Okay, this is a steaming load of horse shit:
Tulsi Gabbard grew up in a secretive offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement and has made a dizzying political journey from anti-gay conservative to Democratic Party star to a celebrity in President Trump’s world.
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) January 27, 2025 at 11:06 AM
I don’t remember Tulsi Gabbard ever being a “Democratic Party star,” so I clicked through to see what evidence the Times cited for her alleged stardom. Here it is:
Telegenic, a veteran and the House’s first Hindu member, she arrived in Washington in 2013 and was soon a Democratic star. She grew close to the liberal commentator Van Jones, befriended Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and posed with a surfboard for Vogue. In her first year in office she was awarded a Democratic National Committee vice chairmanship.
Lots of Democrats (rightly) think Van Jones is a blithering ninny. Cory Booker is famously friends with everybody. And Gabbard was probably awarded a DNC vice chairmanship for the same reason Vogue wanted the photo shoot with the surfboard.
My point is, DNC vice chairmanship doesn’t signify party stardom. Some DNC vice chairs are “Democratic Party stars.” For example, I think Gretchen Whitmer qualifies. Others I’d never heard of until today, and I follow party politics fairly closely.
In any case, Gabbard resigned from the DNC a few years later and endorsed Bernie Sanders. When that didn’t pan out, she went sucking up to Team Trump in 2016 on behalf of recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, which rightly appalled and alarmed Democrats. She launched a quixotic run for president herself in 2019, gaining very little support, despite being an alleged “Democratic Party star.”
Hillary Clinton called Gabbard a “Russian asset” in 2019. That’s what transformed Gabbard into a Trump “celebrity,” as the Times calls her.
I don’t know why this “Democratic Party star” thing pisses me off so much. Grading on the Times curve, it’s a small thing. But it contains a both-sides lie that is harmful. Gabbard is a fucking KOOK, and she’s the Republicans’ kook, not ours. Democrats recognized and disowned her for her erratic behavior. So she switched sides and joined the party of crazies.
PS: The Times also declines to forthrightly call the rabidly anti-gay “secretive offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement” in which Gabbard was raised a cult. Instead, the article limply notes that “some critics” call it a cult, even while recounting ex-cult members stories about “disciples” sprinkling the cult founder’s toenail clippings on their food.
What more evidence do they need that it’s a cult? Jesus. Also, sorry if you’re eating lunch.
Open thread.
Chetan Murthy
Also,
that ain’t no Hindu.
matt
I got some help from ChatGPT on this one:
“Chris Butler Cult”
(to the tune of “Rock Lobster”)
Verse 1
We were children in the fold,
Learning truth from the old,
Chris Butler’s the guru,
He’s got the answers, we’ve been told.
Pre-Chorus
Chanting, meditating,
Their world’s got us vibrating,
Tulsi’s raised in this place,
They say it’s more than just faith.
Chorus
(Chris Butler) Cult leader!
(Chris Butler) We will follow!
(Chris Butler) Only truth,
(Chris Butler) Leave the world behind!
Verse 2
In the ashram, strict and pure,
With the teachings to endure,
Chris Butler’s on the throne,
Telling everyone they’re not alone.
Pre-Chorus
They’ve got that mystic grace,
A different way to see the space,
Tulsi learned it all,
She rose from that mystic call!
Chorus
(Chris Butler) Cult leader!
(Chris Butler) Hold us closer!
(Chris Butler) Learn the ways,
(Chris Butler) Follow in the line!
Bridge
No more worldly cares,
He’s the only one who dares,
Tulsi’s voice so calm,
Taught in that devotional charm!
Chorus
(Chris Butler) Cult leader!
(Chris Butler) Only leader!
(Chris Butler) Teach us now,
(Chris Butler) We’ll be holy!
Outro
(Chris Butler) Cult leader!
(Chris Butler) In the name of Butler!
(Chris Butler) We will rise,
(Chris Butler) We’ll transcend the world!
Steve LaBonne
Fuck, and I say this with deep feeling, the fucking New York Times. It’s time to start completely ignoring them.
schrodingers_cat
She was member of the Sanders Insitute until very recently.
Elizabelle
The NY Times is a liar. They do not seem to be able to report accurately on Democrats. AG (Putz) Sulzberger is a disaster
hire.nepotist. His team sucks.Quicksand
Whoever said AI isn’t useful
Kay
Finland, Norway and Swedens leaders met yesterday with the PM of Denmark at her home to discuss the threat posed by the United States.
And the NYTimes is writing fawning articles about MAGA celebrities.
Not a real newspaper.
laura
I don’t know why this “Democratic Party star” thing pisses me off so much.
Here’s why it pisses me off- it’s trying to slip the turd into our pocket. Nope, no way, no how. She’s all their’s.
kindness
With all due respect, Tulsi was never a Democratic Party star.
Kay
Here’s the link from a news org in France
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250127-danish-pm-says-nordics-united-as-trump-ratchets-up-greenland-bid
John S.
@Kay:
They haven’t been for decades. They’re still the same paper that published a tongue bath about Hitler in 1939.
jonas
I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t an annoying Tankie continually pissing into the Democratic tent.
trollhattan
She was a “star” like I was a pileated woodpecker. TBH my head still hurts.
trollhattan
@Chetan Murthy: Nor, a moon.
suzanne
LAWL, yeah, she’s not a star. I even take note of the image aspects of politics — because I think they affect voting behavior on the margins and thus are important to master — and she is a black hole of rizz.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
She was a mole in the Dem party and Hillary never mentioned her by name as I recall. I guess Hillary is to blame for telling the truth though…
matt
@Quicksand: I got it to do another version where it added back in the surfing and beach references. I do like that it made the ‘Rock Lobster’ into ‘Chris Butler’, that’s a good idea. Still, pretty mediocre. Did only take about 1 minute including prompts
If you want to write a satire of something though, this could give you a working base in about 5 minutes including some refinement which is startling
Maybe I’ll see if it can write me a version of Dante’s Inferno with all Trump era characters in politics and media.
Old School
They left off “rising”.
From 2012:
Another Scott
@Elizabelle:
Something something believe them the first time.
(repost) ReutersInstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk (from February 2024):
(Emphasis added.)
(Google tells me they claimed to have 11M total subscribers in November.)
Their judg[e]ment sucks and has for a long time. They admit they’re not giving us straight news. People should not expect that they’re getting straight news from them.
Believe them the first time.
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott..
comrade scotts agenda of rage
You are being kind.
I say this repeatedly as a former intel officer, Gabbard is a massive national security risk. If the three (R) Senators that didn’t vote for Hegseth don’t also vote for her…and maybe, just maybe, convince one other (R) Senator whose head is not totally up the ass of the MAGAt cult to join them, it’ll be a start.
Jeffro
this right here
“if Hillary hates her and has made the (obvious) connection between Gabbard and Putin…well…we kind of have to have Gabbard on our side, don’t we?” – trumpov & Co
“yes, you do” – Putin
WTFGhost
To me, it’s because the *only* source for “star” is Republicans, who have a vested interest in making her seem so (“…but they drove her away!”). So you know they’re deliberately putting their finger in our eye, either to try to get our attention, or to show they can. Both are dishonest and dishonorable for anyone that would be called a “paper of record” – it’s not recording, it’s deliberate news seeding.
Baud
Replies say Fetterman has since signed on.
pajaro
@John S.:
Also, they normalized Stalin at the time he was deliberately starving Ukrainians.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: Sorry, a fellow not a member. And I think he is going to vote for her.
RaflW
The totebagger crowd who are core NYT customers are probably lapping this cuisinart-swirl-of-shit up. I think there’s a slice of the gelatinous center in our country that somehow believes and even relishes freaks like Gabbard and Sinema. They revolt me, as does so much of NYT’s politics cum quisling horsepucky.
WTFGhost
@Chetan Murthy: from what I’ve heard, her sect comes from Hare Krishnas, who come from Hindu. I don’t understand your statement.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I hope it’s true that he eventually signed it.
Princess
NYT must be trying to prevent her from being confirmed to the NSA, calling her a Democratic Party star and all.
WTFGhost
Hey, we could have a contest for a new motto. Instead of “all the news that’s fit to print,” they could say “trust us: we’ll make you feel good about not being a *premature* anti-fascist.”
(Was that really a target of suspicion? By whom? It sounds so comically evil, it seems Nixonian, but I don’t think Nixon was that tone deaf.)
Captain C
@Kay: They’ve become Pravda Lite. The same amount of truth as the original, but less substance.
Captain C
@Another Scott:
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!—oh, wait, they were serious?
trollhattan
@Princess: “We can defeat Tulsi with One Weird Trick” would be an ironic strategy for anybody, much less NYT. Hey, whatever works.
Captain C
@pajaro: Fucking Walter Fucking Duranty won a Pulitzer for his Stalin stenography regarding that.
Mr. Bemused Senior
I have one word for the FTFNYT: deplorable.
RaflW
@Kay: Macro Rubio is going to have his ass handed to him on a platter at least weekly in his new job. Here he is trying to reassure a Danish official. But we all know Trump will undermine lil’ Marco and make him look the powerless fool that he is.
tobie
I don’t know anything about the Bridge Project at Georgetown but they have a fascinating summary of Gabbard’s positions over the years. Some are extreme like her general anti-Islamic stance. Here are two others on matters related to India:
And:
WTFGhost
@Mr. Bemused Senior: So this whole hostility to Democrats, leading to the election of a fascist, is about their being insulted by Hillary Clinton’s choice for the type of basket that half of Trump’s supporter’s seemed to be from?
Um. I haven’t come up with a better explanation so far, but it doesn’t seem sufficient.
Princess
Is it too soon to start talking about the Trump Stock Crash? I think not. After all. He no sooner started promising big bucks for AI, than Nvidia started tanking.
tobie
@RaflW: The Chinese have cottoned on to this. Apparently they address Rubio as a subordinate in press statements.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@WTFGhost: I meant it as a description (in my opinion). A dictionary definition: shockingly bad in quality.
[ETA of course it’s rich with other associations 😁]
RevRick
If calling Gabbard a former “Democratic star” tanks her nomination and sends her to the oblivion to which she rightly belongs, then I’m willing to take that temporary hit.
The Democratic Party has never been without its share of whackos, flaming narcissists, sheisters, and overall jerks. It comes with the territory. What matters to me is how we deal with them, and when Gabbard shed her carapace and revealed her true colors, she became a pariah to us.
Princess
@RaflW: I think Trump picked Rubio solely for the fun of humiliating him on a regular basis. Can’t really blame him completely tbh.
trollhattan
@RaflW:
Listening to that little fuck declaring “America first” to the rest of the world is not having the intended effect. How many Scaramuchis does Li’l Marco possess? Alternatively, he might squeeze a Jeff Sessions out of it. [Odd phrasing not unintended.]
Belafon
@Princess: Or they’re trying to set up a “Why won’t Democrats support her?” narrative.
lowtechcyclist
@RaflW:
He’s really more Micro Rubio.
Miss Bianca
Glad I’d finished my lunch before reading about the toenails bit.
Citizen Alan
@Elizabelle: The one positive thing about AI is that it might put political pundits out of business. I firmly believe that if, on any topic, you fed a press release put out by a Democratic source and one from a GOP source into ChatGPT and told it to write a balanced summation of the parties’ positions, you would get a fairer and more accurate product than anything produced by the NYT political staff.
trollhattan
@lowtechcyclist:
He should have been water czar.
suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
This would have been a way funnier nickname than “L’il Marco”. What a missed opportunity.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Citizen Alan:
…and there’s the problem. Can’t have that!
Citizen Alan
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: My recollection is that Hillary referred to a Russian asset under circumstances where the only possible person she was talking about was Gabbard. And IIRC, Gabbard certainly took it that way. Hit dogs hollerin’ and all that.
Captain C
@Citizen Alan: FTFNYT Op-Ed: “Why our investigative reporters and other lowly staff should be replaced with AI, but not us high dollar pundits.” Probably written by AI
suzanne
@Princess:
Come sit by me, friend. I have snacks.
SC54HI
Tulsi’s political career started out as a non-partisan city council member, back during her first marriage (to another person raised in the Butler Cult’s Filipino boarding school). She only got into federal office because she ran against the wildly unpopular Mufi Hanneman in the D primary for the CD2 seat.
For a deeper dive into the Butler Cult I recommend Christine Gralow’s work. The local news outlet, Honolulu Civil Beat, has also birddogged Tulsi over the years. There are also a number of local bloggers & others who over the years have tried to shed light on the cult – they should show up on a google search.
Bonus material: Here is a highlight video of Tulsi’s wedding to her second husband, also raised in the Butler Cult.
lowtechcyclist
@trollhattan:
Since Sec of State is essentially our foreign minister, and 7/10 of the globe is covered in water, in a way he is. :D
Belafon
@Captain C: Or the CEO.
I still say someone should promote a business venture promising to replace executives with AI.
Scout211
I haven’t read all the comments downstairs so it may have already been covered but this sounds a little fishy. Maybe Tulsi will investigate. /s
Hmm. Who would do such a thing?
WaterGirl
If they want to tie Gabbard to us, who – even remotely on their side – can we tie to them?
Betty Cracker
Sounds like Trumpsters are nervous about Gabbard’s prospects: [source: Politico]
I think there’s a chance the Gabbard and RFK Jr. nominations can be derailed. Repubs did manage to sleaze the incompetent, drunk, rapey weekend Fox & Friends host through to lead the Pentagon, so the odds aren’t great, but it’s a possibility, maybe.
Melancholy Jaques
It would be more accurate to say she was, for a month or two, the political media’s new shiny toy who happened to be a Democrat.
Citizen Alan
@WaterGirl: No one. If tying Donald Fucking Trump to the GOP wasn’t enough, then they’re simply not capable of shame.
lowtechcyclist
@Betty Cracker:
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans were all about how they were the Party of a Strong Defense, and we Dems weren’t.
Hell, if you’re old enough to vote, you’re that old.
And now thanks to them, we’ve got a Secretary of Defense whose goal is clearly to break our military.
Taken4Granite
@WTFGhost: “All the news that fits, we print.”
Hilbertsubspace
The Obama administration rejected Van Jones for reasons they didn’t want to say to anyone. Instead, they leaked something about a 9/11 truth adjacent document he signed onto. When Van Jones said “This is the moment Donald Trump became president” at the end of Feb. 2017, I was wondering if he was just a useful idiot for Trump/Putin or something more. This “closeness” with Gabbard is slightly more evidence.
People working for Gabbard have said she’s not a Russian asset, she’s just easily fooled. I’m not convinced. I think she is genuinely sympathetic to Putin and authoritarianism in general.
Miss Bianca
@jonas:
Right??
Gin & Tonic
@pajaro: And refuse to return the Pulitzer that Walter Duranty received for his “reporting” from Moscow.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
“Then, in a surprise turn Dr. Jill Stein became the Director of National Intelligence.”
Soprano2
@Kay: It really is sad to see what’s happened to the NY Times. There was a time that they would have been covering the real news on the front page, and the stuff about Gabbard would be inside the paper. At this point they’re not much better than a celebrity rag for the GOP. They’ve decided they’d rather entertain people than report the news.
Marc
@Princess: @Scout211:
The DeepSeek LLM software that was just released by a Chinese company as open source includes an innovation that reportedly allows it to be trained 50X more efficiently than the models OpenAI, Google, Meta, etc., are using. If it works, this would dramatically reduce the need for vast networks of hyper-expensive AI-enhanced GPUs (which can costs upwards of $10K each, and places like Google have thousands of them in data centers). I’m not surprised Nvidia just tanked, as they make the GPUs.
Toeless Flenser
Skepchick has a pretty good video on the hare Krishna offshoot.
https://youtu.be/4gDvPoFsWYg?si=sLhqmsP8xs4Gz_12
rusty
@WTFGhost: That’s from WWII. Folks who supported and fought the fascists in Spain were labelled “pre-antifascists” and blackballed. They were anti-fascist too early (they were looked upon as too liberal or socialist), it wasn’t ok to be fully anti-fascist until the US entered the war.
The closest recent analogy would be people who opposed the second Iraq war from the beginning. By mainstream media standards, they were wrong for opposing the war too early.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
JFK Jr could be a problem for them though. We underestimated his dumb as rocks voters, IMO. They’re Left leaning and voted for Trump based on support for RFK Jr.I think they hurt Harris.
The GOP can’t just throw them aside. They were important to Trumps win and they’re entitled, higher income and extremely online and vocal.
trollhattan
@Marc: It’s like suddenly discovering “Hey, we don’t have to burn silk pajamas and Shaker furniture in the boiler to run this steamship, after all!”
Kay
@Soprano2:
It reminds me of their Christopher Rufo profile. It’s all this fad – following “social science” garbage they just pull out of their ass.
Not a real newspaper. If they spun off the recipes, puzzles and fancy real estate and wedding porn would anyone buy it for news?
Kay
Of all the new MAGAs the Tulsi Gabbard/Glenn Greenwald/RFKJr people are the ones I don’t want back.
They can remain with MAGA and the GOP. They’re morons.
They can also keep the tech bros billionaires.
Sister Golden Bear
@Marc: It also runs far more efficiently, using what seems to be a rather obvious optimization. I’m not an AI expert, but based on what I’ve read — and I’m sure this is a drastically overly simplistic analogy — imagine you’ve got a team of experts in a wide variety of different subject matter areas. Current LLM AIs enlist all of them when someone asks a question, while DeepSeek figures out which subjects are involved and only calls on the experts needed. It’s also able to create “LLM model subsets” (for lack of a better term) of particular topics, better enabling the LLM to run on lower-powerful devices, such as laptops and mobile phones.
Since export restrictions prevented DeepSeek from getting the latest and greatest GPU chips, they had to, ya know, innovate rather than just throwing more billions at it. Apparently DeepSeek is mostly R&D focused, but since their work is open source lots of other companies will be eager to commercialize it.
Really bad news for AI-related chipmakers, especially Nvidia, whose products were the most widely used.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I’m hoping we get more reliable voting data soon and can figure out stuff like how large a group the RFK Jr. bloc is. God, I hope it’s small, but this is a big (dumb!) country.
Starfish (she/her)
@RevRick:
But enough about Marianne Williamson
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: One other interesting aspect of DeepSeek is that as part of being open source, they’ve said all their info about what they trained the AI on is publicly available.
So in theory — yes, yes, I know — companies using DeepSeek could create AI models trained on “ethical” sources, e.g. not stealing copyrighted material, etc. (FWIW, Adobe’s AI in Photoshop is supposedly only trained on images from stock photos that they own the rights to.) Whether this happens in practice….
DeepSeek also faces some issues with its current models being adopted worldwide because apparently the models won’t allow any criticism of the Chinese government (surprise, surprise). But again, being open source with its model relatively inexpensive to train, I’m sure others will develop their own models.
Captain C
@Hilbertsubspace:
As I understand it, the term ‘asset’ covers useful idiots, which is her best-case scenario. Being a useful idiot is also, IMHO, disqualifying for any remotely intelligence-related position in the U.S. government.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: I still think the vast majority of LLM/ChatGPT AI stuff are solutions in search of a problem* but at least if DeepSeek-based solutions take off at least we won’t be destroying the planet as quickly.
*There’s plenty of other AI stuff (e.g. what used to be called “machine learning” that does do valuable stuff, like analyzing medical imaging where they’re often used to look for things like cancers. Likewise, in the photography field they’re great for cleaning up images — things like removing noise, enlarging images, or removing unwanted stuff in the background (like a stray telephone pole).
ThresherK
“Democratic party star” here is as horseshit as you think, and you ought to be pissed off. Gabbard is a woman whose skin color would get her shot by a fascist cop. She got in the short line.
Her being a turncoat (without much to turn) is a big get, in the estimation of Beltway Inbreds, because almost all the old white southern and rural bigots whose flag was The party left me are dead.
This is going to be a shibboleth as sure as “Young Republican rising star” has meant, in most of the post-Reagan era, “R under 40 not yet found with dead girl or live boy”.
Another Scott
@Soprano2:
Not to pick on you, and no I Am Not A Crank, but as long as I have been politically aware they have not been a “real news” newspaper. They’ve had an agenda that they push continuously.
E.g. Google – NY Times Carter Peanut Warehouse. They beat that drum for all the years Carter was president. And that’s just one example.
One of their stories, from February 1979:
Geee, I wonder who published those news articles in recent months? It’s a mystery!!
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Baud
Just saw this, Betty
Another Scott
@Sister Golden Bear: One of my biology courses in college, back many decades ago, was on brains. There was some comment once about whether there was a “Grandmother recognition nerve/center/area” somewhere in there. The thinking at the time was, no, there probably wasn’t, but our brains are amazingly talented at representing relatives with just a glance, even far away, so something seemed to be going on.
So, specialization in work areas in “AI” or LLM or … makes a lot of sense.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Chris Johnson
@Citizen Alan: Hillary has been correct about Russian assets every single goddamn time.
I can only fault her for not being able to convey the seriousness of it, or to act accordingly. She knows, has known all this time, and yet she doesn’t have enough clout to make it stick (which is probably more the fault of the Beltway than a fault of hers). I don’t like that she doesn’t just go scorched earth, because she’s been absolutely correct. AOC is more shrill about this sort of thing, and Hillary has been more right about this than AOC has.
Bobby Thomson
She didn’t switch sides. She came in from out in the cold
bluefoot
@Chetan Murthy: Hey, you’re alive! I hadn’t seen you in the threads I’ve been on lately. I know a couple of people taking active steps to move, so I was wondering if you were still around…or of course the darker alternative.
ascap_scab
JOSEPH ISADORE LIEBERMAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY STAR!
WTFGhost
@rusty: Thanks!
Mark Jones
Ah yes, the Vogue quasi swimsuit issue, with Tulsi doing her Hawaiian flower girl look (Blue steel was already taken). As I recall she was in her early 30’s and could still play the part. 13 years, 4 terms in Congress and numerous Russian and Syrian propaganda stints later, she is not looking very Hawaiian; now passing for a cross between Nancy Mace and (a natural mousy brown haired) Majorie Taylor Greene. All of whom have long since passed their last “lovable” day (on the Julia Louis-Dreyfus scale), and on the human scale as well.
WaterGirl
@Mark Jones: Welcome!
ljdramone
@WTFGhost: “Prematurely anti-fascist” is code for “commie” and has to do with the Spanish Civil War. Franco’s Nationalists were the fascist side. The Republicans were a mix of Communists (both Stalinists and Trotskyites), anarchists, and whatever else.
Dates back to the post-WWII Red Scare. If you had supported the Republican side against Franco in the 1930s, you were anti-fascist too early (before WWII) and therefore a probable agent of Communist subversion.