Episode 211: Tulsi Gabbard P1 (The Cult) feat Mike Prysner
A political chameleon now considered a rising star of the GOP was raised within a cult run by a surfer who broke away from the Hare Krishnas to focus more on himself as the conduit of God on earth — and to attack homosexual rights. Our guest writer is Mike Prysner (Empire Files, Eyes Left Podcast) who helps us explore Tulsi Gabbard and her family's intimate involvement with the Science of Identity cult.
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Mike Prysner: https://twitter.com/mikeprysner / https://www.youtube.com/empirefiles / https://linktr.ee/eyesleft
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Music by Anahedron & Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 211 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Tulsi Gabbard episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Brogatansky, Mike Presner, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Today, we are very happy to be joined by Mike Presner, who has written a very extensive expose of Tulsi Gabbard, the Political chameleon and all-around confusing political figure.
No matter where you stand, I think, if you have any kind of ideology, she's confusing.
Of course, hidden behind that, cults.
Why not?
Because this is America.
So we're gonna be doing a two-parter on Tulsi.
This is just one half of how bad things are gonna get.
So Mike, yeah, welcome, man.
It's really a pleasure to have you on.
Happy to be here.
Introduction.
On March 19th, 2020, Hawaii Congresswoman and presidential candidate in the Democratic Party primary, Tulsi Gabbard, announced the end of her run.
It looked like the end of a once-made political career for someone who had been trained and groomed for politics since she was a teenager.
Before she had even won her debut congressional run in 2012, she had been dubbed the Democratic Party's new rising star, then immediately given a vice chair position on the Democratic National Committee, and as Rachel Maddow put it at the time, quote, on the fast track to becoming very famous.
Perhaps overestimating her appeal, however, Tulsi found herself consistently polling at 1% through the entire 2020 primary race.
She would win just 0% of the vote during her first showdown in Iowa, 0.3% in Nevada, and in every other state she reigned from.
0% to a couple peaks of 3%, receiving less than 1% in every single state on Super Tuesday.
Every losing candidate dropped out the day after Super Tuesday to clear the field for the only viable candidates, Bernie vs. Biden.
But Tulsi, to everyone's confusion, stayed in.
Two weeks later, she went out with a whimper.
Having started her career in Washington as a Democratic Party darling, she torched that bridge by jumping on the Bernie bandwagon in 2016, becoming a celebrated Bernie surrogate and a fellow at the Sanders Institute.
After her rebrand as an opponent of the establishment Democrats, she fell from the embrace of the Bernie movement when she jumped in the 2020 race, Not just as a Bernie opponent, but as another Bernie-lite challenger, backing off core positions like Medicare for All and remaining a competitor when it was do or die for the new Bernie-led future.
She caused a weirdly suspicious rift in the Bernie base as the only, quote, true anti-war candidate.
Having broken with both wings of the Democratic Party base, she shocked everyone again when she ended her campaign in late March with a full-throated endorsement for Joe Biden, the exact type of establishment pro-war Democrat she fashioned herself as hating.
Mind you, when Bernie was clearly still a viable candidate, who she maintained she still loved and supported throughout the race, even Elizabeth Warren, who had shown herself to be a fairly nefarious Bernie saboteur, refused to endorse either candidate until the primary was over.
Now after Tuesday's election, it's clear that Democratic primary voters have chosen Vice President Joe Biden to be the person who will take on President Trump in the general election.
I know Vice President Biden and his wife, and I'm grateful to have called his son Beau a friend, who also served in the National Guard.
Although I may not agree with the Vice President on every issue, I know that he has a good heart, and he's motivated by his love for our country and the American people.
I'm confident that he will lead our country guided by the spirit of Aloha, respect, and compassion, and thus help heal the divisiveness that has been tearing our country apart.
So today I'm suspending my presidential campaign and offering my full support to Vice President Joe Biden in his quest to bring our country together.
A far cry from the statement she made about Joe Biden when asked about endorsing him just a few weeks prior.
People will get into a lot of conversations about political tactics and how do we win this race and who's going to beat Donald Trump bluntly.
I might get in trouble for saying this, what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?
So, loathed as a supposed Russian agent by mainstream Democrats, viewed as a traitor by Bernie World, and now coming off as kind of pathetic and untrustworthy to her fans and the Republican Party for bending the knee to Creepy Ol' Joe when she had zero reason to do so, she was alone, save for a very small but very devoted following.
Retaining her congressional seat was such an unrealistic venture, as the Tulsi she became differed so much from the Tulsi who her constituents elected, she wouldn't even try to run for re-election.
During her presidential run, the Democrat aiming to unseat her in Hawaii raised far more money from Hawaiians than she did through her whole presidential campaign.
Scorned nationally, as well as her home state, many wrote her off as finished, one who would fade into obscurity.
Today, she is far from obscure.
This past October, her new podcast, This Is Tulsi Gabbard, took the No.
10 spot on Apple Podcasts, beating Pod- Yeah.
Oh my god!
Oh, you didn't know this was a hit job against a fellow podcaster, Jake?
That's the whole point here.
This is Tulsi Gabbard.
It's like she's confused by herself.
She's like, who am I?
Who am I?
This is it.
Now.
This time.
Yeah, when you shapeshift your policies so often, you know, that can lead to a crisis of identity, you know?
I get it.
Mm-hmm.
You know, she beat out names like Barstool Sports, Potsave America, The Ben Shapiro Show.
For contrast, Candace Owen's podcast is ranked number 40, Megyn Kelly's is number 48.
Oh my god!
Her Twitter following of about 300,000 the day she dropped out of the primary is around 2 million today.
Fuck.
But it's not just podcasting and social media.
This year, she guest hosted Tucker Carlson's show multiple times, signed a lucrative contributor deal with Fox News, was a headline speaker at CPAC, and led a series of nationwide rallies against transgender rights and quote, the rally to end child mutilation.
Where we are now today, though, is those in power denying the existence of women.
They are seeking to erase us as an entire category of people.
And even more dangerously, they are denying the existence of objective truth.
She's becoming more and more, even with these three clips, she's working her way towards, like, Hunger Games villain.
Yeah, she has like a kind of white streak or something.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, she says the white streak is to remind her of the fallen soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And she will never die it because it is a constant reminder of the cost of war.
Clearly, Tulsi's story is far from over, and when you dig into her past, you find that it's unlikely she will simply remain in the mediasphere.
where someone like this can just like cruise, come off all the things you just described and just soar.
Clearly Tulsi's story is far from over and when you dig into her past you find that it's unlikely
she will simply remain in the media sphere. Tulsi today is very likely just a reset, building a new
base for another go at political power. She is even more relevant than ever as a newborn right-wing
ideologue, one who seems poised to resurrect her rising star, this time with the Republican Party.
But her story is much weirder than just an opportunistic political chameleon.
It is true, her grift really is something to behold, beginning her political career as an anti-gay bigot in state politics, then a fairly generic liberal democrat to get into Congress, then a tough-on-terror, pro-torture, attack-Obama-from-the-right congresswoman to a Bernie champion.
To a Bernie Light candidate, slash oppose both Republicans and Democrats maverick, to a loyal Biden backer, to someone whose politics are basically just those of Ron DeSantis, all in the span of a decade.
Impressive, albeit just the surface, of Tulsi's character.
Beneath everything is a complex and bizarre fabric on which her career has rested.
Tied like a hammock at two ends on one, a secretive, fascist, Nazi-inspired paramilitary network in India, the other, an even more secretive, US-based cult around a white surfer guy who claims to be the voice of God.
While mainstream media focused almost all of its mudslinging against Tulsi based on the claim she is a Russian agent or an Assad lover, they failed to dog her on these far more scandalous truths.
The Science of Identity Foundation To truly know Tulsi Gabbard, you first have to know a man named Chris Butler.
Her story really begins with his.
Chris Butler is the founder and spiritual head of the Science of Identity Foundation, or SIF.
It claims several thousand members, mainly in Hawaii, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and some in the Philippines.
Butler created it as a splinter group from the Hare Krishnas, who many in the US recognized as the shaved head, barefoot, unusually happy, and mostly white religious folks you can find selling copies of the Bhagavad Gita, By the beach, chanting the namesake of their organization.
Butler's science of identity appears to differ from the Hare Krishnas in three main ways.
The first, they blend in.
They don't wear the uniform or shaved head like the Harries.
They don't chant in public or sell flowers by the beach.
Second, a vicious hatred for homosexuals.
And third, and most important, the belief that Chris Butler is the one and only vessel for the god Krishna to speak to the mortals on Earth.
The name Science of Identity appears to come from a 1984 pamphlet Butler published titled, Who Are You?
Discovering Your Real Identity, in which he tries to use science to prove that material reality is not real, but the eternal self is, even though Butler has always been known to hate science and, in particular, Carl Sagan.
Before exploring this group, how it came about, and how it connects to Tulsi Gabbard, we should get one thing out of the way.
Is it fair to call it a cult?
It's hard to know a lot about signs of identity because they are extremely secretive.
Butler, who was once very much in the public eye, has been highly reclusive the past several decades, typical of cults who recruited heavily in their heyday, then retreated with their flocks from public scrutiny.
Followers of Butler are likewise very dismissive about their involvement with him.
Defectors say Butler forbids members from talking about the group in public.
However, we do know that they all deny it is a cult, and members as well as Science of Identity officials insist that all the accusations you're about to hear are totally false.
What we do have to go off of is a lot of testimony from many former members, family of current members, and journalists who have tried investigating them.
And that side of things is freaky.
The most compelling stories come from the first generation born into Science of Identity.
Children of Chris Butler followers recruited into his herd in the 70s and 80s, who grew
up in the organization and escaped as young adults.
One comes from a woman named Lolita, who today is in her early 40s, which she published in
2017.
"Everything I did, I had to think about how it benefited Butler.
I was raised to believe Chris Butler was God's voice on earth, and if you questioned him
or offended him in any way, you were effectively offending God."
Chris Butler would also ridicule the intelligence of anyone he didn't like, belittling anyone he felt was questioning his authority even slightly.
He demanded the utmost dedication and loyalty from his followers, and if he didn't get it, the punishments were swift and severe.
I remember hearing stories of the people who were told they weren't allowed to eat because they didn't make food to his liking, who were not allowed to sleep because there was a light making a buzzing noise in the house.
Literally everything we did had to go through Chris.
If you wanted to work outside of the group, you had to ask his permission.
No one could get married without his consent.
Classes were on hygiene and cooking, and all the ways that they would need to serve Chris Butler best.
We were encouraged to not invest in any relationships other than with him, so we were in effect isolated from our parents, who did their best to not love us as per his recommendation, and instead looked at him like a surrogate father slash messiah figure.
My sister developed stress-induced epilepsy during the time when we were supposed to be taken out of school.
For my parents' part, they did try to keep us in school for as long as they could, but when Chris heard parents were resisting him, his directive was clear.
Get them out, or else.
Every time my parents would try to take us to school, my sister would become hysterical, and then she started having seizures.
That was the power he had over us.
From the late 80s, all of us kids were removed from public schools because he didn't want them influencing our minds away from our service to him.
By the time I officially left the Science of Identity Foundation in 1997, just before I turned 20, I had only received up to a 5th grade education.
Yeah, I don't know about this whole cult claim.
Doesn't seem appropriate to describe the situation around Butler.
He seems like a totally aboveboard guy.
Butler's own words corroborate this master-servant relationship.
he wrote in one lecture, "A spiritual master should be accepted in full surrender, and
one should serve the spiritual master like a menial servant."
One of the most outspoken ex-members is a guy named Rama Ransan.
He's white from New Zealand, but of course has a Sanskrit name.
Raised in Science of Identity, same as Lalita, but a little younger.
He has done several interviews for articles, but there's only one video of him, or of any ex-member for that matter, speaking about his experience.
It's from an interview which came out in 2016, and right now has less than 2,000 views on YouTube, so very few people have actually heard it.
It's from an interview on a very small YouTube channel of Saul Rosenberg, a psychotherapist who specializes in cult brainwatching.
A SIF spokesperson confirmed that Rama was brought up in the butler faith, but was technically never a member of Science of Identity, presumably because he never joined of his own accord.
Myself and pretty much all these guys who were born into this cult, all the guys who are running things now, it's like from my earliest memory.
was Chris Butler is this person who you're worshiping every day.
You have pictures of Chris Butler and you're saying prayers to him.
Before you eat any food, you're like taught to say prayers to Chris Butler by his Hindu names.
My thoughts and my ideas of the world was all based on this man, Chris Butler, being the truth and being like a godlike figure.
in our lives, we're listening to Chris Butler chanting tapes, and we're told as
young kids that if we died and we didn't have the names of God spoken, you know,
from Chris Butler, if we weren't hearing that, then we might, you know, go to hell
or something, or be reincarnated, because they consider he is the only pure devotee
of Krishna in the world.
They would tell us this all the time.
And all the other Hare Krishnas were fallen and misled and illegitimate.
When I was seven years old, we flew to Sedona, Arizona to serve him and we would be brought into his house.
And every single one of us would be made to wear a surgical mask in his presence, except for Chris Butler, who enters the room in his, you know, strange white outfits.
And it's just like, people treat him like he's God, and they hit the floor and they worship him.
When they see him.
Most people would lay, like, completely flat on the floor, laying on your face with your arms stretched out towards him.
And you would even do this to his wife, Wailana, who we knew as Vaishnava Dasi, who was, you know, basically considered as holy as Chris Butler, just on the fact that she got married to him, I guess.
So I was a little kid made to, like, worship these cult leaders.
These people are just parasites that have nothing to offer.
Totally evil.
Tell people they know the truth and that they're the only way you can connect to God.
And they've lived like millionaires off the backs of my family and
hundreds of families around the whole world, if not thousands of families.
Yeah.
Wow.
Sedona, Arizona!
I know!
The Vortex, baby!
Yeah!
That's gotta be one of the worst places in America.
It's one of the most beautiful places, which is ironic.
It's so beautiful and so ugly.
If you knock on a random home in Sedona, you could probably end up in a cult.
Something both Lalita and Rama talk about is how from early childhood they would have to listen to tapes of Chris Butler day and night.
I mentioned earlier that a pillar of Butler's ideology is virulent homophobia, but only a couple statements of his on the issue have been unearthed.
This testimony from Rama reveals the real depth of the issue.
I remember as a young kid listening to extremely graphic lectures constantly where he's always talking about sex and describing in pornographic detail like what it's like to look at a pornographic magazine or what depraved activities that homosexuals get up to or that maybe straight, you know, people get up to out in the world.
Using all this fear tactics.
Your parents would make you listen to that stuff about sex when you were six, seven, eight years old?
Absolutely.
That's the way it goes in the Chris Butler cult.
It's normal.
That's normal, normal everyday stuff.
In 2005, I went back to Australia and I stayed at the house of my friends who are the same age as me, but they stayed in the cult.
And they married other cult members and they had a bunch of kids.
And I was staying in their house and they were doing the exact same thing.
And this was the final straw that made me go on the cult institution forum and start posting in 2006.
But they sat their little kids down in front of Chris Butler video lecture and he was talking badly about homosexuals and Like, he didn't even have a real point, but he spent, like, a good five minutes just going down a list of, like, derogatory terms for homosexuals and get laughter from the audience.
And this was being shown to, like, these little kids, my friend's, you know, kids, like, little girls that were, like, five years old, six years old, little boy who was, like, ten.
Yeah, I was gonna say that's probably worse than whatever the fuck Tulsi's currently fighting against, you know, just the existence of trans people and stuff.
If you're doing this to children...
I don't think you should be able to then turn around and be like, we need to protect children.
You cannot go full QAnon if this is where you come from.
Yeah, I have yet to encounter a cult leader that isn't also a horny freak.
Like all of these guys.
About stuff you don't like.
I just can't stop talking about it.
Yeah, all of these guys.
You inevitably find out that they're, like, introducing sexual ideas and sexuality to, like, children who are, you know, like, way, way, way, way, way too young to be hearing about this kind of stuff.
Yeah, just seems very, like you were saying, there's like no other point but the homophobia.
If you're like an ascended master and you're just thinking all day about what gay people are doing, I just... Yeah, and if Tulsi's whole thing now is like, you shouldn't be able to teach kids about sexuality, but yet...
Play the Butler tapes.
Thou doth protest too much.
Yeah.
After being the first person to ever really expose Butler's practices, Rama said Butler ordered his parents to excommunicate him and were even under the orders to prevent him from attending his father's own funeral, which he missed as a result.
Many other ex-members raised in the alleged cult were interviewed by journalist Christine Grillo, who's done probably the best investigative work on Butler and Science of Identity for her blog, Meanwhile in Hawaii.
One told her that Butler ordered him to infiltrate gay pride parades and track the activities of gay rights activists.
Butler was known to be quite a misogynist as well, in the past making the bizarre declaration that, quote, an increasing number of women in the United States keep dogs for sexual reasons.
Oh my god.
Because Butler was anti-school, he started a few of his own.
The first would be in Hawaii, and soon after a Butlerite boarding school opened in the
Philippines, probably because such a school would not be legal in the United States.
Very young kids who were sent there without their parents from the US and Australia describe
it as a boot camp, being forced to wake up at 4am and take ice cold showers, spend much
of the day chanting, and a curriculum of listening to cassette tape lectures of Chris Butler,
He would never appear in person himself.
Christine Grillo interviewed several former members who wished to remain anonymous.
Each attended the school from 1 to 4 years, at ages 11 to 15.
One said, quote, We were taught to follow the teachings and words of Butler as if they were the holy divine word itself.
We were taught that, homophobic slur, are taking over and doing disgusting things.
We were always hungry.
I almost committed suicide when I was there.
I really wanted to go home but was told that my parents did not want me to go back home.
That source also said he reported sexual abuse at the school but was accused of lying.
Another who attended the school for a year in the 90s said this.
We were taught Butler and his wife Wylana were the only true messengers of God and serving them would be the ultimate mission in life.
They strip you of your individual identity.
They humiliate you, try to figure out your strengths and weaknesses.
You weren't allowed to talk to any outsiders.
You were not allowed to contact your family.
Everything we did there was in preparation for whatever they wanted us to do next.
Others who had more contact with Butler in person have posted on cult education forums things like, quote, Butler only ever wanted to be taken care of hand and foot and the power and money that comes along with it, end quote.
Others describe him as easily angered and intensely paranoid, saying he has tinfoil lining the walls wherever he goes, requires extensive air filtration systems, and requires everyone around him to be wearing surgical masks, as Rama explained.
He also blamed all his health problems on the failures of his pathetic disciples.
Another child of the organization, Ian Koviak has written several blogs about the trauma he still carries from four years at the so-called school in the Philippines.
He wrote, quote, for a religion that professes love and devotion, we are basically programmed to be mildly petrified and disgusted with the world around us, end quote.
The comments to this post are filled with other survivors of the school, corroborating everything from the abuse to the centrality of anti-gay bigotry.
Many ex-members have supported the accounts of Lolita, Ian, and Rama, and the anonymous members as well.
Family members and journalists have similar stories, which we will get to later.
There is video of children prostrating at the feet of Butler, corroborating this aspect.
And there are even weirder accusations.
Worship of Butler's feet is one of them.
His photos of his feet As part of the alters, and to make things more gross, the New Yorker in 2019 interviewed some ex-members who said that some followers would put sand that Butler had walked on and even clippings of his toenails in their food to be closer to his grace.
Oh, God.
Does he keep them and then distribute?
He's like, here you go.
Your weekly toenails to sprinkle over your salad.
So... My God.
I don't know what's the... Deeply perverted, man.
Just in every possible way that word could be used.
So to me, the verdict is that it's fair.
I would say it's fair to call it a cult.
I think this is a cult.
So how did this cult around Butler begin?
In 1966, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, was established in the United States, commonly known today as the Hare Krishnas.
As you can imagine from the era, the quote, not-a-religion religion, which featured a wise old guru from India, sermons of love and laughter, and a focus on recruiting young hippies who like to take psychedelics, the group took off in America.
It was the golden era for new age, utopian, counterculture, Eastern philosophy inspired communities and, of course, for cults.
ISKCON got an added boost, with The Beatles' record label releasing a Hare Krishna track and George Harrison's song, My Sweet Lord, inspired by his relationship with them.
The founder of ISKCON, Swami Prabhupada, was called by Indian press, quote, the most successful Indian in America, as he established over 100 ISKCON temples with substantial followings within a decade of landing in New York City.
As you would guess from their whole vibe, Krishna spirituality had its own rising tide among white youth in Hawaii.
By 1970, a man named Chris Butler, just 22 at the time and considered quite a good-looking guy and charming surfer bro, had declared himself a guru in Krishna practice, though not affiliated with the Hare Krishnas.
He had amassed a flock of followers.
A woman who attended one meeting of his at the time reported being disappointed that Butler had apparently not even read the Bhagavad Gita, the most important Hindu text, so whether his following was based on aesthetic or knowledge is a question.
Nevertheless, the handsome surfer had a dedicated and youthful following, reportedly some girls as young as 15.
He earned the attention of the Honolulu Star Bulletin in September 1970, which reported he was living with 20 followers in a large tent under a freeway overpass, chanting at the top of their lungs over the roar of traffic.
At the time, he claimed around 50 young devotees on the Hawaiian islands.
The Star Bulletin described him as a, quote, dictator who had, quote, absolute power over devotees.
Followers interviewed at the time said they obeyed all his commands and stood ready to murder anyone who tried to hurt him.
What kind of commands did he give them?
Well, the reporter at the time, Janice Wolfe, uncovered one disturbing example.
Butler had allegedly ordered an 18-year-old follower to marry one of his male business associates.
But the media attention around Butler and his crew, as well as his reputation among Hawaii hippies, made him a real competitor to ISKCON.
Which was determined to rapidly expand in the US.
That made two separate Hare Krishna groups recruiting on the islands, the Authentic Indian Organization and the Young White Poser.
So in November 1970, Swami Prabhupada himself wrote a letter denouncing Butler, The next month, Butler submitted, renounced his disciples and his guru claim, turned over close to $30,000 in his group's finances to Prabhupada, officially joined ISKCON, and flew to California to genuflect in person.
All was forgiven, and the Swami put Butler right back to work as a recruiter for the bona fide Hare Krishna membership roles.
Predictably, the young, egomaniacal, aspiring guru couldn't be a subordinate himself as a mere member of ISKCON.
So in 1973, he was accused by his master of selling a Hawaii ISKCON temple without permission and stealing all the money.
Butler responded by claiming ISKCON leadership was trying to assassinate him.
Wait, so this was- You bringing it up?
That's literal murder.
Okay, stop trying to kill me.
He was still officially part of ISKCON at that time, but he resumed building his own
crew of disciples despite repeated denunciations from ISKCON leadership, including Prabhupada
himself.
But Butler was dutiful in his cash payments, so the rivalry was tolerated.
In 1977, the ambitious Butler, chained down from being the guru he was destined to be
by ISKCON, began to plan his next move.
He founded his own side organization called the Holy Name Society.
A few weeks later, the 82-year-old Swami Prabhupada fell severely ill, many disciples believe
he was poisoned by arsenic, and was dead before the end of the year.
Immediately, Butler's flock started calling him Prabhupada, and he officially split from the Hare Krishnas, changing the name of the Holy Name Society to the Science of Identity Foundation.
He re-anointed himself a prophet, adopted the name Jagadguru, which translates to Teacher of the World, which is a heavy title, and reformed the spiritual teachings of ISKCON around himself as the vessel for God on Earth.
Krishna spoke through Chris Butler, and only Chris Butler.
He was the only true Krishna devotee.
The year he became a newly liberated guru, he claimed around 1,000 loyal followers.
At least he doesn't have a TV show.
True.
Well, to boost his reach, he created a TV show.
It was called Chris Butler Speaks and it aired on Hawaii's Channel 13.
Let's check out a clip.
An intelligent person must ask this question, how do I know that someone is a bona fide spiritual master?
You can know from God.
That's all.
First way that God tells you whether or not someone is His representative, the first way
is from within the heart.
From within the heart He tells me, He confirms to me within that what this person is saying
is true, this person is my representative.
Not just that, but actually helps me experience from within my heart that I could place my
entire life in this person's hands and in doing so I am placing my life in God's hands.
I'll have that vision from God.
He's a vibes-based prophet.
If it feels God-like, then yes, it comes straight from God.
You want to know whether or not I am actually the representative of God?
There's so many people saying they're a representative of God.
So you must check.
You must check what I'm teaching, and you must check with the Lord in your heart.
Not you should just lightly or blindly accept, just because many people are accepting.
As far as you know, all these people here are insane.
You don't know.
So Butler was not just making moves as a spiritual master.
Not even 30 years old, he was also planning both a business and political empire.
He built a network of businesses that were able to fund Science of Identity, which, according to ex-members, Butler considered his personal bank account.
In his year of independence, 1977, an all-vegetarian grocery store called Down to Earth opened in Hawaii.
It was under a corporate entity founded the same year called Healthies Incorporated.
Through the 70s, Butler had been running a produce farm, which thrived on the free labor of his disciples, and in 1977 found a new way to monetize the vegetarian lifestyle.
Down to Earth grew into a major grocery chain in Hawaii.
The longtime CEO and CFO of both Down to Earth and Healthy Inc.
is a man named Mark Ferguson, a disciple of Chris Butler who was recruited in 1978.
This financial connection is longstanding, and parent company Healthy's Inc.
could siphon its profits to Science of Identity, as a registered religious charity, by donating stock to it.
Why Lana, a disciple who would become Butler's wife, created a yoga company, But they would hit even bigger than the health food and yoga market.
One follower named Joseph Bismark co-founded and manages QNET, a global multi-level marketing company among its products, a very expensive air filter, like the kind Chris Butler liked, which claimed to purify the harmful electro smog in your home.
Science of Identity is also linked to QI Group, an umbrella of companies under which QNET exists.
It seemed to work well enough because Butler would be flying around the world via private jet by the early 80s.
He would reportedly become very angry if these private planes were not up to his standards.
An ex-member describes him flipping out on one because his cabin was not big enough and in his rage destroyed the custom air filters he had relied on to catch all those germs.
Some money might have been shady.
Joseph Bismarck would be arrested by Interpol in Indonesia on charges of fraud, but charges were later withdrawn.
QNET shareholders in India were jailed on charges of running a Ponzi scheme and potential money laundering before they were cleared by India's Supreme Court.
But maybe the most lucrative recruit was a man named Patrick Bowler, an early butler devotee from the 1970s known to the butlerites as Pramahansa Das.
Bowler was a major international drug trafficker.
In 2008, he was convicted of smuggling 250 tons of heroin.
What?
What?
That's a decent amount of heroin.
You're definitely going to the execution island for that.
Wow.
Tons.
And from Afghanistan's Taliban.
It was one of those things.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's the best stuff.
They really do make the uncut.
He served only two years on account of being a rat.
Oh.
And our friend Rahm Aranson told the Sunday Star Times, "I have known Patrick Bowler
my whole life.
He was known throughout the whole cult.
He was the man and everyone knew he had tons of money.
He paid for my family to go serve Chris Butler during the height of his drug dealing."
But most insidious is Butler's quest for political influence.
Sometime in the mid-70s, he founded and registered a political party called Independence for Godly Government, or IGG.
In the late 70s, they would run 14 candidates in Hawaii local and national elections, all of them Butler devotees.
They ran on, among other things, extreme homophobia.
According to the Honolulu advertiser, journalist Walter Wright, who was covering the election
at the time, their campaigns were basically entirely funded by individuals associated
with the down-to-earth grocery company, which he said must have violated campaign finance
laws.
candidates lost their elections.
Losses turned into some victories in the early 80s, but they had to shed the I.G.G.
party affiliation to do so, choosing based on what was politically expedient.
Science of Identity members Wayne Nitsche was the first to hit, winning a seat on the Maui City Council, where he served off and on for about 22 years as a Democrat and then a Republican later.
And Rick Reed won a seat in the state legislature as a Republican in 1987.
But still stuck in the small time of local seats, SIF candidates would continue to try for U.S.
House and Senate over the years, always unsuccessfully.
But there were two other Hawaii politicians who played the most important role for political power.
Two who are very loyal members of Butler's inner circle, who both founded political organizations on his behalf and ran for office themselves.
A young couple so devoted to Butler that they moved their entire family to Hawaii to be close to him.
Mike and Carol Gabbard, the parents of Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard was two years old when her parents moved her and her four older siblings from American Samoa to the
north shore of Oahu in 1983.
Mike is Samoan, and Carol is a white woman from India.
Tulsi is often described as Hindu-American, but that's a purely religious distinction.
Her parents are converts from Catholicism, but not to Hinduism, to Chris Butlerism.
So, Mike Gabbard's sister, who is, of course, Tulsi Gabbard's aunt, Dr. Sina Viana Gabbard, is a bit of a public figure in her own right.
The Samoan poet, intellectual, and environmentalist is a professor at the University of Hawaii, and in 2020 was listed by USA Today as one of the most influential women from the territories, also known as the colonies.
Sina told The Independent this past October that she remembers about 40 years ago, just before Tulsi was born, her brother Mike announced that they had just become strict vegetarians, and suddenly changed their names, and the names of Tulsi's older brothers, to Sanskrit names.
Tulsi was born into it, named after a sacred plant referenced in the Bhagavad Gita.
Sina says she soon learned that her brother and his family were quote, prostrating at the feet of a white surfer dude.
In another interview with journalist Peter Friedrich, Sina recalls asking brother Mike in the 90s if they were Hindu, since the only books she saw in their home were Krishna-oriented.
He, quote, emphatically and categorically stated, no, that's different, end quote.
Chris Butler also insists, quote, I'm not a Hindu.
I'm an eternal spirit soul.
Sina says the first time she ever heard the word Hindu associated with her brother's family would be decades later when Tulsi entered national politics as the first Hindu in Congress.
Sina seems confident that the Gabbard clan left their home for Hawaii for one reason, to be close to, and to serve, Chris Butler.
It appears they did just that.
Mike and Carol, known within SIF as Krishna and Devahuti, were so devoted to Butler they earned top positions.
Not easy, with a large harem of devotees vying for his attention.
Tulsi's father quickly became Butler's secretary of personal affairs, and her mother, SIF's treasurer.
In 1983, they headed up an even more important piece of Butler's web.
Because so many in his original flock were having children, and Butler very much disliking the influence of public school, opposed to teaching evolution, bashed science, and even dismissed learning history, SIF needed some schools of their own.
So they started their first private school in Hawaii on a Butler curriculum, the Panamaulas School.
The precursor to the boarding school in the Philippines, which would open a few years later.
Mike Gabbard ran the school as headmaster.
SIF escapees who attended both Gabbard School and the Scary School in the Philippines said Gabbard's was quote, more mellow.
But we're still mainly taught that Chris Butler should be worshipped, and we're regularly exposed to extremely graphic Butler lectures about disgusting homosexual sex.
One student of the Gabbard-run school emailed the blog Meanwhile in Hawaii, quote, I know nothing of U.S.
or world history.
Mike Gabbard would run the school from 1983 to 1987.
He was like, he would only bring out the switch and beat us three times as opposed to the, you know, ten times, which is what we were used to.
It's amazing.
Good guy.
Awful.
I mean, the odds are there probably were a handful of gay kids, you know, trying to fucking wrestle with their identity and hearing this over and over.
I mean, it seems like it is the foundation of their beliefs with this guy.
Mike, I haven't heard you say he's taught anything other than this!
One that he's God and gay people are bad.
That seems to be the tenets of this entire religion.
Do not question me and these folks are bad.
Well, one indicator of how obsessed Butler and Science of Identity is with it is how obsessed Mike Gabbard is with it, who, as a loyal devotee of Butler, is, of course, always acting in a way that is serving Chris Butler.
So in 1988, the Gabbards became part of Butler's business network by opening a CIFF-affiliated vegetarian deli.
But the place wouldn't last long, because Mike had also started a local radio show called Let's Talk Straight, Hawaii.
Presumably, talking straight means not gay.
And look, I mean- There's nothing straighter than constantly talking about gay people.
Let's not overlook- Let's be clear.
Let's not overlook the fact that a vegetarian deli- I mean, come on.
You don't want some cold cuts?
Look, I had- What if I sprinkled some toenail?
Yeah, the vegetarian corned beef.
Yeah, it's not, you know.
What is going on here?
What are you going to go on an anti-vegetarian rant?
What is happening here?
No, no, I'm just saying it's another strike.
What are we setting up here?
What are we even doing here today?
It's a strike against them.
OK.
So he, of course, used Let's Talk Straight Hawaii as a platform for the homophobic garbage
that Butler was obsessed with.
When Mike admitted to a caller live on air that he would absolutely discriminate against
hiring a homosexual, activists picketed the Gabbard business until it had to close.
The Gabbard couple would continue to make anti-LGBT bigotry a center of their political work for the science of identity.
In 1991 they founded the organization, and this is Mike and Carol Gabbard founded this organization, called Stop Promoting Homosexuality.
They couldn't even call it SPH.
You know, they couldn't even try to disguise it in any way.
Mike was in charge of it, his wife Carol was the spokesperson who confirmed that the group was a project of Science of Identity.
He also started filming a TV show called The Gay Agenda.
Oh my god, this guy is like kind of... Holy shit!
Yeah, precursor to the entire Republican platform now.
And, you know, mind you, I didn't find any evidence of him doing, like, anything else.
You know, it's not like he's also starting, like, Krishna religious nonprofits.
It's like just this.
Yeah.
And you're, like, in the 90s.
Like, TV was not yet that gay.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
Uh, because the Gabbard couple were among the most important disciples to Chris Butler, presumably this was all happening under his direction.
Meanwhile, they sent the young Tulsi away for two years to the Butler Brainwashing School in the Philippines.
The rest of her education throughout high school would be homeschooling.
She would join her parents in their SIF political activities while still a teenager, and perhaps this was always the plan for her.
Here's another clip from the Rama Ransom interview.
The worst part is putting it onto their children.
It's like so messed up.
They just destroy lives.
They completely destroy kids' lives.
Kids never have a hope, man, if you grow up in that.
The best you could hope for is that you might have some talent, like you're an artist.
And then Chris Butler might send you to school, but you'd be the exception, and you'd be expected to turn around and serve him for free.
Well, Butler said in a rare interview that he did see talent in Tulsi as a child.
And in a recorded lecture leaked to Christine Grillo of Meanwhile in Hawaii, Butler addresses Tulsi's father directly, saying, quote, You could say she was groomed for a political career.
get one of these kids to run for office.
You could say she was groomed for a political career.
Her official debut is at age 17 with this political ad alongside her father.
Each of us has the right to marry, but we don't have the absolute right to marry anyone we want.
For example, I'm not allowed to marry my daughter or my son.
What?!
What?!
I can't marry my sister or my brother.
And I can't marry Kimo!
And I can't marry my dog!
This doesn't mean you don't have civil rights.
Don't open the door to weird marriages.
Don't let homosexuals force their values on the people of Hawaii.
Vote yes on the marriage amendment.
So, uh, Tulsi is the one he gestures to and says he's not allowed.
Hey listen, we'd all like to marry my daughter.
Me first.
But this is what we call weird marriage.
Look, if I had my way, my daughter and I, we'd be married, okay?
We'd be an item.
We'd have three children by now.
But what are we gonna do?
Marry dogs too?
I mean, be gay in any way?
I mean, just psychotic.
That is so psychotic.
Oh my goodness.
God, Tulsi.
Hey, yeah, it's me!
A little kid, it's me!
I can't marry my sister!
What the fuck?
That a commercial was part of an initiative by Mike's latest SIF front organization called the Alliance for Traditional Marriage.
He and his cohorts were trying to pass an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting same sex marriage.
It passed the year of the TV ad, 1998.
Tulsi was not just a passive extra in the campaign.
A few years later, she told the Honolulu Star Bulletin, "Working with my father to pass
the 1998 constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage, I learned that real
leaders are willing to make sacrifices for the common good."
Her father seemed to be into creating a non-profit industrial complex in 2001.
After the September 11th attacks, Tulsi and her father together founded yet another 501c3 called Stand Up for America.
Steeped with the language of SIF, their mission statement includes working to quote, increase our awareness of our identity as citizens of one nation under God, end quote.
And that 9-11 created a quote, "...awakening within the collective heart of Americans is the thirst for a deeper meaning to life.
This shift within the national psyche is a clear sign of a vacuum that needs to be filled."
End quote.
Filled by Chris Butler, they would most likely argue.
Yeah.
Around the same time, the Gabbard family jumped into electoral politics as well.
Tulsi, both her parents, and her brother.
In the year 2000, Tulsi's mom and older brother run for school board and Carol wins.
In 2002, Tulsi runs for state legislature and her pops for Honolulu City Council.
Both of them win.
Tulsi becomes the youngest person ever elected to that office at age 21.
That year she also got married to, you guessed it, another Science of Identity child.
He was the son of the Butler disciple who ran the boarding school in the Philippines.
The marriage between the two headmasters' children would last only four years.
As a new state senator, she would get to work implementing the CIF agenda.
But first, she had to stand up for America.
So Tulsi often says she decided to join the army after 9-11 to quote, go get those responsible.
But that's not exactly precise.
She would join about two years later, one month after the U.S.
invasion of Iraq in April 2003, which is interesting timing.
She enlisted in the Hawaii National Guard in a medical unit, went to basic training, then right back to her Hawaii state legislative seat to do some bigotry.
That year, she opposed a bill for hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims.
In February 2004, Hawaii is trying to pass a bill to legalize same-sex civil unions.
Not even marriage, just civil unions.
Tulsi didn't just lead the fight against it in the legislature, but led a protest outside the Senate chambers during the deliberations.
She told reporters there, quote, as Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.
The next month, her father becomes the first Gabbard to step into the national arena, declaring his candidacy for Congress, running as a Republican.
Now that he was in a different kind of spotlight, his connections to Chris Butler become an issue.
When press asks him about his affiliation with Science of Identity, he flat out refuses to give an answer.
So then he just stops taking interviews altogether.
Which is not a great campaign strategy.
At the time, Honolulu Magazine wrote that they believed he was avoiding interviews specifically because he did not want to be asked about science of identity.
Eventually, when the magazine emailed Mike Gabbard questions about science of identity, they did get a reply.
Not from Mike, but from his daughter Tulsi, who wrote, quote, I smell a skunk.
You're acting as a conduit for homosexual extremists.
I really feel like this should have been disqualifying, because we're not even remotely into kind of contemporary Gabbard, but like, my lord, she makes fucking Rush Limbaugh look like he's on the left.
Later that year, she volunteered to deploy to Iraq, losing her seat in the legislature, which she may or may not known would have happened.
She says she gave up her seat to go and others say that she thought she could keep the seat because she, you know, lost it anyway.
All three Gabbards would be out of office by the end of that year.
Tulsi would spend 12 months on Balad Air Base, the second largest military base in the country.
The most in-detail she gets is a letter she wrote while on deployment to the Honolulu Advertiser, which she intended to be published.
It's dated seven months into her tour.
She describes living on the massive, sprawling tent city, a Halliburton-run dining facility, and of course regular explosions and air raid sirens from mortar attacks.
She does not indicate then or since that she took part in any operations outside the base, on the perimeter, or treating wounded.
In 2020, she told Headstrong Project, quote, many of my friends experienced that direct combat action, end quote, but her own experience was.
Limited.
Tulsi gets home in 2005 and jumps right back into politics, right away putting her new veteran bona fides to use, volunteering for the Senate campaign of incumbent Democrat and WWII veteran Daniel Akaka.
This was a smart move.
There was no way Akaka was going to lose this election to his Republican challenger.
He was a Hawaii legend with a heavy Democratic Party electorate.
If Tulsi was vying for a ride to Washington, pumping up her service in Iraq, she got it.
As soon as he won, he hired her on as an aide to work on veterans policy with him on Capitol Hill.
Shortly after, she convinces her longtime political collaborator Daddy Gabbard to join her rebranding effort.
The lifelong conservative operative quits the GOP and formally joins the Democratic Party, personally initiated by Senator Akaka.
He said of the switch, quote, But it was a smart move.
They would be needing to get their ducks in a row.
And with new plans to use the Democratic Party as their vehicle to political power, they needed to clean up some of their skeletons.
Wow.
I think this is a good place to kind of end this episode.
Unbelievable already.
I mean, just... Does no one even look into people anymore?
How did this slip through the cracks?
Why are we learning about this on this stupid show?
I always assumed that if you like, if you reach the level of like, you know, big national politics and you reach, you become like, you know, a presidential candidate, then yeah, then your history is sort of picked over very finely.
And any little thing, if you had like, you know, a friend in the fifth grade who thought like you were kind of a stupid head, they would dig that up and that would be published nationally.
But here, just someone who was exposed some really vile, vile views somehow cruises along in his bathroom.
Yes, she was smart to switch to the Democratic Party because if she had been a Republican, they would have found out within 10 minutes that she spent her entire life condemning homosexuality.
And they would have elected her for it.
Yeah, it would have been par for the course.
Yeah, and there's a lot more to come, right, Mike?
I mean, you've done some really, I have to say, really good work researching this.
Yeah, this is, the level of depth here is just amazing to me.
And Butler is amazing, and he is obviously the voice of God, and he makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, Julian and I, we're actually ending the episode, so Julian and I can go join the Science of Identity Foundation, or whatever the fuck it's called.
Imagine, you're just like, yeah man, I'm into fucking acid and surfing, and then fast forward 20 years, you're like, eating the toenails of a guy called Butler.
Horrifying stuff.
Yeah, so we will be resuming this in part two of this Great Exposé on Tulsi.
In the meantime, Mike, where can people find your work?
I have to say I've long been a fan of your podcast, Eyes Left, but I know you also do a lot of work for Empire Files and all that, so tell people about that.
Yeah, so Eyes Left is a, well, so I guess, you know, the reason I got into Tulsi in the first place is because I am an anti-war veteran.
And as soon as Tulsi came onto the scene with that as her branding, it seemed a little sus to me.
And so I became interested in her at that time.
So anyways, I do a podcast called Eyes Left, which is a socialist anti-war military podcast for anti-war
veterans and active duty service members.
But yeah, I also do a show with my partner Abby Martin called
Empire Files, which is a documentary and podcast series that people can find on YouTube and the podcast
world as well.
Awesome.
Go check it out.
And hey, speak to you in a week, listener.
It does get weirder.
You're going to find out that this shit is just the beginning of a terrible path.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and support us for five bucks a month.
You get a whole episode every single week, plus access to our archives, plus access to Travis View's series, Trickle Down.
Plus access to Julian Field's series, Man Clan.
A lot of content there that'll make you feel good.
I don't think so.
That's a lie, that's a lie.
You can't tell them that.
That's simply unfair.
Yeah, do you like to feel bad?
For everything else, we've got a website, QAnonAnonymous.com Listener, until next week, may the deep dish keep you and bless you.
Is that right?
Good enough.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
When I had asthma as a child at three or four years old, they did not give me an asthma inhaler.
Because Chris Butler had ordered that none of the kids take drugs and that we don't go to the doctors.
And so even at the young age of three or four I was put through a lot of suffering and I was made fully aware that it was because this was pleasing to Chris Butler for me to suffer my asthma attacks of two or three days.
Uh, whole weekends, and I would never be taken in, never be given an inhaler, never be taken to the doctor, and after I finally did, they gave us an inhaler, and when I went to use it, my mother confronted me.
I was sure I was only four years old, maybe five at the oldest, but I think I was literally three or four, and she was
