Clinton, Gabbard, and the frenemy left
By: Stan Goff
Tags: Hillary Clinton, Tulsi Gabbard, Frenemy Left, Cults, Poltics

There are Russians in your underwear.

Anyone who knows me or has read anything I’ve written on the subject knows that I am no fan of Hillary Clinton — warmonger, coup-maker, defender of Wall Street. Her claim that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian mole is absurd, but understandable, as we shall see. I am also no fan of Tulsi Gabbard. Why?

First, on a personal level, my career in the Army formed in me a visceral dislike for all but a very few military officers. This is a plus for those armchair strategists who think she is uniquely positioned to weaponize her triple-identity as woman, POC, and veteran, and everything else is selected by, arranged for, and conformed to that delusion.

I have a second personal dislike for her based on something I can’t quite articulate, but its an aura of sly performativity to which life among careerists has sensitized my sonar.

My political dislike of Gabbard is based on my belief that she’s making it up as she goes along — fueled by privilege and the hubris of youth — and that her first widespread appearance, supporting Sanders in 2016, did in some respects weaponize her identities, even if not by design.

Her anemometer was working well then, and she gained mad popularity among quite a few (strangely, mostly) men. I’m still trying to figure that out. But once she started being vetted, particularly on the left, some disturbing facts and tendencies began to appear. Her political history has been highly opportunistic. She had homophobic positions on policy. She was associated with a very creepy cult for some time. And she has ties to Hindu nationalism, i.e., the neofascist Prime Minister Narendra Modi — architect of the ongoing apocalypse in Kashmir.

So my objections to Gabbard are twofold — I don’t like or trust her, and she is a walking political liability waiting to explode. I’m glad she’s running against Bernie.

All that said, however, what got her into hot water here was an ill-advised, unilateral 2017 confab with the Syrian dictator, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. her little junket to Damascus was presumptuous and ill-advised, but for every phenomenon there are multiple interpretive frameworks.

One of those frameworks in the background of Tulsi’s Syrian Adventure was the Russia lunacy being promoted through the official and unofficial organs of the Democratic Party in their vain strategy to unseat Donald Trump by reigniting the Cold War. This latter narrative still has some people by the hypothalmus as effectively as Scientology, so Gabbard equals Assad equals Russia — The Enemy. This is the Clinton/DNC tale. It worked while it did, before Donald Trump rubbed their noses in it, because there is an element of truth in it — which all effective lies have.

Untangling Clinton-Gabbard, then, has to be an exercise in nuance and context that is absent in the devotion of both Hillary-bots and Tulsi-bots — species who are losing ground in today’s political ecology, the current dust-up notwithstanding.

Three days ago, David Duke endorsed Gabbard, which does not mean Gabbard supports David Duke, but which does speak to the kinds of spaces that are created (and then filled in) with cut-and-paste ideologies like Gabbard’s. Any one of us who has actually done political organizing has met, over the course of organizing, met many, many declared “allies” who are . . . problematic. That’s modern deracination mixed well with mental illness.

Gabbard’s is not a coherent world view. She’s kind of a syncretic mess of “progressive” isolationism, crackpot philosophy, and military epistemology. She reminds me of Lyndon LaRouche’s devotees in this respect. But she is demonstrably not a “Russian agent.” I was a critical ideological supporter of Hugo Chavez, but that didn’t mean I was receiving funds from Venezuela or coordinating my message with an agent handler.

“Russia” has become a conceptual screen upon which we can each project our own fears. Enter Hillary Clinton, like the reanimated undead. Lashing the fallen beast though a swarm of flies. The undead flogs the dead. Gabbard is a Russian agent, and not only Tulsi Gabbard, but Jill Stein! I mean, really?

I wonder if Hillary Clinton, who by all accounts is very intelligent even if she is an amoral creature, really believes deep down that her recent Russophobic rebukes will do more than momentarily agitate her shrunken but diehard brigade of bots. This seems like just another Hail Mary by a desperate Democratic Party leadership clique that sees the foundation of its house washing away. What interests me today though is an apparent bloc of Tulsi-bros (who will read this and have petit mal seizures).

My completely unscientific and subjective impression, based on what I see circulating across Facebook and Twitter, is that the vast majority of Tulsi groupies are men. They’ve spun out on an oil slick of outrage every time I’ve written anything critical of their idol. Based on this admittedly small sample, I have provisionally concluded that the subset of the left is drawn to Gabbard, apart from the armchair strategists who are on about the triple-identity thing, are what I call the frenemy faction of the left. They are, in fact, often also apologists for Russian actions, for Vladimir Putin, and even for Bashar al-Assad.

Frenemy-bros are those people who are still on the track I was on for about a year when I was still a member of the Communist Party USA back in the 1990s. They say no one is more acutely aware of those defects in others than those who once shared the same defects, so mea culpa. The basic formula is twofold: first, the primary contradiction in the world is US imperialism; second, if US imperialism is The Enemy, then any force that opposes it for any reason becomes our friend . . . the frenemy.

Ergo, Assad opposes the US (and “the US is on a regime change mission in Syria” — it never was!), so Assad is a Good Guy, because Assad opposes the US, the Bad Guy. If Russia opposes the US, then Russia is the Good Guy. If China opposes the US, then China is the Good Guy. Which is an elegant and thoroughly misguided approach, a post-Stalinist one.

Anyone not initiated into the left’s battles in bubbles will find this strange, but it is a thing, and one that has led a number of lefties down the garden path of conspiracism, from 9–11 truthers to claiming the brutal actions of the Assad regime are a series of highly sophisticated false flag ops. They conform their ontology to support the rightness of their convictions. Russia is a democratic beacon, a fact concealed by fake news. The plight of the Uyghurs is a colossal hoax. Assad’s chemical weapons attacks were actually a frame-up. This was the bullshit that captured Gabbard’s fevered imagination and convinced her that visiting Assad would be a brilliantly edgy thing to do.

I’m not saying that this means Gabbard herself is in this camp. She’s merely their strange attractor. Gabbard herself is drawn to aspects of this tendency for the same reasons she and her ex husband were sucked into a homophobic Hare Krishna cult led by a sketchy character named Chris Butler aka “Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa,” founder of the “Science and Identity Foundation,” living to this day in his opulent Hawaii mansion. Gabbard maintained a connection to Butler at least until 2015, when she sent him a video birthday greeting for his fiftieth. Gabbard’s current husband, Abraham Williams, grew up in a family with close ties to Butler.

Gabbard doesn’t need to be a Russian asset, as the reanimated Clinton claims, to be problematic. To me, she smells of rank opportunism. She’s someone who is always on the lookout for the next wave to ride. Bernie was 2016, and that was a good one. This time? Not so much.

What’s remarkable is how many so-called progressive dudebros have adopted her.

When you itemize Gabbard’s public positions on policy in general, she was a standard Democrat, not even listed among the members of the Progressive Caucus. Her critical vote scorecard from Progressive Punch in 2016 was an F, rating her 136th overall, between Dwight Evans (PA) and Mark Veasey (TX). She has carried water for billionaire uber-Zionist casino magnate, and Trump-buddy Sheldon Adelson. And she loves to post pictures of herself in her Army uniform, an opportunistic cash-out of her veteran status which ought to trouble anti-militarists.

(When I see people promoting themselves with that uniform, it makes me want to eat broken glass. Her anti-imperialism hasn’t provoked her to resign her commission, has it?)

Perhaps more troubling than her essentially centrist politics and her cozy relationship with Adelson, however, is her selective if vicious Islamophobia and her willingness to associate with anti-immigration reactionaries. When sharing the stage with the execrable Islamophobe and nitwit Bill Maher, she dressed down then-President Obama for not calling “violent extremism” “Islamic extremism,” adding that we have to “identify our enemy to defeat them.” Once a strong supporter of drone attacks, Gabbard has essentially endorsed Russian and Assadist bombing in Syria, because they are ostensibly targeting ISIS.

If one opposes militarism, then one ought to oppose Russian and Assadist militarism as well. Trump’s latest stunt there was pulling US troops who were human shields for the Kurds in Syria against the Turks who want nothing less than extermination; and this has worked to the benefit of Assad, but I suspect Trump’s motive were more pecuniary — something to do with hotel properties in Istanbul. I support withdrawing all US troops from around the world, but there are serious unforeseen consequences if there’s no plan to phase the withdrawals. So this is not to advocate for US military intervention anywhere, ever.

Nor am I tapping into the insane post-Cold War Russophobia of DNC toadies like MSNBC, but opposing conspiracy theories does not mean calling Putin and company a legion of angels.

Leftist apologists for Putin/Assad often forget that it was Assad’s commitment to neoliberal “reforms” that set up the social crisis that Assad’s own government then escalated into a full-blown civil war. Gabbard is not pro-Assad, she is an isolationist with latent Zionist tendencies.

During the bloodthirsty seven-week Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014, Gabbard co-sponsored a completely dishonest Congressional Resolution stating Israel has restrained itself and attacked only “terrorist” targets during that campaign. Is this inconsistent with her tacit support of the Assad regime? No, because — as I suggested earlier — Gabbard’s ideology is an incoherent reappropriation of anti-imperialism, her military/martial arts episteme, and Hindutva nationalism. She occupies a very slippery terrain where disaggregated bits of left and right tossed into a salad the way LaRouchites do.

When Donald Trump began appointing Generals to cabinet positions, Gabbard came to his support, calling opposition to Trump’s Strangelovian clambake of uniformed lumpen-intelligentsia nominees “discrimination against veterans,” and claiming that military people are “far more deeply personally committed to upholding and protecting our democracy than their critics.” Really? Is that what I was doing between 1970 and 1996? Protecting democracy? Because it sure felt like I was making war on poor people.

Gabbard has refused to support a ban on assault weapons. She supported Trump’s early anti-immigration initiatives. And her connections to her own father’s friends and staff — who were at the forefront of conservative campaigns against what she herself in 2004 called “homosexual extremists” (people who wanted to get married) — remain firmly in place. Google “Devon Bull.” In 2014, she shielded the violent, right-wing, and Islamophobic BJP in India from Congressional review. The thing about Gabbard is, she adapts. She saw the Sanders wave, and she started paddling her board.

She now says she opposes drone strikes and supports marriage equality. Eoin Higgins, who has followed Gabbard for some time, says that “jettisoning political beliefs that are no longer useful in her quest for power” is Gabbard’s MO. That’s why she has repeatedly scrubbed her past.

Five of Gabbard’s nine biggest 2014 Congressional campaign contributors were major contributors to her father, a right-wing Republican who converted to right-wing Democrat, these conversions are a family tradition. Gabbard was home-schooled by her Republican parents.

From the point of view of trustworthiness, she gets an F On foreign policy, her Islamophobia, connections to the BJP, her disrespect for the civilian control of the military, and support of hard core Zionists loses. On judgement — let’s talk Syria trip — big F. On vulnerability during an election? Fuggetaboutit. She’s never broken out of the single digits. She’s toast. So why am I going on about it? Hillary Clinton started it this time with her Russian mole shit.

As to the recent Clinton attacks — and here is where we have more than one order of complexity — they are worthy of ridicule, because the whole Russians in your underwear thing is worthy of ridicule. But Gabbard gave them the stick to beat her. It was a fake narrative, but there was an opposite fake narrative — the frenemies narrative — and she was drawn into that current, where her Tulsi-bros have drawn the last lines in a battle that’s already lost.