‘Tulsi’s single governing principle seems to be expedience’
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, former Democratic lawmaker Tulsi Gabbard, has been accused of amplifying Russian propaganda and would come to the job having never worked in the intelligence world or served on a congressional intelligence committee.
Gabbard, who served in the Hawaii Army National Guard and was deployed to Iraq with a medical unit, has long criticized U.S. foreign policy as imperial and heavy-handed. She also has sharply criticized Trump in the past over his approach to the Middle East during his first presidential term, portraying him as dangerous.
As director of national intelligence, a position created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Gabbard would oversee 18 intelligence agencies with a budget of about $70 billion and serve as the principal adviser to the president on intelligence matters. She would first need to be confirmed by the Senate, where Republicans will hold the majority starting in January. [Continue reading…]
In 2022, The Independent reported:
Tulsi Gabbard has staked out extreme positions on LGBT+ rights, spread disinformation about Ukrainian biolabs, and claimed she was being shadowbanned by Big Tech while using her vast social media footprint to label Joe Biden a “warmonger”.
In one breath Gabbard expresses a desire to bring love and aloha from her native Hawaii to the world, in the next she is fanning conspiracy theories on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
Last week, Gabbard announced she was leaving the Democratic Party, claiming it had become “an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness”.
The decision came as little surprise to anyone who has followed her political trajectory from 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to darling of Russian propagandists and the American far-right.
To understand her ambitions, her aunt Dr Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard tells The Independent in an interview that it is necessary to look to her upbringing in a secretive cult called the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF) whose members show absolute loyalty to a reclusive guru, Chris Butler.
A former member toldThe Independent the group’s teachings are virulently homophobic, often anti-Islamic and misogynist, and how they were forced to worship Butler, who is considered to be akin to a God.
Sinavaiana Gabbard says her niece’s career is all about the pursuit of power, and her bid for the presidency in 2020 was the culmination of four decades of Butler’s efforts to seek political influence.
“Once again I find my niece’s apparent penchant for parroting extremist toadies such as Tucker Carlson and vile ‘strongmen’ such as Vladimir Putin, to be problematic and deeply troubling,” Sinavaiana Gabbard, a retired professor of English at the University of Hawaii, told The Independent.
“It gives me no pleasure to note that Tulsi’s single governing principle seems to be expedience, which is in effect no principle at all.” [Continue reading…]