My Battle with Tulsi Gabbard’s Cult Followers in Hawaii
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TWICE IN MY LIFE I’ve experienced political realities so implausibly sinister, I mistook them for bad dreams. Both incidents involved my former congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard.
The first was in January 2017. I’d been digging into wild whispers from some neighbors that Gabbard was in a money laundering cult in our community. I was a former journalist turned teacher with zero interest in political reporting at the time. I had just moved from Kauai Island to Kailua, in Windward Oahu. When one Kailua neighbor learned of my financial reporting background, he encouraged me to figure out “what’s up with the money laundering.”
I did have solid financial investigative reporting training from the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism, and I had done a brief stint with Bloomberg News in Singapore. I’d long ago left the trade, though, to become a special educator, a career change I wrote about for The New York Times in 2008. I had no plans to return to it.
One neighbor, a surfer, was particularly earnest, though, repeatedly asking if I’d looked into “the cult” yet. He complained that local news had been tepid on it, even though he and others had heard rumors for decades about its alleged “massive money laundering.” And it wasn’t as if its members kept a low profile in Kailua Bay. They flagrantly violated surfer etiquette, he said. They sped around in souped-up Zodiac boats, and one, he alleged, had recently struck and killed his friend in a reckless boating incident. He also claimed this cult owned a local health food store, Down to Earth.
I thought part of my neighbor’s story was likely a ‘coconut wireless’ rumor, but out of respect for his loss of a friend, I began digging. I found that Sri Shim, a native Hawaiian florist and skilled waterman, was in fact spearfishing in Kailua Bay in January 2016, when a speeding Zodiac’s propeller struck and killed him. In the aftermath, online Kailua community groups were abuzz about “the cult” and “the cult boat.” Many said an incident like this was inevitable, given the long-time reckless behavior of “the cult members” in the water.
Content retrieved from: https://www.spytalk.co/p/my-battle-with-tulsi-gabbards-cult.
