2020 Democratic presidential candidate and former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard will speak at this year’s annual Ronald Reagan Dinner hosted by the far-right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
A CPAC spokesperson told the conservative publication the Washington Examiner that it will be an “extraordinary event” to have a Democrat speak at the dinner.
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But while Gabbard did represent Hawaii as a Democrat and also ran for president as one, she has increasingly moved to the right.
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Lately, she’s been touting deeply Republican rhetoric, blasting Biden for playing “identity politics” in his commitment to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court and calling critics of anti-LGBTQ conservative podcaster Joe Rogan “zealots of wokeism.”
I get the feeling some people are using @joerogan's COVID interview as a pretext to silence his voice because he's not woke. Zealots of wokeism try to censor voices who don't agree with theirs, because they fear the absurdity and weakness of their positions will be exposed.
— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) February 1, 2022
Biden chose Harris as his VP because of the color of her skin and sex—not qualification. She's been a disaster. Now he promises to choose Supreme Court nominee on the same criteria. Identity politics is destroying our country.
— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) January 31, 2022
And as Rolling Stone put it, the major goal of the CPAC dinner is to increase “buzz for the star of the circus, former President Donald Trump,” who Gabbard once called “unfit to serve.” She has since become a loud and vocal critic of the Biden-Harris Administration.
Gabbard also has a long anti-LGBTQ past.
Before she was elected to Congress, she worked for one of her father’s anti-LGBTQ organizations, the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, which she later cited as a positive experience when she ran for the state legislature in 2002.
When asked about this, she said that she personally never supported conversion therapy and in early 2019 she made a video apologizing for her anti-LGBTQ past.
She said that her views had changed, but she was still accusing Democrats of “fomenting religious bigotry” for saying that Christian judges should not impose their religious beliefs on others.
During her presidential campaign, Gabbard refused to respond to an HRC questionnaire on LGBTQ issues, which all the other major Democratic candidates responded to.
And in December 2020, she introduced legislation that would ban transgender girls and women from participating in sports as their gender.
The bill sought to amend Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972 to make it illegal for sports programs “to permit a person whose biological sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.”
The theme of the CPAC conference is “Awake Not Woke.” The group’s chairman Matt Shlapp told Fox News, “I’m expecting CPAC Florida to be a packed house because America is experiencing a great Un-Wokening.”
The conference will reportedly include speeches with titles such as “Obamacare Still Kills,” “Put Him To Bed, Lock Her Up and Send Her to the Border,” and “Fire Fauci.”
Other conference speakers will include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), as well as Trump himself.
