Tulsi Gabbard — Former Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii and DNC vice chair who served in the US military for many years, reaching Lieutenant Colonel, with deployments to Iraq, Kuwait, and East Africa. Now an independent and author of the book 'For Love of Country.'
The gist
Lex Fridman talks with Tulsi Gabbard about her combat-deployment experiences and the human and taxpayer costs of war she witnessed firsthand. She lays out her philosophy on when war is justified, critiques US regime-change wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and argues for diplomacy in Ukraine and Gaza. A central thread is the power of the military-industrial complex and the 'national security state' to smear voices of peace, exemplified by accusations that she is a Putin asset. They also discuss the dangers of nuclear war, the anti-TikTok bill as a free-speech threat, and her reasons for leaving the Democratic Party, before closing on her Hindu faith.
Big reveals
- Gabbard says KBR/Halliburton charged taxpayers roughly $35 per head per meal four times a day in Iraq while importing workers from Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines who were paid about $500 a month.
- She describes how soldiers from Hawaii, Samoa, and Guam built human relationships with local Iraqis (pointing muzzles skyward, sharing tea, throwing shakas), which her medical unit saw lead to a downward shift in casualties.
- Gabbard claims peace efforts that began weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine were thwarted by the Biden-Harris administration and other Western powers, costing many lives.
- She traces the 'Putin asset' narrative to an NBC News hit piece published the hour she announced her 2019 candidacy, later escalated when Hillary Clinton said on a podcast 'the Russians are grooming her.'
- She argues the anti-TikTok bill does not name TikTok and instead gives the executive branch unilateral power to designate foreign adversaries and ban platforms, potentially targeting figures like Elon Musk and X.
- Gabbard warns the bill includes a provision where using a VPN to access a banned platform could create legal problems, implying a surveillance component she calls a 'toxic onion.'
- She explains she resigned as DNC vice chair in 2016 because chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was tilting the primary toward Hillary Clinton, and endorsed Bernie Sanders as a non-interventionist alternative.
- Gabbard says she left the Democratic Party because it has become 'opposed to freedom,' controlled by an 'elitist cabal of war mongers' pushing a 'woke agenda.'
Things worth remembering
- Gabbard's first daily task during her 2005 Iraq deployment was reading a list, name by name, of every combat-related injury across the US military to check on her ~3,000 Hawaii National Guard soldiers.
- She notes traumatic brain injury was barely discussed at the time, so many soldiers had 'invisible wounds' that went unrecognized.
- She supported the initial post-9/11 mission targeting Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan but says focus was diverted to the Iraq regime-change war waged on false pretenses.
- Gabbard's most recent deployment was in 2021 to East Africa and Somalia, where she encountered the Islamist terrorist group al-Shabaab.
- She cites the Cuban Missile Crisis, where JFK secretly communicated with Khrushchev around military commanders urging action, as a model for leader-to-leader diplomacy.
- She criticizes a New York City emergency-management nuclear-attack PSA whose advice was essentially 'get inside, stay inside, stay tuned,' ending with 'we've got this.'
- She references the documentary 'The Man Who Saved the World' about a mid-level Soviet officer who declined to launch nuclear missiles during a false radar reading.
- Gabbard notes the US president gets roughly six minutes after an early-warning alert to decide whether to launch a nuclear counterstrike.
- She explains Hinduism is monotheistic—one God known by many names—and non-sectarian, and that she grew up with bedtime stories from both the Bhagavad Gita and the New Testament.
- The episode closes with Lex reading from Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address warning against the military-industrial complex.
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For Love of Country
Tulsi Gabbard
“now she's the author of a new book called for love of country this is Lex Freedman podcast” — Lex Fridman 00:00:30Find it on Amazon