She says the elites are lying to us.
The anti-establishment conspiratorial left meets the anti-establishment conspiratorial right.
Tulsi Gabbard was lost in the scrum of Democratic candidates in 2020. She isn't lost anymore. She has a niche. On Fox.
Bernie, Warren, Klobuchar, Moulton, Delaney, Booker, Harris, Gabbard, Steyer, Bennet, Williamson, Buttigieg, Gillibrand, O'Rourke, Yang, Swalwell, Delaney, Ryan, Inslee, Bullock, Sestack, de Blasio.
That isn't all of the 2020 Democratic candidates. A close reader will notice that I didn't list Jeff Merkley, Julian Castro, John Hickenlooper, or Michael Bloomberg. They were bonafide candidates, but I only list the people I personally saw in New Hampshire. I also list John Delaney twice. I do that because he had far more Town Hall events than anyone else, not that it helped him. Like his name, he hardly got noticed once, much less twice.
Tulsi Gabbard's name is there in the scrum. She dropped out in March, 2020. She didn't catch on either.
The failure of a candidate to get attention is less due to candidate competence than it is to whether candidates had an established brand that caused them to stand out. To a casual observer, they all said approximately the same things. They all wanted to expand health care, thought billionaires should pay more in taxes, thought Black Americans faced prejudice, and supported Roe v. Wade.
The fact that Kamala Harris didn't get traction is not that she was a "poor candidate." She got lost in the crowd. So did Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard had two elements that might have made her stand out. One is that she included the names of Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton but also Obama and Biden, in her denunciation of America's military and foreign policy establishment. She voiced attitudes I had not heard since the 1960s, a broad-brush condemnation of the whole American military-industrial-intelligence complex. She was unique in her partisan "disloyalty." It wasn't just Republican hawks who lied to us; Democrats did, too. They are all corrupt liars.
The second element was her striking appearance and manner. She is wears solid primary colors--red, white, blue, black. She has a calm, deep voice. She looks like a Fox News anchor or commentator, but she doesn't share their tone of high drama. She sounds serene in her earnest self-confidence.
She comments regularly on Fox. I have not seen her praise Trump there, but a Fox commentator need not do that. She dislikes what Fox News dislikes, and that's enough. She criticizes Biden on foreign policy, saying America provoked Russian into invading Ukraine. She criticizes Kamala Harris on criminal prosecutions. She says the left is godless. She slams Mitt Romney and tells him to resign from the senate. She criticizes Ukraine and its medical labs. She criticizes the fact that she is criticized; she says she is a victim of cancel culture.
She says American Democrats have "a F-You" attitude to the American public.
She tells Tucker Carlson that Biden's comment hoping Putin would leave office reveals the truth that this is a war of regime change.
She has a style: She looks straight at the camera. Like Liz Cheney, she is an uneasy fit for either political party. She has a platform and a popular message of profound distrust of political elites and the foreign policy establishment. They are lying to us, she says. They are trying to drag us into foreign wars and they hate us. There is a market for that view on the Tucker Carlson right: Populist, conspiratorial, obliquely-anti-Semitic, resentful of elites. There is also a market for it on the left. There is still an anti-war left. Like the right, it believes powerful elites are running the country and dragging us into wars.
If things go badly in Ukraine--and maybe they already have--we will be seeing more of Tulsi Gabbard on TV, and maybe in New Hampshire. This next time she will get noticed.
Carlson, like many on the Tucker Carlson right are pro-Israel, but, like Marjory Taylor Green, show up at neo-Nazi rallies. The Trump/Carlson right does not condemn her and in fact they endorse her. Trump’s own election-eve closing video advertisement was full of anti-Semitic tropes and images of George Soros, Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke. Please tell me this is not at least obliquely anti-Semitic. The left has its own version of anti-Semitism, although I do not equate discomfort with Israel's treatment of Palistinian natives with anti-Semitism. Trump supporters need to own Trump's overt and slightly-disguised message. He ran it in a dozen battleground states. It summarized the purpose of his campaign, he said. Watch this and tell me that there isn't some anti-Semitism in Trumpland:
https://youtu.be/vST61W4bGm8
Sent from my iPad--please excuse typos!
I am pretty disappointed in the fact that you would throw in the "obliquely anti-Semitic" label in referring to the "Tucker Carlson right". I think honestly that Republicans in my lifetime have generally been much more pro-Israel than Democrats. Also, I am a Trump supporter and Carlson supporter; however no one I know in these circles is anti-Semitic at all, obliquely or otherwise. Seems like you are simply trying to paint all conservatives, without any evidence, as neo-Nazis, which is intellectually dishonest. You probably know that, so it's beneath you.