Whether Putin is paying Gabbard is beside the point

07 December 2024

Nov 16, 2024; New York, NY, USA; Speaker of the house Mike Johnson (left) stands with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (center) and former representative Tulsi Gabbard during UFC 309 at Madison Square Garden. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-Imagn Images

If Tulsi Gabbard is confirmed as director of national intelligence, she will become the president’s top intelligence advisor and the head of the sprawling US intelligence community. She will be tasked with evaluating and synthesizing intelligence from 18 different agencies. Above all, the job requires discernment. It should therefore alarm us that Gabbard is incapable of differentiating fact from fiction.

Gabbard’s political allegiances shift like quicksilver, but her devotion to conspiracy theories remains constant. Her career arced from Democratic congresswoman to failed presidential hopeful to Trump surrogate. In every era, she has spouted conspiracy theories on topics ranging from Syrian chemical weapons attacks to “Ukrainian biolabs” to antidepressants.

Gabbard rails against an alleged “Great Reset” by a think tank called the World Economic Forum. The Great Reset is the conspiracy theory that the WEF cabal exploited the covid pandemic to usher in what Gabbard calls the “totalitarian dream” of a “cashless society” where people “own nothing” and are subject to constant surveillance.

The WEF is akin to the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, or the Bohemian Grove in the paranoid imagination. These are non-governmental entities with no real power onto which paranoids can project their fears. In consensual reality, the WEF is best known for hosting a swanky annual meeting in Davos. To sensible people, Davos is a byword for self-satisfied CEOs rubbing shoulders with politicians. Not great, but not particularly sinister. To conspiracy theorists, it’s the Illuminati. When the World Economic Forum mildly suggested that insect protein might help avert world hunger in the face of climate change, the conspiracists alleged that the cabal was trying to force us to eat bugs.

Gabbard’s twitter feed offers a glimpse into her deeply conspiratorial mindset. “Just like Biden wasn’t the one calling the shots, Kamala Harris won’t be either. She is the new figurehead for the deep state and the maidservant of Hillary Clinton, queen of the cabal of warmongers,” Gabbard tweeted in July.

Then she upped the ante, accusing “the establishment TV networks” of committing “election interference” as the “propaganda arm of Kamala’s campaign and Deep State.” Gabbard has even dabbled in the Big Lie of election fraud, claiming that Joe Biden was only elected because the “Dems/National Security State/MSM rigged the election by deliberately suppressing Hunter Biden laptop story.”

In 2019, Gabbard sued Google for $50 million for violating her freedom of speech after her AdSense account went down for a few hours on the night of the 2020 Democratic primary debate. Gabbard’s only “evidence” that she faced censorship rather than poor customer service was her mean tweets about big tech. Google explained that the account was temporarily frozen by an automated security system that detects unusual activity and reinstated after Gabbard complained. The lawsuit was dismissed.

Gabbard trafficks in false-flag allegations worthy of Alex Jones. She claimed that Russian-allied Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was framed for chemical attacks he unleashed against his own people. In fact, the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons has been confirmed by the United Nations, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and countless media outlets. Russian intelligence waged a disinformation campaign to discredit claims that Assad used poison gas on his own people and Gabbard fell for it.

In 2017, Gabbard secretly travelled to Syria and met with Assad. She later claimed she didn’t know she was going to meet with the dictator, but former Republican congressman Charlie Dent told MSNBC that Gabbard told him she was planning to meet with Assad before she left. Gabbard ended up paying for the Syria junket out of her own pocket because the Assad crony who initially footed the bill out of his own pocket falsely claimed that the money came from a mainstream Islamic social services charity.

Russian state media celebrated Gabbard’s 2020 presidential bid. Even though Gabbard was a nuisance candidate who won less than 1 percent of the vote, state media gave her twice as much coverage as front-runners Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Gabbard appeared on the Russian-funded Tenet Media network, which funneled millions of dollars to rightwing influencers in a bid to influence the 2024 election.

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard leapt to Russia’s defense, tweeting that the war could have been avoided if the west had acknowledged Russia’s “legitimate security interests” (aka imperial ambitions) in Ukraine. Russia’s most bizarre pretext for invading Ukraine was the baseless charge that the United States was "filling Ukraine with biolabs” with an eye to “destroying the Russian people at the genetic level." The Kremlin even insinuated that the covid-19 virus was produced in one of these non-existent facilities. Russia’s defense ministry unveiled the official crazy wall, tracing a fantastic biolab narrative that encompassed Hunter Biden and George Soros. It should come as no surprise that Gabbard amplified the biolab lie, tweeting a two-minute video demanding that these imaginary facilities be immediately dismantled.

It has become a parlor game in Washington to speculate about whether Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset. A New York Times investigation found no evidence that Gabbard has ever knowingly collaborated with Russian intelligence. Gabbard dropped her defamation lawsuit against Hillary Clinton for suggesting that Gabbard was being groomed by the Russians before discovery could shed light on the matter one way or the other. However, the question of whether Gabbard is being paid by Russian intelligence is a red herring. The problem is she genuinely loves conspiracy theories and broadcasts them for free to anyone who will listen. It’s hard to imagine a person less suited for a high-level intelligence position.

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