Part 2: My Battle with Tulsi Gabbard’s Cult Followers in Hawaii
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One morning in early 2017, just weeks after I’d begun digging into the Science of Identity cult connected to Tulsi Gabbard, something in the background of a local TV news story caught my attention. I was only half awake, rushing to get ready for work. It was something about the congresswoman secretly flying to Syria and meeting with its murderous dictator, Bashar al-Assad. On top of everything else I’d been learning about Gabbard, it seemed like a weird dream.
A month later, on Feb. 25, 2017, I attended a truly bizarre Gabbard “town hall” in Waianae, in Leeward Oahu. 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.
Content retrieved from: https://www.spytalk.co/p/part-2-my-battle-with-tulsi-gabbards.
