Why are Democrats Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard backing Donald Trump?

For the same reason that the right-leaning figures J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, and even a group like the Libertarian Party are: They are all dissidents, something that in this moment goes beyond mere left and right.

But who, or what, are they dissenting from?

In the 2024 presidential election, you have the clear establishment choice in Democrat Kamala Harris.

Let me be clear what I mean by “establishment”: Those who control the narratives and parameters of the Democratic mainstream, who dominate and manipulate legacy media for their own gain, and who ensure that permanent war, central planning, corporatism, and identity politics will continue to define their party. The people who gave us the Clintons, the Obamas, and the Bidens, and who ward off any dissidents to their left, whether it was Bernie Sanders in 2016 or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and pro-Palestinian voices today. This establishment is also bipartisan, in that it now includes so many of the Bush-Cheney era Republicans, who see a better neoconservative future—their forever non-negotiable reason for existence—in Kamala Harris than they do her Republican opponent.

They will spy on citizens, censor speech, weaponize government, and demolish any democratic or constitutional norms to retain power.

This establishment doesn’t control the Deep State; they are the Deep State.

In this election, it is also clear that the dissident candidate, or major disrupter, is Donald Trump. You don’t have to like or agree with everything he has said or done to recognize that since the moment he descended down that escalator nearly a decade ago, Trump has completely turned American politics on its head.

If the Republican establishment’s presidential game plan was once to run George W. Bush–style candidates for eternity, as John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 certainly seemed to indicate, Trump demolished that business model in 2016, blasting the Iraq war that had become so central to Republican identity—something would-be frontrunner Jeb Bush himself had to endure. Many neoconservatives backed the Democrat Hillary Clinton that year just as they support Harris now, banished from a party they once considered their birthright. The few remaining, like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, challenged Trump head-on, lost their congressional seats, and became de facto Democrats. Some even attempted a last-ditch effort at a neocon coup through the former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. This failed embarrassingly.

Now, the old Republican establishment and current Democratic establishment are essentially one, and Kamala Harris is their champion. 

They have ten weeks to prevail.

Trump is flawed, and that’s being generous. But he is also the greatest threat to the bipartisan, entrenched establishment of this country.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tried to run as a Democrat this election, but his party refused him. When he was getting poll numbers north of 20 percent, they still refused to hold a primary. Kennedy went Independent and got the astronomical number of petition signers required to be on state ballots. So Democrats sued him. Before dropping out of the race, he asked to speak with Trump and Harris. Harris refused.

He was the most high profile non–White House Democrat running; he exposed in real time how deeply undemocratic his party is. As a liberal of old, his antiwar views and free speech concerns ran counter to the current neocon-tinged and increasingly authoritarian Democratic Party.

So much so that those old liberal views—stances that would have been typical of most anti-Bush Democrats 20 years ago—now puts Kennedy on the right. Many conventional Democrats today will tell you that they see him as a right-winger, even before he aligned with Trump.

And on those issues and others, that he said he discussed with Trump and said that they agree, Kennedy now takes a stance with Trump against an establishment that wants nothing to do with him and his traditional liberalism.

The same is true of the former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard. In 2016, Gabbard was the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, who resigned her post to back then dissident Democratic presidential candidate, who, according to former DNC Chair Donna Brazile, had the primary rigged against him by the eventual nominee Hillary Clinton. Gabbard would run for the Democratic presidential nomination herself in 2020 on war and peace issues, where she decimated fellow candidate Kamala Harris on her controversial record as California’s attorney general. Harris left that race soon after.

Another liberal of old, her anti-interventionist and pro-civil liberties views have made Gabbard a mainstay in conservative and independent media. After endorsing Trump in late August, she said, “I believe his first task will be to walk us back from the brink of war,” referring to the tense, U.S.-fueled conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

“We can’t live free as long as we have a government that is retaliating against its political opponents, that is undermining our civil liberties, weaponizing our very institutions against those they deem as a threat,” Gabbard said in her endorsement. “We as Americans must stand together to reject this anti-freedom culture of political retaliation and abuse of power.”

She’s right. Trump abused his power, too, while in office. But it was nothing like the great institutional power the Democrats now wield and deploy at whim with no accountability or repercussions.

Before her endorsement of Trump, it was reported that Gabbard had been put on a TSA watchlist.

Like Kennedy, Gabbard understands the real threat to democracy is the party constantly warning about threats to democracy. Other left dissidents in this election like the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the independent candidate Cornel West are not endorsing Trump, but do have sympathy with Kennedy and Gabbard in their critiques of the current regime.

The number of high profile dissidents backing Trump span the ideological spectrum, both Left to right, but also within just the right. Trump’s vice presidential choice, Senator J.D. Vance, represents the national conservative wing of the GOP, while the former candidate and “America First” advocate Vivek Ramaswamy and the Libertarian Party itself, which has coordinated with Trump’s campaign, cover the more libertarian bases. Trump, Kennedy and Ramaswamy all even spoke at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention.

Arguably Trump’s greatest non-politician ally is also the greatest dissident voice on the contemporary Right and even more so after getting kicked off Fox News, the pundit Tucker Carlson.

What these figures represent under the rubric of Trump is not undying loyalty to the man, and most of them have been clear on that front. In his endorsement, Kennedy said he may even “furiously” disagree with Trump publicly during the span of this election.

But each seems to understand the importance of a dissident coalition that might match and thwart the institutional power of the Democratic party and the threat it has become to peace and our most basic liberties. Democrats like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are supporting the Republican presidential nominee this year because they see the real problem of limitless power held by those in power, something far beyond the mere categories of Republican and Democrat.

As of this writing, Kamala Harris has done only a single soft interview with CNN, but every pro-Trump figure I have mentioned here has done many, sounding the alarm.

They now dissent in the most impactful way possible from a wholly undemocratic regime that unironically calls itself Democratic, that seeks to undermine and upheave America as we have known it.

What American wants that?

The most important sentence in the Nayib Bukele profile and interview in TIME magazine is a simple question to the interviewer: “How can I ask the Salvadoran people, who often have modest meals like beans and tortillas for dinner, to pay taxes to provide meat and chicken to prisoners who have killed their family members?” 

Walk the streets and ask around if this sentiment makes sense. If you pay taxes, do you think the money should go to the benefit of those who are, legally and morally, inferior to you? The question itself is absurd, but the modern liberal worldview does not allow such stark hierarchy. Are citizens better than illegal aliens? Are normal law-abiding people better than those who break laws? Do they all deserve the same treatment, under the vague and increasingly unjust umbrella of “human rights,” just because they share the happy accident of a genetic and chromosomal similarity with a fellow ape?

These are not hypotheticals. The postwar world is more than anything defined by the vague superstructure of the human rights complex. Its organs are above democratic mandates. They are also above politics itself. Wars don’t end as they used to, because wars are not fought as they were prior to the Second World War. Wars that end—Grozny, Sri Lanka—don’t follow postwar norms of conduct. States that disregard human rights and NGOs deter mass migration, as evident recently by Saudi Arabia going as far as shooting illegals instead of inviting them. The difference is most stark in the realm of crime and disorder. 

In Bukele’s case, it is a positive change for El Salvador. As the TIME reported, 

At 43, he has remade a nation that was once the world’s murder capital, turning it into a country safer than Canada, according to Salvadoran government data. Bukele’s policy of mano dura—iron fist—drove an aggressive crackdown on vicious gangs that has jailed 81,000 people and led to a precipitous drop in homicides. After decades of violence, fear, and extortion, citizens can move freely in former gang-controlled “red zones,” lounge in parks, and go out at night. El Salvador now markets itself as the “land of surf, volcanoes, and coffee,” hosts international events like the Miss Universe pageant, and draws tourists and cryptocurrency enthusiasts to coastal enclaves like “Bitcoin Beach.” The transformation helped Bukele cruise to re-election earlier this year; his approval rating these days tops 90% according to the latest CID Gallup poll.

And for that, he was duly chastised by the U.S. government, with Kamala Harris tweeting, “We have deep concerns about El Salvador’s democracy.” Bukele ignored all that, and fought the drug cartels and criminals in a manner similar to a prewar, pre-NGOcracy world. As Bukele’s security minister himself mentioned, his administration kicked out the NGOs and then “studied the enemy, like in any war,” with handbooks cataloging gang tattoos, graffiti, and slang to identify suspects’ affiliations. “There are many priests…but few are exorcists.” 

These are not new, perception-altering philosophical insights. Bukele explains his “philosopher king” outlook about the greater ethics of punitive deterrence: “We don’t put them in jail to punish them. We put them in jail to get them off the street. They can’t be on the streets. They cannot be in the community besieging their neighbors. We catch them and remove them from society by putting them in a cell.”

A very simple logic. George Savile, the First Marquess of Halifax, would have agreed: “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.” The restoration of order by a legitimate leader isn’t “authoritarian”; it is in fact the most basic function of statesmanship that would have been recognized by anyone in the preceding 6,000 years of human governance and history. One reason among others why we have a crisis of legitimacy and the longing for strongmen in our times is that men have forgotten that basic governing norm because liberals have convinced themselves they are not bound by the laws of nature and that history itself has ended. They have convinced themselves that arbitrarily defined “rights” on the basis of shared humanity trump governing compacts or peace. 

To Bukele’s credit, he is bringing the “great man theory” of history back by exercising his agency and standing opposed to structural unaccountable forces. 

Sacramento, California — 

California lawmakers approved a host of proposals this week aiming to regulate the artificial intelligence industry, combat deepfakes and protect workers from exploitation by the rapidly evolving technology.

The California Legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, is voting on hundreds of bills during its final week of the session to send to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. Their deadline is Saturday.

The Democratic governor has until Sept. 30 to sign the proposals, veto them or let them become law without his signature. Newsom signaled in July he will sign a proposal to crack down on election deepfakes but has not weighed in on other legislation.

He warned earlier this summer that overregulation could hurt the homegrown industry. In recent years, he often has cited the state’s budget troubles when rejecting legislation that he would otherwise support.

Here is a look at some of the AI bills lawmakers approved this year.

Combating deepfakes

Citing concerns over how AI tools are increasingly being used to trick voters and generate deepfake pornography of minors, California lawmakers approved several bills this week to crack down on the practice.

Lawmakers approved legislation to ban deepfakes related to elections and require large social media platforms to remove the deceptive material 120 days before Election Day and 60 days thereafter. Campaigns also would be required to publicly disclose if they’re running ads with materials altered by AI.

A pair of proposals would make it illegal to use AI tools to create images and videos of child sexual abuse. Current law does not allow district attorneys to go after people who possess or distribute AI-generated child sexual abuse images if they cannot prove the materials are depicting a real person.

Tech companies and social media platforms would be required to provide AI detection tools to users under another proposal.

Setting safety guardrails

California could become the first state in the nation to set sweeping safety measures on large AI models.

The legislation sent by lawmakers to the governor’s desk requires developers to start disclosing what data they use to train their models. The efforts aim to shed more light into how AI models work and prevent future catastrophic disasters.

Another measure would require the state to set safety protocols preventing risks and algorithmic discrimination before agencies could enter any contract involving AI models used to define decisions.

Protecting workers

Inspired by the monthslong Hollywood actors strike last year, lawmakers approved a proposal to protect workers, including voice actors and audiobook performers, from being replaced by their AI-generated clones. The measure mirrors language in the contract the SAG-AFTRA made with studios last December.

State and local agencies would be banned from using AI to replace workers at call centers under one of the proposals.

California also may create penalties for digitally cloning dead people without consent of their estates.

Keeping up with the technology

As corporations increasingly weave AI into Americans’ daily lives, state lawmakers also passed several bills to increase AI literacy.

One proposal would require a state working group to consider incorporating AI skills into math, science, history and social science curriculums. Another would develop guidelines on how schools could use AI in the classrooms.