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Start of Day from one timezone to GMT

I am using moment-timezone library to build a UI that needs to be relative to a variety of timezones.
I am taking an input of a timezone, i.e "America/Chicago" and need to get the start of day in GMT.
For instance, if today is March 27th at 9am Chicago time (2pm GMT), I need to get the date in epoch seconds for March 27th, 00:00 AM.
I'm using the moment.tz("America/Chicago").startOf('day') but I keep getting Tue Mar 27 2018 01:00:00 GMT-0400 (EDT) . Any idea how to do this?
Thanks

// This part you are already doing correctly.
// You get back a Moment object representing the start of the current day in Chicago:
var m = moment.tz("America/Chicago").startOf('day');
I need to get the date in epoch seconds
// Ok, so simply now get the associated Unix Time
var timestamp = m.unix();
Also note that the correct terminology is "Unix Time", not "epoch seconds".
See my blog post: "Please don't call it Epoch Time".
... but I keep getting Tue Mar 27 2018 01:00:00 GMT-0400 (EDT)
You are probably either looking at _d or a Date object, or rather the string representation of one. Don't. See this Moment.js documentation for details.
Per your comment:
I need to take the current time in a specific timezone. I then need to convert that time to the corresponding day in GMT. Finally I need to get the midnight epoch timestamp of that GMT day.
That's a little different then you originally asked, but it would be like this:
var timestamp = moment.utc().startOf('day').unix();
Note that there's no purpose in involving another time zone for this operation. Logically, when asking for "Now in time zone A converted to time zone B", it's the same as asking for "Now in time zone B". In other words, you would get the same value even when the time zone was present:
var timestamp = moment.tz('America/Chicago').utc().startOf('day').unix();
So you're better off just leaving the time zone out.

Why does Javascript show me the wrong date?

Consider the following date object which is created in JavaScript.
var date = new Date("2017-09-07T16:46:06.000Z");
This date object should be equivalent to Sep 7 2017 4:46:06 PM
However, in the browser console, when I type the following:
console.log(date);
The following is returned:
Fri Sep 08 2017 02:46:06 GMT+1000 (E. Australia Standard Time)
The time is wrong. (It actually is today's date, but the time is completely wrong).
Key points of confusion:
My computer timezone is set to GMT+1000 (Australia/Brisbane)
When I created the date object, I did not specify the timezone, therefore it should conform to my systems timezone
When I log the date object to the console, it is still using GMT+1000 (Australia/Brisbane) but the date is different

When you created the date, you did specify a timezone. That Z at the end means Zulu or Greenwich Mean Time. Your computer is 10 hours off from GMT, so it adjusts to your local timezone for display.
If you want the date to be in your local time zone, remove the Z

var date = new Date("2017-09-07T16:46:06.000Z");
So it looks like the Z at the end of your date string is meant to represent UTC or Zulu time
var date = new Date("2017-09-07T16:46:06.000");
should be the correct solution

Why does js subtract a day from a Date object with a certain format?

I get dates from the database in this format:
yyyy-mm-dd
When I create a javascript Date object using this string, it builds a day before the date.
You can test this in your console:
var d = new Date("2015-02-01");
d
You will get January 31st! I've tested many theories, but none answer the question.
The day is not zero-based, otherwise it would give Feb 00, not Jan 31
It's not performing a math equation, subtracting the day from the month and/or year
Date(2015-02-01) = Wed Dec 31 1969
Date("2015-01") = Wed Dec 31 2014
It is not confusing the day for the month
Date("2015-08-02") = Sat Aug 01 2015
If this were true the date would be Feb 08 2015
If you create a Date using a different format, it works fine
Date("02/01/2015") = Feb 1st, 2015
My conclusion is that js does this purposefully. I have tried researching 'why' but can't find an explanation. Why does js build dates this way, but only with this format? Is there a way around it, or do I have to build the Date, then set it to the next day?
PS: "How to change the format of the date from the db" is not what I'm asking, and that is why I'm not putting any db info here.

Some browsers parse a partial date string as UTC and some as a local time,
so when you read it the localized time may differ from one browser to another
by the time zone offset.
You can force the Date to be UTC and add the local offset if you
want the time to be guaranteed local:
1. set UTC time:
var D= new Date("2015-02-01"+'T00:00:00Z');
2. adjust for local:
D.setMinutes(D.getMinutes()+D.getTimezoneOffset());
value of D: (local Date)
Sun Feb 01 2015 00:00:00 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
Offset will be whatever is local time.
Some differences between browsers when time zone is not specified in a parsed string:
(tested on Eastern Standard Time location)
(new Date("2015-02-01T00:00:00")).toUTCString();
Firefox 35: Sun, 01 Feb 2015 05:00:00 GMT
Chrome 40: Sun, 01 Feb 2015 00:00:00 GMT
Opera 27: Sun, 01 Feb 2015 00:00:00 GMT
IE 11: Sun, 01 Feb 2015 05:00:00 GMT
IE and Firefox set the Date as if it was local, Chrome and Opera as if it was UTC.

In javascript, Date objects are internally represented as the number of milliseconds since Jan 1st 1970 00:00:00 UTC. So instead of thinking of it as a "date" in the normal sense, try thinking of a Date object as a "point in time" represented by an integer number (without timezone).
When constructing your Date object using a string, you are actually just calling the parse function. Most date time formats (including ISO 8601) allow you to reduce the precision of a date string.
For reduced precision, any number of values may be dropped from any
of the date and time representations, but in the order from the least
to the most significant.
e.g. 2015-02-01 would represent the day February 1st 2015.
This causes a dilemma for javascript because a Date object is always accurate to the millisecond. Javascript cannot store a reduced accuracy date since it is just an integer of milliseconds since 1st Jan 1970. So it does the next best thing which is to assume a time of midnight (00:00:00) if not specified, and a timezone of UTC if not specified.
All valid javascript implementations should give the same result for this:
var d = new Date("2015-02-01");
alert(d.getTime());
1422748800000
The out-by-1-day issue comes when outputting the date either to some (often unclear) debugger or using the getter methods because the local timezone is used. In a browser, that will be your operating systems timezone. Anyone "west" of Greenwich Mean Time may see this problem because they have a negative UTC offset. Please note there are UTC equivalent functions too which use the UTC timezone, if you are really just interested in representing a date rather than a point in time.

Javascript date formatting - one hour out due to daylight saving

So now, its 9:23am. I have a UTC date string that represents the current date, that looks like this "2012-07-17T09:23:27.75"
I want that in a date object, so I can display a nicely formatted date, so I:
var myDate = new Date("2012-07-17T09:23:27.75")
// Gives --> Tue Jul 17 2012 10:23:27 GMT+0100 (GMT Daylight Time)
So because of daylight saving time I'm getting an hour-out issue. I can see that myDate.getTimezoneOffset() gives me -60, what's the standard / best practice way to get my date to actually reflect the current correct time? Have I just entered javascript date hell?

Try momentjs.com. I really found it handy for such things.
var myDate = moment("2012-07-17T09:23:27.75");
Gives you a date instance in your timezone (that basically configured on your computer). Moreover momentjs has nice human friendly formattings like "a couple of seconds ago", "a month ago",...
Dates are really a hell in JS (but not only in JS). The best thing you can do is to always only transport in UTC between browser <-> server. Then on the server convert it to what time format you like, you obviously only have to be consistent. That way I managed to handle date-times properly.

Try removing the 'T'
I was debugging some date time format issue in chrome when I found out that in console
new Date('2016-04-16T15:15:00') returns Sat Apr 16 2016 16:15:00 GMT+0100 (GMT Daylight Time)
while
new Date('2016-04-16 15:15:00') returns Sat Apr 16 2016 15:15:00 GMT+0100 (GMT Daylight Time)

Convert date/time in GMT to EST in Javascript

In Javascript, how can I convert date/time in GMT to EST irrespective of user settings?

var tmpDate = New Date("enter any valid Date format here")
The javascript Date() function will automatically convert it to your local time.
Example:
var tmpDate = new Date("Fri Jul 21 02:00:00 GMT 2012");
alert(tmpDate);
//Result: Fri Jul 20 22:00:00 EDT 2012
Try some different values at jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/R3huD/

i was surprise to find the simplest solution.
If you have date in GMT, and when you create date in browser it always create in that time zone.
Simplest way is create date object with GMT itself and then do below
starTime.setHours(starTime.getHours()+(starTime.getTimezoneOffset()/60));
That's it. Even if you have date of future after day light saving like after November then also it will also work.

See here:
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://articles.techrepublic%2ecom%2ecom/5100-10878_11-6016329.html
all you have to do is get the time in miliseconds and then add the offset in milliseconds and then shift back to a date time object