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Thread: Tulsi Gabbard

  1. Link to Post #41
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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard



    Another Tulsi appearance on Joe Rogan's show.


    Oops, Maggie beat me to it.

    Bump!

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Trying to explain who supports Tulsi Gabbard..."in a lane of her own"....

    comment
    Grrrg Grrrg
    6 minutes ago
    Reds and Blues unite.
    Tulsi for a better world.

    "Representative Tulsi Gabbard fighting to make debate stage"

    Last edited by Delight; 4th December 2019 at 04:30.

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Just think if more politicians included Yoga in their routines for health.

    I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions. - Robert Anton Wilson

    The present as you think of it, and in practical working terms, is that point at which you select your physical experience from all those events that could be materialized. - Seth (The Nature of Personal Reality - Session 656, Page 293)

    (avatar image: Brocken spectre, a wonderful phenomenon of nature I have experienced and a symbol for my aspirations.)

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Abby Martin critiques Tulsi Gabbard with Michael Brooks



    One thing Abby Martin dislikes is her running against Bernie. I think he is just too old and he caved to the DNC in 2016. I like Abby Martin but why isn't she interviewing Gabbard? I think she would be glad to talk to Martin.

    This comment is one I agree on because IMO She COULD be a serious contender and COULD mobilize people who want real change? I like feeling my support of her as it is definitely a counter point to despair.

    Quote Loveyourplanet X
    3 weeks ago
    Abby is contradicting herself. She is all for Bernie but I don't hear Bernie speaking out about ending wars in Gaza. Is Abby afraid that once Tulsi becomes President Empire Files will come to an end? What is her deal? Tulsi got out of the democratic race, endorsed Bernie, and then Bernie stabs his supporters in the back by endorsing Hillary Clinton. Does Abby not see how childish she sounds? Complaining and threatened by someone who actually can end regime change wars and who CAN beat Donald Trump. What a disappointment.
    Last edited by Delight; 5th December 2019 at 03:13.

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    I haven't seen anything on PA about this topic of the Gabbard family's relationship to a quasi Hindu guru, often referred to as a cult leader. Here is a local Hawaii article about it. Tulsi Gabbard and her family decline to comment in depth about the relationship and their history with the group.

    Krishna Cult Rumors Still Dog Tulsi Gabbard

    The Hawaii congresswoman’s national rise invites closer scrutiny of her family ties to an offbeat religious community. Her fiancé and chief of staff also grew up in families affiliated with the sect.

    By Rui Kaneya / March 16, 2015


    Eleven years ago, U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, now a rising star in the Democratic Party, was a little-known state representative from a West Oahu district. It was her then-Republican father, Mike, who was in the political limelight.

    The elder Gabbard, known for his virulent anti-gay crusade in the 1990s, was challenging Democratic incumbent Ed Case in the race to represent Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District. So, for a profile piece, a writer at Honolulu Magazine emailed him and asked about his family’s ties to a guru named Chris Butler, aka Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, who leads an obscure offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hawaii.

    But it was Tulsi Gabbard who jumped in. “I smell a skunk,” she emailed back. “It’s clear to me that you’re acting as a conduit for … homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case.”


    Gabbard at a Kauai Women Veterans Conference

    U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s conspicuous silence on her family’s ties to guru Chris Butler has only made her detractors more suspicious.

    Much has changed with Tulsi Gabbard since then. She enlisted in the Hawaii Army National Guard and served two tours in the Middle East before successfully running for a seat on the Honolulu City Council in 2010. Then, in 2012, she got what eluded her father — a seat representing Hawaii in Congress.

    But one thing has remained: The Gabbard family’s ties to Butler still hound her — in the hallways of the Hawaii State Capitol, on blogs of political observers, on pages of online discussion forums, and in commentary sections of various news sites, including Civil Beat’s.

    Now, the mysterious world that’s been swirling around Gabbard all her life is coming under closer scrutiny as the 33-year-old congresswoman’s stature on the national stage steadily rises, and her views on national and international issues — whether she’s standing up for veterans or challenging President Barack Obama over his stance on the Islamic State — continue to draw the media spotlight.

    During the past few weeks, speculation about her place in that world has intensified, thanks in no small part to two recent developments in her life, one personal and one professional: her upcoming marriage to Abraham Williams and the appointment of Kainoa Ramananda Penaroza as her top advisor.

    Quote “While my parents and I have a very close relationship, and we love each other and respect each other very much, we don’t agree on everything.” — U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard
    Both men grew up in the same offbeat religious world as Gabbard. Many of the people who still talk about and obsess over the Gabbard family’s ties to Butler try to also paint both Williams and Penaroza as devotees of the guru.

    A Civil Beat review of decades’ worth of records and Internet postings, as well as interviews with the Butler group’s insiders and observers alike, found that, as with Gabbard, there is no evidence that either of the men adheres to Butler’s teachings.

    Gabbard declined to be interviewed for this story but, through her spokesman, issued a written statement to Civil Beat. The statement, however, does not address the subject of this article — which was explained in detail to the spokesman — and instead only offers her thoughts on being the first Hindu elected to Congress.

    Williams and Penaroza could not be reached for comment. Gabbard’s parents, Mike and Carol, and other staff members also could not be reached or did not respond to Civil Beat’s request for comment.

    Still, the Internet continues to provide a ready forum for the commotion over Gabbard to fester — you need look no further than a thread on the Cult Education Institute’s forum titled, “Chris Butler, Jagad Guru, Science of Identity.” Civil Beat recently scanned the entire thread and found a trove of information, including useful links, scanned copies of news articles and other historical documents.

    For this story, Civil Beat drew on information from the forum that could be verified, along with other publicly available documents and news articles, as well as interviews with people who have intimate knowledge about the community of Butler devotees.

    What emerged is a fascinating look at the world Gabbard and her close associates grew up in. It’s another lens through which to view the fast-rising congresswoman.


    Tulsi Gabbard and fiance Abraham Williams

    Tulsi Gabbard is set to marry Abraham Williams, who grew up in a family with strong ties to guru Chris Butler.

    ‘Science of Identity’

    The Cult Education Institute’s forum on Chris Butler began back in 2004 and is still going strong. It has lasted long enough to reach nearly 500 pages, containing thousands of lengthy posts intended to shed light on Butler and the inner workings of his group, called the Science of Identity Foundation.

    The group formed in the early 1970s, and its leaders later sought to turn the organization into a political force in Hawaii by fielding a number of candidates for key political offices over the years. By and large, the candidates pushed for a brand of social reform that seemed to mimic Butler’s teachings, which stressed environmentalism, vegetarianism, and opposition to homosexuality and “illicit” sex.

    And they had some successes: former state Sen. Rick Reed; former Maui County Council Member Wayne Nishiki; Mike Gabbard, who came back from his loss to Case to win a state Senate seat; and Carol Gabbard, who was elected to the Hawaii Board of Education.

    It’s no wonder that longtime observers see Tulsi Gabbard’s steady climb from the Honolulu City Council to Congress as somehow connected to Butler.


    Chris Butler
    Chris Butler, aka Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, formed a Krishna community in Hawaii in the 1970s.


    Butler, a Kalani High School graduate and son of a prominent Kailua doctor, Willis, was a disciple of A.C. Bahkitevedanta Swami Prabhupad, who founded the International Society of Krishna Consciousness 1966. The group is better known in Hawaii as Hare Krishnas, and it was widespread throughout the country in the 1960s and ’70s. Its members were highly visible here — with their shaved heads and orange robes, they were often seen in Waikiki, chanting and soliciting contributions.

    An internal power struggle eventually led Butler to break away from ISKCON in the early ‘70s and form his own Krishna community in Hawaii. The group has since swiftly expanded, reaching the mainland and as far as Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

    By most accounts, the community was made up of a loose-knit collection of individuals who eschewed the street-begging and instead chanted in the privacy of their homes or makeshift worship centers. Over the years, they banded together to start a number of businesses, including Down to Earth grocery stores and a number of other health-food related businesses under a company called Healthy’s Inc. A portion of the proceeds from these businesses usually got diverted to support the movement.

    Around 2012, after Tulsi Gabbard announced her candidacy for Congress, the focus of contributors to the Cult Education forum turned from Butler himself to Gabbard and efforts to pin down her ties to the guru. The result: More than 100 pages of the thread now document the activities of Gabbard and her parents, as well as her four siblings and associates.

    Many, if not most, of the posts contain claims that are not backed up by supporting material, and they can be readily dismissed as rumors and innuendo — even patently false. The posts are all anonymous, written by people who go by names like “zombiefied,” “dharmabum” and “jaggedguru.” Even the forum’s regular contributors have acknowledged that its content needs to be viewed skeptically.

    But Civil Beat was able to verify a number of the ties that link Butler to Gabbard’s family and associates:

    • Kainoa Penaroza, who was appointed as Gabbard’s Washington, D.C.-based chief of staff last month despite his relative lack of political experience, is the son of Bill Penaroza, who was among a slate of 14 candidates running for a variety of offices in 1976 under an enigmatic political party called the Independents for Godly Government. The party’s connection to Butler was revealed in a three-part investigative series by the Honolulu Advertiser’s Walter Wright in 1977.

    Penaroza, 30, and his wife, Alana Leigh Penaroza, who now works as Gabbard’s D.C. fundraiser, at one time lived in a Kailua property owned by Joseph Bismark, a Singapore-based businessman whose company, QI Group, bought Healthy’s in 2007.

    Quote Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Healthy’s owns Noni Connection, which lists Kainoa Penaroza as a director. Healthy’s does not own Noni’s, according to Mark Fergusson, Healthy’s chief executive officer.
    • Abraham Williams, Gabbard’s 26-year-old fiancé, is a freelance cinematographer who also grew up in a family with strong ties to Butler. His mother, Anya Anthony, is listed as a registered agent of Wai Lana Productions LLC, a company named after Butler’s wife, Wai Lan, that runs www.wailana.com, which sells yoga instruction DVDs, clothing and other accessories.

    Anthony is now the manager of Gabbard’s district office in Honolulu. Last month, Gabbard put a post on Facebook introducing Anthony as her soon-to-be mother-in-law. Gabbard noted that she had asked the Congressional Ethics Committee to determine if it was ethical for the congresswoman to employ her future mother-in-law. The committee signed off on Anthony’s continued employment, a committee spokesman confirmed to Civil Beat.

    • Sunil Khemaney, who accompanied Gabbard on her December trip to India, is listed in Wai Lana Productions’ business registration records as its manager. He is also the director of Healthy’s and one of the trustees of Wai Lana Yoga Trust, whose mission is to “educate and teach the general public about the philosophy, moral standards and practices of yoga for the benefit of mankind.”

    Khemaney is also the vice president of the East West Yoga Foundation, a nonprofit registered in Arizona. Chris Butler is listed in Arizona corporation records as its director, along with his wife, who is the president and director.


    Mike Gabbard was in the audience at a taping of Chris Butler’s TV show, “Jagad Guru Speaks,” which aired for several years in the 1980s and 1990s.

    • Mike Gabbard has long maintained that he’s a Catholic, not Hare Krishna. But, in Honolulu Magazine’s 2004 profile, he acknowledged his ties to Butler: “Although I’m not a member of the Science of Identity Foundation, I’m eternally thankful to Chris Butler … whose teachings of karma yoga (selfless service) and bhakti yoga (devotion to God) have brought me back to my Catholic roots and the fundamental teachings of Christ.”
    Plenty of evidence suggests that there’s more to the story than that.

    Multiple historical documents show that, at various points in the history of the Science of Identity Foundation, both Mike and Carol Gabbard sat on its board. According to various reports, they were bestowed Sanskrit names, “Krishna Katha das” and “Devahuti dasi,” respectively.

    The Gabbards were also in attendance at at least one taping of Butler’s local TV show called “Jagad Guru Speaks,” which aired for several years in the 1980s and ’90s. In old footage of the show, they can be seen in the audience, listening and laughing as Butler lectured on spirituality.

    The Gabbards also owned a vegetarian restaurant in Honolulu called the Natural Deli, housed inside a Down to Earth health food store on King Street. But they were forced to sell the restaurant to Down to Earth in 1992 after an anti-gay comment Mike Gabbard made on a local radio show triggered fervent protests.


    State Sen. Mike Gabbard and his daughter US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard enter the Democratic Party Unity Breakfast on August 10, 2014
    For years, rumors about their ties to guru Chris Butler have hounded U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and her father, state Sen. Mike Gabbard. PF Bentley/Civil Beat


    Tulsi Gabbard’s World

    Civil Beat found no evidence that Tulsi Gabbard is — or ever was — a Butler devotee. And we could find no record of her ever speaking publicly about it.

    Gabbard has veered away from her earlier, conservative positions on social issues and voiced support for same-sex marriage — in stark contrast to her father, who still maintains his anti-gay stance, in line with Butler’s teachings.

    In 2012, Gabbard told Civil Beat that the changes were part of her “gradual metamorphosis” on social issues brought on by her experience of seeing oppression in the Middle East during her military deployments. As for her father’s views, she said: “While my parents and I have a very close relationship, and we love each other and respect each other very much, we don’t agree on everything.”

    When it comes to religious choice, Gabbard has openly described herself as a Hindu since her 2012 campaign. At her swearing-in ceremony in January 2013, she took the oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, and became the first Hindu in Congress.

    “I chose to take the oath of office with my personal copy of the Bhagavad Gita because its teachings have inspired me to strive to be a servant-leader, dedicating my life in the service of others and to my country,” Gabbard said that day.

    In a statement to Civil Beat sent Sunday, Gabbard touted the character of Hawaii voters for choosing “a Vaishnava Hindu” to represent them in Congress. “I make the most of every opportunity I get to tell the world that Hawaii is a place where people live the dream of Martin Luther King — where a person is judged not by the color of their skin, ethnicity, or religion,” she wrote.

    Gabbard added: “Many Hindus have not felt they would be truly accepted for who they are, that they would have to change their religion. … My example and my words are very liberating to them, as I share with them and their children: ‘Every American has the right to run for political office or serve our community in any capacity he or she may choose.’”

    Quote “It probably has reached a point where it is to her benefit to start opening up and talking more frankly about this.” — University of Hawaii political science professor Colin Moore
    Still, Gabbard’s conspicuous silence on her family’s ties to Butler — especially after the many times it’s come up in public discussions — has only made her detractors more suspicious.

    But, even if Gabbard were a Butler devotee, does it matter? As Honolulu Weekly, in its 1992 profile of then-U.S. Senate candidate Rick Reed, put it: “Hey, candidates with a covert religious right-wing social agenda are a dime a dozen these days, even if most of them are doing it in the name of Christ, not Krishna.”

    By and large, this question is met with a collective head-scratching. Beyond the vague notion of transparency, none of the people Civil Beat has interviewed, or even the Gabbard skeptics on the Cult Education forum, can point to any nefarious plot being concocted by Butler or offer an articulate explanation as to why Gabbard’s constituents should be alarmed by Butler’s potential influence on the congresswoman.

    But that hasn’t stopped them from looking for evidence of a secret agenda. And there’s been no shortage of material for them to examine in recent months, given that Gabbard’s profile on the national stage has been rising to a new level — on the back of her unconventional, and often controversial, policy positions. She has made multiple appearances on cable and network TV news programs and conducts frequent interviews with the national and international press.

    To some, all this attention to Gabbard’s faith is troubling. In fact, they have been arguing that the whole idea of examining Butler’s influence reeks of religious bigotry.

    Historically speaking, they may have that argument on their side. After all, the minority faiths of politicians — be it Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, Joe Lieberman’s Judaism or John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism — have at times been singled out and met with bigoted backlash.

    Gabbard experienced this firsthand in the run-up to the 2012 campaign when her GOP opponent, Kawika Crowley, told CNN that Gabbard’s Hinduism “doesn’t align with the constitutional foundation of the U.S. government.”

    But others argue that discussing the religious identities of public officials and political candidates, particularly those on the national stage, has long been considered fair game.

    And the questions, fair or not, are piling up. University of Hawaii political science professor Colin Moore says it might not make sense for Gabbard to keep her silence much longer.

    “There comes a point where it begins to look more and more suspicious than perhaps it already is,” Moore said. “With this issue, it probably has reached a point where it is to her benefit to start opening up and talking more frankly about this, because this isn’t likely going away.”

    John Hart, a longtime political pundit who chairs the communications department at Hawaii Pacific University, also points out that Gabbard’s recent criticism of Obama’s refusal to label the Islamic State as “Islamic extremists” bolsters the argument for those demanding transparency.

    “Representative Gabbard has argued publicly on the ISIS issue that we need to consider religious affiliations to understand what we’re dealing with,” Hart said. “If that’s the case, then we shouldn’t be surprised to see that some people are going to apply that same standard” to her own faith.

    Civil Beat reporters Chad Blair and Nick Grube contributed to this report.
    A million galaxies are a little foam on that shoreless sea. ~ Rumi

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  10. Link to Post #46
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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    This makes for some interesting reading as well - keeping in mind it's from New York Magazine

    https://www.culteducation.com/group/...candidacy.html

    Tulsi Gabbard Had a Very Strange Childhood Which may help explain why she’s out of place in today’s Democratic Party. And her long-shot 2020 candidacy.

    New York Magzine/June 11, 2019

    By Kerry Howley

    The Poet

    It was 1970-something, and Sina was not yet teaching at the University of Hawaii — a Samoan poet who had not yet become the first Samoan full professor in the States, and who had not yet written

    of our oceans

    the watery skin

    of earth

    pulled back to expose

    a webbing of coral

    rough & prickly

    She was back in Samoa at a traditional Sunday feast with her mother, her brother Mike, her American sister-in-law, Carol, and three little boys so strikingly beautiful one would model professionally as a teen. They hadn’t yet sat down to eat, Sina remembers, when Mike announced that his wife and boys would not be able to eat most of what his mother had cooked, as they were now vegetarian. Also, everyone needed to stop calling the children by their birth names. Their new names were Bhakti, Jai, and Naryana. They were now devotees of a man named Chris Butler, whom they called Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa.

    When Sina next visited Mike and Carol’s house, there was nothing on the walls but pictures of the immediate family and portraits of Chris Butler, a 30-something, tan, sandy-haired Caucasian, an aging beach boy in leis and white linen. Altars to him had sprung up in every room. The children’s lives were filed with ecstatic chanting, prayer, and beach gatherings exclusive to Butler devotees. Sina, who studied Eastern religions and spirituality and taught from the Bhagavad Gita, tried to be open-minded about the fact that they were, in her words, “bowing and prostrating to this white surfer guy — it was bizarre.” It was her Buddhist training to which she appealed in order to remain calm about her nephews attending Butler-focused schools and associating only with children whose parents were in the group, members of what she would come to see as the “alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.” She said little about it outside the family until 2019, when one of her nieces, the most retiring and introverted of all the siblings, decided to run for president.

    The Politician

    It is strange but true that I first meet Tulsi Gabbard in a town run by an entirely different group of Caucasians taken by the ritualistic trappings of India. Fairfield, Iowa’s most politically liberal enclave, is centered on a university devoted to the teachings of an Indian guru named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. We’re at the convention center in February, a stone’s throw from a pair of snow-covered golden domes where the town attempts to levitate in the service of world peace. “Aloha!” Tulsi says, ascending to the dais in her signature red blazer. A thick gray stripe runs through her voluminous black hair. “Namaste!” a few people shout back.

    “We share a deep love,” Tulsi says to a standing-room-only crowd of 200. She talks about love a lot in a way that might have provoked eye rolls pre-Trump but now just sounds appealingly weird. A Hindu veteran and millennial congresswoman of Samoan descent hailing from Hawaii, she brings together disparate constituencies: most noticeably, Bernie Sanders fans who love that she resigned from the Democratic National Committee to endorse him in 2016, but also libertarians who appreciate her noninterventionism, Indian-Americans taken by her professed Hinduism, veterans attracted to her credibility on issues of war and peace, and racists who interpret various statements she has made to be promising indications of Islamophobia.

    That she is polling at one percent, sandwiched between Andrew Yang and Amy Klobuchar, suggests that bringing together these constituencies is not nearly enough, but the intensity of emotion she provokes on all sides sets her apart. When FiveThirtyEight asked 60 Democratic Party activists whom they didn’t want to win, Tulsi Gabbard came in first out of 17 candidates, a poll she used to rile up her own intensely motivated supporters, who tend to identify, proudly, as anti-Establishment outsiders.

    In May, Joe Rogan, whose podcast is listened to millions of times each month by MMA fans, stoner bros, and self-styled freethinkers, chose his candidate. “Tulsi Gabbard’s my girl,” he said. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. **** it.”

    On the campaign trail, Gabbard talks frequently about the actual, material costs of forever war — trillions of dollars wasted, lives pointlessly lost — which is odd, because this is a campaign for votes and foreign-policy speeches are not what voters want. Though we are 18 years deep in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan and currently engaged in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, the crowd in Fairfield is waiting for her to finish yammering about war and get to lines about Medicare for All and climate change, which she does, eventually, at which point they stop politely nodding and rise from their chairs to applaud.

    Many have called Tulsi cold and lacking in charisma and “not particularly spontaneous.” She is not cold. She can be spontaneous in the right setting, exude charisma if engaged on the right subject. What she is — take it from someone with the same emotional profile — is remote. In interview after interview, she gives the impression of having anti-Establishment convictions just beyond the reach of articulation, as if she had carried instructions into battle and lost them. Her speeches feel not so much overly prepared as capably delivered from a separate location through her. She operates on the slightest delay, taking in information, scanning it, and delivering a slow response that registers only barely on her face.

    Tulsi is a self-described introvert, an extremely quiet and obedient child grown into a woman whose job entails constant exhausting engagement. Her sister — Vrindavan to strangers, Davan to the campaign, and Davs to Tulsi — spoke for her back when they were kids, and she continues to do much of the talking for her today. When they were at a store as girls, it was Vrindavan who would interact with the cashier; Tulsi was too nervous. If the phone rang, Tulsi would wait for her sister to answer. If Vrindavan disobeyed their parents, Tulsi would be upset. “Please do your chores or our mother will have to do all of them!” Vrindavan recalls being scolded. “Our poor mother!”

    Davan is a federal marshal currently on leave, used to keeping things running, and after the event, she’s behind the wheel of the SUV on the way to Iowa City. She drives carefully — like “an effing grandma,” she says, to which Tulsi, in the back holding hands with her husband, Abraham Williams, says, “Watch your language. PG-rated, please.” In the car is the entire traveling staff, which is to say the candidate, her sister, and her husband, an aspiring cinematographer who, at 30, is eight years her junior and consistently two feet away from her with a camera pointed at her face.

    Abraham has known Tulsi since childhood, when they both appeared at gatherings presided over by Chris Butler. He proposed five years ago on a surfboard. Also accompanying her to Iowa is a quiet, mustachioed campaign worker named Sunil Khemaney; he gives me his card, which is branded with the campaign’s logo, but where a job title would typically go is empty white space. He runs a business owned by Chris Butler’s wife, and former members of the sect say he is Butler’s right-hand man.

    I’m in the front with Davan, and it is she who explains to me how hard it is for Tulsi to compete in the most meaningful popularity contest on earth as someone who doesn’t really like talking to people. “Even when she was running for statehouse,” says Vrindavan, “she had to go door to door, and that’s like … Even if you’re not an introvert? That’s like not fun. You’re bothering people, and what are they gonna say when they open the door or whatever. As a younger sister, it’s a very big inspiration, knowing how much courage and selflessness it took. It’s not about what you want to do. There could not be a better role model or example for someone who may have grown up a little more … self-centered,” she says, laughing.

    Tulsi sits quietly behind us. A long moment passes. “The anxiety she is talking about, I wouldn’t say it got easier,” she says. “There was a turning point when I first ran for Congress, where I had a realization that this anxiety was coming from a selfish place and from thinking about, you know, my own fears and how are people going to respond to me — I don’t want to bother people. That felt like it was coming from an inward-looking place, a selfish place, rather than my seeing them as beautiful opportunities to share my aloha. Once I realized that, that changed everything completely.”

    The Blob

    In the house, to which she was elected in 2012, Tulsi Gabbard does not behave like a representative who wants to remain in Congress; she appears to be building a political platform for another office. Her legislative record amounts to one anodyne bipartisan bill on veterans’ affairs, but she is constantly introducing “messaging bills” — non-committee-specific, hopeless pieces of legislation, often to do with the environment, such as one bill that would eliminate dependence on fossil fuels by 2035, but also one to end the federal marijuana prohibition, one requiring the president to ask Congress before going to war, a Sheldon Adelson–backed one to end internet gambling, and a resolution supporting Trump’s efforts in diplomacy with North Korea. It’s not uncommon to introduce symbolic bills meant to signal something to constituents; it’s just very hard to imagine the anti-gambling, pro-marijuana, pro-Trumpian-diplomacy constituent to which Tulsi appears to be signaling.

    When Tulsi announced her intention to run for president in January, the response among journalists and pundits was essentially don’t. “Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend,” read a headline in the socialist publication Jacobin, a statement followed by a laundry list of unrelated reasons not to like her, despite her being a reliable progressive endorsed by Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, and the AFL-CIO and particularly beloved by Jacobin fave Bernie Sanders.

    The Nation has denounced her for “nationalism cloaked in anti-interventionism,” and when I mention her name to an expert paid by a prominent think tank to think publicly about foreign affairs, she sends a two-line email asserting that Tulsi is unqualified to lead and refuses to elaborate. When Joe Rogan mentioned the name to the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, she looked alarmed and laughed.

    “Monstrous ideas,” she said.

    “Well, when she was 22, she — ”

    “No! She’s an Assad toady.”

    “What does that mean?” asked Rogan. “What’s a toady?”

    “I think I’m using that word correctly,” Weiss said. “I think it’s like, T-O-A-D-I-E?”

    “What does that mean?”

    “I think it means,” said Weiss, scratching her head under her headphones, “what I think it means.”

    “That’s known about her,” said Weiss, when they had settled on a definition of toady. “I don’t remember the details.”

    Here are the details: Bashar al-Assad is a depraved dictator best known for his willingness to murder his own people, including many children, with chemical weapons. Tulsi Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War, has positioned herself as a noninterventionist liberal, a “peace candidate” who believes in diplomacy with unseemly characters such as Assad. She has taken a similarly conciliatory approach to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu-nationalist strongman, who is complicit in widespread violence against Muslims. She has visited Modi and given him a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, accepted a wedding gift from him, and opposed a House resolution “reaffirming the need to protect the rights and freedoms of religious minorities” that was a veiled jab at him.

    The most obvious obstacle between any noninterventionist candidate and mainstream success is D.C.’s foreign-policy Establishment — the think-tankers and politicians and media personalities and intelligence professionals and defense-company contractors and, very often, intelligence professionals turned defense-company contractors who determine the bounds of acceptable thinking on war and peace. In parts of D.C., this Establishment is called “the Blob,” and to stray beyond its edges is to risk being deemed “unserious,” which as a woman candidate one must be very careful not to be. The Blob may in 2019 acknowledge that past American wars of regime change for which it enthusiastically advocated have been disastrous, but it somehow maintains faith in the tantalizing possibilities presented by new ones. The Blob loves to “stand for” things, especially “leadership” and “democracy.” The Blob loves to assign moral blame, loves signaling virtue while failing to follow up on civilian deaths, and definitely needs you to be clear on “who the enemy is” — a kind of obsessive deontological approach in which naming things is more important than cataloguing the effects of any particular policy.

    The cult of war, however, cannot entirely explain the opposition to a candidate who constantly picks low-stakes, politically inopportune fights within her own party. During Barack Obama’s tenure, Tulsi repeatedly criticized him for failing to use the words Islamic extremism and described her concern about a “radical Islamic extremist agenda,” a move that earned her no love among members of her party, which had once considered her its future. She voted, with Republicans, to make it virtually impossible for Syrian refugees to come into the country. She has been strangely absent for votes relating to Russia and NATO and has racked up unwelcome support from Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, and David Duke. Her divergence from party orthodoxy on many issues is striking, against her self-interest, and lacking in any apparent narrative line. There is no cohesive ideology that explains the idiosyncratic political positioning, no single point of reference from which it all makes sense, and so the relevant question regarding Tulsi Gabbard is reducible to: What is she doing?

    Over a series of months of reporting, I heard any number of hypotheses on this question. There was, for instance, the idea that she is so desperately attention-seeking that she seeks out bad press. There was the idea that she simply holds, with extreme tenacity, a number of unrelated, deeply unpopular beliefs in tension with any ambition she might have to be president, and there was the idea that she seeks favor with Modi in order to gain mainstream-Hindu legitimacy for Chris Butler’s otherwise obscure religious sect. There was the theory that she is a toady of Assad, though often she was said to be under the control of Modi, or Putin, and I began to wonder, when we try to expose her motives, whose subjectivity we are really exploring.

    The Guru

    When Tulsi talks about her girlhood, it is with a profound vagueness, a visible discomfort. In Iowa, there is awkward silence when I ask about her three brothers (“They’re kind of separate,” her sister eventually says) and silence when I ask about being homeschooled (“The schools in Hawaii weren’t very good,” Davan offers). Tulsi calls herself Hindu, the first Hindu member of Congress, in fact, though the group in which she appears to have grown up does not identify as Hindu. She says she was raised by “an eccentric Catholic father.”

    In 1970, the Honolulu Advertiser published a piece called “One Man Rules Haiku Krishnaites,” with the subhead “Absolute power of devotees.” In the photo beside the piece, Butler is seated shirtless and smoking, hair skimming his shoulders and a sarong around his waist, staring alluringly into the distance, a mischievous smile on his face. It is the expression of less a guru than a playboy, and this is how Advertiser reporter Janice Wolf depicts him, a handsome dictator with the ability to hypnotize the two dozen 18-to-22-year-olds who live with him in his Quonset hut. One of the girls, an 18-year-old who also happened to have the Sanskrit name Tulsi, says he arranged her marriage to another member of the group. She and another girl, who say they would kill for him, describe his teachings. Among them: “Flowers scream when they’re picked. So do trees when they’re trimmed.” (“Tulsi and Boni were sitting on the lawn chewing blades of grass when they said this,” notes Wolf.)

    Butler taught vegetarianism, sexual conservatism, mind-body dualism, and disinterest in the material world. He taught a virulent homophobia, skepticism of science, and the dangers of public schools. He had been associated with Hare Krishna, and in fact claimed to have been given his Sanskrit name, Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, by the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, but by the time he encountered the Gabbards, he’d started his own group. His teachings revolved around worship of Krishna but differed from those of Hare Krishna, in that he instructed his followers to learn from only a single guru — himself — and did not require them to shave their heads or wear robes. The lack of formal dress allowed the group an anonymity he encouraged. He forbade them from visiting India, which is not typical of Hare Krishna, and, also against Hare Krishna practice, married.

    His wife was one of his followers, Wai Lana, a popular yoga instructor who later had a long-running instructional yoga series on public television. (Abraham, Tulsi’s husband, has helped with filming Wai Lana’s videos; his mother also works for her.) Whenever Butler traveled, he’d have the homes he stayed in lined with tinfoil, to protect against electromagnetic radiation.

    The children of those teenagers in the Quonset hut were born into the sect, as Tulsi was. Another, Greg Martin, wasn’t allowed to play with neighborhood children as a boy, so he looked forward to Sundays, when he’d spend all day on the beach in Kailua with all the families who worshipped as his did; when they’d wait for hours in the sun for Butler to arrive, and Tulsi’s father, Mike, would strum his guitar while leading a hundred devotees in hours of joyful chanting. “You just knew Mike was a dick,” says Greg. “He carried himself with dickishness.”

    It was the 1980s. Greg says he and Tulsi attended these gatherings together, and years later, when Abraham was born, he’d see him too. (Tulsi says that she did not attend gatherings like these.) Waiting four or five or six hours for Siddhaswarupananda’s entrance built a kind of thrilling pressure, and Greg remembers Sundays as “incredibly theatrical.” Devotees with radios would place themselves at various high points along the beach, operating as a security force. “You’re waiting hours and hours for this dude to show up, and then when he does, people go absolutely wild — it’s all your family and all your friends singing and dancing and chanting, you’re so excited,” says Greg.

    The guru would then address the crowd. He was good with the pregnant pause. He had the kind of easy confidence you’d expect from Krishna’s representative on Earth. He was also vulgar and vindictive. “He would start excoriating people for ****ing up. Sound systems not working, cups of water not being cleaned, people dressed funny, driving poorly. He would publicly mock people. And when he would do that — that’s a form of Krishna’s mercy.”

    Everyone I spoke to who was raised in the group described, as children, hearing Butler call men “faggots” and women “cunts.” One time in Malibu, Greg recalls, Butler had passed a man on the beach in a thong on his way to the gathering; Butler then described in graphic detail what that man allegedly wanted his “boyfriend” to do to him. “That’s vivid as a kid,” says Greg, whose name is not really Greg; he does not want to be cut off from his family.

    Back in the ’70s, Butler went by the name “Sai Young,” a name he possibly picked because he was a gifted baseball player who had hoped to go pro. In their boyhood, according to his estranged brother Kurt, Chris was the handsome, popular one. Their father, a family physician named Willis Butler, took them, their mother, and their siblings to protest Vietnam well before it was socially acceptable to do so. Kurt remembers the whole family standing along a sidewalk on the edge of the University of Hawaii campus, holding signs that read stop the war and stop the bombing. From their cars, people threw garbage at the family. They yelled things: “Losers,” “Love it or leave it,” “****ing commies.”

    Their father was, in fact, a communist. The Butler patriarch loved the Soviet Union, thought North Korea a workers’ paradise. When Kurt brought home a geography book from school that mentioned political repression in the USSR, his father called it “lying propaganda.” When, as an adolescent, Chris pointed out that the Viet Cong had committed atrocities, his father wouldn’t hear it. Chris sought refuge in psychedelics, Kurt wrote in an email to me, then in meditation. He began writing poetry. He began giving meditation classes. “The classes,” says Kurt, “gradually evolved into a full-fledged cult.”

    Butler’s group, called Science of Identity, has had political ambitions at least since 1976, when its members formed a political party called Independents for Godly Government and ran a number of candidates in local races. They kept their association with Butler under wraps until, in 1977, the Honolulu Advertiser published a three-part series headlined “The Secret Spiritual Base of a New Political Force.”

    A party chair, Bill Penaroza, is the father of Tulsi Gabbard’s current chief of staff, Kainoa Penaroza. Kainoa had no political experience prior to being hired by Tulsi at age 30. He was managing one of the group’s health-food stores. Former members of the Science of Identity say that Butler has always craved legitimacy for his group among mainstream Hindus, and that he has come closest to achieving this through Tulsi Gabbard’s relationship to Narendra Modi.

    n the videos made available to the public by the Science of Identity Foundation, Butler has cut his hair and donned a collared shirt under a V-neck sweater, and watching him lecture is a bit like imagining Mister Rogers if Mister Rogers were very stoned. In a typical lecture on the ephemeral nature of the body, he says, softly, “You can ask yourself the question, Am I my hand?” and holds out his hand. “And then you can ask yourself that if your hand was sitting on the other side of the room because it got — ya know — cut off by a sword or it fell off on your way to work or something, would you be where the hand is or would you be where you are looking at the hand?” He pauses. Cocks his head. “Actually,” he says, smiling, “try to imagine a person freaking out. It happens! Quite often; people lose their hands or they lose their arms, they lose their legs, or they lose their fingers, they lose an ear, or a tongue, whatever, and here they are — and some people lose their genitals! … You’re not any one part of your body.”

    Ian Koviak is a Portland, Oregon–based book designer who has made covers for Sherman Alexie, James Patterson, and many other writers. He was 10 years old and living in Brooklyn, when his single mother found Butler’s group through a friend. They began to attend “gatherings,” in which families would listen to tapes of Butler’s teachings on philosophy and mythology, and also Butler’s curse-laden excoriations of group members who had disappointed him in some way.

    “Basically, what one disciple did,” Koviak said, “was thwarting us from making spiritual progress.” Butler was a hypochondriac afraid of contamination, and this disciple might have washed his sheets with the wrong detergent, or set up his air filter incorrectly, or failed to cover their mouths with masks in his presence. Ian feared being a target of these lectures. “We regarded him as God’s representative on Earth,” he says, “It was an intense feeling that you’re displeasing someone that’s your only connection to a spiritual path and life.”

    A year later, when he was 11, Koviak and his mother moved to Malibu, where Butler was then living, so she could be closer to him. A year after that, Koviak was sent to a boarding school in Baguio City, in the Philippines, run by Butler devotees, including a man named Toby Tamayo, the uncle of Tulsi’s first husband. They began the day at 4:30 with a cold bucket shower, followed by hours of chanting in the dark. They watched a video of “homosexual biker types in Folsom Street Fairs doing each other in the middle of the street. That would pan off to a guy in a wheelchair who has AIDS. Then at the end of the video the guy dies.”

    There was, Koviak says with equanimity, “light sexual abuse, the kind of thing that happens when you put 30 boys in a bunch of rooms. People groping you at night.” Koviak stayed at this boarding school for four years, from age 12 to 16, during which he saw his mother only once.
    The Fall

    When Tulsi was 14, her father founded a nonprofit called Stop Promoting Homosexuality America and began hosting a radio show called “Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii.” Her parents owned an organic deli, located inside a larger natural-foods store owned by Butler’s followers. On his show, Gabbard declared he would always hire a straight person rather than someone of nontraditional sexual orientation, at which point the deli was picketed and quickly went out of business. The station pulled the program, but Gabbard was energized; he led the fight against gay marriage in the state.

    Tulsi began political life in her teens, knocking on doors with her father, who went on to be elected to the city council, and eventually the state senate, where, socially conservative and pro environmental regulation, he remains.

    At 21, Tulsi was Tulsi Gabbard Tamayo, having married a man involved with Butler’s group, and like many people at that age, she had yet to outgrow the views with which she was raised. But unlike most 20-somethings grappling with the ideological legacies of their parents, Tulsi was elected to Hawaii’s house of representatives at 21, becoming the youngest woman ever elected to a state legislature.

    Her early opposition to abortion and gay marriage would be a part of her political record. After a single term, she joined the military, later saying she’d been motivated by 9/11, and deployed in Iraq and Kuwait. Critics might draw a line from her deployment at a time of American Islamophobia through her later sympathies for Assad and Modi. But that story may be too neat. Her tours were her first time as an adult out of Hawaii, away from her family and the religious sect in which they were enmeshed.

    In Iraq, Tulsi was in a medical unit on a base 40 miles north of Baghdad, an area sometimes known as “Mortaritaville,” where shells exploded and sirens wailed as she took cover in a concrete bunker. She worked 12-hour shifts out of a mobile trailer with a small window; during storms, she watched “an orange wave of sand” envelop everything and shook with the wind.

    Every day at 9 a.m. she scrolled through an Excel spreadsheet of casualties. These were American troops for whom she was supposed to organize treatment. “That daily task — it left an indelible impression on me,” she says, “understanding behind every one of these names is a soldier, sailor, seeing the volume of people paying the price for war. It caused me to think about those who made a decision to start this war. I wondered if they ever thought about these people, their families.”

    When she returned, her positions on social issues eventually fell a bit more in line with the party; she said that living in a theocracy had changed her, and she no longer believed the state should dictate the romantic or reproductive lives of its citizens. She divorced Tamayo, won a seat on the city council, and ran for Congress against the Democratic Establishment candidate, a pro-life, anti-gay-marriage former mayor of Honolulu 27 years her senior. A Democratic National Committee in need of speakers for the party’s national convention turned to a young, attractive multicultural woman veteran and Congressperson who voted left but sounded credible on national security.

    “I can’t tell you how many people have mentioned your name and said, ‘This is the one to look out for,’ ” Suzanne Malveaux said to her on CNN. “Tell us why. I mean, people see you as a rising star.” She was called a rising star on ABC and she was called a rising star in the Washington Post and she won her election easily, at which point she became no longer the youngest woman in a state legislature but the youngest woman in Congress. A rapturous Vogue profile praised her for her “fit physique,” soldier’s stamina, and a “smile so warm that it’s no surprise Web sites have offered polls rating her ‘hotness,’ ” a truly curious reading of hotness polls.

    The fall from rising star to party pariah began with a gift from the Establishment. As a 31-year-old freshman representative, she was chosen for a DNC vice-chairmanship, an easy way for a new face to achieve visibility. During the Democratic primary season, Tulsi began arguing with DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, demanding that there be more than six debates in the Democratic primary (a move that would theoretically benefit Sanders); Wasserman Schultz, according to Tulsi, suggested that she not come to the next one. When Tulsi later endorsed Bernie Sanders over a woman who supported campaigns in Iraq and Libya, it was after Sanders had suffered a devastating loss to Clinton in South Carolina; once again, this was not a move that could be explained by political calculation.

    Syria doesn’t get much airtime on American television news — it’s a horrifying, complicated proxy war involving Iran and Saudi Arabia and Russia to which Americans have neither answers nor the will to meaningfully intervene. It is not good content. But when Tulsi Gabbard appears on any given news program, a Blob-driven game ensues: corner Tulsi into insulting Assad.

    “Do you think Assad is our enemy?” asked Kasie Hunt on a February episode of Morning Joe.

    “Assad is not the enemy of the United States, because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States,” said Tulsi in her slow monotone.

    Joe Scarborough broke in: “Is he an adversary?”

    “We have to look to who poses a threat to the United States — ”

    “Is he an adversary?” Scarborough asked again.

    “What would you say he is?” asked Mika Brzezinski. “If you cannot say he is an adversary or an enemy, what is Assad to the United States? What is the word?”

    At this Tulsi finally smiles, incredulous — a look of condescending skepticism. “You can describe it however you want to describe it. My point is — ”

    “I want to know how you describe it!” said Brzezinski. “Adversary,” she says to herself, very quietly. “It’s not hard.”

    The Silence

    For many years in Kailua, the Gabbards’ known involvement with the Science of Identity went largely unremarked upon. It took an outsider, a 45-year-old special-education teacher and independent journalist Christine Gralow, who moved to the island just three years ago, to get curious enough to start asking questions. She mapped a web of relationships among devotees. “I had no idea,” she told me, “that this was going to lead me to Tulsi Gabbard.”

    Soon after, she attended a town hall run by Tulsi. It was alarming for her to recognize so many faces from her research, and the whole production felt oddly staged. Gralow asked some questions about Syria, to boos from the crowd, and held up a protest sign. She interviewed anyone in the community who would talk and published it all on her website, meanwhileinhawaii.org, which is when the DDOS attacks started. She says, undaunted, that she has seen members of the group waiting outside her home, taking pictures. “I’m a special-ed teacher,” she says, “and special-ed teachers don’t like bullies.”

    Tulsi Gabbard’s response to questions about the Science of Identity frequently begin with accusations of religious bigotry and “Hinduphobia.” Her campaign website once mentioned her years in the Philippines, but that reference has been removed. When The New Yorker asked her if she had a spiritual teacher, she said she had had “many different spiritual teachers,” that none was more important than the others, and that she has never heard Chris Butler say an unkind thing. (“I don’t even know what to say about that,” says Ian Koviak.) The campaign’s position is that any serious inquiry into Tulsi’s religious background constitutes a Hinduphobic line of attack to which other candidates would not be subject, though again, Butler’s group does not identify as Hindu.

    I knew nearly nothing of Tulsi’s backstory when I found myself in her car back in February, and so in April, when she returned to Iowa City, I arranged for a follow-up conversation at a vegan restaurant. On the day before the interview, a staffer texted me to ask about the gist of my questions.

    The morning of, I was told that the interview was canceled. I then reached out to another staffer, who eventually said Tulsi would take questions on religious matters via email, at which point I sent a series of questions regarding Chris Butler, the Science of Identity, the beach gatherings to which Greg Martin had referred, her time in the Philippines, and when, precisely, Tulsi began to identify as Hindu. Tulsi replied with an email that declined to mention Hinduism, Butler, the Science of Identity, the gatherings, or the Philippines.

    “My ‘religion,’ ” she wrote, “is my loving relationship with God, and the motivation that springs from that relationship to try my best to use my life in the service of humanity and the planet.”

    But as late as 2015, in a video still up on YouTube, Tulsi publicly acknowledged her guru-dev to be Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, Chris Butler.

    No one I spoke to with personal experience of the group, including Tulsi’s aunt, thought it possible that Tulsi Gabbard had somehow left Chris Butler’s sphere of influence, that her thirst for world peace and her persistent concerns about Islam were positions held independent of his counsel. “I don’t think that she is a bad person or in any way malicious,” says Koviak. “Butler’s agenda from way back in the ’70s has always been to have a political hold in some way. Now he has realized his dream through Tulsi Gabbard.” Says Rama Ranson, who maintains the blog RamaRansonvsthecult.com, “Her success is Butler’s success.”
    The Storm

    The analysis is like, ‘Oh, she just loves dictators,’ ” says Vrindavan.

    “She loves dictators,” says Abraham, “and is also an opportunist who wants to advance politically.”

    The snow is coming down harder now as we make our way to Iowa City. Flights are canceled. Cars have been abandoned on the side of the road. They consider canceling the stump speech, but here we are in Iowa and no one has anywhere else to be.

    “Looks like this may be a very intimate event!” jokes Vrindavan.

    Tulsi looks slightly concerned but holds it all in. For once, Abraham is not filming. He’s watching surf videos on his phone. Tulsi leans forward, suddenly spontaneous.

    “Do you know who Kelly Slater is?” she asks. She’s telling me about a surfing competition featuring men and women, where the women slayed. She leans forward to show me. “This is Kelly Slater’s wave pool. This is the first time in a sanctioned competition hosted by the world surf league where men and women have competed in the exact same wave conditions, size and everything! That finals day that we were there? I think seven of eight men did not even complete their first wave!”

    Vrindavan is cracking up. “That should not make me happy!” she says. Abraham hands me his phone so I can watch a GoPro video of Tulsi surfing.

    “Every time she goes home, she’s on the water,” says Vrindavan. “Every morning”

    “The best spot to go is [redacted],” says Abraham.

    “You can’t publish that name!” says Vrindavan.

    “We walk to the beach,” says Tulsi.

    “It’s a two-minute walk,” says Abraham.

    “It’s not two minutes,” says Tulsi.

    “Like five.”

    “It might take two minutes to skate there,” says Tulsi.

    “Oh yeah,” says Vrindavan. “They skateboard.”

    The Last Straw

    Over the few months I was reporting this piece, Tulsi’s transient aunt called me from a plane; from an apartment in Portland, Oregon; from her home in Hawaii; and finally, unexpectedly, from a new home in Samoa, deep in Oceania, “as far as you can get from anywhere else.” It was a surprise even to her, but she had had a charged email correspondence with the island’s high ranking official and on a whim decided to return in retirement. “It was not my plan at all, not at all,” she says. “I’m here in the ancient world now. I’m operating in a framework of unbroken antiquity. It’s a riot of joy. I’m sprouting into a rain forest.”

    Tulsi’s candidacy was not the first time that Sina felt compelled to speak to the press. When, in the early ’90s, her brother became the poster boy for homophobia in Hawaii, she very much wanted to say something, but in the thick of personal and medical challenge, she was advised by her therapist to say nothing much and left journalists’ calls unreturned.

    Years later, when Trump emerged victorious on Election Night 2016, she was inert for two days, and it wasn’t until she heard a rousing statement about resistance out of the mouth of Elizabeth Warren that she “literally got off the couch.” She thought about her only vector to power. She texted Tulsi, Sina says, and while she waited for a response, Tulsi met with Donald Trump, declined to join her colleagues in denouncing Steve Bannon, and met with Assad. When the family invited her to Thanksgiving dinner, Sina did not go. Tulsi never called back.

    It was, finally, the failure to sign the letter denouncing Bannon that pushed Sina over the edge of reticence. “An alarming pattern of Tulsi’s priorities is becoming increasingly clear and problematic,” Sina wrote on Facebook. “Having been a citizen twice as long as I’ve been Tulsi’s aunt, I hold my responsibilities for both roles as equally significant.”

    She is still in frequent contact with the family despite everything. She and her brother share responsibility for an intellectually disabled relative, and so Sina and Tulsi’s mother confer about her care. “I used to think lifelines are what you toss to someone who falls overboard,” she writes in her book Alchemies of Distance. “But my sailor friend says, ‘No, lifelines are the ones that help keep you inside the boat.’ ”

    The End

    How far does our commitment to religious diversity extend? Is it weirder to follow the dictates of a surfer guru who believes the moon landing was a hoax than to claim, as does Evangelical Mike Pence, that the establishment of Israel represents biblical prophecy? Georgia representative Jody Hice believes you can predict major political events through a succession of “blood moons.” A recent member of Congress claims pregnancy by “legitimate rape” is impossible. Because he believes bee pollen cured his allergies, former Iowa senator Tom Harkin has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars failing to prove the legitimacy of various alternative medicines, pollen among them.

    In February, Tulsi Gabbard introduced a draft bill intended to keep Trump from pulling out of a nuclear-arms treaty; the move was supported by representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. (Abraham shot a Facebook Live video of a press conference for the bill, during which an expert on nuclear war spoke of Armageddon while red hearts floated past his face.) Three months later, she said she’d pardon Edward Snowden and drop charges against Julian Assange.

    The Democratic front-runner in every poll was a man who both signed the Authorization of Military Force, which has since been used to justify interventions in 14 countries, and hailed its signing as an inspiring act of democratic legitimacy. And when it appeared possible that the United States was gearing up for a military intervention in Venezuela under the guise of humanitarian aid, only one presidential candidate was willing to condemn the idea.

    As Bernie Sanders has moved toward a compromise position on military intervention abroad, Gabbard has chosen not to accept “this worldview, this regime-change-war addiction,” and has not backed down from the statement about “people whose whole careers have been built around support for these wars.”

    Maybe Tulsi Gabbard is a toady, or naïve, or negative-attention seeking, or maybe a boy who grew up watching his father ridiculed decided to build a world in which he never would be, and in the world he built appeared a girl capable of holding firm to brazen ideas the world disdains. There are good actors and bad ones, but you don’t get to know what is in a candidate’s heart. If you think you do, you’ve been fooled. There is only the story they tell and the one you choose to believe. There are the votes they show up for and the forces they resist — the strength of the lifeline and into what strange waters they steer the boat.

    To see more documents/articles regarding this group/organization/subject click here.

    ***

    This is a very interesting and lengthy investigative article on Tulsi, her family and the Science of Identity organization and guru from June of 2019.
    A million galaxies are a little foam on that shoreless sea. ~ Rumi

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    MSNBC and all establishment media manipulating the information potential voters will see.


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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Franny I appreciate these in-depth article describing her family history and her history, but I must say it does not make me like her any less as a thoughtful, spiritually tuned, potential leader.

    I see no other current Democratic party national candidates I can say that about.
    I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions. - Robert Anton Wilson

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    (avatar image: Brocken spectre, a wonderful phenomenon of nature I have experienced and a symbol for my aspirations.)

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Quote Posted by mountain_jim (here)
    Franny I appreciate these in-depth article describing her family history and her history, but I must say it does not make me like her any less as a thoughtful, spiritually tuned, potential leader.

    I see no other current Democratic party national candidates I can say that about.
    I tend to agree with you on this point. It's a part of her background and important. However, she she will not address the question so digging for information is the only means to learn about it. On one hand I understand her reluctance to discuss it as she still has ties to this controversial group/cult, on the other she has altered her views since her earlier years when she was deeply involved. Time will tell or at least give us a better understanding of where she actually stands.

    As a congresswoman and as a potential, though an unlikely president, I want to know what her positions are and how close her ties to the group and Chris Butler are particularly since she has never, even indirectly, renounced them or indicated she is no longer a member.
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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    I know we can sometimes be fooled by words BUT when Tulsi Gabbard speaks, I feel it in my bones as a resonant chime of YES. I love that feeling. She talks about how powerfully people bond when they share unity of purpose. The whole thing about the military is that it does create that shared bonding. BUT IMO the military uses a quality that is inherent in us as beings. We are individuals who seek unity through purpose. IMO Gabbard undersatnds how we could unite for the purpose of actually solving the issues we face. Her strengths and her lack of affiliation with the powerful "pay to play" culture is a threat.IMO, she is inspiring!!!! I will see her able to win in 2020.... I call on Pepe (hehe).



    A supporter video

    Last edited by Delight; 14th December 2019 at 17:56.

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Tulsi Gabbard is again confirming that she follows principles that IMO we really need to thrive as a country.




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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Tulsi's explanation of impeachment vote video

    Last edited by Franny; 19th December 2019 at 18:13. Reason: Embed Tweet/video
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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Quote Posted by Franny (here)
    Quote Posted by mountain_jim (here)
    Franny I appreciate these in-depth article describing her family history and her history, but I must say it does not make me like her any less as a thoughtful, spiritually tuned, potential leader.

    I see no other current Democratic party national candidates I can say that about.
    I tend to agree with you on this point. It's a part of her background and important. However, she she will not address the question so digging for information is the only means to learn about it. On one hand I understand her reluctance to discuss it as she still has ties to this controversial group/cult, on the other she has altered her views since her earlier years when she was deeply involved. Time will tell or at least give us a better understanding of where she actually stands.

    As a congresswoman and as a potential, though an unlikely president, I want to know what her positions are and how close her ties to the group and Chris Butler are particularly since she has never, even indirectly, renounced them or indicated she is no longer a member.
    When you think about it, it really is no different than someone being raised in a cult group like Catholicism or Southern Baptists or our public school indoctrination camps. Who doesn't have something a bit weird in their upbringing?

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Quote Posted by Delight (here)
    Tulsi Gabbard is again confirming that she follows principles that IMO we really need to thrive as a country.



    This is what I love about her. She can think independently and she won't compromise what she believes is right, also her thinking processes are so good. I am so disappointed that apparently the masses cannot see how rare and valuable this woman is. The fact that slime like Biden can be far more desirable than this woman is incomprehensible to me. I feel like I am living in a madhouse on the planet at this time.

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    No need to follow anyone, only consider broadening (y)our horizon of possibilities ...

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    What I would like to know more about is Tulsi's ties with the Council on Foreign Relations.
    A discussion here from 2017 that focuses more on that: https://www.reddit.com/r/C_S_T/comme...fr_council_on/
    More here: https://libertyconservativenews.com/...ign-relations/
    This from May 2019, where Tulsi says in a video that she became a a "term member" of the CFR in 2013 (for members under the age of 40), which entails a membership of 5 years. No indication as to whether she was admitted again to the CFR after that initial membership ended.

    This from June 2019 showing she is no longer on the online list of CFR's membership: http://www.renegadetribune.com/cfr-r...egades-expose/
    ...though that may simply be because her 5 year term was up at that point.
    The question is whether she will re-apply, be re-admitted, and could actually be or become another pawn of the NWO.
    It seems clear that it's very easy to get swallowed up in that swamp, no matter how good one's original intentions might be.
    Until the swamp is really drained, even if Tulsi's motivations are pure, she could still become another sort of sacrificial virgin to that sucky swamp.
    Last edited by onawah; 19th December 2019 at 22:10.
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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Quote Posted by peterpam (here)
    I feel like I am living in a madhouse on the planet at this time.
    ME TOO! Tulsi Gabbard is someone I support because of the same things you said

    Quote She can think independently and she won't compromise what she believes is right, also her thinking processes are so good. I am so disappointed that apparently the masses cannot see how rare and valuable this woman is.
    Tonight I feel really sad about the state of the world. I cannot believe how strange everything looks.

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    If Tulsi Gabbard is not genuine, is not telling us her truth, then I have no character assessment skills. Nah, I trust my discernment skills. PEACE. I expect that it is possible and I am feeling many of us gathering our hearts together and making up our minds together.


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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    Tulsi gabbard is IMO being shunned by the DNC. This inspires me to appreciate the powerful threat her ideas appear to the status quo.

    Quote Yang asks 'Where's Tulsi?' after video of Democratic candidates leaves her out
    BY JOHN BOWDEN - 12/24/19 08:12 PM EST 544


    Yang asks 'Where's Tulsi?' after video of Democratic candidates leaves her out
    Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang posted and later deleted a tweet questioning why Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) was excluded from a video message filmed by a number of candidates running for the party's presidential nomination on Tuesday.

    The video, posted Monday by the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) Twitter account, features Yang alongside a slew of other Democratic candidates for president, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).



    It's part of a fundraising push for the DNC's Democratic Unity Fund, which works to support whichever candidate wins the Democratic nomination following the primary. Gabbard is not among the candidates in the video.

    In a now-deleted tweet, Yang wrote, "Where's Tulsi?"

    He followed up the message with an explanation, writing, "Just posted a tweet about a DNC video when I was unaware of the criterion used. That’s why we have teams around us - to let us know these kinds of things. Happy Holidays!"

    The DNC did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on what the requirements were for appearing in the video.

    Gabbard failed to qualify for December's Democratic debate, and Yang himself lies on the verge of not qualifying for the Democratic debate in January following the DNC's decision to raise the requirements for participation.

    But the video has received some attention on social media since two other Democratic candidates who have yet to appear on stage in any of the debates, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, are both in the video.

    Both Patrick and Bloomberg joined the race in November.

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    Default Re: Tulsi Gabbard

    I like feeling the friendliness that Tulsi Gabbard projects.


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