Inside the Tulsi Hive

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To anyone appropriately tuned out of the race, Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign might look shipwrecked. She consistently bobs around 1 percent in national polls, and about 64 percent of registered voters have either never heard of or have no opinion of her. Despite this relatively low profile, Gabbard manages to stand out among the grim procession of Michael Bennets. Between consistent anti-war messaging, willingness to buck the party line, and a mildly hypnotic presence, she’s amassed a hardened core of dedicated supporters.

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Once counted among the Democratic Party’s “rising stars,” the Hawaii representative had mostly drowned her image in a litany of bizarre stances and emerging liabilities well before formally announcing her presidential ambitions seven months ago. She scorned the party’s centrist wing by abandoning a prestigious DNC post to endorse Bernie in 2016, but has been deeply controversial on the left, largely thanks to her tacit support of blood-soaked despots like Narendra Modi, Bashar al-Assad, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as well as her troubling history of anti-LGBTQ lobbying for an organization run by her father.

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Gabbard often seems like a candidate without a constituency — which is why, before last month’s first-round debate, few predicted that she’d walk away with one of the night’s most-discussed performances. After fact-checking Human Ball of Clay Tim Ryan and decisively condemning the American forever-war, she earned a maxed-out contribution from Jack Dorsey and emerged as the most-Googled candidate of the moment.

I had spent that night ensconced in a crowd that came ready to believe, scoping out her supporters at a pro-Tulsi debate watch party. Coordinated by “New Yorkers for Tulsi,” a small cohort of grassroots volunteers, the event drew about a hundred people to The Craic, a cozy Irish bar in Williamsburg.

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I had found the watch party through Gabbard’s official campaign website, which promoted it alongside dozens of others under a “supporter events” tab — but it was also advertised on PresidentTulsiGabbard.org, a portal for “an interconnected group of individuals who seek to actively enlist, encourage and motivate a groundswell of uniquely skilled, self-motivated grassroots activists and organizers” in support of the Hawaii congresswoman.

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Among other materials, PresidentTulsiGabbard.org hosts an open letter urging her supporters not to trust the mainstream media and instead to get their information from figures including far-right stepping stone Joe Rogan and David Icke.

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Back in Brooklyn, an hour before the June 26 debate, The Craic was humming with giddy anticipation. An organizer dispensed plastic leis, a relaxed selection of tropical button-ups peppered the crowd, and a pack of guests huddled around a corner tray of fruit kebabs—later complimented by roving pans of Hawaiian pizza—as a stream of arrivals stocked the room. Seated in the middle of the bar, a young man laughed with his friends while clutching a ukulele and sporting a white hat with a familiar slogan: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

The guy in the MAGA hat, who asked that I call him “Sam,” told me he was unlikely to vote for any Democrat in 2020, but that he’d come out with a friend who was “obsessed” with Gabbard. I mentioned that I was surprised to find a MAGA hat at a Democratic debate party, and a middle-aged man from Long Island laughed at the sentiment. “I think you’ll find a lot of invisible MAGA hats here,” he said, adding that he was a Trump supporter as well.

Attendees were hesitant to speak with me, but they didn’t seem like paranoid conspiracists — just garden-variety nationalists. Almost everyone I talked to who had come for the watch party described themselves as either a current or a disaffected Trump supporter, and over the course of the night I encountered about as many “invisible MAGA hats” as I did plastic leis.

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Listen to Tulsi Gabbard talk about war, and you will hear about wasteful government spending. You will hear about post-traumatic stress disorder, the VA’s failures, and the tolls extracted from the bodies of American soldiers. You will hear about the cost of our bombs, and how they help to sow the seeds of terrorism around the world. You are unlikely to hear, however, about suffering abroad. You are unlikely to hear about the victims of imperialism, international solidarity, or the essential right of non-Americans to freedom, material security, or collective self-determination. Tulsi Gabbard rarely claims to oppose imperialism on principle — she merely pits herself against wars that don’t serve “legitimate” national security interests. Rather than empathy for noncitizens, her anti-war posture takes root in patriotic isolationism and the primacy of the state. It is deeply similar to Trump’s anti-war rhetoric from 2016 and thoroughly compatible with his nationalist vision.

This lack of solidarity with the plight of noncitizens might be why Gabbard has found herself at home with strongmen like nationalist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and willing to align with horrendous figures like Assad and Sisi against “terrorism” abroad. It might also explain all the Trump supporters I found at her Williamsburg watch party. “We have to have strong borders,” a young woman in a vibrant, Coachella-style flower crown told me, elaborating that she supported Gabbard because Trump had failed to deliver on the wall. “America first.”

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Her debate performance won accolades from crypto-fascist luminaries like Tucker Carlson, Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and Paul Joseph Watson, and she dominated a post-debate Drudge Report poll by a 3-to-1 margin (with some help from trolls on 4chan and Reddit), speaking to Breitbart about it almost immediately afterwards.

Gabbard has also found fans among some of the internet’s most explicitly racist bastions of Trump support. During the debate, someone on /pol/—4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” discussion board, known for its density of racist, sexist, and neo-Nazi beliefs — commented that “Tulsi Gabbard is the only person on that stage with a soul.”

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Even self-professed support from outright fascists doesn’t mean that Gabbard herself is necessarily right-wing, and it certainly doesn’t imply as much about all of her supporters. But it lends credence to alarm bells sounding against her coziness with foreign dictators, former opposition to LGBTQ rights, and “America First” anti-war posturing.

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Departing the debate party, I ran into “Sam” outside the bar — the lonely MAGA hat in a sea of invisible comrades. This time he was with his “Tulsi-obsessed” buddy, a stocky young man in a Lacoste polo who asked to go by “Tom.”

When asked if he used to be a Trump supporter, he told me,“I was, but now I’m on the fence, the big beautiful fence. . . . If its Trump vs. Tulsi, I’m voting Tulsi. If its Trump vs. any of these other whack jobs, I’m voting Trump.”

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