Former Congresswoman and US presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard announced on Tuesday that she is leaving the Democratic Party.
"I can no longer remain in today's Democratic party," she said on her podcast, a video of which she shared on Twitter. "It's now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers," she said, and accused the party of standing "for a government of, by and for the powerful elite."
Gabbard is a controversial figure and has expressed support for authoritarian figures such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad of Syria and India’s Narendra Modi.
On Wednesday, a day after leaving the party, Gabbard claimed the war in Ukraine was the United States’ "proxy war", claiming the US was using Ukrainian forces to achieve its goals against Putin on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
In the past, Gabbard has refrained from calling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a 'war criminal', despite atrocities committed by his forces since 2011.
The Assad regime has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians in a bid to cling to power. She claimed during a Democratic primary debate that the conflict in Syria, which began with the regime's brutal suppression of peaceful protests, was instead an attempt by Washington at "regime change" in Damascus.
She also visited Syria in 2017 for what she called a "fact-finding mission", expressing scepticism about the crimes committed by Assad’s forces.
At the time, late Republican senator John McCain said Gabbard’s trip "kind of legitimises a guy who butchered 400,000 of his own people", according to The Guardian.
In 2013, Gabbard voted against a resolution condemning the anti-Muslim violence in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002.
More than 1000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed by Hindu extremists during the violence, and current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was chief minister of Gujarat at the time, was widely accused of stoking the violence.
Gabbard has often spoken highly of Modi, and welcomed him to the United States in 2019. She also reportedly participated in fundraising for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014.