Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career
he first time I spoke with Rebecca Saltzburg, she told me Tulsi Gabbard was a freethinker who took orders from no one.
“I didn’t always agree with Tulsi on everything,” Saltzburg, who worked on digital strategy for several of Gabbard’s congressional campaigns, said in November 2024. “But as for the core of her life and political path? I can vouch 100 percent, that is her own.”
Saltzburg had heard I’d been asking people about Chris Butler, the eccentric religious leader Gabbard once described as her guru. Gabbard grew up in Butler’s breakaway Hare Krishna group. Her parents held senior positions in the organization. Saltzburg said that she herself had been a member since moving to Hawaii with a college friend in the 1990s.
Butler’s followers practice a form of Hinduism that involves devotion to a single deity, in their case Krishna, and certain expectations around meditation, yoga and diet.
