The Progressive Case Against Tulsi Gabbard

By Opinion Haver

The Case Against is a special feature where we single out one particular Democrat who needs to go, regardless of whether they have a challenger. For this issue we’ve got Tulsi Gabbard, of Hawai‘i’s Second Congressional District.

Quick note: this is in reference to her 2020 congressional run. We’re not touching the presidential primaries.

Foreword

Tulsi Gabbard is a tricky congressmember to write about. Hawai‘i isn’t just separated from the mainland by thousands of miles of water, it’s also separated by media and political culture. Common political knowledge on the islands sometimes simply won’t make it off them. And Gabbard herself doesn’t help things. Even local outlets find her evasive. There’s good reason for that, from her perspective. She’s young, telegenic, and attempting to get in the national spotlight. To do this, she’s crafted a narrative about herself, mostly to explain away inconvenient parts of her record.

The Story of Tulsi, to hear it from her, is that she’s always been a progressive and drawn to public service. Unfortunately, she grew up in a socially conservative household, and it showed in her early career. A tour of duty in Iraq changed both her social outlook, and her trust in American military intervention as it’s used. Since then, she’s been a bold, yet consensus-building progressive looking to stop our country’s desire for regime change. It’s a good story, and she’s stuck to it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up upon closer inspection. And I think it’s time for a closer inspection.

Hawaii State House

The first major period in Tulsi’s political career is her single term in the Hawaii State House. Gabbard has since distanced herself from her social stances during this period, and attributed it to her upbringing. While there’s an argument to be made that she was an adult and shouldn’t have become an elected official if she didn’t have a firm sense of her politics, I’m going to leave it be for now and just say that her voting record at the time does indeed reflect the social conservatism she’s since disaffiliated herself from (mostly, at least—she’s only explicitly mentioned abortion and gay rights, but the whole package is kind of implied). There’s more to her tenure, and I’m surprised it isn’t talked about more. This newspaper clipping from the time serves as a great metaphor for that term. The anti-gay statement up top catches your attention, and is something she’s apologized for. Below that is just some nonpartisan platitudes. But if you read to the bottom, you notice some worryingly conservative language.

Hawai‘i politics is a realm of odd coalitions built on geography, parochialism, race, and more, which can make the ideological grounding of politicians hard to suss out. Even still, I would say that in the State House, she accumulated a pro-corporate voting record. She sponsored bills to give tax breaks to the famously cash-strapped entertainment and medical research industries, plus one for unspecified “job creation.” These were pretty much blank checks, too. No need to make your research public or even portray Hawai‘i in the films. Just do what your business does and collect the tax credits whenever you want.

Another cool and progressive bill she co-authored was a constitutional amendment creating a super-majority revenue raising requirement. Specifically, she teamed with seven Republicans and no Democrats to make a constitutional requirement that a ⅔ vote is necessary to raise revenues. If you’re unaware why that’s such a big deal, these measures are the crown jewel of the anti-tax movement in America. California’s requirement has famously hamstrung the state and made even modest and necessary changes a white-knuckled ride in the legislature. In Oklahoma, the ¾ super-majority requirement meant that even though funding was so dried up schools were shifting to four-day weeks, when the governor and large majorities of the house wanted to raise taxes to fix that, they couldn’t. Tulsi Gabbard co-authored one of those, which House leadership thankfully killed in committee.

She also put her name on “tough on crime measures” like War on Drugs bullshit and broken windows policing. Probably the weirdest, and quite frankly the most Gabbard bill she co-authored was to ban water fluoridation. Being anti-fluoridation is sort of like being anti-vaxx in that people reach can reach it either from a sort of right-wing underground paleoconservative fear of government control, or a pseudo left-wing Luddite fear of chemicals as a concept, and the two perspectives muddle to the point where it’s often to tell them apart, which...hey, get ready for that theme to show up again.

In 2004, with the War on Terror in full swing and the Iraq War still revving up (roughly a year after the Mission Accomplished speech) Tulsi Gabbard, a National Guard Reserve member, opted to volunteer for the effort. Before she left, though, she had a distinctly Gabbard moment where she held a press conference to announce that she had recently discovered her tour of duty meant she couldn’t campaign for reelection or act as a Representative, so she wouldn’t...but people could still vote for her...and while she couldn’t actually perform any of the duties of the office, she could technically hold the office...oh, and it would be possible for her to give another House member instructions on how to run her office, not that that’s necessarily what would happen. But just letting you know it’s possible, that’s all. She wouldn’t even say if she’d resign or not if elected.

Honolulu Council

Gabbard’s second tour of duty ended in 2009. She launched her newest political venture not soon after, running for and winning District 6 of the nonpartisan Honolulu Council. She was in office for a scant six months before announcing her Congressional run, so she has a pretty thin Council record to examine. She only did one notable thing in her time there, in fact. But that one thing is awful.

Gabbard wrote and ushered through the council a bill that would empower the county to seize any belongings left on public property. This measure, eventually signed by the de facto Republican mayor did not explicitly mention the homeless, but everyone knew that was who it was targeting. Hawai‘i has the highest homeless population in the country, and ⅔ of the state lives in Honolulu. The homeless obviously have no private land of their own, and are forced to live on the streets. The bill enabled the government to take away the belongings of a homeless person for the crime of staying somewhere for a full day. It was called a “Sidewalk Ban Against the Homeless” in the press at the time. Officials were even talking about taking toothbrushes.

The backlash to such a cruel and unnecessary measure from homeless and civil rights activists was immediate. The ACLU showed up at a council meeting to testify, correctly pointing out that the bill couldn’t actually reduce the homeless population, and that indeed the harassment from the city would make it even harder for a homeless person to keep a job. According to them, Gabbard’s bill was an attempt to “eradicate the homeless instead of eradicating homelessness.” Once the bill was in effect, it began costing the city tens of thousands of dollars a month and resulted in bin after and bin of personal belongings being incinerated. The ACLU made good on their implicit threat to sue, and Honolulu eventually settled for some monetary damages and a guarantee they would provide more notice and a better tracking system. Today, Honolulu is considered one of the four most hostile cities to the homeless in the country by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

The bill also had the fringe “benefit” of allowing the council to quietly end long-term protests by taking away the belongings of the protesters until attrition won out. At the time the bill was written and signed, Honolulu had an ongoing Occupy protest. Once the bill went into effect, the government began to go to their camp so frequently, Occupy Honolulu actually created a rotation system to avoid confiscation. When Tulsi was running for Congress she took the brave stand that somebody should do something about allowing protests, but she wasn’t going to do anything at all. Occupy Honolulu, for their part, continued to lay the blame for their treatment at her feet.

Congress

Once she got to Congress, Tulsi continued her pattern of mostly voting the party line, but with some pretty alarming deviations. One of those is Obamacare, which she’s voted to weaken multiple times (including the mandate, excise tax, IPAB, and co-op system). She’s also had her dalliance with corporate tax cuts and austerity Republican budgets opposed by Democrats. That’s austerity budgets for the civilian government, of course. She’s voted with Republicans to inflate the military budget. And she voted for the initial Republican attempt functionally turn all VA employees at-will.

Gun control is another issue she’s weirdly conservative on. David Cicilline’s 2015 assault weapons ban had 149 cosponsors, over 80 percent of the Democrats in Congress. Tulsi declined to sign on. In June of 2016 she took a picture watching the Senate gun control filibuster. It was quickly pointed out that of the eleven gun control measures that had been floating around the house for a year and a half, she had signed onto none of them. At that point 174 out of 188 Democrats had, as well as two Republicans. The week after that was pointed out, she threw her name on a couple of them. If you thought she’d learned from that experience, you’d be wrong. Cicilline reintroduced his 2015 bill again in 2018. The resolution had 164 co-sponsors, 85 percent of the Democratic caucus, and Gabbard declined to be one of them. She added her name only after her primary opponent made it a campaign issue.

Perhaps her worst gun vote was to allow veterans who had been declared mentally incompetent to purchase firearms. This NRA-backed bill was avoided by nearly all of the Democratic caucus. (Henry Cuellar was one of the few cross-party votes, and we have a whole other piece on why he’s great company to keep.) The problem with it should be obvious:

20 veterans a day commit suicide. Roughly 90 percent of suicide victims suffer from mental disorders. Having a gun in the house significantly increases the risk of a successful suicide attempt.

Putting these three facts together, we can see why it’s a good idea not to give firearm access to thousands of people with PTSD, depression, dementia, and other such disorders. What makes this vote especially galling is that Tulsi should know this from experience. In 2010, a fellow veteran she knew from the military base they had been stationed in together shot his ex and daughter before attempting to kill himself. He suffered from PTSD and was under psychiatric care. At the time, she said “You know, it hits you really close to home when you see someone who went through the same thing, very terrible,” in a news story about the incident she put on her campaign website. Gabbard has, to my knowledge, never given her reasoning for voting for this bill.

Her record on refugees is particularly troubling. She voted for the Congressional Republican attempt to first pause and then slow the process for refugees fleeing Iraq and Syria. The first bill she wrote was to make it significantly more difficult to travel to America from a country with even a minor ISIL presence. The only cosponsor was a member of the Freedom Caucus. She also opposed returning Yemenis home from Guantanamo Bay, even though they had been cleared for release for over half a decade. But we’re getting into Tulsi’s foreign policy, which really needs a section of its own.

Tulsi’s Foreign Policy

Gabbard status in the political world really centers around her foreign policy. She was one of the first two women veterans sworn into Congress, and has earned a reputation for being outspoken against regime change and military invasions. Those are good things. It’s the way she’s actually gone about those things that’s the issue. Beyond the broadest strokes, it’s been hard to pin her down on what exactly she wants done.

This interview she gave with Truthout shortly after her election really puts that question into focus. She has a reputation for not getting back to reporters and dodging interviews, but she actually sat down for this one to talk about foreign policy...and it’s a few admirable broad stances, with either an inability or an unwillingness to explain further. Should the US practice nuclear disarmament to encourage it worldwide? “I don’t know.” Is there a role for drones in Yemen? “You’ve got to look at a bigger picture than that.” Or take this answer, which is amazing in its refusal to actually convey anything:

JL: Let’s talk about Iran. The UN Security Council imposed four binding resolutions starting in 2006, and since then, economic sanctions have increased in number and severity. We’re under pressure to draw “red lines”; meanwhile, Ahmadinejad and the rest of the Iranian regime insist they do not intend to build nuclear weapons; the Supreme Leader Khamenei has issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons; Israel’s intelligence community said they’re not doing it, and in January of this year, Secretary of Defense Panetta said Iran is not trying to develop nuclear weapons. Yet talk of war and the sanctions continue. What path do you think the United States should pursue with Iran, and should we even have the option of military force on the table? TG: Again, this is where I see great value in having members of Congress who truly understand firsthand what the cost of war is, so that decisions like this – conversations and debates like this – about what role military force has to play in foreign relations in these international questions – you know. This experience weighs heavily on these decisions. If you look at our own senators – Senator Akaka and Senator Inouye – both veterans who fought in World War II, both who voted against the war in Iraq, you’ll see that people who understand what the cost of war is are much more careful about making the decisions on when and where our troops should have boots on the ground. I think that doing our best to stick to the facts about what is happening in Iran, and really looking at the intelligence that is there versus the rhetoric, and focusing on diplomacy, is where the heavy lifting or real work lies. I’m not naive to the political challenges that are there and the influence that Israel has, and our good friendship with Israel as a country, but again, taking military action is not something that we should take lightly for many reasons. And we really need to focus on the facts, on diplomacy and relationship-building.

This hits most of the Gabbard themes for foreign policy: knowing the cost of war, focusing on diplomacy, not sending in troops—really all it’s missing is a statement about regime change. But then how does this get applied to a particular situation, say Iranian nuclear negotiations? Focus on diplomacy is good advice, but the question was asking what that diplomacy should actually be. I hate to harp on a politician for being unprepared and vague on foreign policy—Tulsi’s hardly alone or, honestly, in the minority there. But for someone with a foreign policy record like hers, not being willing to expound on her intentions beyond Schultz-ian platitudes is a much greater problem.

So let’s learn about her intentions through her actions. For one, she does not seem to be interested in shrinking the size of America’s massive, bloated military budget. As I said before, she voted for Department of Defense budget increases, and in her first major national magazine profile, in 2013, she was “particularly vocal” on wanting more money for missile defense, and is quite willing to brag about the additional military funding she secures. She voted to allow money to be used for combat operations in Iraq.

Okay, I’ve put it off long enough. We’re nearly 3,000 words in. It’s time to talk about Syria. To summarize the civil war as best I can, there are four camps. The first camp is Assad’s fighters, who want a return to the pre-Arab Spring government. This would be a bad thing, although likely “just” a return to the prior state of things. Assad is backed by Iran and Russia. The second camp is the Free Syrian Army, a collection of military groups and settlements that are the rough successors of the original rebels. It is highly uncertain what would happen if they won, and after the failed 2016 Aleppo offensive, it’s highly unlikely that they will win. They are mostly Sunnis, are not necessarily interested in anything resembling a democratic or secular government any longer, and are backed by Turkey and Qatar. The third group is ISIL, an ultra-religious terrorist organization that has ties to al-Qaeda and seek world domination. They captured a bunch of territory in 2014 and 2015, but have since lost it all and are a small paramilitary group at this point. The fourth and final group are the Kurds, a previously repressed ethnic minority group native to the mountains of the north, who have since formed a semi-recognized democratic state in their homeland with a secular, leftist ideology.

For a lot of people, the first time they heard Tulsi Gabbard’s name was in January of 2017, when she met with partially-deposed dictator of Syria Bashar al-Assad. Bashar al-Assad is, no holds barred, a monster. His father transformed the leftist-authoritarian-adjacent Ba’athist state of Syria into a cult of personality dictatorship, and Bashar has only made it worse. After tension between Arab Spring protesters and the Assad government escalated into civil war, Assad’s forces committed human rights abuses on a massive scale. Meeting with him, on a trip he paid for, without telling anyone, is at the very least unwise. The explanation she gave at the time was plausible enough:

“When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so, because I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace. And that’s exactly what we talked about.”

Quite a bold statement to tell her critics they need to “care about the Syrian people”, after she voted to block Syrian refugees, but let’s focus on the argument. *deep breath* Diplomacy is good, this is true. However, if someone is not in a position where they can negotiate, and are in fact not even in a position of communication with those who can, it’s very much worth asking what that meeting will accomplish. For instance, will it legitimize the actions of a murderous tyrant? Is doing this without telling anyone helping the dialogue or sowing confusion? Look, the meeting was a bad idea, but if it had just been the meeting, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, even if a key companion on the trip has reported ties to a militant Assadist party in Lebanon. However, her actions regarding Syria overall have been really, really bad, and they’ve all pointed in one direction.

First, while she opposes sending in troops, she has staked out a clear position of belligerence in the region. She’s even described herself as a “hawk” when it comes to fighting terrorists.

Those are stunningly aggressive tweets for a Democratic member of Congress to be making. As a reminder, Russia killed thousands of civilians in those bombings.

After the trip, she uncritically repeated things the Assad government had told her on her trip, including that the rebels were no different from ISIL. She also wrote two bills attempting to block all US aid to Syrian rebel groups, including the Kurds, but with no such stipulations for Assad. On one hand it’s true that these bills were targeted at a particular program—on the net they were probably even a good thing. On the other, she could have chosen to not write something that included the Kurds but not Assad. A minor point maybe, but considering she had recently just voted against keeping the US from sending arms to Syria, something to consider.

A few months after her meeting with Assad, there was a Sarin gas attack on civilians. It looks pretty certain to have been the Syrian government, who had done this kind of thing before. The UN and nearly every country that weighed in said that Syrian government forces had carried out the attack. The two exceptions were the Syrian government and their ally Russia, who both floated the conspiracy theory that it was a false flag attack. Gabbard went on CNN to express sympathy for that view, “skeptical” of the radar data and UN reports. Just a few days ago, she refused to call Assad a war criminal. A nation demonstrating a willingness to engage with governments they know to be terrible in order to achieve the least bad outcome is one thing. Extending a baffling amount of leniency toward a war criminal to the point where you’re not terribly far off from relaying his talking points is another.

I wish it were it only Assad. But there’s also Modi. Narendra Modi is the current prime minister of India, and a real piece of work. He’s a proud Hindu nationalist, and belongs to the main Hindu nationalist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The simplest comparison to make here is the KKK, and indeed that comparison has been made before, but I’ll describe it “what if the Boy Scouts were openly fascist?” The RSS leader in the 70s even said only Hindus should be citizens. Modi himself rose to fame in 2002 after he, in a role similar to a governor, either allowed or encouraged a massive Hindu mob riot attacking a Muslim community, resulting in hundred or thousands of deaths. Modi opposed many relief efforts and offered a compensation package that would advantage Hindus. His 2014 prime minister campaign was marked with a promise to deport millions of (mostly Muslim) immigrants. Since his election as prime minister, he’s mostly been known for his neoliberal economic reforms…but also arresting dissidents and overseeing an increase in Hindu Nationalist violence.

Tulsi has a history with Modi, besides the well publicized meetings they’ve had. She’s maintained that “there’s a lot of misinformation” about the 2002 riots, and criticized the US government for not issuing Modi a visa in the decade after. She’s done events with leaders in Modi’s political party. Gabbard’s view of him is that “He is a leader whose example and dedication to the people he serves should be an inspiration to elected officials everywhere.” When a resolution came into the US House expressing the need for more religious tolerance from the Indian government, Gabbard was furious, despite having written a similar resolution for Bangladesh just months earlier. Her ties to Hindu nationalism run deeper than that. She’s accepted tens of thousands from an American-run advocacy organization with extensive ties to Hindu Nationalists, the Hindu American Foundation, done events with them, and gotten some of their staff internships in her office. In one of her trips to India, she met with right wing Hindu nationalist leaders.

She also has ties to good old fashioned right-wing American foreign policy organizations. In 2015, she spoke at Christians United for Israel, run by a pro-settlement evangelical preacher, and later accepted an award by an Adelson-affiliated rabbi who’s so far right, he thinks Susan Rice is responsible for Rwanda. At the award event she talked to at least one Adelson. She’s gone to an event for the American Enterprise Institute, perhaps the main organization in the Koch network, and is an advisor for a seperate Koch-funded think tank whose other members include a neo-confederate, a George W. Bush advisor, and Federalist Society board member.

Remember a few paragraphs ago when I said Gabbard likes to repeat how diplomacy is important without saying what that diplomacy should be? Surely, such a fan of diplomacy as an inherent good would be a big fan of the largest American diplomatic achievement in years, perhaps decades, the Iran Deal. Nope. Tulsi went on Fox News to talk about her skepticism regarding it, and called it similar to other failed deals like with North Korea, and the Neville Chamberlain-Hitler appeasement. She also attended Netanyahu’s tirade against the Iran Deal and softness of the Obama administration during his Republican-invited speech to Congress that Obama and most Democrats boycotted.

Another late period Obama administration bugbear of the Fox New Republican circles that Gabbard was on board with was her commitment to calling ISIL “radical Islamic terrorism.” At a certain point, Obama decided not to use the phrase to avoid lumping the vast majority of Muslims in with a few terror cells. The intention being to strip ISIL of legitimacy among the Islamic world, while also being empathetic to American Muslims, considering how high anti-Muslim sentiment was running at the time. Republicans, including Trump, were livid that compassion was being shown, and turned it into A Thing. Gabbard joined in the chorus, going on a variety of interviews, where she called the decision “mind-boggling”, “disturbing”, and “not recognizing who our enemy is.” Worst of all, she went on Fox News and argued that Middle Eastern terrorism was the result not of systematic problems like poverty and exploitation, but of “an ideology.” That’s quite the statement to make in light of her friendship with Modi, a perpetrator of anti-Muslim violence.

Social Views and the Gabbard Network

Prologue: Mike Gabbard

I want to be clear that I am not attempting to imply that Tulsi is responsible for the actions of her father. Tulsi is her own person, and this should be viewed as context for her choices regarding her father and what they mean.

Mike Gabbard was a fixture of the right-wing crank scene in Hawai‘i the 1990s. He ran a nonprofit, Stop Promoting Homosexuality, and a radio show, Let’s Talk Straight, Hawai’i. Both, as you can guess from the names, were dedicated primarily to promoting his particular brand of religiously-fueled homophobia. He rose to prominence in 1991 when he announced on his show that he would defy the state’s anti-discrimination laws. The ensuing protests from a half-dozen activists lasted for 12 media-fueled days, eventually concluding with Gabbard ending his show, shuttering his deli, and declaring that the people had been on his side. In 1992, he started another radio show, which similarly ended amidst backlash from gay rights activists.

Afterwards, Mike Gabbard took his anti-gay outreach national, advising other bigoted organizations, leading pickets on the mainland, and just being all-around Anita Bryant/Jerry Falwell level awful. Lambda Legal, at the time, described him to be “Hawaii’s #1 Homophobe.” In 1996, the Hawai‘i Supreme Court took what was at the time a very progressive stance that limiting marriage to straight couples was unconstitutional, and Mike Gabbard pounced. He founded a new PAC, Alliance for Traditional Marriage, and was a leader in the campaign for Constitutional Amendment 2, a 1998 ballot measure that amended the state constitution to reverse the ruling.

He has not mellowed much since then. A Republican for most of his political career, he switched parties in 2007, because the HIGOP was dying out, and as he said at the time "I can be much more effective as a legislator being a member of the majority party, and that's what it's all about.” He called the passage of Hawai‘i’s civil unions bill the low point of 2011. He nearly got reprimanded by the party in 2013 for his continued attempts to make the state constitution oppose gay marriage.

Tulsi

This is where Tulsi first enters the picture, in one of his 1998 ads:

She would have been 17 in that.

In 2000, the Gabbard family scored their first electoral victory, with the election of Carol Gabbard, wife of Mike and mother of Tulsi, to Hawaii Board of Education. She ran as an anti-gay candidate, and received the same backlash her husband had. That election cycle, both her husband and daughter were involved in her campaign, and she was backed by her husband’s current nonprofit-Alliance for Traditional Marriage and Values, the “and Values” being added after the Amendment 2 fight. In 2002, Mike and Tulsi ran for office together. And I do mean together. They shared staff, worked together, did events together, and even had a campaign manager talk about them pretty interchangeably.

So it’s fair to say that Tulsi entered politics through her family. To a certain extent, that’s a reason for judging her in her early period with more leniency, as someone still in the shadow of her father. But it’s important to be aware that this means she has a detailed understanding of the extent of her father’s network, as well as the extent of his weaponized bigotry.

It’s also important to understand just how rabidly anti-gay Tulsi was in her early 20s. She famously told a reporter in 2004, “It’s clear to me that you’re acting as a conduit for The Honolulu Weekly and other homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case.” I say that one is famous because it's the quote that usually gets used to demonstrate her in that period. It wasn't unusual though; she used that sort of language often. Regarding civil unions that same year? “[W]e should be representing the views of the people, not a small number of homosexual extremists.” A study about whether LGBT students face harassment? “An indirect attempt by government to encourage young people to question their sexual orientation.”

So what changed? In 2011, while running against arch-social conservative Mufi Hannemann, she announced that she was now pro-choice and pro-gay rights. This is not shocking, exactly. Many adults have moved left on gay issues after leaving their conservative households. But this is another situation where the details paint a much uglier picture than the broad strokes.

For one, let’s look at her rationale. In a story she’s shared many times then, she explained that she was horrified at the legally enforced religious restrictions during her tour of duty in Kuwait, and over the next couple years back in Hawai'i saw the parallels to gay marriage and abortion bans. “Slowly, I began to realize that the positions I had held previously regarding the issues of choice and gay marriage were rooted in the same premise held by those in power in the oppressive Middle East regimes I saw--that it is government's role to define and enforce our personal morality.” This lead her to oppose these measures.

This reasoning is something she’s not alone in, but make no mistake, it is not the language of allyship with the LGBTQ community, but of a more libertarian role of government philosophy. Gabbard herself has made this clear on many occasions. While other candidates were explaining in detail why they supported gay rights causes in her 2012 and 2016 primaries, she was giving flat, basic answers. In 2015 she was even more explicit about her support for gay marriage being merely a function of the role of government when in an interview with Ozy Magazine, “She tells me that, no, her personal views haven’t changed, but she doesn’t figure it’s her job to do as the Iraqis did and force her own beliefs on others.” Yikes. Gabbard has also opposed the Hawai‘i LGBT Caucus multiple times. In 2013, she was the only federal Democrat in Hawai‘i to refuse to send someone to testify in favor of gay marriage, and in 2015 her press team called the leadership of the caucus “out of touch” for opting to not endorse her in light of the Ozy interview.

Another sign of her questionable commitment to social justice is her continued connections to her father’s political network. This is where things get a little hazy. In the 1970s, a Hare Krishna religious leader in Hawai‘i named Chris Butler split his sect off from the main branch. It grew to over 1,000 members by the end of the decade. Around that time, the group became interested in politics and launched their first candidate slate in 1976. None were successful, but they eventually got an ally in state senator Rick Reed in the 80s and 90s. The group’s candidates were strict religious moralists on sexual issues, but were not doctrinaire right wingers elsewhere. For instance, one of the candidates, Kathy Joyce Hoshijo, is actually a minor vegetarian cooking celebrity.

Around this time, Mike and Carol Gabbard became involved with the group. Carol was the organization’s treasurer for a while, and Mike taught at a school they set up. They were also on Butler’s local TV show at least once. Mike Gabbard’s deli, the one that got shut down by gay protestors, was in the Down to Earth grocery store, owned by Butler followers. I’m being a little over-detailed with this, because the Gabbards are famously testy about these connections. Mike now denies it, and that “homosexual extremist supporters of Ed Case” quote from Tulsi was actually in response to a reporter’s question to her father about Butler. I want to be clear that am not saying anything about the Gabbards’ religions. Carol and Tulsi say they’re Hindu, and Mike says he’s Catholic. That’s fine—I have no objections, and it doesn’t really matter here. What matters is that Mike and Carol got their political start in in Rick Reed’s office and since then have relied on a network of donors tied to Butler or affiliates during their political careers (or at least Mike has; Carol ran one campaign, in 2000, and there don’t appear to be any records on it available).

Tulsi also appears to be plugged into this network. Take her 2010 Council campaign. She was running during when she describes as a year “of challenges and soul-searching as my long-held views were challenged by my newfound recognition of the absolute importance of keeping church and state separate.” She would announce her evolution on abortion and SSM the very next year. And yet, she was connecting her campaign to “Hawaii’s #1 Homophobe” Mike Gabbard in big ways. More of her campaign money came from donors connected to her father than from donors that didn’t, and that’s without counting members of her family. She put his image on campaign literature and on her website.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of children of political dynasties use their political relatives for a leg up and connections to donors. But if your political dynasty connection is a guy like Mike Gabbard, choosing to work through him says something. During this time there was also a controversy where a nonprofit Tulsi and Mike had started after 9/11, and which she was VP of, started campaigning for her. Tulsi blamed this on the decision of an unnamed “intern”, despite the nonprofit raising little to no money at the time and having been inactive for three years. So we shouldn’t expect forthrightness from her on her campaign financing.

Her 2012 campaign was a lot of the same. This was after she had evolved on social issues, and Mike wasn’t on the campaign literature anymore, but the fundraising doesn’t lie. Early on, nearly half her money was coming from Mike-affiliated donors, and by the end, that network had been tapped to the tune of over $200,000. And that’s just of those with direct connections. Relatedly, Gabbard was the only candidate in that race out of five in that race to refuse to share with reporters basic information on her fundraisers like dates, locations, and attendees.

In addition to fundraising through this network, she appears to be relying on it for staffing as well. She shocked Hawai‘i politics in 2015 when she announced she’d hired a new chief of staff, her third, and that the hire was Kainoa Ramananda Penaroza, who had absolutely no government experience. Chief of staff is an immensely powerful position in a congressional office, and most are long-time staffers, or at least legal/political professionals. Penaroza was a bizarre choice, as he’d mostly just done low level campaign stuff for her. Penaroza, however, is the son of one of the original 14 Butler candidates in 1976. His day job was director and salesman for Noni Connection, a scam health drink company with a lot of Mike Gabbard donors; their products are mostly sold at Down to Earth, where they are a prized partner. Down to Earth, again, is the store with Butler ties that Mike Gabbard had his deli at.

Many other staffers have ties to the Butler network. Her office manager, Anya Anthony, is employed by another Butler-affiliated company, and was a Mike Gabbard donor. Another aide, Sunil Kemaney, works at the same company as Anya Anthony, and is the vice president of another company, which lists that Chris Butler as director. Her former communications director, and current campaign spokesperson is Erika Tsuji. Erika Tsuji is married to Franklin Tsuji, a Mike Gabbard donor who worked on Tulsi’s 2012 campaign, also ran something called TULSI PAC in 2014. Her 2012 campaign also includes Mike Gabbard donors John Bishop and Celine Logan. Devin Bull also played a key part, and he was not only a Mike Gabbard donor, but at one point served in a (kind of unhinged) communications role for him. He’s a kind of guy that would say things like “Their agenda is to teach homosexuality in the schools.” That quote, by the way, comes from when he was on a Board of Education committee during Carol Gabbard’s tenure.

Tulsi also seems sensitive about these connections. Last year, an independent journalist wrote a series of articles on the Butler organization. Soon after that, a man named Chris Cooper began writing to local news outlets to discredit the journalist. Chris Cooper is a former author who now runs a government-focused PR firm, and was given a one-time payment by the Gabbard campaign right before this. In 2016, Cooper and his PR firm also came under controversy for running a media campaign to repeal a law that allows the US to sanction international officials that commit human rights abuses. The Department of Justice believes he broke lobbying laws for that one by not disclosing his foreign clients. Gabbard hired him after this.

There are two possible interpretations that can be drawn from these connections. The first, and more scandalous, is that she’s a sleeper agent of a mysterious cult. Stranger things have happened, of course, but I don’t think this is terribly likely. The other interpretation is much more reasonable — that she saw the gains to be made from tapping into a generous donor network through her father, and simply doesn’t see the fact that the network appears to be virulently anti-gay, or at least supportive of those kinds of politicians, as a deterrent; and that she’s since been turning to them for staffing decisions either as favors or because she has trouble maintaining an office and wanted someone to make the picks for her. Which is not a whole lot better.

In Summary

So that’s Tulsi Gabbard. As much as she’ll talk up her progressiveness, it’s hard to nail her down on the specifics, because the specifics simply aren’t that good. Her foreign policy is atrocious, both the parts that are well-intentioned and the parts that aren’t. Her politics outside of that are also hard to recommend, with her corporatism, aversion to gun control, and simple callousness the hardest pills to swallow. As if to top it all off, she seems barely interested in meeting the standards of not being an anti-gay politician, including her continuing decision to enable a political network of religious extremists.

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