Steve Kahl
Appearances
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
I said I'm a school of realism. I think that's not going to happen.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
That is a charge that's been leveled against her. She's a favorite of the Russians. She once sued Hillary Clinton for $50 million for saying something along those lines.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
I think that goes too far, but she has expressed sympathy for... Putin's dilemma.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
And for dictators like Bashar al-Assad, the former dictator of Syria.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
She has called for a pardon for Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed illegal surveillance of Americans. You've celebrated Snowden as, quote, brave whistleblower. So she sounds more like a progressive politician sometimes than a establishment spy chief. And I think she would say that's kind of the point. We need a different perspective on top of the American intelligence system.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
Well, she grew up in Hawaii in somewhat unusual circumstances. Her parents were members of a religious community called the Science of Identity Foundation, which was derived from the Hare Krishna branch of sort of meditation and yoga teaching.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
And the community that her parents belonged to and that she had considerable exposure to as a child was led by a charismatic guru named Chris Butler, who was a former surfer and college dropout who had lived on the streets as a Hare Krishna follower, but then started his own community.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
So one of Chris Butler's most adamant views, at least in the 80s and 90s, was an opposition to homosexuality, which he regarded as an abomination, but also to the establishment of rights for gay and lesbian couples. And as a teenager, Tulsi Gabbard found herself on the streets of Honolulu protesting alongside her parents against the establishment of gay marriage rights in Hawaii.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
And it was in that time when she was very young, I think just 20 or 21 years old, that she and her father simultaneously ran for public office in Hawaii. She was elected to the state legislature and her father was elected as a city councilman initially. So she was in politics. But she decided after 9-11 that she wanted to join the military.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
And she has described this experience of war as transformational in her outlook on the American government, on American power.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
She did eventually come back to politics after establishing her military career as a part-time reservist, and she found an opening first on the Honolulu City Council, and then in 2012, a seat in Congress, one of the four that Hawaii has opened up.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
She arrived in Washington, and Nancy Pelosi took her under control. her wing. She was seen as maybe the next Obama, another Hawaiian politician, a woman of color, military career, what's not to like, good speaker, telegenic. Come on, man. And then very quickly, as these things go in Washington, it kind of started to come apart.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
Partly, she didn't play the game, and she started to pick fights with the leaders of her party, including Barack Obama, who she called out for not being sufficiently tough on Islamic terrorism.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
So, by the time the 2016 presidential cycle arrived, She was starting to drift away from the party that had embraced her. What you can see by 2016 is the beginnings of what some people have called the horseshoe shape of American political populism, where the farther you go to the left, the closer you get to the MAGA right.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
By 2019, she's still a Democrat, and she can be critical of Donald Trump in public.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
She was already part of the MAGA conversation. She knew Tucker Carlson went on his show on Fox News, and she won praise from some ardent Trump supporters. in the manosphere and podcasting landscape and so forth. And so she, in 2022, she left the party to become an independent.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
And in 2024, She campaigned with Donald Trump and then she endorsed him.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
And then finally, toward the end of the campaign, she announced that she was becoming a Republican.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
Well, you know, it really is a puzzle because Donald Trump could have nominated her to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs or something, and everyone would have said, oh, what an innovative choice, and she would have gotten confirmed with no difficulty. Instead, he named her the top spy of the U.S. system. Now, She has no experience of these bureaucracies.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
She has not been an intelligence analyst or a synthesizer of complicated information. Indeed, a lot of her takes over the years on the foreign policy questions that she was most interested in were a bit garbled or a bit puzzling in different ways. She sometimes aligned herself with misinformation and propaganda that was coming out of Russia or serious dictatorships.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
she seemed kind of an uncritical thinker. She clearly had strong policy views, but she would select facts as if she was just cruising the internet and making her arguments out of what she found. And so it left me initially, as I was working on her biography, kind of puzzled, like, why this job? But the answer reveals itself in her own speaking and writing and her own convictions.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
And she brought some of this even to her confirmation hearing.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
is attracted to her leadership and why she's aligned with Donald Trump's agenda in the intelligence community, which is that her first job includes carrying out two executive orders that the president signed fairly early on that basically designate the director of national intelligence for a period of a couple or three months to conduct a review of people who are disloyal and to take disciplinary action against them, people who had
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
quote-unquote weaponized intelligence in the previous administration or who were otherwise unreliable politically. And so she's going to lead that review. And what you can say is that she's motivated to do it. She thinks there is a really deep-seated problem in the intelligence communities that she will now have the power to do something about.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
Well, she never appeared to regard Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the United States. She tended to express herself indirectly about this by criticizing the democratic elites for demonizing Putin. And she would mock them for calling him the new Hitler. And she blamed NATO for provoking Putin.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
So in that sense, she was aligned with President Trump's assessments of Putin as someone he could do business with, as someone he should try to do business with. You know, perhaps there are people around President Trump who see grand strategy in this situation. They might say that U.S.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
policy has driven Russia and China closely together, complicating America's great power position, and that the U.S. has to pull one of those two away, and Russia is the better choice. That seems to be the hypothesis that has brought hawks and non-interventionists together in this early period of the Trump administration. But for Tulsi Gabbard, I don't hear anything on the chessboard like that.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
This was like the Donald Trump show, and he was going to throw red meat to the people who love him anyway.
Today, Explained
Vatever you vant, Vladimir
I think she just has an instinct that the elites have gotten it all wrong and that Vladimir Putin has been unfairly maligned.