John Swaine
speaker
191 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Jul
John Swaine’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'd always been interested in Tulsi Gabbard because she has been such an unusual political figure.
She's gone from being a socially conservative Democrat to a liberal Democrat and a Bernie Sanders ally to eventually being a MAGA Republican and Donald Trump appointee.
And I'd been interested in some stories over the years in magazines like the New Yorker and New York Magazine and in some Hawaii publications.
about this faith group that she grew up in, the Science of Identity Foundation, but none of them had really gotten to the bottom of whether it mattered and whether Chris Butler, the founder, had any influence on her politics.
She had always said he was her spiritual teacher, her guru, but there just seemed to be this lingering question of what exactly was their relationship.
And so when she was nominated by Trump to be director of national intelligence, I thought I'd give it a go.
Chris Butler, in the late 60s, dropped out of the University of Hawaii and fell in with the Hare Krishna movement, which was just then beginning.
And he quickly accumulated a group of followers, devotees.
He was charismatic and good-looking and a good speaker.
And that grew into this organization that he called the Science of Identity Foundation.
And
Spiritually, it is a sort of offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement, and it's interested in chanting and yoga and diet and morals.
Chris Butler himself has a really unusual politics.
It doesn't really fit on the left-right spectrum.
He's very much into environmentalism and anti-capitalism, but he's against abortion and against same-sex marriage and homosexuality.
So lectures that Chris Butler gave to his followers in the 80s and 90s that I saw were very anti-gay people, very anti-Muslims.
And former members I actually spoke with
recalled that when they went to schools associated with the Science of Identity Foundation, they would be expected to listen to recordings of Chris Butler's lectures, and several of them actually noted their surprise as they sort of thought back about how explicit and kind of disgusted Chris Butler's lectures were when talking about gay people.
And he also has, from reading his lectures, quite sort of wild conspiratorial views on other things, including sometimes the intelligence services and intelligence agencies.
So that was the kind of environment and the kind of teachings that were going on in this group when Tulsi Gabbard's parents became members in the early 80s.
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