Who Is Tulsi Gabbard?

My VIP for this week is Tulsi Gabbard, former Democrat and Independent and now Republican. She is also President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the director of national intelligence. According to Tyler O’Neil at The Daily Signal, Gabbard’s selection has sent “shockwaves through the political establishment.” O’Neil described Gabbard’s qualifications. 

Tulsi Gabbard, a fearless truth-teller who found herself outside the Democratic Party because she wasn’t afraid to buck the Left’s narratives, will be taking the reins at the very intelligence community she herself has loudly condemned.

A veteran and active-duty Army reservist, Gabbard has loudly criticized the censorship-industrial complex and has taken aim at the Left’s sacred cows. A former Democrat who served in the House of Representatives from 2013 to 2021 and who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Gabbard has since joined the Republican Party and backed Trump, in part due to her disgust over the way government agencies and Big Tech censored her, Trump, and conservatives.

Trump announced Wednesday that he will tap her as director of national intelligence.

“I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our intelligence community, championing our constitutional rights, and securing peace through strength,” the president-elect said in a statement. “Tulsi will make us all proud!”

Trump noted Gabbard’s three deployments to war zones in the Middle East and Africa, her rejection of the Democratic Party, and her role as co-chair on his transition team.

“She puts country before party and approaches every issue, domestic and foreign, based on ensuring the safety, security, and freedom of the American people,” he said of Gabbard.

Gabbard’s emphasis on freedom, and free speech in particular, stands out. She has repeatedly condemned Big Tech censorship, even encouraging then-President Donald Trump to take action against the protection from liability that social media companies enjoy under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. She had previously spoken out after Google censored her ds ahead of a Democratic primary debate in 2020.

In her September speech endorsing Trump, she hailed the Republican as “our best hope” to “stop the censorship of free speech in America.”

She said she never imagined that she would live in an America where “we couldn’t criticize our own government for fear of them labeling us as a domestic terrorist, but this is the country that we live in.”

“The very next day after I did an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News and I talked about how dangerous [Vice President] Kamala Harris would be as our president and commander in chief, I was added to a secret domestic terror watchlist called ‘Quiet Skies,’” Gabbard noted at the time.

O’Neil shared more information about Tulsi Gabbard that you can find at this site. I like Tulsi Gabbard and have followed her at least since she was a Democrat Party candidate for President of the United States. She made a lot of sense then, and she still makes a lot of sense.