What Does Tulsi Gabbard Believe?

Gabbard began with a personal tribute to those whose service had cost them their lives. “Like so many of you, I woke up this morning with a heavy heart,” she said. “Remembering that time in training, or downrange, when things were so crappy that all you could do was laugh, know that we had each other, and embrace the suck. We remember that last roll call, when their name was called with no response.” She talked about how she had never seen her father cry until the day she came home, unharmed, from Iraq. Anyone sitting close enough might have noticed that her eyes were gleaming. But she also sounded a note of political protest. “Too often we have found, throughout our country’s history, we have people in positions of power who make offhanded comments about sending a few thousand troops here, fifty thousand there, a hundred thousand there, intervening militarily here, or starting a war there—without seeming to understand or appreciate the cost of war,” she said. “If our troops are sent to fight a war, it must be the last option. Not the first.”

Friends and supporters sometimes describe Gabbard as “poised,” which may also be a way of acknowledging that she is not particularly spontaneous. She engages audiences with a voice that is slow, reassuring, and faintly hypnotic. Her resting expression is a sympathetic smile, and she has perfected an effective double-hug technique: a warm, long embrace when she meets someone, and an even longer one when saying goodbye, as if to signal that something meaningful has transpired. “We love you, Tulsi,” someone called out when she finished.

“I love you, too,” she called back.

In Gabbard’s telling, her comfort with crowds is the result of hard work, and a philosophical breakthrough. She was unusually shy as a girl, but eventually she realized that her anxiety was not just inconvenient but indefensible. She remembers thinking, “If all of my fears are coming from selfish thoughts, then that kind of defeats the whole point of what I want to do.” So she trained herself to talk to strangers, to “share that aloha with them.” In the Hawaiian language, “aloha” can be a salutation or a valediction, but it also refers to a spirit defined in state law as “the coordination of mind and heart within each person.” (Hawaiian officials are directed to “give consideration to the ‘Aloha spirit’ ” as they discharge their duties.)

When Gabbard entered politics, she was only twenty-one, and in those early years she was a social conservative, pro-life and active in the fight against same-sex marriage. She is now pro-choice and pro-same-sex-marriage: on these and other issues, she has evolved enough to be almost—but not quite—at home in the contemporary Democratic Party, which is increasingly progressive, particularly on issues of gender and sexual orientation. The exact nature and extent of Gabbard’s political evolution is not easy to apprehend, especially since Hawaii is not known for political centrism. It is, by some measures, the bluest state in the country: in last year’s election, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump there, sixty-two per cent to thirty per cent, her biggest victory anywhere besides the District of Columbia. Many of those Clinton voters were unhappily surprised when, less than two weeks after the election, Gabbard agreed to meet with Trump to make her case for a noninterventionist foreign policy. A few months later, she flew to Syria and met with Bashar al-Assad, who is presiding over a brutal civil war; she and he seemed to agree that the United States should not intervene to stop it.

Earlier this year, a handful of impassioned progressives gathered in downtown Honolulu for an event known as Resist Trump Tuesday, in which they visited their senators and Congress members—all Democrats—and urged them to fight harder. They got a friendly reception at the office of Senator Brian Schatz, and one participant presented some red flowers at the office of Senator Mazie Hirono, who has been battling kidney cancer. But at Gabbard’s office the staffer who met them was warier: he read a list of her recent legislative positions, including her support for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, then listened politely as they expressed their concerns. (They wanted a more vigorous congressional investigation into Russian collusion with Trump’s campaign, legalization of sex work, action on climate change, funding for the arts.) As they spilled back out into the hallway, they were, for the first time all afternoon, expressing ambivalence.

“Tulsi is great,” one man said. “She’s really good on the positions.”

“Most of them,” a woman replied. “She’s a riddle to me.”

On a steamy summer day in Washington, Gabbard was shuttling between her office, in the Longworth Building, and the House floor, where her presence was urgently but irregularly required, for votes. In keeping with congressional tradition, she has filled her office with mementos of her home state, including a plaque, at the receptionist’s desk, bearing a friendly but blunt message: “ALOHA SPIRIT REQUIRED HERE. IF YOU CAN’T SHARE IT TODAY, PLEASE VISIT US SOME OTHER TIME.” Gabbard flies back to Hawaii whenever she gets a long enough weekend, but she has come to enjoy her circumscribed and frenetic existence in Washington. She lives across the Anacostia River, on the city’s southeastern edge, with her sister, Vrindavan, who is a U.S. marshal, and Vrindavan’s husband, whose responsibilities include the preparation of vegetarian meals. When Gabbard is in town, she finds that she can spend days in constant motion, meeting and voting and meeting some more, while hardly ever leaving the warren of federal buildings. Even her daily recreation is there: she is a member of the famously tough bipartisan workout group led by Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, who happens to be a former professional mixed-martial-arts fighter.

Like all congressional offices, Gabbard’s receives a steady and variegated stream of guests: curious visitors, hopeful advocates, aggrieved constituents, old friends. On this morning, she had a brief discussion with a couple of missile-defense experts and then rushed over to the Capitol for a series of uncontroversial votes on sex trafficking. The chamber was mainly deserted, except for the tourist galleries, which were full of families, none of whom, it seemed, had been warned about the day’s agenda. “These votes are separated by two minutes,” Gabbard said. “So, if you’re not paying attention, you can end up voting wrong on a bunch of things.”

Gabbard does not consider herself to be especially loyal to any leader or faction. “No one from the D-triple-C”—the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—“came and recruited me to run for Congress,” she says. “So my situation may be different from others, who have relied heavily on Party support from the beginning.” Gabbard was a long shot when, in 2012, she decided to compete in the Democratic primary against Mufi Hannemann, the popular former mayor of Honolulu. So she sent a small army of volunteers across the islands, planting lawn signs and lining the roads with placards, running a campaign based less on policy than on personality. People who supported Gabbard then have a hard time remembering now what the issues were. One local Democratic activist was drawn to her mainly because she seemed like “a bright, fresh voice.” Gabbard won the primary by twenty percentage points, and then ran all but uncontested in the general election, against a token Republican opponent.

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Gabbard praised President Obama, a fellow-Hawaiian, and Vice-President Joe Biden, along with their wives, as “the strongest advocates our military families could ever have.” But, once in office, she declined to play the role of reliable ally. Not long after she was sworn in, she joined with Republicans to vote for a short-term spending bill that most of her Democratic colleagues opposed. (She said that she wanted to insure uninterrupted funding for the military.) And in 2015 she went on Fox News and accused the Obama Administration of not recognizing that “Islamic extremists are our enemy.” By then, she was building a nationwide profile: in 2013, the Democratic National Committee had appointed her vice-chair, a role that marked her as a rising star. But, later in 2015, as the Presidential primaries drew near, she called for additional Democratic debates, a position that seemed to put her at odds with the Hillary Clinton campaign and, not coincidentally, with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the D.N.C. chair. According to Gabbard, the committee retaliated by disinviting her from the first debate; Wasserman Schultz contended that Gabbard “was not uninvited,” but that she had been asked to focus on the candidates, not on the process.

A few months later, Gabbard resigned her D.N.C. position so that she could endorse Clinton’s opponent Bernie Sanders; she argued that Clinton was a committed military interventionist, and that Sanders was more trustworthy on “issues of war and peace.” The endorsement unnerved some of Gabbard’s allies, who assumed that Clinton would be the nominee. “Some of my friends and colleagues were looking at me as though I had just—they were preparing for my death, essentially,” Gabbard remembers. They told her, “When she”—Clinton—“wins, you’re going to suffer for many, many years.” (At least two potential fund-raisers abandoned Gabbard; in an e-mail, which was forwarded to John Podesta and subsequently made public by WikiLeaks, they accused her of being “disrespectful to Hillary Clinton.” )

When Clinton won the nomination, it posed a problem for Gabbard, until someone came along to solve it: Donald Trump, whose victory insured that Sanders supporters would pay no substantial price for having abandoned Clinton. Gabbard says that she was “shocked” when Trump won, and “concerned, in so many ways.” But, while some of her friends spent weeks fighting depression, she had a more levelheaded reaction. “I’m a pretty pragmatic person,” she says. “It was, like, ‘O.K., there’s a lot at stake. We are where we are—let’s figure out how we move forward.’ ” And so, when Steve Bannon called and asked her to meet with Trump, at Trump Tower, she accepted. (The Hill reported that Bannon “loves Tulsi Gabbard,” and that he viewed her as someone who “gets the foreign policy stuff, the Islamic terrorism stuff.”) Gabbard insists that she never considered the possibility—which seemed plausible, in those unpredictable days—that Trump would offer her a position in his Cabinet. Her claim is not entirely believable, but it spares her from having to answer the question of whether she would have accepted such an offer.

Gabbard says that she and Trump talked mainly about foreign policy; as a candidate, he had suggested, however inconsistently, that he would curb military interventions. Gabbard recalls that she found the meeting encouraging. “I walked out thinking that there may be some opportunity to work with this Administration to shift our foreign policy in a more positive, less destructive direction,” she said, and then paused. “Less hopeful, now.” In April, after Trump ordered an attack on a Syrian airfield, Gabbard accused him of behaving “recklessly,” and suggested that he had fallen under the influence of “war hawks.” More often, though, she has seemed reluctant to antagonize Trump. Given the overwhelmingly Democratic makeup of her district, this approach cannot be explained by electoral calculation, and it has complicated her relationship with some of the grassroots activists who might otherwise be inclined to support her.

When Gabbard appeared in Syria, last January, many wondered whether she was carrying a message to Assad from Trump. She says that she was not, and that she didn’t even tell the incoming Administration that she was going there. She met twice with Assad, who wanted to convince her of the threat posed by groups like ISIS and Al Nusra. She travelled with her husband, Abraham Williams, a cinematographer, who made a couple of stark but stylish videos of the trip: Gabbard talking to university students in Damascus, assuring them that she wants to stop the United States from supporting “terrorist groups”; Gabbard touring the rubble of a destroyed church with a local pastor, who said that Christians were being targeted by “rebels” loyal to the Islamic State. The videos conveyed the impression that these outsiders had brought chaos to Syria, and that the only path to peace was to put down the insurgency. Upon her return, Gabbard gave an interview in which she intimated that she and Assad—who is known to viciously punish dissent—had negotiated an agreement to bring democracy to Syria. “I challenged him, and talked to him about having fair and open elections, objective international observers, and making it so that the Syrian people can determine the future of Syria for themselves,” she told a reporter. “And these are things that he agreed to.”

Gabbard’s trip was widely regarded as a political disaster; Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois, called Assad a “mass murderer,” and accused Gabbard of having “legitimized his genocide against the Syrian people.” After reporters revealed that the trip had been funded by a pair of Lebanese-American businessmen with ties to a pro-Assad political party, Gabbard agreed to repay her travel costs. And yet, instead of distancing herself from this episode, she has embraced it. In April, after a sarin-gas attack in Syria, Gabbard said that she was “skeptical” of claims that Assad’s government was to blame. Howard Dean, the former D.N.C. chair, responded on Twitter, “This is a disgrace. Gabbard should not be in Congress.”

If you criticize her, you are criticizing ME and MY ENTIRE FAMILY!!

Gabbard is a member of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees. But she is still trying to build support for her signature piece of legislation, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, which would prohibit federal funding for “Al Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, and ISIL, or any individual or group that is affiliated with, associated with, cooperating with, or adherents to such groups.” Its main aim, as Gabbard describes it, is to force the C.I.A. to stop aiding militants in Syria. The current version of the bill has fourteen co-sponsors, eight Republicans and six Democrats, but it has not received a vote. Gabbard’s interest in foreign policy sets her apart from other ambitious Democrats, many of whom have difficulty articulating a clear position on Syria, and virtually all of whom would rather attach themselves to the kinds of domestic issues—stopping Trump, fighting poverty, combatting discrimination—that thrill the Democratic base. In this and other ways, Gabbard’s counterintuitive approach can make her seem unusually principled, or maybe just unusual. The United States has been prosecuting a war on terror for more than sixteen years; Gabbard is one of vanishingly few Democratic politicians who are eager to talk about it.

One afternoon in Hawaii, as Gabbard made her way to visit a Filipino-American veteran at home, she explained that locals sometimes identify one another by asking, “What high school did you go to?” This is a complicated question for Gabbard, who is not quite a native Hawaiian. She was born in American Samoa and moved to Hawaii in 1983, when she was two. She was both a tomboy and a nerd, a combination that caused her no problems in the local schools, because she didn’t go to one: Gabbard was mainly homeschooled. Her first political passion was environmentalism, an interest derived from her first recreational passion, which was the ocean. She lives on Oahu’s east side, and whenever she is home she likes to start her day on the water. On the morning after Memorial Day, she and Williams woke up before dawn and drove to an unmarked beach so that they could take paddleboards out to an island they like. As the sun rose, they ate mangoes and lychees on the sand. Williams, who is twenty-eight and solicitous, monitored a group of tourists nearby, making sure they didn’t get too close to a monk seal and her pup, playing in the surf.

One of Gabbard’s friends describes her parents, fondly, as “fuckin’ hippies,” and it was her father who encouraged her to turn her interest in the ocean into a political cause. Politics was a family vocation: Carol Gabbard, Tulsi’s mother, won a seat on the State Board of Education in 2000. For a decade, Mike Gabbard was Hawaii’s leading opponent of the gay-rights movement, an energetic and often brusque activist who stood ever ready to denounce what he called “the radical homosexual agenda.” In 1999, after one of the main characters on the teen drama “Dawson’s Creek” was revealed to be gay, Mike Gabbard flew to North Carolina, where the program was filmed, to lead a protest.

In 2002, when Tulsi Gabbard was only twenty-one, she ran, as a Democrat, for the Hawaii State House of Representatives, alongside another first-time candidate: her father, who sought and won a seat on the nonpartisan Honolulu City Council. She is eager, now, to explain that she and her father had entirely separate political lives. “He was talking potholes and trash and sewage, and I was talking about education and environment and other issues,” she says. “We’d see each other every now and then.” In fact, the two Gabbards co-founded a pair of nonprofit organizations: Stand Up for America, a patriotic pro-military group, and the Healthy Hawaii Coalition, which promoted environmentalism, and which secured a government grant to send Gabbard into schools dressed as a pollution-fighting superhero named Water Woman.

In her first political incarnation, Gabbard balanced liberal environmentalism with a pronounced conservative streak. In 2003, she voted against a bill to oblige hospitals to “provide emergency contraception immediately” to survivors of sexual assault, because it did not contain a “conscience clause,” to allow providers with a religious objection to opt out. She supported government surveillance efforts, warning that the “demand for unfettered civil liberties” could make the nation vulnerable to terrorists. And she joined her father’s battle against what she called “homosexual extremists.” In 1998, Mike Gabbard had successfully pushed for an amendment to the Hawaii State Constitution, to permit the legislature to ban same-sex marriage, which it did. Six years later, Tulsi Gabbard led a protest against a bill that would have legalized civil unions for same-sex couples. That same year, in the Hawaii State House, she delivered a long, fierce speech against a proposed resolution meant to target anti-gay bullying in public schools. She objected to the idea of students being taught that homosexuality is “normal and natural,” and worried that passing the resolution would have the effect of “inviting homosexual-advocacy organizations into our schools to promote their agenda to our vulnerable youth.”

As Gabbard was settling into her political career, in 2003, she did something surprising: she joined the National Guard, and, when her brigade was shipped to Iraq, she volunteered to go, even though her name was not on the mandatory-deployment roster. She served as a medical-operations specialist on a base in the Sunni Triangle, and also as a military police officer, before attending officer-candidate school in Alabama, where she excelled; a second deployment took her to Kuwait. She often cites her time in the Middle East when asked to explain her political reinvention. By the time she ran for Congress, in 2012, Gabbard was presenting herself as a more or less orthodox progressive, pro-choice and pro-same-sex-marriage. “Experiencing as a woman, firsthand, the impacts of countries that are acting as moral arbiters for their people—it really caused me to rethink the positions I held,” she says. This realization was well timed, because it enabled her to win a Democratic primary in a state that was increasingly blue. (Mike Gabbard, who is now a state senator, defected from the Republican Party and became a Democrat in 2007.

At a meeting in 2012, she apologized to L.G.B.T. activists in Hawaii for “very divisive and even disrespectful” things she had said. But Gabbard has seemed unusually conflicted about sexual orientation, an issue on which young Democrats are typically united and enthusiastic; she has been inclined to tolerate same-sex marriage but not to celebrate it. “Just because that’s not my life style, I don’t think that government should make sure that everybody else’s life styles match my own,” she told me, over the summer. Perhaps her views are still evolving, because in a recent conversation she said that “gay marriage should be celebrated.”

The new version of Gabbard is better suited to the era of Bernie Sanders, whose Our Revolution group endorsed her. (She was also chosen to be an inaugural fellow at the Sanders Institute, founded by Bernie’s wife, Jane Sanders.) She supports single-payer health care and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage; her 2016 critique of Clinton, as too close to corporate and political élites, now sounds less like apostasy and more like the conventional wisdom of a changing Democratic Party. Gabbard is also a symbol of demographic change: she is from Hawaii, where nonwhites make up about three-quarters of the population, and she is the product of an interracial marriage—her father is Samoan, and her mother is white. Gabbard is, prominently, a religious minority, the first representative to swear the oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita, a central Hindu text. She releases yearly holiday videos celebrating Diwali, the grand Hindu festival of lights, and has cultivated a close relationship with Indian-Americans. In 2014, she travelled to India, where she met with the controversial Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has become a political ally, and she is now a co-chair of the Congressional India Caucus.

With her brown skin, black hair, and Hindu name, Gabbard is sometimes mistaken for an Indian-American. (She is named for the holy-basil plant, also known as tulasi, a sweet-smelling herb that appears in the Bhagavad Gita as an offering to the Lord.) “Hindu,” of course, refers to her spiritual orientation, not to her national origin, but she is often described as “Hindu-American,” a formulation that blurs the line between faith and identity. Gabbard has grown more comfortable talking about her faith, which she barely mentioned earlier in her political career. But she has resisted telling the story of her spiritual journey. This summer, when I asked her about the teacher who led her to Hinduism, Gabbard grew evasive. “I’ve had many different spiritual teachers, and continue to,” she said.

“There’s not one that’s more important than the others?”

“No,” she said. But there is, in fact, a teacher who has played a central role in her life—a teacher whom Gabbard referred to, in a 2015 video, as her “guru dev,” which means, roughly, “spiritual master.” His name is Chris Butler.

In 1965, an elderly Indian man known as A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada arrived in America, and soon began singing and preaching in Tompkins Square Park, in New York’s East Village. For reasons that resist secular explanation, Bhaktivedanta drew a crowd, and the crowd grew into something new: the Hare Krishna movement, which introduced Westerners to the five-hundred-year-old Hindu tradition known as Gaudiya Vaishnavism. The Hare Krishna devotee became, for a time, a familiar figure, and sometimes a figure of fun: a young white man with a shaved head and an orange-sherbet robe, chanting ceaselessly and carrying an armload of books to sell. The Beatles’ record label released a Hare Krishna single, and George Harrison wrote “My Sweet Lord” under the group’s influence. (Although Harrison was never initiated into the movement, Bhaktivedanta once praised him as “humble, meek, polite, and devout.”) From 1965 until his death, in 1977, Bhaktivedanta taught and travelled constantly, while corresponding with seekers all over the world.

Homophobic CUNT

By the early seventies, his message had reached Hawaii, where Chris Butler was a young yoga teacher and surfer. Butler, the son of a prominent doctor and antiwar activist who had come from the mainland, was something of a prodigy: a self-styled guru who began attracting followers soon after he dropped out of college. Even so, Butler was awed by Bhaktivedanta, who had a knack for making ancient Indian texts sound like sensible instruction manuals. In his annotated translation of the Bhagavad Gita, readers could learn how to be pleasing to Lord Krishna by eschewing meat and spicy food (which could “cause misery by producing mucus in the stomach”), by working hard, by chanting his name—small, tangible steps that could bring a devotee close to the divine.

In 1971, Bhaktivedanta came to Hawaii, and Butler, who was twenty-three, met him, and made a trade: he turned all of his disciples over to Bhaktivedanta, and in exchange gained a new name, Siddhaswarupananda, which marked him as an initiated disciple and a prominent figure in the growing Hare Krishna movement. It was not always an easy relationship. At times, Bhaktivedanta admonished Butler for non-orthodox teaching, and Butler questioned Bhaktivedanta’s insistence that initiates shave their heads and wear robes.

After Bhaktivedanta’s death, Butler no longer had to choose between devotion and independence. As the Hare Krishna movement fractured, Butler created his own group, now known as the Science of Identity Foundation, and amassed a tight-knit, low-profile network of followers, hundreds or perhaps thousands of them, stretching west from Hawaii into Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. Butler deëmphasized age-old Indian texts and practices, presenting himself instead as a smart and curious guy who had figured out the answers to some very puzzling questions. In 1984, he published “Who Are You? Discovering Your Real Identity,” which used examples from science to argue that materialism was false, and that the self was real—and eternal. (Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita are mentioned only in passing.) He recorded a series of television specials, in which he resembled a hip young college professor on a couch, surrounded by inquisitive students.

One of those students was Mike Gabbard, who had been interested in Hinduism since the nineteen-seventies: he once corresponded with Bhaktivedanta, asking for advice on establishing a temple, and Tulsi Gabbard’s name reflects the family’s pre-existing spiritual commitments. When the Gabbards moved to Hawaii, in 1983, they joined the circle of disciples around Butler. Tulsi Gabbard says that she began learning the spiritual principles of Vaishnava Hinduism as a kid, and that she grew up largely among fellow-disciples, some of whom would gather on the beach for kirtan, the practice of singing or chanting sacred songs. Gabbard pursued a spiritual education: as a girl, she spent two years in the Philippines, at informal schools run by followers of Butler.

Gabbard recalls her childhood as lively and freewheeling: she excelled at martial arts and developed a passion for gardening; she was a serious reader, encouraged by her parents. But a number of Butler’s former disciples recall a harsher, more 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. Butler denies these reports, and Gabbard says that she finds them hard to credit. “I’ve never heard him say anything hateful, or say anything mean about anybody,” she says of Butler. “I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people.”

A number of those people have businesses. One of Butler’s followers is Wai Lana, a yoga entrepreneur who is also his wife. Her company, which produces yoga videos, has helped fund the Science of Identity Foundation. Another person who seems to be a follower is Joseph Bismark, the co-founder of a global multilevel-marketing company called QNET, whose products include a small disk meant to protect users from “the harmful effects of electrosmog.” (A decade ago, Indonesian police, alerted by Interpol, reportedly arrested Bismark on charges of fraud; the charges were eventually withdrawn.)

Unlike Bhaktivedanta, whose every utterance seems to have been recorded for posterity, Butler has carefully controlled his public appearances, and has essentially stopped talking to the media in recent decades. But he agreed to talk with me, by telephone, about his teachings and his star pupil. Butler will be seventy next year, but he still speaks with the boyish, wondrous voice of a mind-blown surfer, enriched by a trace of the clipped, singsong accent that, in Hawaii, provides a form of local cred. He often interrupts himself to chuckle, or to interject his favorite rhetorical question: “Right?”

Although Hindu identity plays an important role in Gabbard’s career, the term itself has a complicated history: it is often used as a catchall for widely varying spiritual practices on the Indian subcontinent, and it is neither universally accepted nor reliably defined. “In the Bhagavad Gita, where is the mention of ‘Hindu’?” Bhaktivedanta once asked. Butler, too, finds the term constricting. “I’m not a Hindu, I’m not a Christian, I’m not a Buddhist, I’m not a Muslim,” he says. “I’m an eternal spirit soul—an atma, part and parcel of the supreme soul.” (His followers have generally avoided the term; Mike Gabbard describes himself as a Catholic, notwithstanding his ties to the foundation.) But Butler recognizes the usefulness of a concise, recognizable label, especially in politics, and so he suggested to Gabbard a compromise: “I told her, ‘Why don’t you use the phrase “transcendental Hinduism”?’ ” (Indeed, during a recent conversation in the congressional dining room Gabbard did precisely that.) Gabbard and Butler both say that the foundation is a resource, not a religious organization; there is no official hierarchy, and therefore no system of accountability, besides Butler’s own conscience, and the conscience of those who are devoted to him. In one lecture, he acknowledged the potential for skepticism, offering followers his version of Pascal’s wager. “If I’m not the representative of God, and you dovetail your will with mine, then your life is destroyed,” he said. “And if I am the representative of God, and you don’t dovetail your will with mine, then your life is wasted.”

And yet he allows that he does have “disciples,” who call him Jagad Guru, or “teacher of the world.” “What the Jagad Guru title conveys is that what’s being taught is not just for a certain group of people,” Butler says. “It’s something that everybody can appreciate, and it’s for people all over the world.” A guru, Butler once explained, is supposed to be “a bona-fide representative of the Supreme Lord.” In commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Bhaktivedanta emphasized that submission was crucial to spiritual advancement. “A spiritual master should be accepted in full surrender,” he wrote, “and one should serve the spiritual master like a menial servant, without false prestige.” 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.” Not coincidentally, he speaks lovingly of Gabbard, whom he’s known virtually all her life. As a girl, he remembers, she had “a real gravity and seriousness that was way beyond her years.” Nowadays, Butler regards Gabbard with fatherly pride, likening himself to a music teacher watching a star pupil excel. “He’s taught one of his students cello,” he says. “And he sees that, oh, this student of mine is now playing cello in the philharmonic orchestra. And it’s beautiful.”

Gabbard is not the first disciple of Butler’s to enter politics. In the late seventies, a rather opaque group called Independents for Godly Government appeared in Hawaii and fielded more than a dozen candidates for local races. The group presented itself as a multifaith coalition of conservative-minded reformers, but in 1977 the Honolulu Advertiser published a three-part exposé identifying I.G.G. as an initiative created mainly, or entirely, by disciples of Butler. One candidate told the newspaper that discretion was part of his political strategy. “I know for a fact that, if I said I was a Hare Krishna, the first thing people would think was I had a shaved head, bells on my feet, and I bothered people at the airport,” he said. “To communicate, I have to keep the doors open.” In Valley Isle, a newspaper based in Maui and friendly to Butler, Bill Penaroza, one of the leaders of the initiative, announced that the group—which hadn’t got any of its candidates elected—was “restructuring.” Penaroza didn’t identify Butler as its leader, but he did concede that he had some influence. “There was an interesting conversation with a friend of mine who I consider to be a very spiritually advanced person, whose name is Siddha Swarup Swami,” Penaroza said. (He was using a version of Butler’s initiated name, Siddhaswarupananda.) “He said he thought we were a little too self-righteous, and that we seem to have limited ourselves to working with people who were of Eastern spiritual disciplines, neglecting many of the people we could probably work with in the more established Western-oriented churches.”

The publisher of Valley Isle was a businessman named Rick Reed, who was elected to the State Senate in 1986. That year, Reed, who had worked for a local prosecutor, was accused of leaking confidential state documents in order to discredit a Democratic politician; Reed’s ex-wife told the Advertiser that Butler had been part of the plot. (Both Reed and Butler denied it.) In 1992, Reed challenged Daniel Inouye, the old lion of Hawaiian politics, for his seat in the U.S. Senate, and the campaign brought more scrutiny to Reed’s relationship with Butler. Reed had previously referred to Butler as his “spiritual adviser,” but he told the Advertiser that there was “no evidence I have ever been a member of a Hare Krishna organization, or of Independents for Godly Government.” Reed lost the election, but he successfully fended off the Federal Election Commission, which investigated a Christmas video he had filmed in the Philippines and distributed in Hawaii, allegedly in an attempt to beguile the state’s sizable Filipino-American population. The F.E.C. ultimately ruled that the video was a legitimate (if dubious) business venture, and that the ninety-thousand-dollar loan Reed had received to produce it was not, therefore, an unlawful campaign donation.

In Gabbard, Butler’s movement finally seems to have produced a widely appealing politician, with a national profile. And there are links between Gabbard’s political operation and those of I.G.G., going all the way back to Bill Penaroza: in 2015, Gabbard hired Penaroza’s son, Kainoa Penaroza, to be her chief of staff, even though he had virtually no political experience. Gabbard, like her predecessors, firmly rejects the idea that she is part of a political initiative tied to her spiritual leader. “It’s a whole lot of conjecture,” she told me. She offered a hypothetical comparison. “Senator Brian Schatz, from Hawaii—he’s Jewish,” she said. “His chief of staff is Jewish. So there must be some great plan of the Jewish community in Hawaii to advance this Jewish leader and those around him?”

The difference is that the world of Butler’s disciples is relatively small and dizzyingly interlinked. Reed’s video of Christmas in the Philippines begins with a visit to Toby Tamayo, a longtime employee of the group who helped run a Butler-affiliated school there. Tamayo happens to be the uncle of Gabbard’s first husband, Eddie Tamayo, whom she married in 2002 and divorced four years later—partly, she says, because of the stress of serving overseas. Both of Gabbard’s parents worked in Rick Reed’s office. And the loan Reed received to make that Christmas video came from Richard Bellord, whose son, Rupa Bellord, recently married Gabbard’s sister and roommate, Vrindavan. Richard Bellord himself used to be married to Wai Lana, the yoga instructor who is now Butler’s wife; Abraham Williams, Gabbard’s husband, has helped film her videos. (Williams’s mother, Anya Anthony, is Gabbard’s office manager in Washington; she sits behind the “ALOHA SPIRIT” sign.) Wai Lana’s company is run by a longtime Butler associate named Sunil Khemaney, who is also a business associate of Joseph Bismark’s. Khemaney helps run Gabbard’s outreach to the Indian-American community; he accompanied her on her 2014 trip to India. One person familiar with Gabbard’s operation describes an office divided between disciples and non-disciples: “Everyone wondered who was in the group and who wasn’t. It was taboo—people in the group didn’t talk about it, so no one knew for sure.”

Gabbard’s most pronounced political tendency—her instinct toward bipartisanship—is, Butler says, entirely in keeping with what he teaches. But he says that he does not tell her, or any other disciple, how to vote. “That sense of aloha, or love for others, and the desire to work for the well-being of others—that’s a successful politician, from a spiritual perspective,” he says. “But as far as positions on different issues that come before politicians? That is something that every individual has to deal with on their own.”

When asked about Hinduism, Gabbard often talks about anti-Hindu bigotry. One of her prime examples is Kawika Crowley, her Republican opponent in the 2012 election, who told CNN that he thought Gabbard’s Hinduism conflicted with the American system of government. (Crowley, a smokers’-rights activist who lived in his minivan, lost the election by nearly sixty percentage points.) In an essay about her faith that she sent to me, Gabbard compared herself to John F. Kennedy, who sought to reassure voters who were worried by his Catholicism; he promised to discharge the duties of the office “without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.” But there is no simple way to distinguish between the religious “dictates” that might make voters nervous and the religious “values” that politicians—particularly Christian politicians—so frequently pledge to uphold. It would be absurd to expect Gabbard to make political decisions without reference to the spiritual path that she has walked all her life. After all, her determination to seek agreement outside her party is, in no small way, a product of that path, and quite possibly a laudable one. Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican, likes to tell Gabbard that she is “the most Christlike member of Congress,” a complicated sort of compliment that says something about the way we try to reconcile spiritual traditions that are ultimately incommensurable.

It is possible, though, to discern something more specific than all-purpose aloha in the shifting political priorities of Butler’s followers. 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, and other political candidates associated with him tended to echo these pronouncements. Nowadays, Tulsi Gabbard takes a different view, and Butler seems to have deëmphasized the issue: there is no mention of homosexuality on the foundation’s Web site, or in his recent teachings. Gabbard says that she and Butler have discussed same-sex marriage—“perhaps, a while ago.” She says, “It’s something that we don’t agree on.”

In recent decades, Butler has presented himself less as a Hare Krishna dissident and more as a member of a loosely connected worldwide Vaishnava movement. To explain how he fits in, Gabbard e-mailed me “The Genealogical Tree of Theistic Vedanta,” which depicts dozens of great teachers from across the centuries, most of them Indian; Butler occupies a secure but modest place, at the end of a thin branch. By forging relationships with Modi and other Indian leaders, Gabbard has made herself a prominent ambassador of American Hinduism, and she may be bringing Butler’s previously obscure movement closer to the global Hindu mainstream. Last year, when the Indian government announced the winners of its annual Padma Awards, only two non-Indians were included. One was a former U.S. Ambassador. The other was Wai Lana.

Gabbard’s relationship with India is also a strategic alliance: she has defended Modi’s political organization, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which champions the view that India is—and should remain—an essentially Hindu nation. In 2013, she opposed a resolution on “religious violence” in India that was seen as a veiled criticism of Modi, and she suggests that, whatever the problems faced by India’s Muslim minority, they can’t compare with the tribulations of religious minorities in many Muslim countries. This summer, she came to New York to participate in an Indian-American business forum. She had the bad luck to appear after Anil Kapoor, the garrulous Indian movie star, but she seemed entirely at ease, chatting with the Indian Ambassador about economic partnership and security coöperation. This was Gabbard’s kind of crowd: friendly and relatively nonpartisan. One of the first questioners began by establishing herself as a committed fan. “Congresswoman, I was really hoping you would get a Cabinet position in Trump’s Administration,” she said. “Now I’m hoping for the day when I can vote for you in the Presidential election.”

Gabbard smiled and shook her head at the suggestion. But, in October, she went to Iowa to appear at a Democratic fund-raiser, a sign that she is thinking about the 2020 caucuses, and that she is one of dozens—or perhaps hundreds—of Democratic politicians who think they have a chance to be elected President. For now, she is on the list of possible candidates, though not the short list; her relatively conciliatory attitude toward Trump seems to have diminished her profile among the kind of Democrats who start thinking about primary contests three years in advance. But if Gabbard joins the field she will almost certainly be the most interesting candidate in it. One question is whether her life story will turn out to be too interesting—too unusual—for her own good.

Former disciples of Butler tend to be extraordinarily bitter about the time they spent in spiritual service to him, and extraordinarily suspicious of his motives. This suspicion extends to some of the people who have supported Gabbard but find themselves troubled by the ambiguous role that Butler and his followers have played in Hawaiian politics. Nine years ago, another promising politician had to figure out what to do about a spiritual leader who became a magnet for criticism: as a candidate, Barack Obama defended his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, until, finally, he abandoned him. But Wright represented only a small slice of Obama’s life, whereas Gabbard’s life would be unrecognizable without Butler’s influence. Decades ago, her father tried, with some success, to make common cause with Mormons, evangelicals, and other people of faith who shared his opposition to same-sex marriage. His daughter is far more politically skilled, but her task is also far more difficult: she must find a way to make common cause with a Democratic Party that is increasingly secular and increasingly partisan.

Gabbard doesn’t seem too frustrated by the stalled progress of her signature bill, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act; in political terms, it may be more effective as a blocked bill—a symbol of the intransigence she wants to battle—than as an enacted law. And although she remains relatively reluctant to criticize the President, or even to mention his name, she has found plenty of chances this year to voice her disagreement with “the Administration.” Still, in the current climate Gabbard is aware that Democratic voters are drawn to politicians who seem to be leading the resistance to Trump and the Republicans, rather than searching for ways to work with them. Many of her supporters believe that, eventually, the mood will change. “At some point,” Van Jones says, “the country’s going to be tired of people whose only qualification is that they hate the other side.”

Gabbard, more than most politicians, is a celebrity. (At the airport in Kauai, she was stopped by a T.S.A. agent, who wanted a photograph with her. “This is my perfect week,” he said. “My son got married—and I get to meet you!”) And she has one of the most important qualities a politician can have: an uncanny ability to make people believe in her, even if they don’t agree with her. One of her longtime fans on Oahu is Linda Wong, who hosted fund-raisers during Gabbard’s first congressional campaign, and who has grown used to fielding questions about her various acts of political insubordination. “She makes a move, but then I get the phone calls: ‘What is she doing?’ ” Wong says. “I say, ‘I don’t know what she’s doing, but I know she’s thought it through.’ ”

Depending on the day, and the mood of the country, Gabbard’s stubbornly personal approach to politics can seem either refreshing or discomfiting. When she talks about her passion for “service,” she is speaking the language of politics and the military and faith all at once. She is talking about her determination, which is obvious, and her aims, which aren’t, always. “She’s got a servant attitude, a servant’s heart,” Butler says. “Whether she’s in politics or anything else, she’s going to take that same servant’s heart with her.”

Tulsi and husband.

She's a troll.

For her being a millennial and to have been so anti gay shows she is very dangerous.

And of course stupid bitch Rachel Maddow would admire her since she probably has a crush on her.

R18 so is OP

WRONG, R20.

Why in the FUCK was that article so goddamned long???!!!!

She believes:

1. The children are our future

2. For every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows

3. She can fly now.

4. In miracles, you sexy thing

She believes that she needs to say and do anything to get elected.

She’s hot

[quote]What Does Tulsi Gabbard Believe?

That she has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming president.

It is a church with precisely 7 members.

R23, haha, you beat me to it but I'm posting mine anyway!

Tulsi believes for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows…that somewhere in the darkest night a candle glows. I’m sure she believes for everyone who goes astray, someone will come to show the way. I bet she believes above a storm the smallest prayer can still be heard, and that someone in the great somewhere hears every word. Every time Tulsi hears a new born baby cry, or she touches a leaf or sees the sky, then she knows why she believes.

Interesting article, thanks, OP.

I believe that the children are our future: teach them well and let them lead the way!

"She believes that she needs to say and do anything to get elected "

r24 ...don't they all?

She is worthless, useless, pock-marked TRASH. That sums it up..

Her husband is cute. He was born in New Zealand, but I can't figure out what his ethnicity is.

R32. You sure told her.

LOL! You are welcome :-)

R33, Marie Claire article on Abraham Williams:

From the very moment that Tulsi Gabbard announced her intentions of running for president of the United States earlier in February, she must have known that the battle for the White House would be long and hard—before facing Donald Trump, she would have to take on the literal dozens of candidates running for the Democratic nomination, including big name politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and even former vice president Joe Biden. The road will be a bumpy one, but with the support of her husband Abraham Williams, Gabbard might be able to go all the way. Here's everything you need to know about Williams as his wife takes center stage in the 2020 election.

Politics was the initial thing that brought Gabbard and Williams together; Williams was working as a volunteer on Gabbard's 2012 political run for a seat in the House of Representatives, shooting many of the notable images of her campaign. After the race was won, they met in person, and sparks flew. "About a year and a half later, he asked me out for the first time at a birthday party that a mutual friend of ours threw for me," Gabbard told The New York Times in 2015. "It was the first time that we had a chance to kick back, relax and really talk on a personal level." That first meeting might have sealed the deal, because in 2015, the couple exchanged vows in a beautiful ceremony in Kahaluʻu.

As evidenced by his role in Gabbard's first campaign, Williams has an excellent eye for capturing images and puts his skills to work as a cinematographer, steadicam operator and camera operator. His professional website pretty much speaks for itself—the guy is really talented.

Growing up in what is arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth, Williams naturally developed an affinity for the outdoors, particularly for the beautiful clear waters of Hawaii. He's big on surfing waves, something that also really endeared him to his wife, who shared his interest in the extreme sport. "As we got to know each other, we realized how much we actually had in common," said Gabbard. "Pretty soon, we were going on hikes, going surfing and spending as much time together as we could. Oftentimes that meant an early-morning surf before work. Our friendship and relationship developed over our mutual love for the ocean and surfing.”

Williams' romantic marriage proposal to even involved the water sport; He popped the big question one evening while he and Gabbard were taking on the waves, the orange glow of the setting sun as their backdrop. Talk about romantic.

She's a total fraud that is fueled by a need for vengeance. Something went very wrong with this woman - probably in her childhood.

R37, I keep digging for more information about Tulsi and found this. Not sure how credible the "Hawaii Free Press" is, but the information is a bit disturbing. (FYI "Anya Anthony" is her mother-in-law)

"Tulsi Gabbard Office Manager tied to Chris Butler Cult" By Andrew Walden

Hawaii politics is supposedly all about seniority and connections. But shortly after the June, 2013 news that Tulsi Gabbard parted ways with former Abercrombie staffer Amy Asselbaye and professional congressional staffer Jennifer Goedke, she passed up legions of experienced former Inouye and Akaka staffers to quietly install Anya F. Anthony as her new Office Manager.

Who?

That would be Anya F Anthony, formerly agent of “Sunset Studios,” which Daily KOS identifies as a front for the Chris Butler Cult. According to DCCA business registration records, Sunset Studios was originally incorporated in Australia and registered in Hawaii as a foreign partnership in 2002. According a September, 2012, post on a cult watch website, Anya F Anthony is a “NZ disciple.”

Anya Anthony’s name comes up three times in a February 2012 Daily KOS expose of the links between the Gabbard campaign and the Chris Butler cult. KOS lists Anthony among a select group of donors to cult-linked political candidates over three decades--either Rick Reed’s 1994 campaign or Mike Gabbard’s 2004 campaign and also to Tulsi Gabbard’s 2012 Congressional campaign.

Chris Butler was born in 1948, the third son of Willis Butler, the ILWU’s Red Doctor of Molokai. But the red diaper baby became a Hare Krishna and, after taking LSD, led one of the many 1977 Hare Krishna splinter groups making himself ‘Jagadguru’ of the so-called Science of Identity foundation. They run the Down to Earth ‘natural food’ markets which profit from the anti-GMO hype spread by Rep Tulsi Gabbard. They also have a long history of sponsoring cult members as Hawaii political candidates starting with the 1970s third party effort, “Independents for Godly Government.” Until Tulsi flip-flopped in order to win against Mufi Hannemann in the 2012 campaign, they were known mostly for their opposition to gay marriage.

According to media accounts and cult emails forwarded to Hawai’i Free Press by a former cult member, Tulsi Gabbard’s father, State Senator Mike Gabbard, is “Krishna Katha das“ in the cult and her mother Carol Gabbard is “Devahuti dasi.”

Allegedly cult members give 25% to the Jagadguru and are honored to eat his yummy toenail clippings. He is said to own three oceanfront Lanikai mansions.

Cults are known for their ability to draw in devotees and make them worship the leader. In a recent poll, Tulsi Gabbard’s popularity was tops among Hawaii politicians at 76%. Republicans vying to become her opponent include a homeless dude in a van, and a lady who recently threatened to ‘choke’ the superintendent of schools.

R37. Your psychoanalysis seems like an analysis of your own issues not hers.

DLer who lives in Hawaii here. As someone else has mentioned, Gabbard is a total fraud. She's not trusted by a majority of the folks who live here in Hawaii. The area she represents (East Oahu) is the poorest and most conservative part of Hawaii, where politicians claim to be Democrats but seem more like Republicans. In fact, most of the elected officials from that area were Republicans who "switched" parties to win the election.

[quote]When Gabbard entered politics, she was only twenty-one, and in those early years she was a social conservative, pro-life and active in the fight against same-sex marriage. She is now pro-choice and pro-same-sex-marriage: on these and other issues, she has evolved enough to be almost—but not quite—at home in the contemporary Democratic Party, which is increasingly progressive, particularly on issues of gender and sexual orientation. What we do know is that she'll do/say ANYTHING to win an election.

We are very skeptical of her evolution into pro-choice and pro-same-sex-marriage. She may claim to be reformed, but if it walks, like a duck, quacks like a duck...

There seems to be a plethora of information about Tulsi and her family's cult ties.

Here's another long article, but whatever. For you, R37:

"Tulsi Gabbard Had a Very Strange Childhood"

It was 1970-something, and Sina (Mike Gabbard's sister) was not yet teaching at the University of Hawaii.

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.

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. Fuck 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.”

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.

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 fucking 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,” “Fucking 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.

In 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.

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."

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 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.”

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.’ ”

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.

tl:dr

One long article is bearable, but TWO long articles?! Learn to summarize R52.

Her fanbase is either the kind of progressive who still resolutely defends Glenn Greenwald and probably Assange, or the type of right wing douche that worships the likes of Cernovich and Posobiec. Oh, and David Duke. That's bipartisan I guess.

R54, that article is FASCINATING.

If you need to know about Tulsi Gabbard, that nymag article is a must read.

She sounds like a very dangerous person.

Some people here are too lazy to read linked articles, so it's better that they read the entire thing here. At least they'll read it.

It's important to know who we're dealing with.

Her fanbase are Nazis..

So she's a US Congresswoman, her sister is a Federal Marshal, and her father is a State Representative?

And they're all members of a cult.

Now I'm getting worried about their political ambitions.

She almost seems like a Manchurian Candidate created by her father.

It strikes me as strange that the "most shy" member of the family, is the one that they put out there to run for President.

Something's not right there.

[quote]she is polling at one percent, sandwiched between Andrew Yang and Amy Klobuchar

Tulsi isn't fit to comb Amy's salad.

This is a really good/damning article on Tulsi and her Russian support. Also her ties to Syria/Assad. Easy access to the article. This needs to be spread far and wide. After she destroys Kamala she will pick another candidate. Would she try to pick them off, one by one? She is dangerous. I know some of my naive friends are starting to be interested in her! The Russians must be delighted.

Tulsi obviously has an agenda. Other than NBC News, is anybody else reporting on the Russian connection? So, she has issues about Russia, belongs to a cult, has met with and supported the evil Assad. How in the world did she even get this far?

[quote] she said she’d pardon Edward Snowden and drop charges against Julian Assange.

For this alone, I would never vote for her.

Just read what Tulsi's aunt Sina (who is a college professor and sounds very level headed) wrote about Tulsi and her views:

[quote] 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.

[quote] 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.

[quote] 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.”

Tulsi Gabbard is a fraud. She is using the "love and aloha" culture of Hawaii, almost as a mask - to hide her true intentions.

I fully believe that all of the views that he held from her childhood as a cult member, are still with her.

Like her homophobic father who switched from the Republican to the Democratic party (for political convenience), she became a Democrat, as well. Because in Hawaii, you can't win high political office unless you are a Democrat.

But that doesn't make EITHER of them true Democrats, or Progressives.

What is makes them is lying frauds, with an ulterior motive.

It also sound like Tulsi still has lots of involvement with the Butler Cult, who organize "staged" rallies for her, and who try to intimidate anyone who questions Gabbard's views:

[quote] 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.”

[quote] 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.”

DDOS attacks? That sounds very Russian, to me.

[quote] 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.

Here's what gay people should be most disturbed with, about Gabbard.

Don't think for one second, that she has "evolved" from these views. Her father certainly hasn't.

[quote]If you need to know about Tulsi Gabbard, that nymag article is a must read.

But I don't need to know about Tulsi Gabbard. She's creepy and a nobody.

She's the only one, other than Marianne Williamson, who talks about ending our policy of forever war. Our wealth and our standing in the world is predicated on war and weapons of mass destruction. Our IC is also involved in drugs and trafficking in order to fund their activities like the ones that lead to the creation of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

I'll believe everything in those articles if someone can tell me why Gabbard would risk drawing attention from the military industrial complex by stating that she would end war. It has been speculated that JFK was murdered for similar sentiments. So why is this such a corner stone of her campaign, it's a very risky thing to do. She is basically pitting herself against everything the Oligarchs stand for.

She is a paid troll - that's why. She has been paid to try to take down the front runners (Kamala anyone?) and will try to attack Biden and Warren next. Gabbard is literally a piece of trash.

[quote]She's the only one, other than Marianne Williamson, who talks about ending our policy of forever war.

Ah, she agrees with the other troll candidate. That sure enough makes me like her!

Okay r68 but pushing the platform about ending war isn't very threatening to any of the current front runners. If that really is what she is running for, to take them down, her strategy makes no sense what so ever.

[quote] her strategy makes no sense what so ever.

Read R41 through R52.

It's discussed in that article, and she definitely has a hidden agenda.

r67 you're not paying attention. Pete Buttigieg has talked extensively about endless war, and the need for Congress to have to authorize war funding in 3 year increments or less - that should already be in the constitutional purview, but congress has abdicated its responsibility in that arena, essentially since WWII

This information is interesting and disturbing. I would be more concerned, except that Gabbard is invisible on the national stage, except for her "gotcha" moment with Kamala Harris.

More lies from Tulsi. I guess she's trying to paint her life and current marriage as some sort of fairytale story.

However, the two articles posted here, seem to contradict one another.

So the Marie Claire article says this:

[quote] Politics was the initial thing that brought Gabbard and Williams together; Williams was working as a volunteer on Gabbard's 2012 political run for a seat in the House of Representatives, shooting many of the notable images of her campaign. After the race was won, they met in person, and sparks flew. "About a year and a half later, he asked me out for the first time at a birthday party that a mutual friend of ours threw for me," Gabbard told The New York Times in 2015. "It was the first time that we had a chance to kick back, relax and really talk on a personal level."

But the NYMAG article says this:

[quote] 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.

So they knew each other from childhood, and yet her "love story" tries to make it seem like they just met.

More bullshit.

The only “bots” with an agenda I see are the ones psychotically trying to rip down Tulsi who - lets be honest - has no shot at winning the non.

However! Her positions on the military and interventionism is on the money which completely fucks the status quo and is what got her blacklisted. It’s amazing she’s getting the popular support to promote her views via the primary. And if she wants to take down establishment frauds like Kamala in the prices, good for her.

The DNC blacklisted her for stepping down to support Bernie than the Clinton neoliberal pro-war machine. She’s skeptical of false flags to create military engagement in Syria (remember when democrats called Bush/Cheney frauds and war criminals over WMDs?).

After toppling Quadaffi in Libya it’s now a lawless land with black Africans openly being sold like slaves! She rightly calls out the toxic alliance with the Saudis including their extreme Wahhabist sect of Islam - you know the one that didn’t let women DRIVE until recently and a kingdom that beheads people?

Oops. Time to AstroTurf her as a Russia loving troll; an amazing Hawaiian spy SO covert she was able to access the upper echelons of the Democratic Party’s NATIONAL COMMITTEE and voluntarily left it lol

R70, she isn't being paid to WIN - just to attempt to damage the top tier's campaigns. Two totally different things. She has no chance in Hell of actually securing the nomination. THANK GOD.

[quote]she isn't being paid to WIN - just to attempt to damage the top tier's campaigns.

No such thing!

Fun fact: if iSlut Gabbard is the Democrat candidate, Russia will grant her all the money that was initially granted to DJT. You can bet on it. The gays will lose big with these two.

Thanks for your input, Boris at R74.

How much is Putin paying you to post here?

Or is there a gun pointed at your head?

This thread is troll bait. How pathetic.. Tulsi is TRASH!!!!!!!!!!!!

[quote] This thread is troll bait.

You must have reading comprehension problems. Either that, or you're a complete moron.

This thread PROVES what a threat, a liar, and a fraud she is.

If you had bothered to read any of it.

I liked when she went for Kamala. Takes a shady bitch to call out a shady bitch. She isn’t accomplishing shit this election, so I am indifferent to her crap. She can kicks rocks.

Thanks r74. That's what I'm feeling as well.

People are talking about her like she has this big chance at hurting other candidates which statistics are showing to be ridiculous. So why is there even a contingent trying to tear her down?

She thing with Williamson. Neither of these women have a shot at it but there are some really unhinged people around here who are acting like she is about to topple Warren, Biden and Sanders.

Curious.

There is not a "contingent trying to tear her down", rather many of us who are actually cognitive don't like her. I would have little to say about her had this thread not be created. Bottom line, she is vile.

........not to mention a RUSSIAN plant.

I'm enjoying her little tiff with Kamala. Every candidate in the Dem field should have someone who is a pain in their ass during the primary.

Lol R85.

Plus, we all love a good cat fight every now and then.

Her attack on Kamala was an order from Bernie since he can't take on Kamala directly himself. Deplorable.

Bernie? Since when is Kamala on Bernie's lane for that to make sense?

I feel like Bernie is more focused on positioning someone to take down Warren on his behalf, and vice versa. It'll have to happen eventually.