That would be a reasonable conclusion based on the recent experience of two local websites, as reported on Sunday by Andrew Walden’s Hawaii Free Press.
According to Walden, the server for his Hawaii Free Press site was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack just a day after linking to a New Yorker profile of Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
And Meanwhile in Hawaii, a new website created by Hawaii writer Christine Gralow, was similarly attacked immediately after posting a long, critical investigative piece on the Krishna-spinoff cult with many ties to Gabbard and her campaign (“Butler’s Web: Krishna, Politics, and QNET’s International Pyramid Scheme“).
Walden’s comment: “Krishna Consciousness is when you know the Krishnas did it.”
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Now that’s very concerning.
Sounds like speculation, only.
Reasonable conclusion but not yet proven who did it. The two attacks on my site certainly match a familiar pattern, but it will take some time to track the origin of the attacks. My site has only one article so far. Seems someone really does not want it read. I am also being ridiculously defamed online by people hiding behind fake accounts, and I was harassed by SIF members after asking serious questions at a Gabbard town hall. The constituent harassment experience is not unique to me.
The only way to truly verify or deny the “speculation” would be to ask Butler and his minions if they did it. You think they would answer honestly if they were perpetrators of the cyberattack?
Sure, it could be a “coincidence” that those two sites were subject to attack shortly after posting articles critical of the cult. Do you have any statistics on how many other local sites were under DDOS attacks during the same time period? If these were the only two, or even two of only several more, that would be an extremely unlikely “coincidence”.
On the plus side, I can now brag about having one of the most popular websites in the world. Nearly 4.5 million hits in an hour.
They’re VERY paranoid. They would do this in a heartbeat.
Also illogical from my experience. Not exactly stress strategists.
That was supposed to say chess, lol.
The New Yorker piece, by the way, is worth reading and sympathetic toward Tulsi Gabbard, although I can see how it might embarrass Chris Butler or his followers. (“What Does Tulsi Gabbard Believe?”, by Kelefa Sanneh, Nov. 6, 2017)
How come the word Cult is never used towards Christians?
Plenty of Christian breakaway sects have been called cults. Branch Davidians and Peoples Temple for starters. Secrecy, lies, and denial tend to be red flags that the group might not be socially healthy.
Ian: The “Free” Press is a right-wing rag.
And this is relevant how?
How is it relevant that the “Free Press” is a right wing rag? Take everything you read in it with a huge grain of salt and be alert for fake news !
A letter to the editor from Tulsi Gabbard’s aunt, a UH Manoa professor.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/letters-from-the-november-20-2017-issue
To better understand Tulsi Gabbard’s perspective, it might be useful to turn to the 1957 political science classic, “The Soldier and the State” by Samuel Huntington. Huntington discusses the “military mind” as the typical attitude inculcated in military officers, which is frequently misunderstood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soldier_and_the_State
It is disconcerting to see pacifism linked with militarism. But in the conservative mindframe of military officers, there is an aversion to risky and expensive foreign military involvement coupled with a desire to promote a large, powerful military. Hence the saying “Democrats want a small military but want to send it everywhere, whereas Republicans want a big military and don’t want to send it anywhere.”
Six out of seven American military officers are Republicans, but they are conservatives of the old school who look upon foreign “adventurism” with a jaundiced eye. They would loath a president like George W. Bush, with his “assertive” foreign policy, and would admire instead a cautious leader like Dwight Eisenhower – a professional soldier such as themselves. But because they are disciplined professionals, they follow the orders of legitimate authority without complaining (in public).
To make this even more complicated, there is the highly confident, impatient, aggressive, gung ho attitude of enlisted men. This is known as “mission ready”. Enlisted men are indoctrinated into this mentality from the earliest days of their training. It gives them a sense of invulnerability that makes it possible for them to function in combat. The enlisted men might have a soft spot for a figure like George W. Bush – a cocky little man with a big swagger. It reminds them of themselves.
When we think of military officers, we often think of the “mission ready” feistiness of the rank-and-file soldier. In fact, the “military mind” of the officer class is deeply pessimistic and averse to foreign entanglements – pacifistic, in a word.
What is unusual about Tulsi Gabbard is the way that she has fixated on a non-interventionist foreign policy and subordinated all other government policy to it. So she supports Bernie Sanders because he is a confirmed “isolationist” – and from a distance, she implicitly inherits all of the Sanders agenda in that moment. But she also reached out to Trump because of his “America First” disdain of foreign involvement – and from a distance she implicitly begins to carry Trump’s baggage. This is rather politically innocent.
Also, she phrases her foreign policy perspective in terms of an opposition to “regime change”. But that is a very broad term. What she really means by “regime change” is the desire by neoconservatives and liberals to democratize the world. But regime change also happens for pragmatic reasons, not just ideological purposes. For example, the CIA helped to overthrow democratically elected presidents (Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, Allende in Chile in 1973), but these presidents were replaced with military leaders (the Shah, Pinochet). The CIA’s goal was not to democratize these countries, but halt the spread of communism (or, from a realist perspective, inhibit the influence of Russia within the American sphere of influence in the Middle East and Latin America). So Gabbard’s understanding of this issue is simplistic.