Tulsi Gabbard: How an Extremist Cult Shaped the Anti-LGBTQ+ Crusader into Intelligence Chief

A Controversial Nomination

“I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our Intelligence Community, championing our Constitutional Rights, and securing Peace through Strength,” Trump declared in his announcement of Gabbard’s nomination. 

While he claims “broad support” from both parties, the Democratic National Committee swiftly condemned the choice, warning that “it is a danger to the American people to place a person who has coddled conspiracy theorists, defended Vladimir Putin, promoted Russian-backed disinformation campaigns, and cozied up to fringe hate groups in our nation’s top intelligence post.”

Born in American Samoa to parents of European and Samoan ancestry, Gabbard, who has no intelligence experience, served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a democrat from 2013 to 2021, following stints in the Hawaii House (2002-2004) and on the Honolulu City Council (2010-2012). A lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, she previously served in the Hawaii Army National Guard from 2003 to 2020. 

After a career as a democratic senator from Hawaii, Gabbard sought to replace Trump as president in 2020, and when she couldn’t beat him, she decided to join him, renouncing the democratic party and embracing Trump’s Christian Nationalist policies. This about-face has paid off in spades for the 43-year-old, who could potentially oversee 18 governmental intelligence agencies, including the CIA, Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Coast Guard Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of the Treasury, Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI. 

The Guru’s Influence

At the heart of Gabbard’s story lies her lifelong connection to Chris Butler, leader of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF) — a breakaway sect of the Hare Krishna movement. Known to be extremely paranoid and rabidly anti-LGBTQ+, Butler’s extremist views distort scriptural teachings found in the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Vedic tome upon which Gabbard took her oath of office. 

While Gabbard has downplayed Butler’s role in her life, describing him as “essentially like a Vaishnava Hindu pastor” sharing “beautiful meditation practices,” newly surfaced recordings reveal a pattern of extreme rhetoric from her guru — her living conduit to god and eternal enlightenment.

Butler’s lectures, spanning decades, document persistent and extremely vulgar anti-LGBTQ hostility. In one 2002 recording, Butler and his disciples laugh while he describes God as “the supreme homophobe” and “the supreme anti-faggot guy.” 

Transcripts leaked by a former cult member show Butler used anti-gay slurs at least 128 times between 1978 and 2006, repeatedly referring to gay people as “demons” and “cockroaches” that should be “exterminated,” The Iowa Informer and independent journalist Christine Gralow report.

The Politics of Identity

Chris Butler, who for a time was a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), angrily split from the organized Hare Krishna movement when he was passed over for an official guruship after handing all his followers and nearly $30,000 dollars to the organization in 1970. 

He instead started a splinter sect — which some have called the “alt-right branch of Hare Krishna”  — to great success. By 1977, Butler boasted his empire had grown to more than 1,000 followers in several countries. 

Five years later, the Gabbard family would count among Butler’s devotees, deeply immersed in their guru’s ideologies and ambitions, which would later drive both Tulsi and her father to seek, and win, political office.

The Gabbard and the Guru

The Gabbards are far from Butler’s first elected followers. The cult leader’s political ambitions stretch back nearly five decades. 

In the 1970s, Butler’s disciples created the Independents for Godly Government (IGG) party, making early inroads into local Hawaiian politics. In 1976 IGG fielded 14 political candidates, acting on guidance from their guru, Chris Butler. 

“The inept politicians would be removed from their seats and replaced with self-satisfied leaders,” Butler wrote at the time. “Sometimes … saintly persons will take it upon themselves to accept such political posts when they can see that there are no worthy leaders to guide the people.”

In another 1976 screed from Butler, he maintains that spiritual enlightenment is necessary for political leaders. “A materialistic person is unqualified to be a leader of society. The list is endless, but they all point to the same conclusion: a worldly politician, devoid of spiritual knowledge and ignorant of the goal of life, can never help bring about peace and prosperity. 

The group’s growing influence prompted the Honolulu Advertiser to publish a 1977 investigative series titled “The Secret Spiritual Base of a New Political Force.” It was also revealed that IGG had founded and funded two publications as fronts for the group’s political agenda. The newspapers, the Valley Isle and the Kauai Sun, purported objectivity but published screeds libeling government officials the cult disagreed with, as well as Butler’s own missives on reincarnation.

A Family Legacy of Anti-LGBTQ+ Activism

Tulsi’s parents took Butler’s admonitions to heart and entered political circles themselves. The couple worked in the offices of State Senator Rick Reed, also a proud disciple of Chris Butler. Butler’s political ambitions for his followers were beginning to prove more and more fruitful as they ascended the echelons of power. Tulsi would become her guru’s star pupil.

Tulsi’s father, Mike Gabbard, emerged as a prominent anti-LGBTQ+ activist, heading the Alliance for Traditional Marriage and Values. The organization characterized homosexuality as “unhealthy, abnormal behavior that should not be promoted or accepted in society” and endorsed conversion therapy, the barbaric and widely discredited practice of turning gay people straight. 

His words are eerily prescient of Christian Nationalist themes that would rise to prominence more than two decades later. 

“We are in the midst of a full-on assault by homosexual activists and their supporters who are trying to force their own misguided value system down our throats,” Mike Gabbard stated on the group’s website in 1998. “Anyone who has deeply held religious or moral beliefs against homosexuality are ridiculed, ostracized, and branded as homophobic hatemongers.” 

In the same article, Tulsi’s father ranted about the proliferation of gay television characters (he counted 30), and the homosexual agenda taking over education.

“In America, colleges and universities have become breeding grounds for ‘gay’ student activist groups, ‘queer studies’ programs and pro-homosexual faculty who do everything in their power to push their propaganda at unsuspecting students.”

In 2000, the website reports Tulsi’s mother, Carol, was targeted by activists for her anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs during her campaign for Board of Education.

“This war of deception and hatred against my mom is being waged by homosexual activists because they know that if elected, she will not allow them to force their values down the throats of the children in our schools,” 19-year-old Tulsi responded.

Under Mike Gabbard’s leadership, the Alliance successfully advocated for a 1998 Hawaii constitutional amendment giving the legislature power to “reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples.”

The Cult Leader’s Enduring Control

Former members paint a disturbing picture of Butler’s control over followers. 

Butler’s devotees were required to lie face down when he entered a room, and some were even told to consume his nail clippings, foot-washing water, or “spoonfuls” of sand he had walked upon, ex-followers and The New Yorker report.

The stealthy political network Butler established in the ‘70s remains active through generations. Bill Penaroza, who chaired the Independents for Godly Government, is the father of Kainoa Penaroza, who served as Gabbard’s congressional chief of staff. 

Kurt Butler, Chris Butler’s estranged brother, told New York Magazine that what began as classes “gradually evolved into a full-fledged cult.” He described his estranged brother as being anti-science and believing the moon landing was a hoax.

As Kurt told independent journalist Christine Gralow who undertook an in-depth investigation into Butler in 2017, “He is indoctrinating his followers into a life of know-nothingism and ignorance, while giving them the delusion that they know everything that really matters.” 

Under the Guru’s Thumb?

Gabbard’s aunt, Carolina Sinavaiana Gabbard, told The Independent in 2022 that her niece’s political ambitions stem directly from the group, calling the relationship “problematic and deeply troubling.” 

Carolina, a respected professor who was murdered in May 2024, went on to say, “As a historian and lifelong student of Eastern philosophies and religions, I find SIF’s role as  uncritical cheerleader, if not patron and primary generator of Tulsi’s checkered political agenda and intemperate, right-wing associations, to be troubling in the extreme.”

Butler’s influence appears in Gabbard’s political positions, particularly regarding LGBTQ+ rights. Butler’s 1980s writings characterized same-sex desires as wrong and bisexuality as uncontrollable “sense gratification,” warning it could lead to pedophilia and bestiality. 

These views echo in Tulsi’s early political career. At a 2004 House Judiciary Committee hearing on civil unions, the then-22-year-old Gabbard declared, “To try to act as if there is a difference between civil unions and same-sex marriage is dishonest, cowardly and extremely disrespectful to the people of Hawaii.” She added, “As Democrats, we should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.”

A Brief Evolution

Hawaii is a democratic state and a savvy Gabbard initially embraced progressive views which she equated with the Hawaiian spirit of “aloha.”

• Gabbard supported Planned Parenthood and a woman’s right to choose. 
• Gabbard was an anti-gun crusader, speaking out against school shootings, and earning an F from the National Rifle Association along the way. 
• Gabbard supported efforts to combat climate change and was endorsed by the Sierra Club in 2018. 
• In 2019, Gabbard called for an end to “anti-Muslim bigotry and hate” on social media.
• She veered further to the left and supported legalizing recreational marijuana and even decriminalizing sex work, she told Reason magazine in 2020. 

During her brief presidential campaign, Gabbard attempted to distance herself from her and her father’s hateful past and her own anti-LGBTQ+ statements. 

“I was raised in a very socially conservative home. My father is Catholic; he was a leading voice against gay marriage in Hawaii at that time,” she explained at a 2019 CNN town hall. She attributed her evolution partly to military service alongside LGBTQ+ colleagues in the Middle East, including during “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

In Congress, she initially maintained a pro-LGBTQ+ record, supporting the Equality Act and receiving high scores on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard, including a perfect 100 in one term. However, this “metamorphosis” proved temporary.

The Return to Conservative Activism

By December 2020, as her congressional tenure wound down, Gabbard began to embrace far-right politics once again. 

• She introduced legislation to bar transgender girls from competing in school sports. 
• In April 2022, she criticized Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law for being too limited, arguing it should extend beyond third grade through high school. 
• She decried educators who she claimed are “indoctrinating woke sexual values in our schools.” 
• Gabbard has gone from advocating for gun control to firm support for the Second Amendment and defending teen shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two racial justice protestors in Kenosha, Wisc., in 2020. 
• She has also embraced the Christian Nationalist concept of “anti-white” racism.
• “Blaming climate change for everything is just another way for politicians to try to evade responsibility,” she posted to social media in 2023. 
• Her stance on reproductive freedom has gone by the wayside in favor of anti-abortion bills and candidates.

With her departure from the democratic party in October 2022, her ideological reversal was complete. Tulsi had gone back to her extremist roots. 

Gabbard firmly denounced the democratic party as “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.” She accused the Biden administration of targeting parents opposing “radical curriculums and explicit sexual content” and “erasing women” by supporting transgender people.

Competency Concerns

Beyond ideological concerns, Gabbard’s intelligence experience is notably thin. Her sole, semi-relevant background consists of two years on the House Committee on Homeland Security. 

Her foreign policy positions have grown increasingly controversial. She met secretly with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2017 despite intelligence community conclusions about his persecution of religious minorities. 

Gabbard has also defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, arguing it could have been avoided if the U.S. and NATO “had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO.”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) has called Trump’s appointment of Gabbard “irresponsible.” “Tulsi Gabbard is someone who has met with war criminals, violated the Department of State’s guidance and secretly, clandestinely went to Syria and met with [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad, who gassed and attacked his own people with chemical weapons,” she said. “She’s considered to be, essentially, by most assessments, a Russian asset.”

Mitt Romney has accused Gabbard of “parroting false Russian propaganda,” he posted to social media in 2022. “Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.”

“Not only is [Gabbard] ill-prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators,” former CIA officer Rep. Abigail Spanberger noted. Gabbard has made unsubstantiated claims she is on TSA’s “Do Not Fly” list due to “security concerns” surrounding her criticisms of the Biden-Harris administration.

The Stakes Ahead

Chris Butler, now in his early 70s, has become increasingly reclusive — reportedly requiring disciples to wear respiratory masks in his presence and endure a three-week-long quarantine before visiting their guru who lives in rooms where the walls are covered in aluminum foil. 

Questions about his ongoing influence over Gabbard’s decision-making have gained new urgency with her nomination as Director of National Intelligence. For the intelligence community, these concerns extend beyond partisan politics to fundamental questions about judgment and independence.

Former CIA Director John Brennan warns: “Clearly, Tulsi Gabbard has taken actions and made statements over the past several years that really raised serious questions about her common sense, her judgment, as well as her political sympathies.” 

As confirmation hearings approach, senators must weigh not only Gabbard’s dramatic ideological shifts but also the extent to which her decision-making may be influenced by her lifelong spiritual leader and his controversial organization. 

In Her Own Words:

“The Biden Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security have focused their newly formed domestic terror unit to target parents who are vocally standing in opposition to radical curriculums and explicit sexual content being taught to their kids in public schools.”

— The Tulsi Gabbard Show, October 11, 2022

“Today’s democratic party racializes everything and blatantly foments, anti-white racism.”

— Ibid

“Public school districts are implementing policies that sexualize kids as young as five or six years old. Taxpayer dollars are being used to bring in drag strippers and encourage gender transition surgery.”

— Ibid

“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. Hare Rama, Hare Rama.

— Tulsi Gabbard praising Krishna through song in 2016 at the International Society for Krishna Consciousness’s 50th anniversary celebration.