The British Hard Left Embraces . . . Tulsi Gabbard?
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A member of the Cult of Corbyn in good standing (involved in the local Momentum exec) this past weekend surprised me by coming out in favour of Tulsi Gabbard, which led to the following hilarious exchange (names obscured to protect the guilty):
The contributor obscured in red is the member who authored the rambling motion on Venezuela that I discussed here.
Admittedly, it was probably naive of me to hope that these comrades in the Labour Party would have paused for a moment to consider my observations, what with my being an actual American who votes in these things, with a Ph.D. in the relevant field, and enough of the left to work my ass off for the local branch of the Corbyn International. But I wasn’t expecting this knee-jerk defense of Gabbard. Surely, in a well stocked field of 20, the crazies out here would gravitate to someone with serious left-wing credentials (in addition to Sanders, of course, whom they revere nearly as much as the saviour himself), and not . . . Gabbard?
When one connects the dots, it does make a bit more sense. It has nothing to do with domestic politics. Among several positions that would endear her to the loony left in the UK, Gabbard is pro-Assad, and disputes that the al-Assad regime was responsible for using chemical weapons (the author of the Venezuela motion, incidentally, firmly believes the conspiracy theories around the White Helmets in Syria).
In the ecosystem of the crazy left in Britain, there are a handful of sources that are accepted as holy writ. Owen Jones, when he hasn’t strayed. Aaron Bastani, while masquerading as a disruptive public intellectual, is really just a predictable shill for Corbyn. The Skwakbox. And . . . The Canary, which has been glowing in its coverage of Gabbard.
So, it makes sense. I’m guessing that Gabbard has not achieved the same level of support in the US among the harder left (what passes as a hard left in the US is distinctly different than out here, which might be a post some day), but then she does dare to challenge Saint Bernie of Vermont. If anybody contemplated the same to the one true saviour in Britain, even if that is purely imagined by the conspiratorially-minded, then the left will turn on them in a heartbeat.
