Tulsi Gabbard: Cult Politics?
When Tulsi Gabbard first entered politics, she focused on promoting anti-LBG causes. This reflected her upbringing in a cult that is an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement, which her parents joined soon after they moved to Hawaii when Gabbard was two. She did not attend public schools and instead attended private ones controlled by the cult.
This post is based on stories from the New Yorker (2017), the New York Times (August 2, 2019), and Honolulu Magazine (2004).
She has now completely reversed her position on LBGT issues and is instead focused on the need for international isolationism. The New York Times describes her message as “Get out of foreign wars. Leave other countries alone. Not everyone wants democracy.”
She views the U.S. as a consistently negative influence on the world, often committing atrocities, starting with the atrocious massacre at Wounded Knee. Of course, she is correct that the U.S. has committed many atrocities. But she seems unaware of the atrocities and gross injustices in the rest of the world.
For example, a few months after she met with Trump to make her case for a noninterventionist foreign policy, she flew to Syria and met with Bashar al-Assad, who is known for using torture on a massive scale. She returned home and voted against a House resolution condemning the dictator’s war crimes. Later it was discovered that the trip had been funded by a pair of Lebanese-American businessmen with ties to a pro-Assad political party.
In April 2017, after a sarin gas attack in Syria, Gabbard said that she was “skeptical” of claims that Assad’s government was to blame. That was also Russia’s position.
These positions have won her a number of (perhaps unwelcome) fans: Trump enabler, Steven Bannon, ultra-right-win Ann Coulter, libertarian Ron Paul, and ex-KKK leader David Duke, who she disavows.
She is close to the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, and was involved in planning his last visit to the U.S. Modi is a fairly right-wing Hindu nationalist, who believes India is, and should remain, a Hindu nation.
More disturbing may be the assessment of Clinton Watts, a former F.B.I. agent and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute:
"In tracking metrics of Russian state propaganda on Twitter, she was by far the most favored candidate. She’s the Kremlin’s preferred Democrat. She is such a useful agent of influence for them. Whether she knows it’s happening or not, they love what she’s saying. She’s a U.S. military officer and a Democrat who says the U.S. should withdraw from the world."
Tulsi Gabbard’s Guru
Tulsi’s father, Mike, joined the Hare Krishna movement in 1973, when living in American Samoa. In 1983, the Gabbard family moved to Hawai’i and became involved with Chris Butler a.k.a. Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, who had split from the Hare Krishnas to form his Scientific Identity Foundation (SIF), the financial arm of his cult. Tulsi’s mother served as secretary/treasurer of the SIF until 2000.
In the summer of 2019, Tulsi told the NY Times that she is still guided by Butler who she considers her guru. So what is her religion? The author of the New Yorker article managed to get a telephone interview with the secretive Butler to try to answer this question.
Butler claimed, “I’m not a Hindu, I’m not a Christian, I’m not a Buddhist, I’m not a Muslim,” I’m an eternal spirit soul.” But Butler recognizes the usefulness of a recognizable label in politics, so he suggested a compromise to Gabbard: “I told her, ‘Why don’t you use the phrase “transcendental Hinduism”? And so she was found calling herself that in the congressional dining room.
However, Butler considers himself a Vaishnava Hindu acharyas (teacher) and now Tulsi Gabbard is calling herself a Vaishnava Hindu. In the video below, she is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first visit to the U.S. of the Hare Krishna movement’s founder.
More about Chris Butler
According to the New Yorker’s 2017 article:
In the nineteen-eighties, Butler excoriated same-sex desire; he wrote, for instance, that bisexuality was “sense gratification” run amok, and warned that the logical conclusion of such hedonistic conduct was pedophilia and bestiality. (He declared, with striking certainty, that “an increasing number of women in the United States keep dogs for sexual reasons.”) Reed, Mike Gabbard [Tulsi’s father], and other political candidates associated with him tended to echo these pronouncements.
Given that Tulsi Gabbard openly espoused similar beliefs when she first joined her father in Hawai’ian politics and has since had to repudiate such views, these charges ring true.
The New Yorker also notes that a number of Butler’s former disciples recall a harsh, authoritarian atmosphere.
Defectors tell stories of children discouraged by Butler from attending secular schools; of followers forbidden to speak publicly about the group; of returning travellers quarantined for days, lest they transmit a contagious disease to Butler; of devotees lying prostrate whenever he entered the room, or adding bits of his nail clippings to their food, or eating spoonfuls of sand that he had walked upon. Some former members portray themselves as survivors of an abusive cult.
Of course, Tulsi Gabbard seems to be nothing like this, but the mystery remains of why she still considers Chris Butler to be her guru.
Ripped Apart
