I’ll admit this up front: I’m not a huge fan of Tulsi Gabbard, the former congresswoman from Hawaii, former presidential candidate, and current media personality. And no, I’m not going to be one of these pundits playing around with making Gabbard into Donald Trump’s running mate.
Enough with that already. It’s irritating.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. If it’s my fate to be governed by one of the people who populated those stages during the 2020 Democrat presidential primaries, I’ll take Gabbard. That doesn’t say a lot, of course: that might have been the single worst aggregation of wannabe tyrants ever assembled in a free nation. Gabbard isn’t an aggressive defiler of America as founded, and that alone put her atop the Democrat slag-heap.
Or beneath it, because when she began promoting things slightly different from the Obama cabal’s orthodoxy, they ran her right out of their party.
Gabbard is a perfect example of why conservatives should start paying attention to the difference between liberals and out-and-out leftists. She’s the former, and it’s a distinction that matters. Liberals actually care about civil liberties like free speech. Leftists, which the Democrat Party is dominated and run by, do not.
It turns out that the cultural and political elite are also dominated by leftists, not liberals. And certainly not conservatives.
The effect is noticeable.
For example, Prince Harry — who isn’t even American, but, if there’s a better example of the typical leftist ruling-class twit than Meghan Markle’s husband, it’s hard to find one — thinks free speech is “bonkers.” He said so after he moved to America, the world’s oldest democracy and a country built on the freedom to speak one’s mind about anything, anytime, anywhere.
America has always believed in the thing Harry finds so weird — in fact, we shot a whole lot of redcoats with accents pretty similar to his in order to win this nation for ourselves, and the very first thing we did after we wrote our Constitution was to enshrine this freedom in writing.
The right to freedom of speech is so vital to America’s way of life that the founders embedded it in the First Amendment. Freedom of speech goes hand in hand with freedom of faith and freedom of the press, as individual rights and as means of keeping the government in check. The Democrat Party once claimed it lived by the ethos — “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
That’s standard liberal cant. You don’t hear it from people like Adam Schiff, Dan Goldman, Pramila Jayapal, or Mazie Hirono because they’re not liberals; they’re leftists and they couldn’t give a red hot damn about your freedom of speech.
But Gabbard is a lot better than they are and she deserves credit for it. She also deserves credit for having the sand to write her new book, For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind.
Gabbard writes in For Love of Country that this public bedrock belief in the right to free speech is what first attracted her to the Democrats. At 21, she writes, she saw a party that passionately defended free speech and represented a big tent that included a variety of beliefs, not all of which agreed with one another. And that was fine. Freedom of speech is for all, and good ideas should win out over bad ones as long as debate is unfettered.
Does this describe the Democrat Party today? Is the Democrat Party, especially under Joe Biden, still dedicated to defending free speech? Are today’s Democrats with America’s founders, or with the prince who just doesn’t get it?
I’d argue that it was mostly a scam all along, but whether that’s true or not, there is zero question Gabbard has her former party’s current number.
Today’s Democrats, by and large, believe “hate speech,” which is often defined as anything with which they disagree, is “violence” or “disinformation” and must be banned. The New York Times, dominated by woke left-wing Democrats in the newsroom and its boardroom, faces rebellions any time it strays from the hard Left’s orthodoxy even to publish an op-ed by a sitting senator. Left-wing network MSNBC has become a partisan cult. NPR, according to 25-year veteran of the taxpayer-funded network Uri Berliner, who was just forced out of his job for having a slightly dissenting opinion, pushes only and always left-wing talking points and viewpoints despite the fact that the majority of Americans disagree. The American Civil Liberties Union, once a staunch defender of Nazis’ right to hold parades, now fights against free speech in the transgender debate. Biden’s Democrats colluded with Big Tech throughout the Trump presidency, and, up to the point when Elon Musk bought Twitter for billions, used federal law enforcement agencies to curb and crush free speech about COVID and other serious issues — to the party’s benefit.
And while our speech is violence, their violence is speech. They taught us that when they burned down half of our cities in the summer of 2020 while Kamala Harris was raising bail money for rioters and murderers.
This is today’s Left and the Democrat Party, Gabbard writes. Free speech has never faced more grave or open threats than it faces right now — from the very party that once made freedom of speech its most prominent and foundational principle. So she left the Democrats for good and is now an independent.
Gabbard has faced smears for this, and she writes that she’s far from alone. She details what happened when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was invited to testify before a House hearing on the weaponization of government under Biden. Before he could even speak, Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz smeared him as “anti-Asian” and “antisemitic.” Schulz had no evidence to present, and when Kennedy attempted to reply and defend himself, she cut him off. Schulz weaponized her mic, her office, and the House itself against an American citizen she falsely accused of one of today’s deadliest sins — because he was set to detail how the Democrats have gone to war against the freedom of speech.
Remember that? If not, here’s a video refresher:
Think Debbie Wasserman Schultz would defend to the death your right to say something that hurts her feelings? Or nah?
Gabbard’s exposition of the Left’s militant disdain and campaign against free speech couldn’t be more timely. Or necessary, for that matter. Here we are facing rising threats from communist China, Putin’s Russia, the jihadist cancer across the Middle East, and even apparently from Niger (please!), and Americans are having to fight a cold cultural war at home against the people Gabbard is sounding the warning bells about.
Free speech is the only way good ideas win. Freedom of thought, conscience, writing, even art, is the most important weapon in the battle for truth. The monsters who run the Democrat Party today are fighting so hard to destroy this bedrock right for that very reason. Cut off debate and nobody notices that their arguments are garbage. It’s a cute plan and it works — in all the worst places on earth.
There’s an election coming up, you know, and the Democrats are literally trying to jail and bankrupt their chief opponent.
America needs real champions of freedom. Tulsi Gabbard is, for whatever other ideas she might have that aren’t so good, one of those champions. With this book, she has stepped up and accepted the challenge of fighting to save America from her former party, and we’re better off for it.
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