From a cult to Congress to Tucker Carlson: A closer look at Tulsi Gabbard
As Gabbard takes to Fox News to regurgitate talking points from the Kremlin for Russian state media to package and sell as fact, it seems she was worth every penny.
(A screenshot of a Fox News clip of Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard broadcast on Russian state television. Photo: Channel One Russia, via YouTube. Credit: The Intercept)
It was just a regular edition of Russian state-sanctioned TV news. That was until the host called a former 2020 Democratic nominee for president “our girlfriend.”
As The Daily Beast columnist and Russian media analyst Julia Davis tweeted on Mar. 30, state TV host Vladimir Soloviev introduced the guest in a clip of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson as “our girlfriend Tulsi.” That’s right: Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who made a bid for the presidency just three years ago.
If that wasn’t suspicious enough, Davis tweets that “after the clip plays, one panelist asks: ‘Is she some sort of a Russian agent?’ The host quickly replies: ‘Yes.’
The clip in question featured Gabbard pondering with Carlson—an American favorite among Russian state media—whether President Joe Biden’s comments on Russian President Vladimir Putin remaining in power in late March were an effort to wage a "modern-day siege" against Russia in an effort to isolate, contain, and destroy Russia’s economy in hopes that the citizens of Russia would revolt and overthrow Putin on America’s behalf.
The comments from Gabbard, implicating the country she served in the act of initiating a regime change war, are among a string of anti-anti-Putin sentiments she’s spewed over the past several weeks on American television’s most-watched cable news program.
Gabbard takes on Clinton, Romney, and the American government
Questions about Gabbard’s ties to Russia have come under intense scrutiny before, with former secretary of state and 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton calling Gabbard “a favorite of the Russians” back in Oct. 2019.
The accusation evidently stung, as Gabbard hit Clinton with a defamation lawsuit in Jan. 2020, to the tune of $50 million.
The lawsuit didn’t make it far, with Gabbard’s team dropping the case four months later in what her team called an effort to prioritize the COVID-19 pandemic and defeat Donald Trump later that year.
While the defamation suit didn’t make the kind of waves Gabbard had likely hoped for, her legal fund did receive a donation from a curious source—Tennison.
On Mar. 13, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney tweeted, “Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.”
In the wake of that accusation, which ardent supporter came to the former Democratic congresswoman’s defense? Tucker Carlson, to be precise.
While Gabbard was on Twitter calling for Romney’s resignation, a Fox News chyron during the Mar. 14 broadcast of Tucker Carlson Tonight read, “Everything Tulsi Gabbard Just Said Is True.”
Referring to propaganda spread by Gabbard about biolabs in Ukraine, Carlson doubled down on the former congresswoman’s lies, and in turn, did Putin’s bidding on his behalf.
The next day, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked Gabbard to compare Putin’s propaganda to so-called “Biden propaganda,” equating the Russian leader’s complex and multifaceted disinformation campaign with the intelligence being shared from the White House.
Gabbard responded, noting “this is what is so dangerous about the place that we are in right now as a country.” But she wasn’t referring to the invasion of Ukraine. She was alluding to the “freedom of speech” that right-wingers are themselves censoring through legislation like Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill.
Gabbard grew up in a cult of homophobia and anti-science
In 2019, New York Magazine profiled Gabbard in the midst of her campaign for the presidency. The article describes Gabbard’s childhood as a member of the Science of Identity Foundation, an organization run by a man named Chris Butler, “whom they called Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa.”
“Butler taught vegetarianism, sexual conservatism, mind-body dualism, and disinterest in the material world,” the article reads, adding that “he taught a virulent homophobia, skepticism of science, and the dangers of public schools.”
Unsurprisingly, those latter three aspects of Butler’s curriculum have become part of Gabbard’s current rhetoric went it comes to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay bill.”
On Monday, Gabbard tweeted a video endorsement of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ recently passed Parental Rights in Education bill, which is set to take effect on July 1.
In her tweet, Gabbard noted that “parents should raise their kids, not the government.”
A 2017 profile in The New Yorker detailed harrowing accounts of former Science of Identity members, some of whom “portray themselves as survivors of an abusive cult.”
Their stories included being reduced to “adding bits of his nail clippings to their food, or eating spoonfuls of sand that he had walked upon.”
Fast forward to 2022 and it appears the former congresswoman has a new leader to which she remains devout.
Just look at Gabbard’s political donations from 2021, a year she wasn’t running in any elections. As Zack Everson of Forbes wrote last month, Gabbard’s single largest individual donation came from Sharon Tennison, “an apologist for Vladimir Putin who runs a nonprofit that aims to foster cooperation between the U.S. and Russia.”
Tennison’s name also comes up several times in donations to Gabbard’s PAC during her run for the Democratic nominee for president in 2019.
But Tennison wasn’t the only Putin apologist in Gabbard's books. The Daily Beast also reported last month that a dual Russian-American citizen, Elena Branson, was recently indicted for “lobbying for pro-Kremlin policies while not registered as a foreign agent.”
Curiously, Branson—also known as Elena Chernykh—donated to just one U.S. politician: Tulsi Gabbard.
Now, as Gabbard takes to Fox News to regurgitate talking points from the Kremlin for Russian state media to package and sell as fact, it seems she was worth every penny.