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Transcript:
Wow, an American politician who is a woman, nonwhite, non-Christian, antiwar, relatively young, was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, and is a SURFER? Tulsi Gabbard would be my most favorite politician ever, were it not for the simple fact that she absolutely sucks and is an enthusiastic member of a dangerous, homophobic cult. I’ve been waiting ages to talk about how horrible this woman is, and when I missed my chance during the 2020 Democratic primaries, I thought the time had past. But it turns out that five, Gabbard is still relevant, because she’s actually even worse than I thought. So let’s go.
First of all, let me state unequivocally that we should never discriminate against someone for their deeply held religious beliefs, unless of course those beliefs are horrifically bigoted, dangerous, or so ignorant that they will interfere with that person’s ability to do their chosen job. For instance, we should not, in general, discriminate against someone for being a Christian. However, if we are hiring an emergency room doctor and that person says their Christian doctrine declares that they cannot deliver lifesaving care to a patient if they are a pregnant woman, then that particular person should fuck off and get a job doing anything where they don’t have to interact with a woman. Like “pick up artist podcast engineer” or something.
With that in mind, let’s talk about Tulsi Gabbard and the “Science of Identity Foundation.” My personal rule is that if a religion was founded in the past century, it’s probably a cult. And if it has “science” in the name, it’s probably a dangerous cult. And yes, Scientologists count because that’s close enough. So do the Christian Scientists, because the late 19th century also counts. Look, it’s a personal rule, not a contractual obligation.
The Science of Identity Foundation was founded in the 1970s by Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa. You know, I have such a hard time with pronouncing things so going forward, let’s just call him, oh, I don’t know, “Chris.” Because that’s his name. Chris.
Chris Butler was a counterculture hippy in the 1960s who, like many counterculture hippies in the 1960s, got sucked into the Hare Krishnas, aka the cult known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. The Hare Krishnas practiced an offshoot of Hinduism, in which they focused entirely on worshipping one god: Shiva. No, just kidding, it’s Krishna. You probably figured that out.
The Hare Krishnas came about thanks to one guy, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who came to New York City in 1965 with nothing but a dream and box of books, which he took to public parks and foisted upon an unsuspecting population of hippies and burnouts. On the one hand, teenagers on acid are possibly the easiest people to get to join a cult, but it’s honestly impressive that he convinced them to specifically join a cult that requires these as the primary tenets for new recruits: not eating meat, not gambling, not having sex outside of marriage, and not eating or drinking anything fun, which includes alcohol, drugs, coffee, tea, and anything that makes food taste good like onion or garlic. Seriously? Worst cult ever.
I will pause here to mention that I have personally had one experience with Hare Krishnas. About a decade ago, I was invited to Glasgow to give a talk to the local skeptic and atheist club. I had a blast, and I met these awesome guys who invited me to lunch the next day, since my flight back to London didn’t leave until the evening. I had no plans so I met up with them, and it was a beautiful day so we ended up sitting outside of a pub chatting, and about every five minutes someone walked by who knew the guys and joined us and bought another round. An hour or two in, the group was large and raucous and I was trashed. It was at that point that a Hare Krishna walked up to us. He did NOT know my new friends but he DID want to invite us all to their meeting down the street, starting in a few minutes. At first we weren’t interested, but then he said there would be free snacks. I still had some time before I needed to be at the airport so we all picked up and walked over to check it out.
It did not go well. In part because we turned the meeting into a philosophical argument and I’m pretty sure someone, maybe me, brought up their ugly history of child sex abuse in their schools, and in part because I tried the food and it was so disgusting that it caught me by surprise and I spit it out into a trashcan, which was, in retrospect, pretty rude. But come on! It looked like a brownie but there was no chocolate in it, because chocolate is delicious and that’s the day I learned that Hare Krisna’s hate delicious food. If you’re going to offer someone a free brownie, you are legally required to say if it doesn’t have any chocolate in it.
Then I had to go catch my flight, so 80% of the room, which was our group, stood up and left at the same time, leaving the Hare Krishnas to have a normal meeting. I assume that since then, the group does less recruiting at pubs.
Anyway back to Chris. Chris Butler was a yoga teacher who was already at work building up his own cult in Hawaii when he joined up with the Hare Krishnas and became a guru, but he almost immediately started disagreeing with the way things were run. Oh, not the weird rules about food…he just wanted to get married (which was apparently not okay for gurus, and if you can’t get married you can’t get your dick wet, right?), and he didn’t want his followers to shave their heads and wear robes, and he also didn’t want to have to compete with any other gurus. He wanted to be the only guru, and he wanted to deemphasize the teachings based upon the ancient Hindu scriptures in favor of his own special feelings.
For instance, the Hare Krishnas hated the idea of homosexual sex but for the same reason they hated (most) hetero sex: nothing should be done for “pleasure,” but only for procreation. But Butler really seemed to fucking hate gay people and he wanted to work that into his “teachings,” along with a hatred of Islam and, naturally for a religion he would end up calling the “Science of Identity Foundation,” a hatred of science.
In other words, he wanted a more business casual alt-right version of the Hare Krishnas. Swami Prabhupada got so annoyed by Butler that he denounced him, and when the Swami died shortly thereafter in 1977, Butler finally had the opportunity to officially cut ties with the Hare Krishnas and solidify his now much bigger following as their own cult.
Butler convinced a few dozen 18-22 year olds to live with him in a little enclave, including the people who would eventually create a little baby Tulsi Gabbard. Her father, Mike Gabbard, was all-in on the entire “Science of Identity Foundation” set of beliefs, like hating public school and so homeschooling his kids, and hating gay people so much that he started hosting his own anti-gay radio show, cleverly titled “Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii,” where he was so homophobic that people boycotted the deli he owned inside a cult-owned grocery store and it went out of business. Imagine being so bigoted you can’t keep a culty deli open while probably getting a cult-special break on rent and selling to your fellow cult members.
Mike Gabbard took his homophobia into politics, getting on the city council and then state senate–this is also in line with the cult, which had been secretly trying to get cult members into power for years. A teenaged Tulsi joined his various campaigns and was inspired to follow in his footsteps, becoming the youngest woman to be elected to a US state legislature at 21, then joining the Honolulu city council, and then running and winning a seat as a Democrat in the US House of Representatives for Hawaii’s 2nd district. While she was anti-choice and anti-same sex marriage at the beginning of her career, in line with how she grew up, she eventually walked back those stances and, thanks to her other more progressive policies like being anti-war and pro-environment, she ended up endorsing and being endorsed by Bernie Sanders in 2016.
That’s about the time that she hit most people’s radar, so it’s understandable that many people just categorized her as “progressive” and didn’t bother to look further. But she very clearly is not progressive.
For instance, she eventually walked BACK her walkback on gay rights, endorsing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, speaking at Conservative Political Action Conferences, and introducing a bill that would deny federal funding to any school that recognized trans girls.
She also reversed her previous common sense views on gun control, now opposing a ban on assault weapons.
And despite her cult’s rule forbidding travel to India–yeah, that’s a thing Chris Butler instituted, and he also said that the cult is explicitly NOT Hindu despite Gabbard branding herself “the first Hindu member of Congress”–Gabbard did travel to India in 2014 to meet and befriend Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a rightwing anti-demoratic nationalist who has overseen several violent riots that targeted and killed Muslims.
Yeah, remember how Chris Butler’s cult is extremely anti-Muslim? Probably not a coincidence, then, that she not only cozied up to Modi but also to now former Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, who is beloved by white supremacists in Europe and the United States for bombing Syrian cities in the name of the War on Terror.
We knew that she visited Assad in February of 2017, the first politician to do since the administration committed a massacre during the Arab Spring of 2011, because Assad is a terrifying totalitarian dictator responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the displacement of millions of others.
What was not publicly known until very recently was that Gabbard didn’t just stop in for tea and crumpets with the bloodthirsty fascist–she met with him several times, with the first meeting scheduled to be three hours long and followed immediately by a meeting with his wife.
The Washington Post has now revealed that in addition to that, Gabbard refused to tell her staffers what was going on at the time, and the entire office scrambled to hide what she was doing from the House Ethics Committee, leading to at least two staffers quitting. By the way, check out the ads on that article (it’s surfboards). That’s impressive targeting.
The Post also revealed that the meeting in question happened during an all-expense paid trip to Syria and Lebanon sponsored by a pro-Assad activist and pitched to the Ethics Committee as a “fact finding mission,” never mentioning the Assad meeting. One of the staffers who quit said they were positive Gabbard knew the meeting was happening but lied about it: “How did you just happen to meet with the leader of [a police state] not once, but twice?”
When the press found out that Gabbard had met with Assad, the staff frantically tried to massage the facts to hide the facts that sure made it look like he had greeted the Congresswoman upon her arrival in Damascus, which would be odd for a spontaneous meeting when she wasn’t even supposed to go to Damascus in the first place, according to the itinerary she submitted to the Ethics Committee.
In the post-trip report to Congress, staffers deleted information about some of the other Syrian dignitaries Gabbard met with. And Gabbard declared that afterwards, she paid back $9,000 for the trip, so she shouldn’t have to disclose “the travel paid by the Syrian and Lebanese governments.”
You know what they say: it’s not the crime as much as it is the cover up. It’s bad enough that Gabbard accepted a free trip to rub elbows with a murderous dictator, but the fact that she felt the need to hide her actions both before and after the trip? In a rational world, that would absolutely lead to some kind of punishment, but instead our Reality TV Star in Chief has put her forward as the person who should be director of national intelligence, the top person in charge of all of our nation’s intelligence operations, including all of our spies. That is concerning!
A lot of people are really confused by Gabbard: is she on the left, with her positions on cannabis legalization, universal healthcare, and environmentalism? Or is she on the right, with her positions on LGBTQ issues and her willingness to cozy up to dangerous fascists? We look to labels like “Democrat” or “Republican” so that we can easily understand someone’s viewpoint, and anticipate how they are likely to behave. Gabbard seems to defy those labels.
But honestly, I think it all makes sense when you put aside the political labels and just go with “cult member.” Remember a few videos ago, when I talked about how our progressive hero Neil Gaiman turned out to be a lying abusive scumbag? And how much of his abuse appears to relate directly to growing up as a Scientologist? This is what cults do, especially to the people unfortunate enough to be born into them. They fuck you up.
I found it interesting, while researching this video, to learn about how the Science of Identity cult treated authority figures. There’s a quote I found in a 2017 New Yorker article, where Chris Butler says, “A guru, Butler once explained, is supposed to be “a bona-fide representative of the Supreme Lord.” Interviews I’ve read with adherents, some of whom have left the cult, support that idea: Butler demanded followers treat him like a god, even encouraging them to eat his toenails to move closer to his divinity. When they disappointed him, he screamed at them, calling them “f***ots” and “cunts,” as New York Magazine reported in 2019. He even recorded those epithets and sent them to adherents around the world so they knew what happened to followers who were insufficiently adoring. “We regarded him as God’s representative on Earth,” said one man who grew up with a mother in the cult.
Back to the New Yorker: “Butler is sensitive to the perception that he is an authoritarian; he prefers to talk about himself as a student and a follower, rather than as a teacher and a leader. “My teacher loves me,” he said. (He was referring, in the eternal-spirit present tense, to Bhaktivedanta.) “It’s a relationship of love. And so the students of such a loving guru will love their teachers—it’s natural that you will love that person.”
That’s an interesting rewriting of history, considering the fact that, if you’ll recall, Butler’s loving teacher actually denounced him for his rebellious, authoritarian teachings. But he has to rewrite the past this way, because he must convince his followers to do what he could not: to submit.
Tulsi Gabbard learned the lesson well. She was born into it, raised in it, and still abides by it today: somewhere inside her may be some moral compass, but it’s surrounded by magnetic authoritarians in her father, her guru, and even foreign dictators. It’s possible to grow up and separate yourself from your childhood, but for those who are in cults that are specifically designed to isolate you from other viewpoints, to not allow you to get a secular education, to not even allow you to play with other children outside of religious services, to raise you with the core belief that there will always be a powerful old man to point you in the right direction, sometimes it takes either superhuman will or the luck of a supportive community outside the cult to escape. Unfortunately, it seems that Gabbard has only found another powerful old man to follow.
