Veteran activist Mike Prysner this month guest hosted a special two-parter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast. The podcast’s subject matter often goes far beyond just QAnon-connected conspiracy theories and cults. And goddamn did Prysner tell a story about the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF) and its leader Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, aka Chris Butler, a former hippie surfer dude turned maniacal cult leader. SIF could accurately be described as a slightly less militant and “Hindu” version of the Branch Davidians. The members of the cult sprinkle the sand Butler walks on into their food. They send their kids to a SIF-run boarding school in the Philippines where they’re subjected to all sorts of abuse. They are virulently homophobic and Islamophobic, and in the 1980s began running candidates for local offices in Hawaii, with one of their candidates making it to Maui County Council as both a Dem and Republican.
However this member of the cult was not actually the one who made it the furthest in politics. The daughter of two high-ranking Butler acolytes was first elected to Congress from Hawaii’s 2nd District in 2012: Tulsi Gabbard. She was groomed in every way to be their bridge into the American political system. Half of her staff in the House were members of SIF. The Democratic Party and the entire media fucked this up so, so freaking badly, taking an attractive veteran “Hindu” woman and making her a rising star. Gabbard is far worse of a fifth columnist than you think.
And yeah, the headline and first paragraph were misleading. The cheap “twist” below the fold here is the only way to properly introduce the insidiousness of the cult behind Gabbard as told in the first episode. The second part gets even worse, detailing Gabbard’s links to Indian dictator Narendra Modi and his links to state-sanctioned massacres of India’s Muslim (and Christian) minority. Literally thousands of non-Hindus have been killed on Modi’s orders and Gabbard was taking money from an American front of Modi’s Nazi-inspired Hindu nationalist party (RSS) for her campaigns.
None of the shit about SIF being a hardcore cult shows up on their Wikipedia page. There are only a handful of articles on second-tier news websites covering Gabbard and Butler/SIF. The whole situation is an immense failure by the mainstream media – of which National Zero sits on the margins, so this is our failure too. This fucking maniac gets all the hype for speaking at CPAC and her stupid endorsements of MAGA candidates while she’s trying to rebrand herself as a “bipartisan moderate” when all along she’s been a genocidal fascist in a lib’s clothing.
Listen to those podcasts when you get a chance. We definitely even undersold Gabbard, Butler, and Modi’s scumbaggery here in this brief outline. It’s over two hours combined of savagery and malice.