the opening salvo in what became a broader attack by liberals along the same lines. “She’s a spy,” tweeted publicist Tommy Lightfoot Garrett. “Unqualified. Unfit. Unacceptably pro-Russia,” Never Trump Republican Dave Hale said. The article was “a reminder of why so many national security experts in this country think Gabbard should not be trusted to safeguard our most sensitive secrets as director of national intelligence,” MSNBC host (and former Biden White House press secretary) Jen Psaki said on her show. 

Claims that Gabbard is a spy or is compromised don’t hold water. She is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve; as recently as 2021, she was deployed to Africa as part of a special ops mission, the nature of which has not been revealed. Many former colleagues, like Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democratic hawk from Massachusetts, speak highly of her. The facts don’t align with liberal conspiracy theories.

And while Gabbard has dabbled in conspiracy theories in the past — her claims last spring that Palestinian liberation protesters are part of “radical Islamist organization” come to mind — Democratic accusations that she is a stooge for Assad or Vladimir Putin just don’t hold up. The best arguments against Gabbard have nothing to do with Syria or Russia, but rather her actual record. A realistic assessment of Gabbard’s views and history reveals a hardcore, hateful Islamophobe who has never strayed from her past as a socially conservative representative in the Hawaiian state legislature. Gabbard’s recent embrace of outright transphobia — something that won her fans in the Republican Party even before she completed her rebrand in October and came out as a member of the GOP — follows a pattern of anti-LGBTQ positions tracking back to her early career in Honolulu. Her views on Muslims, Muslim countries and the purpose of U.S. intervention and foreign policy are impossible to divorce from her extreme anti-Islamic beliefs. More dangerous than any conspiratorial claims about her allegiance to Putin is her very real and public affinity for India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right government. 

By focusing on thinly sourced hearsay and conspiracies, Democrats are opening the door to reruns of the failed Russiagate obsession of 2016-2020. This is, after all, the exact playbook that took up so much energy during the first Trump administration. The result was a waste of resources and time that could have been used to organize and resist in more meaningful ways that would have challenged some central tenets of the overall U.S. political system. But that kind of politics doesn’t boost the careers of Resistance heroes in the media and online — and it makes wealthy donors uncomfortable. Indulging fictions that can be teased and unspooled over the months and years is better business than actually addressing the crises facing the party and the nation. 

Gabbard will probably be confirmed, but the idea that she will be inept is wishful thinking. Democrats should be preparing for how to handle an intelligence and surveillance apparatus under her competent charge, with the real dangers posed to people at home and abroad foremost in mind. Instead, the goal for liberals appears to be indulging their own knock-off version of Le Carre. If that’s how they’re challenging Gabbard — one of the more potentially dangerous members of president-elect’s inner circle — there’s not much hope for the anti-Trump movement this time around either.