The Science of Identity Foundation Candidate

I wish I could be more surprsed that Tulsi Gabbard was for all intents and purposes the sock puppet of a crackpot cult leader, but:

The first time I spoke with Rebecca Saltzburg, she told me Tulsi Gabbard was a freethinker who took orders from no one.

“I didn’t always agree with Tulsi on everything,” Saltzburg, who worked on digital strategy for several of Gabbard’s congressional campaigns, said in November 2024. “But as for the core of her life and political path? I can vouch 100 percent,that is her own.”

Saltzburg had heard I’dbeen asking people about Chris Butler,the eccentric religious leader Gabbard once described as her guru. Gabbard grew up in Butler’s breakaway Hare Krishna group. Her parents held senior positions in the organization. Saltzburg said that sheherself had been a member since moving to Hawaii with a college friend in the 1990s.

[…]

Nine months later, Saltzburg, then 53, got back in touch. This time, she had a different story to tell. She didn’t want to say much on a regular phone line,so we switched to an encrypted messaging app.

[…]

She thought she had deleted most of them, she said. But when Saltzburg logged into an old Gmail account, she found hundreds of emails from her SIF days, many from Nine Isles accounts. She shared some with me.

Their content was extraordinary.

Dozens of attached memos appeared to document directives and advice for Gabbard from her time in Congress. Some contained instructions on what legislation she should propose, which policies she should embrace and how she should conduct herself on television. They had an air of authority.A memo about a proposal to partition war-torn Iraq into three states quoted an unnamed person as saying it was “time for TG to come up with this idea.”

“Time for TG to come up with this idea.”

But before all of that occurred, I compared the content of the memos against Gabbard’s record in the Houseand I found unmistakable parallels. The main speaker in a 2014 memopressed for her to propose legislation penalizing countries with citizens who had fought for the Islamic State, and to issue a statement about it.

“Get it started in the morning,” the personsaid. “You need to be the leader in this regard. Don’t dick around.” I found that Gabbard released a statement the following day. A week after that, she introduced a bill in the House.

An Oct. 12, 2015, memo labeled “CNN Wolf Blitzer Talking points (Final)” contained this language about reports that she had been asked by Democratic leadership not to attend a presidential debate: “It’s not a ‘boohoo, I don’t get to go to the party’ situation, Wolf.” I dug up the clip of her appearance that day and found that she had used the line almost verbatim: “The issue here is not about me saying boo-hoo, I’m going to miss the party.”

Gabbard’s career trajectory has taken her from socially conservative Democrat to progressive darling, Bernie Sanders ally and presidential hopeful, and then to Fox News contributor, MAGA Republican and, eventually, Trump’s top intelligence official, a role that grantedher access to some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets.

If Butler was guiding Gabbard’s political career, the two of themhad kept it under wraps.

Butler,78, once reportedly said he did not tell Gabbardhow to vote in Congress. For politicians, he told the New Yorker in 2017, taking a position on an issue “is something that every individual has to deal with on their own.”

Gabbard, 45, was asked by one of my Washington Post colleagues in 2019 whether Butler had mentored her politically. Her answer was emphatic: “No, no, not at all.”

Either way, I thought, the documents suggested that someone had been telling Gabbard what to do. And at least in the few cases I had looked at, she appeared to have done it.

Whatever other errors the Democratic primary electorate has made, Tulsi finishing in 37th place or whatever in 2020 was not one of them.