When I think of the next four years, I know we're only going to survive via strength. And we're going to need leaders. People who've proven they can stand up and not cower.
Pete.
I wasn't for Pete when he ran in the Democratic Party's presidential primary. I have been impressed with his work as Secretary of Transportation and especially of his refusal to cower when attacked by the fright-wing. He stands strong.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
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.
Van Duyn has sent letters to Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, detailing Gabbard’s deep ties to the organization and its reclusive founder, Chris Butler, who still resides in a multimillion-dollar beachfront home in Kailua.
The van Duyn letters outline what she says are Butler’s long-standing political ambitions and the ways he groomed and supported his disciples in their pursuit of public office while promoting his own ideologies, which include a long history of espousing anti-gay rhetoric.
Van Duyn says she worries that Gabbard is still under Butler’s influence, which could compromise national security, noting in her letter that she suspects that any sensitive intelligence Gabbard is privy to will be “communicated to her guru.”
I also learned that Gabbard, then in her mid-30s, had grown up in, and appeared to remain socially and politically immersed in, Science of Identity, whose devotees worship a man named Chris Butler (born Kris, with no middle name). Although today she typically dodges questions about Butler, Gabbard had publicly celebrated him as her “guru dev” at a 2015 gathering of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, or Hare Krishna). And she has never disavowed him or spoken critically of him. I also came across pictures and video clips posted by Butler followers on social media that placed Gabbard at more recent, private Science of Identity events in Windward Oahu. Most Gabbard congressional staffers were also followers of Butler, as are her parents, sister, ex-husband, current husband, mother-in-law, and others close to her.
Early in my research, Science of Identity struck me as just another benign ISKCON copycat sect. As an L.A. teen in the ‘90s, I’d become familiar with the Hare Krishnas through their Venice Beach and LAX presences. I attended maybe 10 events at their Culver City temple for its free vegetarian food. The community seemed kind, but didn’t appeal to me beyond its diet. So, initially, I didn’t find it newsworthy that Gabbard was tied to Science of Identity. Yet there were red flags: its expressed homophobia was virulent, its finances suspect, and its guru politically power-hungry. Despite this, Gabbard’s ties to the group appeared staunch.
Perusing decades of Hawaii news archives, I learned Butler had been claiming guru status in Hawaii since his late teens, in the 1960s, under a multitude of names. He told the Honolulu Advertiser in 1977 that he was expelled from Kailua High School. (One clue as to possibly why: As he wrote in his 1970 self-published booklet, “Sai Speaks,” he was “very familiar with mind-expanding chemicals.”) I also learned he is the son of the late Dr. Willis P. Butler, Jr., a Hawaii plantation doctor and Communist-leaning non-interventionist. Dr. Butler wrote in his 2006 book about his late wife, “Barbara: Memoir of a Love Affair,” that Chris declined to attend his mother’s funeral because he “would not care for any event at which he was not the center of attention.”
In July 1970, Honolulu Advertiser religion writer Janice Wolf interviewed Butler, then 22, and two female followers—“Boni,” 21, and “Tulsi,” 18. Wolf reported that Boni and Tulsi said they did everything Butler told them to do. They told Wolf they would kill themselves if Butler said to, and “they would kill anyone who tried to attack” him. Wolf described Butler as the group’s “spiritual leader—and dictator.” She reported that several followers “seemed completely hypnotized.” Wolf was careful to differentiate Butler’s budding group from ISKCON. Later, in 1970, Wolf reported that ISKCON’s founder had denounced Butler as a fraud. Butler then briefly joined and split from ISKCON, after being accused of selling a temple and pocketing the money. He was at that time known as Siddha-svarupa.
In a 1977 series, Advertiser investigative reporter Walter Wright exposed Butler’s grooming of about a dozen early followers to run for local political office with their new party, Independents for Godly Government. In 1992, Honolulu Weekly revealed that then-Hawaii State Sen. Rick Reed was a Butler devotee and that Honolulu Magazine journalists had been stalked and threatened while reporting on Butler and Reed. Butler also reportedly spent a lot of time unsuccessfully suing Hawaii news media.
Family Ties
Gabbard’s father, Mike, is a Hawaii State Senator. Her mother, Carol, is a former Hawaii State School Board Member. Both have been extreme Butler loyalists since the early 1980s, when Tulsi was born. They ran a Science of Identity (then “Identity Institute”) school on Oahu called Ponomauloa School. Per its former students, the Gabbards taught children, among other things, to worship Butler, hate homosexuals, and fear Muslims. (Ponomauloa School is still listed in Mike’s bio on his website, under professional experience, the only tie to Butler he hasn’t yet whitewashed.) Mike was also Butler’s personal secretary for years, and Carol was president of Science of Identity’s Arizona branch, according to documents and local reporting.
Mike and Carol reportedly home-schooled Tulsi and sent her for two years to one or more Science of Identity girls’ boarding schools in the Philippines, where the Butler followers are also active. I located five ex-Science of Identity sources, two quite vocal online, all of whom said their Butler-devoted parents sent them to a similar boys’ boarding school in Baguio, the Philippines. They provided overwhelming evidence that their parents were Butler followers, and they all said that, while in the Philippines, they were isolated and heavily indoctrinated to serve Butler. Some also attended the Gabbards’ school.
I wasn’t the only journalist digging into this at the time. My sources told me The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh was also contacting them. In his October 2017 profile of Tulsi Gabbard, Sanneh, the only journalist Butler has agreed to speak with in recent decades, assessed that, “Gabbard’s life would be unrecognizable without Butler’s influence.” Butler told Sanneh he was not Hindu, but he encouraged Gabbard to use the term for political expediency. Butler and Gabbard both told Sanneh that Science of Identity is not a religious organization, but it is in fact registered as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt church, which arranges religious visas for non-U.S. citizens to travel to Kailua to serve on Butler’s extensive kitchen and laundry teams.
Local activists had demanded that Gabbard hold the open meeting, since she’d been evasive with constituents and journalists on almost everything, particularly the controversial Syria trip. Once seated, I recognized nearly half of the town hall attendees as followers of Chris Butler, the once charismatic, now reclusive leader of Science of Identity.
Gabbard's husband Abraham Williams, who, like Gabbard, was a second-generation Butler follower, weaved through the crowd with high-end video equipment, filming his wife and the crowd. Another man born into the Science of Identity group, Prahlad Strickland, was his soundman. Gabbard’s chief of staff, Kainoa Penaroza, whose father William chaired Butler’s political party in the 1970s, controlled the mic. As Gabbard talked, Butler’s followers applauded her, as if on cue. Anytime someone critically questioned her, her fans hissed in disapproval and at times shouted over them. Meanwhile, John Bishop, a Butler devotee since the '70s and husband of Science of Identity President Jeannie Bishop, seemed to be there to surveil Gabbard critics. The man was not subtle about it, zooming in on the faces of constituents asking tough questions, including me. He ignored Gabbard’s fans.
"Cult-staged, cult surveilled," I thought.
When I got up to use the bathroom, Bishop blatantly followed me. Another constituent inadvertently caught Bishop’s chilling behavior in an hour-long video (which I still have). I was later told by a highly reliable ex-Science of Identity source that Butler had also assigned Bishop and others as “undercover photographers” at Honolulu gay pride parades. As I explained yesterday in Part One, and had previously reported, Butler’s messaging was blatantly anti-LGBTQ.
Gabbard was questioned about her odd Syria sojourn, to which she responded with regime propaganda absolving it of war crimes (which had been thoroughly documented). Eventually, though, she begrudgingly opened the town hall to critical questions about her trip.
Tempers flared. A near physical fight broke out between a Gabbard loyalist and a constituent concerned by Gabbard’s frequent appearances on Fox News, which was then heavily parroting Trump’s stolen election falsehoods. I took the opportunity to politely demand the mic.
I questioned Gabbard about the people who set up and escorted her to her meeting with Assad in Damascus. They were Ohio-based members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. I cited a 1987 article from the Atlantic Monthly magazine about the party's terrorist history, including its role in the 1986 TWA bombing over Scotland. A video taken by another attendee shows I was exceedingly civil to Gabbard as I stood up and addressed her, yet her staff accused me of "disrupting the town hall” when I asked, "Did you vet these men before you allowed them to arrange your trip to Syria?"
Gabbard did not answer the question. The moment was featured on local TV news programs that night.
The next afternoon, Feb.26, as I left my Kailua home to walk my dog, I found myself within approximately 20 feet of a man I knew from my research to be deeply affiliated with Science of Identity, Gabbard, and her husband. He was parked immediately outside my home, sitting behind the driver’s wheel of a white pick-up truck. A man I didn’t recognize was in the passenger seat. The driver appeared extremely tired. When he saw me, I heard him say to his partner, “Ok. Now what?” I scowled at them, my big dog barked, and off they sped. I reported this and subsequent incidents via email to the police.
That turned out to be the opening chapter in well over a year of stalker-like surveillance, defamation, cyberattacks, false police reports, false arrests, manufactured restraining orders, and legal harassment by members of Butler’s cult. Science of Identity was using the same attorneys as Scientology to try to silence journalists and former members.
This is not Hinduism, which Science of Identity purports to teach. It’s the practice of a psychologically abusive cult.
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) sent a letter to Dr. Mehmet Oz, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), raising stark concerns about his advocacy to eliminate Traditional Medicare and his deep financial ties to the private health insurers that would benefit from that move.
In June 2022, ahead of his campaign for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, Dr. Oz outlined his vision for the Medicare program, in which he advocated to eliminate Traditional Medicare and instead lean on private insurers that run Medicare Advantage, a private health care program that drastically overcharges for care. Non-partisan estimates project that these insurers overcharged CMS $88 billion in 2024 alone, especially through the practice of “upcoding,” in which private insurers exaggerate the health conditions of their enrollees on paper to secure higher payments from CMS – even if enrollees receive no treatment for those conditions.
Notably, Dr. Oz has at least $550,000 invested in UnitedHealth Group, the largest private insurer in Medicare Advantage. Under Dr. Oz’s plan, UnitedHealth Group’s revenue from Medicare Advantage would roughly double to $274 billion annually – a glaring conflict of interest.
“As CMS Administrator, you would be tasked with overseeing Medicare and ensuring that the tens of millions of seniors that rely on the program receive the care they deserve, including cracking down on abuses by private insurers in Medicare Advantage,” wrote the lawmakers. “The consequences of failure on your part would be grave. Billions of federal health care dollars – and millions of lives – are at stake.”
“Given your financial ties to private insurers, combined with your view that the traditional Medicare program is “highly dysfunctional” and your advocacy for eliminating it entirely, it is not clear that you are qualified for this critical job,” concluded the lawmakers.
Senator Warren is a leading voice on reining in abuses in Medicare Advantage and protecting patients:
- In May 2024, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), responding to the agency’s request for information (RFI) on Medicare Advantage (MA) data and raising concerns that CMS does not collect adequate data to determine when vertically integrated insurance companies in MA may be using anti-competitive tactics to raise health care costs and pocket extra profits.
- In May 2024, at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Senator Warren called out private insurers in Medicare Advantage for accelerating the rural hospital crisis.
- In March 2024, Senators Warren and Brown led their colleagues in a letter to HHS and CMS that urged the agencies to protect seniors by holding insurance companies accountable for abuses in Medicare Advantage.
- In January 2024, Senator Warren and Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) sent a letter to CMS, urging the agency to take administrative action to curb billions in overpayments to MA insurers.
- In December 2023, Senators Warren, Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) sent a letter to the CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, raising concerns about shortfalls in CMS’s data collection and reporting practices for MA plans, and urging CMS to close data gaps to strengthen oversight of MA plans and improve care for Medicare beneficiaries.
- In November 2023, Senators Warren, Cortez Masto, Cassidy, and Blackburn introduced bipartisan legislation to improve transparency of MA plans and ensure these plans are best serving the health care needs of America’s seniors. The Encounter Data Enhancement Act would require Medicare Advantage plans to report important information about how much they are actually paying for patient services and how much patients are responsible for paying out-of-pocket.
- In November 2023, Senators Warren and Braun urged the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General to determine if vertically-integrated health care companies are hiking prescription drug costs, evading federal regulations.
- In November 2023, at a Senate Finance Committee markup of the Better Mental Health Care, Lower-Cost Drugs, and Extenders Act, Senator Warren highlighted the need to do more to prioritize hearing health for seniors and strengthen transparency in Medicare Advantage, and secured commitments from Senate Finance Committee leadership to prioritize these proposals in future packages.
- In October 2023, at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Warren called out giant MA insurers for using deceptive marketing tactics to lure seniors into the wrong plans and drown out competition from smaller insurers that may offer better coverage. Senator Warren called on CMS to act within the fullest extent of its authority to crack down on MA insurers that game the system to overcharge the government and to ensure insurers publish accurate data on patient care and out-of-pocket costs.
- In May 2023, at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Warren highlighted the prevalence of ghost networks in Medicare Advantage plans and called for stronger oversight of the program.
- In March 2023, Senator Warren sounded the alarm on a new analysis by policy experts showing that all Medicare beneficiaries – including those enrolled in Traditional Medicare – are paying higher premiums due to overpayments in MA. She sent a letter to CMS and called on the agency to finalize its proposed rule to ensure payments to MA plans accurately reflect the cost of care.
- In March 2023, U.S. Senators Warren and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) sent letters to the top seven MA insurers – Humana, Centene, UnitedHealthcare, CVS/Aetna, Molina, Elevance Health, and Cigna – regarding their questionable claims that CMS’s 2024 proposed Medicare Advantage payment rules would hurt beneficiaries.
- In March 2023, at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Warren defended CMS’s proposed adjustments to the Calendar Year 2024 MA payment rates, pushing back against giant insurance companies and their lobbyists who are peddling misinformation to protect their billions in profits and scare beneficiaries into opposing the rule.
- In April 2022, Senator Warren and Representatives Katie Porter (D-Calif.), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) led their colleagues in sending a letter to CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure highlighting concerns about overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans that line the pockets of big insurance companies.
- In February 2022, chairing a hearing of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth, Senator Warren delivered remarks about strengthening Medicare and cracking down on pharmaceutical and insurance companies’ corporate greed to pay for expanded coverage.
###
In a post to his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, Trump said: "Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!"
The reception on rival platform Bluesky was similar.
"A government of oligarchs that will exist to solely serve the interests of oligarchs while distracting working people with culture wars," wrote former GOP adviser turned anti-Trump strategist Ron Filipkowski.
Representative
Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services
Committee, issued the following statement regarding the release of the
text of the final negotiated language for the Fiscal Year 2025 National
Defense Authorization Act (FY25 NDAA).
“For the 64th consecutive
year, House and Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats and
Republicans worked across the aisle to craft a defense bill that invests
in the greatest sources of America’s strength: service members and
their families, science and technology, modernization, and a commitment
to allies and partners.
“Rooted in the work of the bipartisan
Quality of Life Panel, the bill delivers a 14.5 percent pay raise for
junior enlisted service members and 4.5 percent pay raise for all other
service members. It includes improvements for housing, health care,
childcare, and spousal support. House Armed Services Democrats were
successful in blocking many harmful provisions that attacked DEI
programs, the LGBTQ community, and women’s access to reproductive health
care. It also included provisions that required bipartisan compromise.
And had it remained as such, it would easily pass both chambers in a
bipartisan vote.
“However, the final text includes a provision
prohibiting medical treatment for military dependents under the age of
18 who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Blanketly denying health
care to people who clearly need it, just because of a biased notion
against transgender people, is wrong. This provision injected a level of
partisanship not traditionally seen in defense bills. Speaker Johnson
is pandering to the most extreme elements of his party to ensure that he
retains his speakership. In doing so, he has upended what had been a
bipartisan process.
“I urge the Speaker to abandon this current
effort and let the House bring forward a bill—reflective of the
traditional bipartisan process—that supports our troops and their
families, invests in innovation and modernization, and doesn’t attack
the transgender community.”
Click here to view a summary of the FY25 NDAA final text compiled by House Armed Services Committee Democrats.
Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing California and a fellow member of the House Armed Services Committee, confirmed that he would also vote no on the measure in a statement to journalist Erin Reed’s newsletter Erin In The Morning.
“This year’s NDAA also includes harmful provisions that would attack the dignity and well-being of trans people by prohibiting coverage of medically necessary healthcare,” Khanna said. “At the same time, Congress has failed to expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) for active-duty military members and their families. We must do better to support all military families and reject these harmful policies.”
In a December 9 statement, Mike Zamore, the ACLU’s national director of policy and government affairs, described the provision as “a dangerous affront to the dignity and well-being of young people whose parents have dedicated their lives to this country’s armed forces.”
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