Tulsi Gabbard’s Anti-LGBTQ Cult Guru Makes Her Unfit for Director of National Intelligence
Gabbard Must Divulge Cult’s Potential Links to Russia to Ease Conflict of Interest Concerns; Her Cheerleading for Fallen Syrian Leader Assad Deeply Troubling
In one undated video, a moralizing Chris Butler, Gabbard’s cult guru, sneered, “Isn’t it true if the faggots stopped screwing the other faggots’ asses wouldn’t AIDS stop?”
Tulsi Gabbard’s ever-shifting LGBTQ positions, ties to an allegedly abusive cult and fealty to Russia make her unfit for DNI. In a country full of reasonable options, Trump literally could not have selected a worse person for the job.
Would you be outraged if a key disciple of the late Kansas pastor Fred Phelps, known for his “God Hates Fags” rhetoric, was nominated to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)?
If so, you should be equally incensed by Trump’s selection of Tulsi Gabbard, given her direct ties to Chris Butler, an infamous quasi-Hindu hate guru and leader of Hawaii’s Science of Identity Foundation. Gabbard is described as an “advanced devotee” of Butler’s seemingly corrupt cult.
Gabbard has never outright condemned Butler, who reportedly lives in a house covered in tinfoil to keep out germs, for his vicious attacks on LGBTQ people. Her silence matters because if she leads DNI she will oversee 18 intelligence agencies including the CIA and NSA. With the President-elect gearing up for a campaign of retribution, it’s too risky to give snooping powers to Gabbard, who could potentially put LGBTQ advocates and organizations in the crosshairs.
Outstanding reporting by journalist Christine Gralow discovered that Butler’s transcribed teachings from 1978 to 2006 include 128 uses of the slur “fag” or “faggot.” (Please check out Gralow’s new, must-read Spy Talk series on Gabbard’s scary cult)
In one undated video, a moralizing Butler sneered, “Isn’t it true if the faggots stopped screwing the other faggots’ asses wouldn’t AIDS stop?”
Gralow found a disturbing audio clip where Butler called homosexuals “demons,” and complained about “fags kissing.” He also mocked Kwanzaa as a “phony holiday” started by “some black prisoner felon.” According to Gralow:
In a 2002 lecture, Butler and his disciples can be heard laughing as he viciously demeans homosexuals and refers to God as “the supreme homophobe” and “the supreme anti-faggot guy, the supreme fag-fighter.”
In other lectures, Butler refers to homosexuals as “cockroaches” that should be exterminated, and he engages in alarming, historically inaccurate hate speech against Muslims.
Former members describe the cult as scary and insular, according to The Times of India:
Critics describe the group as cult-like, citing its authoritarian structure and allegations of intolerance toward LGBTQ individuals, women, and Muslims. Members reportedly view Butler as an extension of God, and questioning his authority is seen as a spiritual offense. Critics, including some former followers, accuse the group of fostering a climate of fear and control.
Gabbard and her family are in the cult’s tight inner circle where toxic levels of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric are regularly spewed. Her parents, Mike and Carol, reportedly home-schooled Tulsi and sent her for two years to one or more Science of Identity girls’ boarding schools in the Philippines. So, she’s intimately familiar with the cult’s anti-gay activities.
Yet, in a November 2017 interview with The New Yorker, Gabbard claimed she had “never heard him say anything hateful, or say anything mean about anybody.” Newsweek reported that in a 2015 address she referred to Butler as her "beloved grandfather" and "spiritual master." Gabbard praised Butler again in a 2019 New York Times article: “He’s shared some really beautiful meditation practices with me that have provided me with strength and shelter and peace.”
Former cult members say that there is no way that Gabbard isn’t well-acquainted with her guru’s anti-LGBTQ teachings. By all indications, she is whitewashing her disturbing background to further her political career.
One self-described cult survivor named Lalita wrote on Medium in 2017,"I know what an abusive, misogynistic, homophobic, germophobic, narcissistic nightmare Chris Butler is. And I know what kind of relationship he has with Tulsi."
Gabbard’s slippery behavior is even more alarming if her political career was carefully crafted to furtively provide political power to Butler and his sketchy Science of Identity Foundation.
"Tulsi was being groomed for a political position because Chris Butler had political aspirations," former cult-member Robin Marshall said. "He wanted the influence. It was very unusual because women in Science of Identity aren't really encouraged to do anything."
Gabbard’s father, Mike, a Hawaii state senator, is also a venomous anti-LGBTQ activist who supports conversion therapy. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported that Mike was director of Stop Promoting Homosexuality and also served on the steering committees of the National Campaign to Protect Marriage and the Hawaii-based coalition, Save Traditional Marriage. He once hosted an anti-gay radio show, Let's Talk Straight Hawaii. According to CNN:
Gabbard's father ran The Alliance for Traditional Marriage, a political action committee aimed at opposing pro-gay lawmakers and legislation that organized and spent more than $100,000 to pass an amendment in 1998 that gave the Hawaii state legislature power to "reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples." The amendment to the state's constitution passed. The Alliance for Traditional Marriage called homosexuality "unhealthy, abnormal behavior that should not be promoted or accepted in society."
Gabbard was 17 at the time of the vote and cited working with her father and the organization during her run for the state legislature in Hawaii four years later when she was age 21. Gabbard would win her race, becoming the youngest woman elected to the Hawaii state legislature.
A CNN KFile review of the organization's website, which is archived on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, uncovers the organization supported controversial gay conversion therapy:
So, to answer your question, yes a person can change. A person can walk away from homosexuality if they are repentant, sincere, and determined. For many, it's a very difficult path. But thousands have successfully left the "gay" lifestyle.
There are some excellent "ex-gay" organizations out there such as Exodus, Courage, and Homosexuals Anonymous, made up of former homosexuals--both men and women--who are actively helping those who struggle with homosexual desires. In addition, the National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), a group of dedicated psychologists and psychiatrists has a remarkable success record in helping people who experience homosexual tendencies or urges to overcome those desires.
Tulsi’s mother also had a reprehensible record:
In 2004, Carol Gabbard was on the Hawaii State Board of Education, actively fighting against protections for LGBTQ youth who were being bullied at school. Tulsi helped her mother with that cause, fervently denying that any significant bullying of LGBTQ students was occurring in Hawaii’s public schools.
Carolyn Golojuch, a former president of the LGBTQ-rights organization PFLAG… says she remembers Carol Gabbard repeatedly bringing up opposition to LGBTQ student rights at the school board meetings, often at seemingly random times.
Tulsi Gabbard’s background is clearly steeped in homophobia. She was a state legislator in 2004 when she condemned "homosexual extremists," who, she said, were falsely claiming there was a difference between civil unions and gay marriage. Yet, her positions dramatically shifted when it suited her political needs.
While in Congress, Gabbard supported the Equality Act, the repeal of DOMA, Restore Honor to Service members Act, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the Safe Schools Improvement Act and the Equality for All Resolution.
In 2012, while running for Congress, Gabbard apologized to LGBT activists in Hawaii for her past comments. Albeit, many Hawaiian activists, at the time, were not buying what she was selling. Michael Golojuch, Jr. wrote an article titled, “Explaining Why Tulsi Gabbard’s ‘Evolution’ is a Farce.”
Eileen McKee, an LGBT Caucus representative with the Democratic Party of Hawaii said:
“Due to Gabbard’s ugly past LGBT stances and the facetious way she handled her evolution around marriage equality — at first stating that she believed the US government should not be involved in any sort of marriage licensing — I knew that she had not changed her thinking. Couple that with her continued support and devotion to the homophobe Chris Butler, many of us in the gay community of Hawaii know she is not being sincere with her recent apology video.”
When she ran for president in 2020, Gabbard apologized to the LGBTQ community again for her homophobia: "In my past, I said and believed things that were wrong, and worse, they were very hurtful to people in the LGBTQ community and their loved ones," Gabbard stated in the nearly four-minute-long video.
Yet, when her presidential run faltered and her influence in the Democratic Party waned, she returned to her old familiar ways. The Advocate reported:
In December 2020, as her tenure in Congress was winding down (she had not sought reelection), she introduced a bill to bar transgender girls from competing with cisgender ones in school sports. The bill went nowhere.
In October 2022, Gabbard quit the Democratic Party and hastily leapt on the fashionable anti-woke wagon. In a video announcing her departure, she huffed that her former Party is “now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, and who are hostile to people of faith and spirituality.”
In April 2022, she posted a video message, according to The Advocate, saying Florida’s “don’t say gay” law didn’t go far enough. In the lead-up to the 2024 campaign, Gabbard was a regular on Fox, as well as a fill-in host for Tucker Carlson. To no one’s surprise, she became a Republican and endorsed Trump.
Both Carlson and Gabbard share a slobbering affection for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who is arguably the most anti-LGBTQ leader in Europe. The Associated Press reported that Russia’s LGBTQ community lives in a “climate of fear” and just last week Moscow police raided gay nightclubs over what they call “gay propaganda.”
Gabbard’s gushing praise of Putin led to Hillary Clinton calling her a “Russian asset.” On The Hill’s show News Nation, anchor Blake Burman asked former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton whether Gabbard should be investigated by the FBI prior to her nomination hearing. Bolton replied, “I think so, given the Russian propaganda that she has espoused over the past period of time, I think she’s a serious threat to our national security.”
Two-Faced Tulsi has become Moscow’s Mouthpiece. Vladimir Solovyov, a popular Russian talk show host, called her “our girlfriend” in a segment in 2022. The New York Times reported:
Her appearances were regularly picked up by Russia’s state media, including the international network RT, which promoted her critiques and lauded her with headlines such as “Tulsi Gabbard dares to challenge Washington’s war machine” and “Biden wants regime change in Russia — ex-congresswoman.”
“The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, wrote in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting, positively, that Ukrainians consider her “an agent of the Russian state.” Rossiya-1, a state television channel, called her a Russian “comrade” in Mr. Trump’s emerging cabinet.
ABC News Reported:
Gabbard’s former aides…said the former Democrat continued regularly reading and sharing articles from RT well after she was advised that it was an unreliable source of [Russian] information.
The Science of Identity Foundation is reportedly active in Poland and Russia. Tulsi Gabbard must answer whether her slavish support for Putin is in the service of expanding her cult in Moscow. If there is a conflict of interest, it may be enough to derail her troubling nomination.
Those boisterously defending Tulsi’s cult background, often members of the cult itself, like to scream that her detractors are engaged in religious intolerance. Yet, many of these same conservatives demanded that Barack Obama explain the controversial speeches of his Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright. He eventually was forced to give a speech in March 2008 explaining that he did not agree with Pastor Wright on several issues.
Shouldn’t Tulsi Gabbard be held to the same standard as Obama? Isn’t it time she breaks from the bigoted hate pastor who allegedly groomed her for public service? Voters have a right to know who Gabbard truly is and what she really stands for before she is handed enormous power, which she can abuse at her discretion.
Finally the inglorious downfall of Bashar al-Assad renews serious questions about Gabbard's past cheerleading for the brutal Syrian tyrant. As she campaigns for the job on Capitol Hill this week, her role serving as an enthusiastic Assad apologist could potentially derail her nomination. This is particularly true if Assad's abandoned top-secret diplomatic or military files show Gabbard in an unflattering light.
Tulsi Gabbard’s ever-shifting LGBTQ positions, ties to an allegedly abusive cult and fealty to Russia and Assad make her unfit for DNI. In a country full of reasonable options, Trump literally could not have selected a worse person for the job.