Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Don’t say they weren’t warned. Honolulu Civil Beat reports:

A former member of a secretive Hawaiʻi religious sect is warning members of Congress about the potential dangers of confirming Tulsi Gabbard as President-elect Donald Trump’s next director of national intelligence.

Anita van Duyn says she spent 15 years inside the Science of Identity Foundation, a fringe offshoot of Hare Krishna that was formed in the 1970s and has been described by defectors as a cult.

She has sent the letters only to Democrats so far, so I don’t know how effective that will be. And as the article acknowledges, Senators are loathe to criticize anyone for their religious beliefs(well, unless the person is a Democrat in which all bets are off.) Most DC types seem to think they should really go near this issue.

But Gabbard hasn’t been nominated to be the head of Housing and Urban Development she’s been tapped to be the head of all the Intelligence Agencies and she’s a lifelong member of a cult! And it’s a real one:

The van Duyn letters outline what she says are Butler’s long-standing political ambitions and the ways he groomed and supported his disciples, Gabbard included, in their pursuit of public office while promoting his own ideologies, which include a long history of espousing anti-gay rhetoric.[…]

Throughout her public life, Gabbard has been dogged by her ties to the Science of Identify Foundation and Butler, in particular, who has openly described Gabbard as a star pupil.

“Everybody is thinking her allegiance is to Trump, but in reality her allegiance was already given away to her guru,” van Duyn said in an interview with Civil Beat. “You can’t just go in and out of that. That’s a lifetime commitment.”

Gabbard has been vague about her own experiences in the group and in 2017 told a reporter for The New Yorker magazine she’d never heard Butler say anything mean or hateful about anyone. “I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people,” she said.

Both her former and current husbands are lifelong members of the cult and remain involved as do her parents. So is she:

Throughout her political career, Gabbard has maintained ties with Butler and his followers, whether hiring them to staff her congressional office or work on her 2020 presidential campaign. Her husband, Abraham Williams, has deep roots in the organization.

Science of Identity members have donated to her campaigns, sign-waved on her behalf and even staffed her most ambitious political endeavors, most prominently her run for president. In some cases, these followers were simply volunteering their time and efforts. In others, they were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Gabbard has always been very weird. And this is likely the source of most of it. She’s a member of a strange religious cult and she is following the agenda of its leader. That’s not an acceptable thing for someone going into the position for which she’s been nominated.

I realize that may seem odd considering the fact that Trump himself is the leader of a massive cult that has distinctly religious overtones. But at least we know what we’re dealing with with him and can fashion some kind of resistance. We don’t have a clue what Tulsi and her guru are all about and there is no way that she should be anywhere near a national security job.

Having said that, I suspect she’ll be confirmed. Trump wants her and the GOP wants what he wants. Let’s just hope that if there is indeed a “deep State” that they can exercise some of their apparent magical powers to thwart anything nefarious.

And the mainstream press could be paying more attention to this too. Whether they will, I don’t know. The big bosses seem intent upon gifting Dear Leader with whatever he wants these days so who knows?

Update — A little more info from Business Insider:

…In 1977, Butler splintered from the Hare Krishna movement to start the Science of Identity Foundation. He began to further deemphasize traditional Hindu texts and practices, and began to expound his own controversial views.

Butler taught that homosexuality is evil, using virulent homophobic rhetoric, and that public schools and the outside world were not to be trusted. Children of followers were homeschooled, and some — including Gabbard — were later sent to schools the SIF created in the Philippines.

The SIF amassed a tightly-knit community of around a thousand followers in Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. Among them were Mike and Carol Gabbard, who would name one of their daughters after “tulasi,” the Sanskrit word for the holy-basil herb that appears in the Bhagavad Gita as an offering to the Lord.

Tulsi Gabbard and her siblings were raised as Hindus and vegetarians, she told the Indo American News before her first run for Congress. She grew up largely among fellow disciples, singing or chanting sacred Hindu songs on the beach, the New Yorker reported. 

Gabbard met both her first husband and her current spouse, freelance cinematographer Abraham Williams, in SIF, according to New York Magazine.

While Gabbard has described her experience growing up in the group as one that was seemingly positive, some other ex-members have described themselves as survivors of a cult.

“I was raised to believe Chris Butler was God’s voice on earth, and if you questioned him or offended him in any way, you were effectively offending God,” someone who identifies as a former member of the SIF wrote in a 2017 Medium post. “Questioning the leader was spiritual suicide, which was seen as worse than death.”

Another former member told New York Magazine that Butler was vulgar and vindictive, excoriating people for small slip-ups like driving poorly or failing to clean water cups properly.

Butler has denied these claims, and Gabbard told the New Yorker that these experiences didn’t chalk up to her own: “I’ve never heard him say anything hateful, or say anything mean about anybody,” Gabbard said. “I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people.”

Both Butler and Gabbard also said the foundation is a resource, not a religious organization, though Butler acknowledged that he does have “disciples” as “Jagad Guru,” or “teacher of the world,” the New Yorker reported.

Gabbard has often downplayed the influence of Butler, telling the New Yorker that she has “had many different spiritual teachers, and continue[s] to.” But she acknowledged that he had shaped her Hindu identity, referring to him as her “guru dev,” or spiritual guide. Gabbard also told the New York Times in 2019 that Butler and his work still guide her.

Come on. This can’t happen.

Once again, many, many thanks to those of you who’ve contributed this year. I am so grateful, There are so many options out there for people to subscribe to good writing and great analysis so it really warms my heart to see that some of you are choosing to support the work we do here. I’ll never have a paywall — I want people who have limited ability to pay to be able to read us too — and I don’t want to go back to featuring ads, so I really appreciate those of you who have the means and the desire to donate.

I don’t know how many of us have the stomach to be dissidents. I certainly don’t know what I will do if I’m forced to ask myself that question. But it’s probably something we should all think about at least a little bit ahead of time. With people like Tom Hohman saying they plan to arrest people who “harbor” undocumented workers and Trump and his henchmen threatening to jail everyone in sight, it’s not completely out of the question that we might be confronted with some unpleasant choices before too long.

The Atlantic features an interesting article this week on that question and I wanted to offer a gift link for you. Here’s a short excerpt:

In the 1970s, the writer Andrei Amalrik characterized the secret power of his fellow dissidents in the Soviet Union: “They did something simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”

Recent examples of people acting out of this same humble presumption—and being slapped down for it—are abundant. In just the past few weeks, a 75-year-old Algerian novelist was detained for expressing opinions that were thought to be “endangering the nation”; a Thai human-rights lawyer had two years added to his existing 14-year prison term for writing a letter to the king that apparently violated the country’s “royal defamation law”; the police in Belarus, ahead of the presidential election in January, held 100 relatives of political prisoners out of fear that they might speak. And we haven’t even gotten to Iran, Russia, or North Korea.

These contemporary dissidents share a mindset, what Václav Havel once called an “existential attitude.” They did not wake up one day and decide to take on the regimes of their countries. They just allowed themselves to be guided by their own individuality—an Iranian woman who decides to no longer wear a hijab, a Uyghur teacher who tries to share his people’s history—and collided with societies that demanded conformity and obedience. Dissidents are born out of this choice: either assert their authentic selves or accept the authoritarian’s mafioso bargain, safety and protection in exchange for keeping one’s head down. Those rare few who just can’t make that bargain—they transform into dissidents.

The equation is simple: The more authoritarianism in the world, the more dissidents. And we are undeniably in an authoritarian moment. According to a report last year by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, when it comes to global freedom, we have returned to a level last seen in 1986. About 5.7 billion people—72 percent of the world’s population—now live under authoritarian rule. Even the United States, vaunted beacon of democracy, is about to inaugurate a president who openly boasts of wanting to be a “dictator on day one,” who regularly threatens to jail his opponents and sic the military on the “enemy within,” and who jokes about his election being the country’s last.

You don’t need to believe that Donald Trump is planning Gulags to see why those who resisted the repressive regimes of the 20th century, as well as those who fight all over the world today, might be worth paying attention to. When Havel talked about an existential attitude, he was describing a fervent sense that certain fundamental principles matter, and that even if a society begins to degrade and devalue those ideals, abandoning them, for these people, is not an option. Many Americans understand today what political exhaustion and complacency look and feel like. But the dissident is the one who hopes against hope.

I’m certainly not convinced that we’re there but I do see the possibility. And it’s not the first time. I’ve written a lot about the parallels between this time and the red scares, particularly in the 1950s, and even more recently in the wake of 9/11. I’m sure I don’t have to even mention the century of Jim Crow as an example of repressive government. But there is something different now in that the democracy itself is under threat in a way that I don’t think we’ve experienced. The authoritarians are turning on the rule of law in a much more explicit way.

I think there will be plenty of people who come into the crosshairs of this new regime. If Trump has his way it will be in the millions as they launch their raids on immigrant communities. And it might not stop there. Once they get a taste for it, these types tend to want to keep going. So we’ll see. But it pays to stay alert, think things through and be prepared for anything.

We’ll try to keep you informed as best we can about the various goings on over the next few years. Obviously, we can’t catch everything but we’ll do our best to synthesize the news in ways that are useful to you. And if we can keep a little bit of humor (gallows?) we’ll do that too. So I hope you’ll continue to stop by, even if you are generally avoiding the Great Cacophony in service of your sanity. We’ll do our best to keep it real.

If you would like to put a little something in the old Hullabaloo stocking to help us keep it going, I’d be so grateful. We’re all in this together.

cheers,

digby

Yum.

I hope he doesn’t want to ban antibiotics too or we’ll be in worse trouble than we already are.

By the way:

Recall this?

Nov. 10, 2010 — An effort by Pennsylvania schools to get students to eat healthier is coming under fire from Sarah Palin.

The proposed new guidelines would limit the amount of sweets in classroom parties and reduce the number of holiday and birthday celebrations.

On the proposed regulations, Palin called Pennsylvania a “nanny state run amok.” In protest, she brought 200 sugar cookies to a Bucks County school fundraiser Tuesday.

“I had to shake it up a little bit because I heard there is a debate going on in Pennsylvania over whether most schools condemn sweets, cakes, cookies, that type of thing,” Palin said. “I brought dozens and dozens of cookies to these students.”

Instead, parents would be encouraged to serve healthy snacks, such as fruits or vegetables.

But hey, the two Sarahs never said you shouldn’t serve raw meat, raw egg yolks and raw milk to kids, amirite? Perfectly legit.

It should be noted that Huckasanders is specifically talking about denying food stamps recipients the ability to buy unhealthy food. What she wants is for those people to be restricted in their choices to punish them for being poor. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if she and others want to reduce the subsidy since they won’t be allowed to buy candy or chips or soft drinks anymore. It’s not like she really wants them eat healthy. The rest of her state, however, which currently has a 40% obesity rate, the third highest in the nation, is free to indulge in whatever they want, of course. This is America, goddamnit!

This drone story taking the country by storm is almost certainly nothing nefarious. People are all over the internet with videos of what are obviously airplanes shrieking about drones the size of SUVs. It’s possible that there’s something going on with drones in New Jersey but with Fox News screeching about an “Iranian mothership” launching them off the Jersey shore we really have reached full Idiocracy. ABC News broadcast about a mysterious orb in the sky.

Well, actually this is full Idiocracy:

That should be all you need to know but just in case you’re curious:

1. Project Blue Beam is a conspiracy theory that alleges a secret plan by entities like NASA and the United Nations to establish a new world order through advanced technological manipulation. Here’s a detailed breakdown of what the theory claims: 

2. Objective:
The primary goal is to implement a new global religion that would serve as the ideological foundation for a totalitarian world government. The theory suggests this new religion would use a simulated second coming of a religious figure or an alien invasion to discredit existing religions and unify humanity under a single belief system 

3. Steps:
Step 1: Breakdown of Archaeological Knowledge – This involves staging events like earthquakes at specific locations to uncover “new” archaeological findings that would contradict traditional religious doctrines, aiming to destabilize faith in existing religions.

Step 2: Gigantic Space Show – Utilizing technology like satellites with laser projections, holograms would be displayed in the sky, creating spectacular visions of religious figures or alien invasions visible to people globally. This would be done to manipulate people into accepting the new religion.

Step 3: Electronic Telepathy – The theory suggests the use of technologies like extremely low frequency (ELF) radio waves to simulate telepathic communication, making individuals believe they are receiving messages directly from a divine source or an alien entity.

Step 4: Supernatural Manifestations – This step involves creating scenarios where supernatural or paranormal events are faked, potentially leading to mass hysteria or acceptance of a new world order out of fear or awe. 

4. Controversies and Criticism:
The theory was popularized by Canadian journalist Serge Monast in the 1990s, who later died under circumstances some conspiracy theorists claim were suspicious. However, there’s no credible evidence supporting the existence of such a project.
Critics argue that the logistics of such an operation would be nearly impossible to execute on a global scale without detection, and the technology described often exceeds current capabilities or understanding.

It’s often cited in discussions around UFO sightings or other unexplained aerial phenomena, with some believing these are “tests” or “early stages” of Project Blue Beam. However, these claims remain speculative and unsupported by concrete evidence.

Cultural Impact:
Project Blue Beam has gained traction in various conspiracy theory circles, often mentioned alongside other New World Order theories. It has appeared in various forms of media, from books to podcasts, reflecting a cultural fascination with grand conspiracy narratives.

The theory has been widely debunked by experts, with no substantial evidence found to support its claims.

People are starting to shoot at airplanes thinking they’re alien drones. I’m not kidding.

We are living in very, very strange times. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Have these people never looked up at the sky before now?

That’s just the most high profile. They bought themselves cabinet sets. The Big CEOs are all donating at least a million to the inauguration and ABC settled a totally bogus lawsuit for 15 million to be donated to Trump’s “presidential library and foundation” which doesn’t exist. They threw in George Stephanopoulos being forced to apologize as a sweetener. (That was probably worth more to Trump than the money.)

I expected Republicans to bend the knee. That’s not unusual. Even a few Democrats following suit doesn’t surprise me. But the media and the business community totally capitulating, bringing gifts to the baby Trump like they’re the three wise men wasn’t something I expected. Those guys have so much money I assumed they’d never have to curry that kind of favor. It appears to me they want to. Maybe it’s just a matter of not wanting to be left out of the Mar-a-Lago party.

But this is definitely happening and it’s very, very worrying.

Descent into madness

Two of my friends (barely a couple of years older) had polio as children. One still walks with a limp. The other told me just yesterday that she spent time in an iron lung as a kid. I was shocked.

Remember when medical ventilators were in super-high demand during the COVID-19 pandemic? Before ventilators there were iron lungs. Obsolete now (save for extremely rare cases), iron lungs fell out of use in the 1950s when positive pressure ventilators came along. Coincidentally, vaccines that ended the polio outbreaks of the 1940s and 1950s arrived about the same time. My parents put me in line at a Chicago park one night to get the Salk vaccine by injection gun. Getting vaccinated against polio back then was a community event.

You can imagine what my friends think of RFK Jr.’s proposal for having the FDA decertify the polio vaccine. The one with iron lung experience used spicier language yesterday than used by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, 82, himself a polio survivor (CBS News):

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell issued an apparent warning Friday to Robert F. Kennedy, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, after The New York Times reported that one of Kennedy’s top advisers had filed petitions to revoke the approval of a polio vaccine and several other shots. 

“Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts,” McConnell said in a statement.

McConnell, a polio survivor, denounced efforts “to undermine public confidence in proven cures” like the polio vaccine.

“The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” McConnell said.

McConnell credited the “miraculous combination of modern medicine and a mother’s love” with saving him from paralysis when he contracted the disease at two years of age, and he praised  the “miracle” of “the saving power of the polio vaccine” for the millions of children who came after him.

Do me a favor. Spread around the link to the 2015 WSJ page, “Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines.” It’s where I found that polio heat map above. Measles, hepatitis A, mumps, rubella and other diseases look like this after vaccines were approved. I don’t need to show you again what a case of smallpox look like.

RFK Jr. is out of his freaking, worm-eaten mind. And Trump is just as insane for entertaining his conspiracy-mongering. God help us.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Splitting sculpted hairs

Don’t use the R-word.

The extremely litigous future former president actually won one in court this week. ABC News agreed to pay Donald J. Trump $15 million dollars in a defamation lawsuit brought against network anchor George Stephanopoulos and his employer, plus $1 million in legal fees. That’s a lot of Eau de Trump.

The network agreed to make a $15 million contribution to a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff.” [Read on once you’ve stopped laughing about where that money will actually wind up.] The network will also issue a statement of “regret” over comments made by Stephanopoulos in a March 10 interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.).

As NBC News tells the tale:

In the initial complaint, Trump’s lawyers alleged that Stephanopoulos “knowingly or recklessly made multiple false and disparaging statements regarding Plaintiff during ABC broadcasts.”

Mace, who has publicly discussed being [R-worded] as a teenager, was asked during the March interview with Stephanopoulos about Trump’s treatment of women and the E. Jean Carroll case.

Stephanopoulos said during the interview that Trump “has been found liable for [R-word] by a jury.” Trump, however, was found liable in a civil case for sexually abusing Carroll, not liable for her alleged {R-word] . The nine-member jury in that case checked the box marked “no” when asked whether Carroll had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump [R-worded] Ms. Carroll.”

The judge in the civil case elaborated that what Trump did to Carroll in that Bergdorf Goodman dressing room did not fit New York’s “far narrower” definition of [R-word] (Washington Post):

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘[R-worded]’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘[R-worded]’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘[R-word],’” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

I’m surprised that Trump doesn’t make the Frost-Nixon defense that when the future president does it … that means that it is not [R-word].

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

I’ve been wondering about the problem of young people growing up in a time when Donald Trump is ubiquitous and seen as a normal political leader. The youngest voters were only 6 years old the last time we had a presidential election in which he wasn’t the candidate. He might as well be FDR to them. It became particularly worrisome to me when I heard about all those text messages being sent to Black kids and girls right after the election saying they were going back to the plantation or “your body my choice” and processions in the halls of high schools waving Trump flags. It’s just so ugly.

This piece by a high school senior says it all:

After Trump’s victory, it became okay to be young and a Trump supporter and anti-woke. It became okay to make offensive jokes, which in many cases were not jokes but just crude and rude insults. It became okay to support the oppression of marginalized groups.

I attend a school that fits well into Middle American Republicanism in the Northeast. I won’t repeat the many things I’ve heard in class and the halls that would be classified as hate. But this isn’t limited to my school, my region, or even the deep red states where racism has always been front and center.

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that “pro-Trump students at Beverly Hills High School held two days of what the [school] district termed “spirited demonstrations” to celebrate the election results. Boisterous students chanted pro-Trump slogans and carried flags mounted on poles throughout the school — but some Black students said racial slurs and racist rhetoric were used. The rallying students knocked on and tried to open the door of the classroom where the Black Students Union was meeting, which caused some of the teens and the teacher in the room to fear for their safety.”

The LATimes continued, referring to a student-run mock election that Trump narrowly won:

“Trump supporters at the school rallied rowdily in courtyards and hallways, shouting pro-Trump slogans as they rushed around the school. The rallies made many students who don’t support the former president feel uncomfortable.

“Students were seen screaming profanity throughout the two rallies and were aggressive to those with opposing views. Everyone has the right to express their political views, but countless students and teachers felt unsafe with the crowd’s mob-like behavior,” wrote the editors of Highlights, the high school’s student-run publication.

[…]

Miss Universe was crowned on November 16th. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed Danish woman, Victoria Kjaer Theilvig, who is now Miss Universe, unwittingly became conservative’s Miss Everything as they tweeted racist and transphobic things against other beauty queens with darker hair and skin.

Among these conservatives was Donald Trump Jr. He wrote on X, “Biologically & objectively attractive women are allowed to win beauty pageants again. WE ARE SO BACK!!!”

Other conservatives took his statement, copied and pasted it, and flooded X with it.

She also talks about a new casual racism and sexism among her peers. There’s no defense for such behavior, of course. But can we be surprised by it? Look at the leadership of the winning political party. Look at the voters who support them. Look at all these important media figures and business leaders rushing to cater to Donald Trump, the most openly crude person to ever win the presidency, ushering in a whole new era of hate and bigotry into our politics. Why would kids not think this isn’t acceptable in our society, celebrated, even? It clearly is!

We had the chance to repudiate this grotesque public behavior and we failed. So now we will have 12 straight years of it. If we are to assume that most people become slightly politically sentient at about 12, that means when Trump finally ends his tenure (if he does) nobody in this country under the age of 24 will have ever been aware of a world in which the president and his followers behaved any differently. The next presidential election the youngest voters will have been born the year Obama became president.

Trump’s legacy is more that border walls and tax cuts I’m afraid,.

The NY Times is reporting that Trump is conducting most of his business at Mar-a-Lago these days after dark, often over dinner with whichever CEO or dignitary has traveled to offer fealty and tribute that day.

Of the more than 80 personnel announcements Mr. Trump has made since Election Day, 45 have been announced in social media posts and emails that he has sent after 6 p.m. Many have come after 10 p.m., prompting a wave of social media chatter and television coverage that sometimes continues throughout the night and into the early morning hours.

One of his veteran staff members said Mr. Trump was known to leave voice mail messages in the middle of the night saying: “This is your favorite president.” He sometimes follows up the next day, suggesting the person might want to share the audio with his friends and family.

Trump’s lovely spokesman Stephen Cheung says that Trump’s working night and day which is obviously bullshit.

But several people close to Mr. Trump — along with aides who have come to expect emails, texts and phone calls to arrive well after bedtime — say he is often just getting started around dinnertime.

That is usually when Mr. Trump walks out to the outdoor dining patio, always met with boisterous applause from people in the room — usually some mix of members, aides and advisers, cabinet picks, business executives, consultants and others eager for a presidential sighting.

So many people are just yearning to be subjects, aren’t they? It’s just stunning how eager they all are to treat him like some kind of potentate, maybe even a demi-God. I would say that I can’t imagine how anyone could do that but I worked in Hollywood where ass-kissing is a fine art and there are so many people who just love to fawn over the rich and famous. I suppose if you add in the power of the presidency they just drool at the prospect of prostrating themselves before him.

Here’s the lowdown on the Trudeau dinner where Trump “joked” that Canada could become a state if they don’t like him treating them like an enemy:

The dinner was an example of the ways in which Mr. Trump mixes business with pleasure at his club, particularly during dinners.

One Canadian official briefed on the dinner with Mr. Trudeau said the president-elect drank Diet Coke throughout the meal (it was repeatedly refilled) and used an iPad to control the music on the patio. (Among Mr. Trump’s musical choices: two renditions of “Hallelujah” by the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, as well as a selection from Pavarotti and the musical “Cats.”)

At the end of the evening, Mr. Trump gave Mr. Trudeau a copy of Mar-a-Lago’s magazine, which included details about membership, as well as ads for plastic surgery and other products and services, according to the Canadian official, who was not authorized to speak with the press and asked for anonymity.

There’s a Mar-a-Lago magazine and he sells ads in it? Is there no end to the grift? It is nice of him to recommend the right plastic surgeons to achieve that Mar-a-Lago look though. Very convenient.

What is the Mar-a-Lago look?

It’s all the rage down there. If you do it right you might even become an ambassador.