Tulsi Gabbard has staked out extreme positions on LGBT+ rights, spread disinformation about Ukrainian biolabs, and claimed she was being shadowbanned by Big Tech while using her vast social media footprint to label Joe Biden a “warmonger”.
In one breath Gabbard expresses a desire to bring love and aloha from her native Hawaii to the world, in the next she is fanning conspiracy theories on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
This week, Gabbard announced she was leaving the Democratic Party, claiming it had become “an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness”.
The decision came as little surprise to anyone who has followed her political trajectory from 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to darling of Russian propagandists and the American far-right.
To understand her ambitions, her aunt Dr Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard tells The Independent in an interview that it is necessary to look to her upbringing in a secretive cult called the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF) whose members show absolute loyalty to a reclusive guru, Chris Butler.
A former member toldThe Independent the group’s teachings are virulently homophobic, often anti-Islamic and misogynist, and how they were forced to worship Butler, who is considered to be akin to a God.
Sinavaiana Gabbard says her niece’s career is all about the pursuit of power, and her bid for the presidency in 2020 was the culmination of four decades of Butler’s efforts to seek political influence.
“Once again I find my niece’s apparent penchant for parroting extremist toadies such as Tucker Carlson and vile ‘strongmen’ such as Vladimir Putin, to be problematic and deeply troubling,” Sinavaiana Gabbard, a retired professor of English at the University of Hawaii, told The Independent.
“It gives me no pleasure to note that Tulsi’s single governing principle seems to be expedience, which is in effect no principle at all.”
In her keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference back in February, Tulsi Gabbard described the various ways she had been smeared by her political opponents.
“I’m sure you’ve all heard them before,” Gabbard said. “Russian asset. White supremacist. Bigot. Racist. Extremist. Traitor.”
Gabbard was given several standing ovations by the grandees of the Republican Party for her scattershot attacks on cancel culture, the power elite, and “Biden-Clinton-neocon-neolib foreign policy”.
Gabbard is a veteran who served a tour of Iraq, still serves with the National Guard, and has spoken about how witnessing first-hand the horrors of war led her to take an anti-interventionist stance on US foriegn policy.
In statements after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gabbard contended that Ukraine was not worth protecting because it “isn’t actually a democracy,” and that the US-funded “biolabs” could result in the release of “dangerous pathogens”.
This baseless claim echoed Russian propaganda that the United States was funding labs in Ukraine to make illegal biological weapons for use against Russia.
Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando in February
Republican Senator Mitt Romney responded by saying Gabbard was spreading “treasonous lies”.
Gabbard was not deterred, telling Jesse Watters on 15 March that freedom of speech in the US was at similar risk to Russia, which has banned all criticism of the government and imprisoned tens of thousands of protestors.
“It is striking when you see Putin propaganda and you line it up against Biden propaganda,” she said.
Politifact rated the statement a “pants on fire” lie.
Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat congresswoman for Hawaii
Science of Identity founder Chris Butler, who Tulsi Gabbard has referred to as her ‘guru dev’, or spiritual leader
