Raised in a fringe religious movement? Secret bio-labs? A
Russian plant?! Just what is Tulsi Gabbard's whole deal?
Tulsi Gabbard's parents were acolytes of the Science of Identity Foundation,
a counterculture religious community founded by spiritual leader Chris Butler in the 1970s,
according to Intelligencer. Butler founded the belief system as an offshoot of International
Society for Krishna Consciousness, or the Hindu Hare Krishna movement, near Kailua, Ohau.
There, Gabbard's parents brought up their children under the guru's
guidance — an alchemical mixture of Hindi practices, Catholic strictures,
and 1970 ideals of strict vegetarianism, scientific skepticism, body and spirit dualism,
criticism of consumerism, strict sexual mores, and intense homophobia.
"You see, the body is just like a pair of clothes we are wearing.
Our real identity is, we are spirits. We are spiritual beings."
Though the Science of Identity Foundation describes respect for people of different
races, ethnicities or religions on its homepage,
its founder Butler has received negative press for Islamophobic commentary.
In 2019, Butler was quoted in a video posted to Twitter as saying,
"The Mohammadian philosophy [Islam] is so full of violence. It's so low class. It's so Mickey
Mouse. [...] It's so violent. [...] You're completely allowed to kill all infidels."
According to The New Yorker, Gabbard referred to Butler as her spiritual guide in 2015,
but Gabbard has since been publicly silent about the SIF leader,
conspicuously refusing to identify the spiritual group as a major influence.
Tulsi Gabbard attended Leeward Community College to study television production but did not receive
a degree. In 2002, she ran for the Hawaiian state legislature and became the youngest person to
represent Hawaii's 42nd House district at 21 years old. Gabbard withdrew from seeking reelection two
years later, instead volunteering for the U.S. Army National Guard. However, her name remained
on the ballot as she had already filed to run. At a 2004 Honolulu press conference, she said,
"My fellow legislators have assured me that they will cover for me,
that they will be involved in my district and make certain that the people of my district
are well taken care of while I'm on active military duty and in Iraq."
Rep. Rida Cabanilla eventually won the seat.
Gabbard would go on to earn a bachelor's degree in
international business in 2009 from Hawaii Pacific University.
From 2008 to 2009, Tulsi Gabbard was deployed to Kuwait, where she became one of the first women
to enter a Kuwaiti military facility. This achievement not only broke with tradition,
but earned her an award of appreciation from the Kuwait National Guard along the way.
The U.S. Office of the Historian notes that Kuwait began a relationship with the U.S. even before it
was a country — an American consulate first opened there in 1951. Though Kuwait is a constitutional
emirate ruled by the Sabah family with executive power shared with an elected assembly, according
to the Kuwaiti government website, the state is Islamic and therefore guided by Shari'a law.
According to the Egyptian Islamic advisory board, Dar Al-Ifta, the Quran states that women can work
as long as the job is safe, suits women's physical and mental makeup, and is deemed
permissible by Shari'a law. Gabbard's Kuwaiti service broke at least two of those strictures,
forging a path and a record of women in the military in a Sunni Muslim nation.
"I love our country."
Tulsi Gabbard grew up practicing capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that blends dance,
music and acrobatics, and she is also fluent in other martial arts. The former representative
suggested that this lifelong practice helped develop her rebellious stance in a tweet:
"I started practicing martial arts as a kid and trained Capoeira for
many years — an art that originated with slaves in Brazil as a form of resistance."
Gabbard is such a mixed martial art fan that she helped former UFC Women's
Strawweight Champion Zhang Weili overcome visa issues to reenter the U.S. While how
much of a role the representative played in greasing Zhang's way is up for debate,
the partnership led to an unexpected friendship. The pair even sparred for
the cameras upon Zhang's 2019 return to the states. Zhang posted on Instagram in 2019,
"Today I had the honor to meet and train with Miss [Tulsi Gabbard] and she is a very strong
martial artist. [...] It is a happy day when martial arts brings people together."
In 2012, Tulsi Gabbard became the first Hindu member of Congress. In 2013,
she became the first elected congressperson to swear their oath of office on the sacred
Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. Gabbard said of the experience,
"I chose to take the oath of office with my personal copy of the Bhagavad Gita
because its teachings have inspired me to strive to be a servant-leader,
dedicating my life in the service of others and to my country. My Gita has
been a tremendous source of inner peace and strength through many tough challenges in life,
including being in the midst of death and turmoil while serving our country in the Middle East."
The daughter of a Roman Catholic father and a Caucasian Hindu mother, Gabbard's first name
derives from the Sanskrit word for holy basil, which Hindus regard as a sacred plant. Gabbard
believes that these non-traditional roots do not hinder her political aspirations.
She told The Atlantic,
"Absolutely [a Hindu can be in the White House one day]. When you look at the national issues
that our country is facing, people are not qualified or disqualified because of
their spiritual practice. People are looking for someone they can trust."
Tulsi Gabbard is an outspoken opponent of the entire Washington D.C. power
structure. On Sept. 13, 2022, she tweeted,
"There is indeed a serious domestic threat to our democracy: the unholy alliance of
permanent Washington, the national security apparatus, Big Tech, and the mainstream
propaganda media to target tens of millions of ordinary Americans as domestic terrorists."
This broad condemnation has earned Gabbard some contradictory political bedfellows.
She resigned from the Democratic National Committee to endorse Bernie Sanders in 2016,
and she spoke at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference.
Liberals love her fierce environmentalism,
and conservative Republicans celebrate her critical stances on homosexuality.
Politico reports that Gabbard supports progressive issues like single payer health
care and a $15-per-hour minimum wage. However, she is a regular guest on Fox News shows criticizing
President Joe Biden, especially his foreign policy decisions associated with Russia and Ukraine.
While guest hosting Tucker Carlson Tonight, Gabbard informed her Fox News audience that
Attorney General Merrick Garland's actions in raiding former President Donald Trump's home
at the Mar-a-Lago Club have, quote, "all hallmarks of a dictatorship."
"The FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago changed the country that we grew up in."
In September 2019, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment
inquiry after a whistleblower charged that sitting President Donald Trump solicited political favors
from Ukraine in exchange for $400 million in aid. Pelosi said during the announcement,
"The actions of the Trump presidency revealed the dishonorable fact of
the President's betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security,
and betrayal of the integrity of our elections."
In an unexpected move, Tulsi Gabbard only voted "present" in a referendum that fell
almost completely along party lines, with only two
Democrats voting against impeachment and zero Republicans voting for it.
"Article one is adopted." *thunk*
This party-line vote, Gabbard indicated in a lengthy statement,
was the very reason for her abstention.
While she indicated her belief that Trump was culpable,
Gabbard decided to voice her concerns, labeling the impeachment process as,
quote, "fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country."
She wrote,
"My vote today is a vote for much needed reconciliation and hope that together we
can heal our country. I am confident that the American people will decide to deliver
a resounding rebuke of President Trump's innumerable improprieties
and abuses. And they will express that judgment at the ballot box."
Just a few months before Tulsi Gabbard would decline to seek reelection to Congress to pursue
further political goals, she made a stand for her fellow veterans, sponsoring an amendment to the
National Defense Authorization Act to allow military members to consume hemp products.
On Monday, July 19, 2020, the House of Representatives voted
336 to 71 to approve a package of multiple amendments to the NDAA,
including Gabbard's amendment. Gabbard's addendum to the bill was a response to the
Department of Defense policy banning the use of hemp products by active duty and reserve
members of the military despite hemp's legality under the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018.
While on The Jimmy Dore Show in 2019, Gabbard expressed that
the restrictions on hemp products was detrimental to a wide array of citizens.
This is affecting our veterans and those who are locked up in our
broken criminal justice system because of this prohibition."
Technical procedures for delineating between marijuana use associated with the psychoactive
chemical THC and the non-psychoactive CBD are still being hashed out. At present, however,
all military departments will issue punitive general orders from the still-prohibited use
of CBD and other products derived from hemp, according to the Department of Defense.
Tulsi Gabbard expressed her advocacy for decriminalizing any and all drugs during
her presidential run in 2020. In a 2019 interview with ABC News, she said that the
choice to use drugs should be decriminalized, but selling drugs should remain illegal.
"That's the direction we need to take is decriminalizing an individual's
choice to use whatever substances that are there."
When interviewer John Stossel pushed Gabbard to elaborate, she maintained issuing criminal
penalties against people who sell these street drugs, even if they're declared legal, saying,
"I think there's a difference here where you have those who are profiting off of
selling substances that are harmful to others as opposed to those who are
making those choices on their own to do what they wish with their bodies."
Though her fellow democratic nominees like Pete Buttigieg offered their support for
decriminalizing drug possession, Gabbard went a step further in proposing to make
all drugs legal with regulation. She stood onboard the same platform as her
peers in using this legalization to wean people from prescription drugs.
In her February 2019 campaign launch speech, Gabbard said that we must stand
against the criminal justice system, which punishes individuals but allows corporations
like Purdue Pharma to escape without criminal punishment for its role in the opiate epidemic.
Tulsi Gabbard is no stranger to tangling with "the establishment" in Washington D.C. Almost
exactly two years after Hillary Clinton called the Congresswoman a Russian plant,
Senator Mitt Romney accused her of spreading pro-Russian propaganda. In March 2022, he tweeted,
"Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian
propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives."
Romney's tweet was in response to a March interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News,
in which Gabbard expressed that she was worried about supposed United
States-backed bio labs in Ukraine. She followed this up with a Twitter
video claiming there were more than 25 U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine.
"These pathogens know no borders. If they are inadvertently or purposely
breached or compromised they will quickly spread."
While a publicly available agreement describes an arrangement between Ukraine and the U.S. to
prevent the production of bio-weapons, no evidence exists to support Gabbard's and Carlson's claim.
This did not prevent Gabbard from clapping back.
She tweeted,
"When powerful, influential people make baseless accusations of treason, they are sending a message
to all Americans: if you dare to criticize the establishment's narrative, you will be
smeared and discredited. If this is allowed to continue, our democracy will be no more."
"So Senator Romney, please provide evidence that what I've said is not true and treasonous."
In response to the natural gas pipeline leaks coming from the sabotaged Nord Stream pipeline,
Tulsi Gabbard continued to lambast U.S. leaders for escalating and sustaining
the war in Ukraine after the February 2022 Russian invasion. On Tucker Carlson Tonight,
she accused both the U.S. and Europe for taking a passive approach, arguing that leaders from
both are taking the stance that there's nothing to be done. In September 2022, Gabbard claimed,
"The United States, our leaders,
and European leaders, are the ones fueling and funding this war."
"So they have a heck of a lot of leverage to be able to push for a cease-fire,
negotiate an outcome and an end to this war, and to actually fight for peace."
Gabbard did not hesitate to label political inaction as a purposeful continuation of
the conflict. In the same interview, she elaborated that, by not actively
pursuing a peaceful resolution, politicians were instead actively choosing violence and warfare.