#hare+krishna

O madhava, wherever I go, may my heart always be at your lotus feet🪷

her true form ⬆️⬆️⬆️

The sun was low, painting the Yamunā’s waters gold, and the air smelled of fresh grass and fragrant kadamba flowers. The gopīs were laughing and talking, brushing the dust from their ghāghrās after the day’s tiring chores, when a new figure appeared among them. She was radiant, her every movement gentle and meek, every glance shy yet full of a hidden soul fire.

Krishna, in the form of a gopi, moved among them, his eyes twinkling with mischief. The gopīs felt a strange tug at their hearts, a mixture of delight and bewilderment. Something about this maiden was different…more luminous, more enchanting than any of them could describe. They whispered to each other, trying to guess her name, their voices soft with curiosity.

Krishna mimicked the gentle gestures of the gopīs, the sway of the ghāghrā, the tilt of the head, and yet there was an otherworldly grace that none of them could imitate. Every small movement; the brush of a hand, the lift of a foot, made the gopīs’ hearts flutter. Some giggled nervously, some felt a sudden shyness, and some could hardly contain the longing in their eyes.

“Who is she?” one gopi murmured, and in that question, Krishna delighted. He had hidden himself in plain sight, yet even in disguise, he could not hide the love and sweetness that radiated from his being.

The gopīs began to gather closer, enchanted by the new maiden. They admired her delicate movements, the gentle way she twirled a strand of her hair, the soft laugh that floated like the music of the Yamunā itself. “She moves as if the river itself dances with her,” one whispered. Another nodded, cheeks flushed, “And yet… there is something familiar. Something I cannot name.”

Krishna, in his playful disguise, let his eyes sparkle mischievously as he joined in their chatter. He mirrored their laughter, leaned in when they spoke, and even shyly accepted small compliments about his… or rather, her grace. Each interaction wove a web of joy, curiosity, and subtle longing. The gopīs were entranced, their hearts beating faster, their senses alight with delight at this mysterious companion.

Some tried to match her movements in dance, spinning and stepping lightly as she did, only to feel their feet falter and their hearts stir in inexplicable ways. Krishna’s subtle laughter rang out like a bell, though his disguise kept the source a secret. Every glance and gesture seemed to carry a divine tease, drawing the gopīs into a deeper, unspoken bhava.

As Surya’s golden light deepened into a warm evening glow, a hush fell over the grove. Among the gopīs appeared Radha, her presence luminous and soothing, yet her eyes quickened with a knowing anticipation. Krishna, sensing the moment, allowed the veil of illusion to shimmer and dissolve. Slowly, his true form emerged, radiant and dark, eyes sparkling with infinite love and mischief.

Radha’s gaze met his, and for a heartbeat, the world seemed to pause. She smiled, a mixture of wonder and gentle reproach. “So it was you,” she said softly, her voice carrying the sweetness of a thousand songs. The gopīs gasped in awe, realization dawning upon them. The playful maiden who had enchanted their hearts all afternoon was none other than Krishna himself.

Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:

A bombshell investigative report published over the weekend by reporter Jon Swaine of The Washington Post answers a question that has shadowed Tulsi Gabbard’s entire political career: Why has she never made any sense? The answer is laid out across more than 25,000 documents obtained by Swaine after nearly a year of investigation. It turns out Gabbard’s political positions, legislative agenda, television talking points and even social media posts appear to have been shaped for years by a man named Chris Butler. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s by design. Butler is the reclusive, 78-year-old leader of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), the secretive Hare Krishna splinter group in which Gabbard was raised and which has been accused by former members of being an abusive cult. Gabbard has publicly acknowledged Butler as her guru. Per Swaine’s reporting, Butler operates through intermediaries and does not put his name on anything. From his beachfront house in Kailua, Hawaii, Butler watched his disciple ascend, with his guidance, to the most powerful intelligence position in the U.S. government.

The memos Swaine reviewed were routed through an encrypted email domain. Gabbard’s television appearances used language lifted directly from the memos. She introduced bills after being directed to do so. She even deployed a signature catchphrase—“the safety, security, and freedom of the American people”—apparently created by her cult leader’s political team, if not her guru himself. Gabbard resigned her office recently, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis. But the timing is suspect. The Post notified her the story was coming two days before she announced her departure. Butler has described U.S. intelligence agencies in his own lectures as run by demonic “power-hungry madmen.” His own acolyte oversaw them all for the last fifteen months.

It never made any sense

For more than two decades, Gabbard defied easy political explanation. She entered the Hawaii state legislature in 2002 as a social conservative, running on an anti-gay platform that opposed same-sex marriage and working for her father’s organization, which backed conversion therapy. She even appeared as a teenager in a television ad her family produced warning that legalization of same-sex marriage would lead to people marrying their dogs. A decade later, she arrived in Congress as a progressive darling, resigning as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. She delivered his nominating speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, a breakout moment that briefly made her a rising star of the party’s left wing.

She then met with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower, shocking Democrats. To make matters worse, she spent years as a Fox News fixture, ultimately embracing MAGA and joining the Republican Party at a Trump rally in North Carolina in October 2024. She would be rewarded for her conversion by being named Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.

Along this Sinema-matic pathway, she staked out incoherent political positions. She supported military action against ISIS while opposing virtually every other form of American intervention abroad. She visited Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017 on an unannounced trip to Damascus while serving as a Democratic member of Congress and defended him against accusations of using chemical weapons on his own people. She amplified the claim—one that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called “parroting false Russian propaganda”—that the U.S. maintained biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and returned to that claim on her way out as DNI, declassifying documents she said proved it. She was skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies yet appeared eager to lead them. Political observers spent years scratching their heads. The most charitable credited her as a genuine independent thinker, following her convictions wherever they led. A more skeptical reading saw her as an opportunist, tracking toward the audience of highest reward. But neither explanation could account for the specificity and consistency of positions that cut so strangely across every recognizable political category.

Swaine's bombshell offers a different, and compelling, explanation entirely.

[...]

“Stop being weak.”

Swaine’s primary source—the “disgruntled volunteer”—is Rebecca Saltzburg, a former member of Butler’s Science of Identity Foundation who also worked on digital strategy for several of Gabbard’s congressional campaigns. Saltzburg initially told Swaine in November 2024 that Gabbard was a free thinker who took orders from no one. But after falling out with SIF leadership over allegations of abuse within the organization (and rather complicatedly, her own arrest in a child custody matter that Texas prosecutors ultimately declined to pursue), Saltzburg came back with a different story. This time, she had a Gmail archive to back it up. That trove contained more than 25,000 pages of documents, including hundreds of memos spanning 2011 to 2017. Those years covered Gabbard’s first two terms in Congress. The emails were routed through an encrypted email domain, NineIsles.com, operated by Butler’s secretarial staff.

The name itself was a clue: “Nine Islands” in Sanskrit is Navadvipa, a pilgrimage city in West Bengal sacred to Hare Krishna devotees. The emails typically contained little beyond an attached memo and a request to confirm receipt. The attachments were encrypted, and the memos contained no named author, no signature and no identifying information of any kind. Butler, like Trump, famously does not use a computer or email. According to Saltzburg, he delivered his guidance verbally, sometimes to Gabbard directly by phone, sometimes to his secretaries, who transcribed his remarks and circulated the resulting memos to a small group she described as Butler’s “political team.” That group included Gabbard’s parents, top aide Allison Hoen who was then married to Butler’s right-hand man Sunil Khemaney, and Saltzburg herself. Everyone who received the memos, according to Saltzburg, understood that the unnamed voice behind them was Butler’s. He had instructed them never to write his name down.

[...]

Now the Picture Clears

That brings us back to my opening question. Gabbard’s political career traced a path that no conventional ideological framework could explain. But Butler’s politics explain nearly all of it, and Swaine walks us through some doozies. Butler’s worldview defies the standard American left-right spectrum in precisely the ways Gabbard’s career did. He has inveighed against homosexuality, Islam, gun control and public schools—all positions that track to the cultural right. At the same time he has promoted environmentalism and expressed deep suspicion of capitalism—positions that track to the left. His interest in “America First” framing predated Trump. And his wild Syria position, which included opposing the removal of Assad and framing U.S. involvement as illegitimate regime change, aligned precisely with the posture that made Gabbard a figure of suspicion.

The memos make the transmission of these positions visible in granular detail. Most tellingly, a 2016 Syria directive instructed Gabbard to maintain her opposition to U.S. intervention even as a photograph of a wounded five-year-old boy dominated international headlines and sharpened public pressure for action. “The CIA is the one that started this thing,” the unnamed adviser said. Gabbard made that precise claim publicly—three years later. Other memos used “America First” framing and recommended deploying the National Guard to occupy inner cities—ideas that would become MAGA orthodoxy within years. What the documents cannot show, because they end in 2017, is whether Butler’s influence persisted into Gabbard’s post-congressional career and her tenure as DNI. It is logical to presume it did. The phrase Butler’s team wrote for Gabbard in 2014 was still her go-to at her confirmation hearing in 2025. The positions Butler shaped in encrypted memos were the positions she carried into the government’s most sensitive intelligence role.

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