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Op-Ed: Tulsi Gabbard reveals she's been Tulsi Gabbard the whole time

The departing Hawaii congresswoman’s discriminatory bill is a reminder of who she’s always been.

There’s that famous last scene in the ’90s movie “The Usual Suspects” where a meek petty-criminal-turned-informant, played by Kevin Spacey, leaves the police station after spinning a very detailed story for the detectives.

Spacey’s character, Verbal Kint, talks about the larger-than-life Keyser Soze, a ruthless and mysterious crime lord who is feared by all. As Spacey’s character leaves the police interview, his whole physicality changes, and it becomes clear that his story was a fabrication, and that he is actually the villain himself.

The penultimate line of the movie is this: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

That scene of walking away, dropping all pretenses and revealing true character is like Tulsi Gabbard as she leaves congress. She has been saying all this time that she had a change of heart about LBGTQ people so that she could be elected in a blue, progressive state; but here she goes, morphing into her real self as she heads off to other plans and schemes. It looks like she was spinning a tale the entire time.

Last week, Gabbard co-sponsored a bill that would ban trans women and girls from participating in female sports in any educational program or activity that receives federal funding. She even had the gall to invoke the name of Title IX champion Congresswoman Patsy Mink in her attack, as if Mink, too, would have backed this garbage.

But really, this is classic Gabbard. Her signature move is to seek controversy and then call the outraged reactions “reactionary.”  She’s leaving Congress, dropping all pretenses, and leaning hard into the headline-grabbing crackpottery that has been her stock in trade all along.

Read more at Civil Beat