The Schema Always Wins
Why Tulsi Gabbard’s career makes perfect sense if you stop looking at what she believes.
In 1932, a Cambridge psychologist called Frederic Bartlett published a book called Remembering. It is one of the most important books in the history of psychology, and almost nobody outside academia has heard of it.
Bartlett wanted to understand how memory works. The answer he found was unsettling. Memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction. Every time you remember something, your brain rebuilds it from scratch, and the blueprint it uses is not the original event. The blueprint is you.
Bartlett called this blueprint a schema. Your schema is the structure your brain uses to make sense of the world. It is built from your culture, your upbringing, your social environment, and your earliest experiences. It is not a belief system. It is deeper than that. It is the machinery that processes beliefs.
His most famous experiment involved English university students reading a Native American folk tale called “The War of the Ghosts.” The story contained elements that made no sense to Edwardian English people — spirits, canoes, supernatural warfare. When the students retold the story later, the unfamiliar elements had quietly disappeared. Ghosts became people. Canoes became boats. The bits that did not fit the students’ existing schema were not forgotten. They were replaced with things that did fit.
The schema does not store information. It digests it.
This matters because the schema was built first. Everything that arrives afterwards gets processed through it. Information that fits the schema gets reinforced and retained. Information that does not fit gets gradually transformed or dropped. Not deliberately. Not consciously. The reconstruction engine does it automatically, every time you recall.
Your first schema is your deepest one. It was installed before you had the tools to question it.
Now. Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard grew up inside a religious community led by a man called Chris Butler, who founded the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler is a self-described guru in the Vaishnava Hindu tradition. The community is eschatological. It has a divine authority structure. The world has a script. The guru knows it. You follow.
This was Gabbard’s first schema. Not her first political opinion. Her first cognitive architecture.
Her father, Mike Gabbard, was the political arm of the same environment. He ran anti-gay activism campaigns across Hawaii, hosted a radio show, led the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, and successfully pushed a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. He was a Republican. He later switched to Democrat. The party label changed. The underlying structure did not.
Young Tulsi campaigned alongside her father. At twenty-one she won a seat in the Hawaii state legislature, explicitly citing her work on the anti-gay marriage campaign as evidence of her leadership. She was not rebelling. She was inside the schema.
This is the foundation. Everything that follows needs to be read through it.
In 2003, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard. She deployed to Iraq in 2004 and Kuwait in 2008.
The US military has a well-documented Dispensationalist template operating at institutional scale inside active command structures. This is not a conspiracy claim. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been cataloguing it for years. Eschatological Christianity is embedded in parts of the American military in ways that would be unrecognisable to most civilians.
Gabbard went from one eschatological environment to another. The schema was not disrupted. It was reinforced.
What changed was the political surface. She came back from deployment as an anti-war Democrat. She opposed interventionism. She talked about the human cost of conflict. This looked like a dramatic shift. It was not.
Anti-interventionism is perfectly compatible with a divine-authority schema. Earthly powers should not play God. Wars of regime change are acts of hubris. The world has a script and Washington is not the author. The content flipped. The structure stayed the same.
Bartlett would predict this. The schema retained the compatible elements of the military experience and transformed the incompatible ones. What came out the other side looked progressive. It was a reconstruction.
From 2013 to 2021, Gabbard served in Congress as a Democrat from Hawaii. She became vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. She endorsed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016. She ran for president in 2020.
During this period she held positions that looked like they came from three different people.
She was a progressive economic populist. Medicare for All. Anti-corporate. Workers’ rights.
She was a foreign policy isolationist who met with Bashar al-Assad in 2017, questioned whether his regime was behind chemical weapons attacks, and was described by multiple outlets as doing the work of Russian propaganda. She sold “No War With Iran” t-shirts.
She supported Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and backed legislation to restrict trans women in sport.
Commentators at the time described this as incoherent. Unprincipled. Opportunistic. A woman who would say anything to anyone.
It was none of those things. The schema was doing its job.
The progressive economics was the weakest fit. It required her to adopt positions that had no anchor in the original template. Bartlett predicts these will be the first elements to be dropped or transformed, because they are the hardest for the schema to reconstruct. And they were. By 2022, she was silent on workers’ rights while sitting on a panel with right-wing influencers. The compatible elements — anti-establishment distrust, opposition to institutional overreach — survived. The incompatible ones quietly vanished.
The Assad visit was Protocols-template-adjacent. The hidden hand. Foreign powers manipulating events. The real enemy is not the dictator gassing his own people — it is the shadowy institutional machinery driving regime change. This fits the schema beautifully. Divine authority knows the script. Earthly institutions are the corrupters. The target rotates — sometimes it is the US establishment, sometimes Israel, sometimes NATO — but the structure is conserved.
The social conservatism never left. It was always there, underneath, because it was installed first.
In February 2023, Gabbard appeared at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington. She shared a stage with Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Jill Stein, and Jimmy Dore. The event was organised by forces adjacent to the LaRouche movement. It was explicitly pro-Russia, anti-NATO, and demanded the dissolution of Western alliance structures.
This was deep Protocols territory. The hidden hand is America. The war in Ukraine is a manufactured crisis driven by corrupt elites. Russia is the victim.
Gabbard was not out of place. The schema processed it. Anti-interventionism, distrust of institutional authority, hidden forces driving conflict — all compatible. The specific target (NATO, the US, Ukraine’s Western backers) does not matter. The structure matters.
In October 2024, Gabbard formally joined the Republican Party and endorsed Donald Trump. In February 2025, the Senate confirmed her as Director of National Intelligence.
She went home.
Trump’s political identity sits inside the Dispensationalist template. The world has a divine script. The leader is chosen. The enemy is eschatological. Graham, Hannity, Huckabee, Loomer — the actors closest to Trump are Dispensationalist-resident. Trump shares their template affinity.
Gabbard’s arrival in Trump’s circle was not a conversion. It was a return. The Dispensationalist template was her first schema. Butler’s community. Her father’s activism. The military command structure. Every other position she held was a temporary reconstruction — the schema processing new information, retaining what fit, dropping what did not.
When Trump’s gravitational well opened up in her original template, she fell back. The return was energetically favourable. It was downhill.
This week, during Senate testimony, several senators pointed out that Gabbard had suddenly omitted official statements she had previously made — statements that contradicted Trump’s position on Iran. She was caught in a superposition. She had held the “No War With Iran” position and the “bomb Iran” position simultaneously, in different contexts, for different audiences.
The Senate hearing forced a measurement. One position survived. The other was dropped.
This is not hypocrisy. This is the schema completing its work. The Protocols-compatible “hidden hand driving war” position and the Dispensationalist “divine war” position cannot coexist when someone forces you to pick. The schema picks the one it was built from.
Bartlett’s English students did the same thing. When the story contained elements that did not fit, the reconstruction engine replaced them with elements that did. Gabbard’s “No War With Iran” was a ghost in a canoe. This week, it became a boat.
Here is what Frederic Bartlett understood in 1932, ninety-four years ago, that most political commentary still does not.
People do not hold beliefs and then act on them. People have schemas and then reconstruct beliefs to fit. The schema was built first. Everything else is renovation.
If you want to understand Tulsi Gabbard’s career, stop asking what she believes. Ask what her schema was built from. The answer has not changed since she was a child in Chris Butler’s community, learning that the world has a divine script and that authority flows from above.
Every position she has ever held is a reconstruction filtered through that architecture. The bits that fit survived. The bits that did not were quietly replaced with something more familiar.
The schema always wins.
This is a companion piece to “The O’Brien Paradox” and “The Pekka Principle.” Frederic Bartlett’s Remembering (1932) is referenced extensively in the forthcoming book The Outrage Dividend*. The formal framework behind this analysis is in peer review. All subscription revenue from The Angry Dogs goes to Ukrainian causes.*