The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | Guests: Tulsi Gabbard & Jason Whitlock | 8/18/23
Aired: 2023-08-18
Duration: 42:35


=== Appalachian Guitarist's Inspiring Journey (12:20) ===

[00:00:00]  A lot, a jam-packed episode and podcast for Friday on the Glenbeck program.
[00:00:08]  We begin with the truth about so much, Hawaii, Biden, the scandals.
[00:00:17]  Did we, I mean, we actually cover this.
[00:00:19]  Did we actually go to the moon?
[00:00:21]  You don't want to miss that segment.
[00:00:23]  And I also tell you the inspiring story of the guy from Appalachia with a guitar.
[00:00:30]  It's an amazing story.
[00:00:32]  You don't want to miss a second, including Tulsi Gabbard, right at the toe end of the podcast.
[00:00:38]  She gives us information of what's happening in Maui that I don't think you've heard yet.
[00:00:43]  We'll give that to you coming up on today's podcast.
[00:00:45]  Brought to you by JaceMedical.com.
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[00:01:40]  Here's the podcast.
[00:01:41]  Listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
[00:01:56]  Yesterday on Facebook, Oliver Anthony, Sarah, do we have a little bit of the Oliver Anthony song?
[00:02:02]  For anybody who hasn't heard it yet, I find it hard to believe that you haven't, but maybe you haven't.
[00:02:08]  Here's a piece of his song.
[00:02:10]  Working home day.
[00:02:12]  North of the world.
[00:02:13]  Overtime hours.
[00:02:15]  Pay so I can sit out here, waste my life away.
[00:02:21]  Drag back home and drink my troubles away.
[00:02:24]  It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to for people like me.
[00:02:31]  People like you.
[00:02:32]  Wish I could just wake up and not be true.
[00:02:36]  But it is.
[00:02:38]  Oh, it is.
[00:02:40]  Living in the new world with an whole soul.
[00:02:48]  These rich men north of richmen, Lord knows they all just want to have total control.
[00:02:56]  Want to know what you think?
[00:02:58]  Want to know what you do, and they don't think you know, but I know that you do, cause your dollar hate, and it's tax to know him, cause rich men, nor for the rich men.
[00:03:13]  This is an amazing song, an amazing story, as it was.
[00:03:17]  And then last night, he went and posted on Facebook.
[00:03:21]  He said, It's been difficult as I browse through the 50,000-plus messages and emails I've received in just the last week.
[00:03:28]  The stories that have been shared paint a brutally honest picture.
[00:03:32]  Suicide, addiction, unemployment, anxiety, depression, hopelessness.
[00:03:38]  And the list goes on.
[00:03:40]  I'm sitting at such a weird place in my life right now.
[00:03:43]  I never wanted to be a full-time musician, much less sit at the top of the iTunes charts.
[00:03:48]  Draven, a friend from Radio West Virginia, and I filmed these tunes on my land with the hope that it might maybe hit 300,000 views.
[00:03:58]  I still don't believe what has went on since we uploaded that.
[00:04:02]  It's strange to me.
[00:04:04]  People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off $8 million offers.
[00:04:09]  I don't want six tour buses, 15 tractor trailers, and a jet.
[00:04:14]  I don't want to play stadium shows.
[00:04:16]  I don't want to be in the spotlight.
[00:04:18]  I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression.
[00:04:24]  These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they're being sung by somebody feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung.
[00:04:33]  No editing, no agent, no BS, just some idiot and his guitar.
[00:04:39]  The style of music that we should have never gotten away from in the first place.
[00:04:44]  That being said, I've never taken time to tell you who I actually am, so here's the formal introduction.
[00:04:50]  My legal name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford.
[00:04:53]  My grandfather was Oliver Anthony.
[00:04:56]  And Oliver Anthony music is a dedication not only to him, but the 1930s Appalachia where I was born and raised.
[00:05:04]  Dirt floors, seven kids, hard times.
[00:05:08]  At this point, I'll gladly go by Oliver because everybody knows me as such.
[00:05:12]  But my friends and family still call me Chris.
[00:05:15]  You decide for yourself.
[00:05:17]  Either way is fine with me.
[00:05:19]  I feel you on that one, Oliver.
[00:05:20]  I feel you.
[00:05:21]  I feel you as Stu.
[00:05:24]  I feel you.
[00:05:26]  In 2010, I dropped out of high school at the age of 17.
[00:05:30]  I have a GED from Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
[00:05:34]  I worked multiple plant jobs in western North Carolina, my last job being in a paper mill in McDowell County.
[00:05:41]  I work third shift six days a week for $14.50 an hour in a living hell.
[00:05:47]  In 2013, I had a bad fall at work, fractured my skull, and it forced me to move back home to Virginia.
[00:05:53]  Due to complications from the injury, it took me six months or so before I could work again.
[00:05:58]  From 2014 until just a few days ago, I worked outside sales in the industrial manufacturing world.
[00:06:06]  My job's taken me all over Virginia and into the Carolinas, getting to know tens of thousands of other blue-collar workers on job sites and in factories.
[00:06:14]  I've spent all day, every day for the last 10 years hearing the same story.
[00:06:19]  People are so damn tired of being neglected, so tired of being divided and manipulated.
[00:06:25]  In 2019, I paid $97,500 for the property, and I still owe about $60,000 on it.
[00:06:32]  I'm living in a 20-foot camper with a tarp on the roof that I got off Craigslist for $750.
[00:06:39]  There's nothing really special about me.
[00:06:41]  I'm not a good musician.
[00:06:43]  I'm not really even a very good person.
[00:06:45]  I've spent the last five years struggling with mental health and using alcohol to drown it.
[00:06:51]  I'm sad to see the world the state's in, with everyone fighting with each other.
[00:06:56]  I've spent many nights feeling hopeless that the greatest country on earth is quickly fading away.
[00:07:02]  That being said, I hate the way the internet has divided all of us.
[00:07:07]  The internet is a parasite that infects the minds of humans and has their way with them.
[00:07:13]  Hours wasted, goals forgotten, loved ones sitting in houses with each other distracted all day by technology made by the hands of other poor souls in sweatshops in a foreign land.
[00:07:24]  When is enough enough?
[00:07:26]  When are we going to fight for what's right again?
[00:07:30]  Millions have died protecting the liberties we have.
[00:07:33]  Freedom of speech is such a precious gift.
[00:07:37]  Never in the world history has the world had freedom that it currently has today.
[00:07:44]  Don't let them take that away from you.
[00:07:47]  Just like those once wandering in the desert, we have lost our way from God and have let false idols distract us and divide us.
[00:07:56]  it's a damn shame i want you to i want you to take his words at heart for a minute That he only did this because he only wrote this song, not because he's a songwriter, but because that's in him.
[00:08:17]  And he was struggling with something and he shared it.
[00:08:22]  He didn't share it knowing that it would become this.
[00:08:26]  He wasn't trying to do anything grand.
[00:08:28]  He was just trying to solve a problem for himself.
[00:08:31]  And then he shared.
[00:08:35]  That's really the hard part.
[00:08:38]  Sharing.
[00:08:40]  Because we're all so afraid and we're becoming more and more afraid of each other because people are actively trying to destroy our relationships with one another, destroy our modes of communication, our empathy for one another.
[00:08:57]  We look at people now, if we even look at them as just, I don't even know, objects?
[00:09:05]  Because the real world has become real in the fake world.
[00:09:11]  That's the world too many people are living in.
[00:09:14]  They're living online.
[00:09:16]  And we're not treating people.
[00:09:18]  We're treating people like we treat people online.
[00:09:22]  And everybody's feeling it.
[00:09:24]  Everybody knows it.
[00:09:28]  He's not just connecting.
[00:09:29]  The reason why he has to be destroyed is because he's the average guy who's just in his own way.
[00:09:38]  Let his voice be heard.
[00:09:42]  I'm on this incredible journey this summer.
[00:09:45]  I don't know where this is going to take me or take us, but I'm trying to solve a problem for my children.
[00:09:55]  And I shared it on the air a few weeks ago.
[00:10:00]  And it was just me just sharing.
[00:10:02]  I wasn't trying to do anything other than just share what I was going through.
[00:10:07]  And I can't tell you how many people have reached out to me and said, oh my gosh, I'm having the same problem.
[00:10:16]  I don't know what to do, but I'm with you.
[00:10:22]  I think this is what Billy Graham told me.
[00:10:26]  That if people will just do exactly what the Lord says to do.
[00:10:32]  And some people don't know what that is.
[00:10:33]  Some people don't hear him clearly.
[00:10:37]  I honestly, I think I hear him.
[00:10:40]  I think I'm going to die and I'm going to get up there.
[00:10:42]  And he's like, dude, that wasn't me.
[00:10:43]  More medication next time around.
[00:10:47]  But I feel like I'm guided in some ways.
[00:10:51]  You know, everything I do wrong, it's me.
[00:10:53]  Everything that I do that is good is because of him.
[00:11:01]  But Billy Graham told me, if everybody will just do their one thing and they're going to think that it is no big deal, they're going to think this is stupid.
[00:11:10]  This isn't going to change anything.
[00:11:14]  He said, it's as if the Lord is planning a surprise party for Satan.
[00:11:20]  And the lights are going to come on and we'll be just as surprised as he is.
[00:11:25]  And the Lord will just go, surprise?
[00:11:28]  And what we'll see in the light is that everyone doing just what they were supposed to do, nothing more, nothing less, has made this mosaic that we will all recognize only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could put together.
[00:11:47]  The things you do just to solve something for yourself, when you share them, I think shocking things come out of them.
[00:12:01]  We all think that we don't have anything important to share or anything important.
[00:12:06]  We hide.
[00:12:08]  We hide our, in my case, alcoholism and self-doubt.
[00:12:17]  We all think, I don't, there's nothing special about me.

=== Breaking the Top 10 Silence (03:05) ===

[00:12:21]  But there is.
[00:12:22]  There really is.
[00:12:24]  I mean, look at this.
[00:12:25]  Here's this song that has just broken all of the, I mean, I've never seen the top 10.
[00:12:34]  You know, in the Beatles' era, in Elvis' era, it wasn't uncommon for the top 10 to have five Beatles songs in it.
[00:12:43]  I haven't seen that from a guy who's completely unknown.
[00:12:51]  This is why evil is tearing us apart.
[00:12:54]  This is why evil is trying to get us to not talk to each other.
[00:12:59]  Evil cannot allow us to share what we really believe.
[00:13:05]  Evil cannot allow us to see our common humanity, our common fears, our common problems, our common solutions, our joys, our wants.
[00:13:16]  I'm convinced the first time I went over to Israel, I met with a bunch of Palestinians and I met with a bunch of Jewish people separately.
[00:13:27]  And what struck me was, they're saying the same things.
[00:13:33]  I don't know why they can't solve this problem.
[00:13:35]  They're saying the same things.
[00:13:38]  I just want my kids to grow up in peace.
[00:13:42]  I just want to go to work and be safe and maybe have enough to be able just to live my life.
[00:13:50]  I don't need a jet.
[00:13:51]  I don't need a big house.
[00:13:52]  I don't need any of that.
[00:13:54]  I just want my children to do a little better than I am.
[00:13:57]  And that doesn't mean necessarily that they do better financially.
[00:14:02]  We've put everything into finances.
[00:14:06]  I've never said to my kids, you know what?
[00:14:11]  Someday you're going to do better than I have.
[00:14:14]  I've told my kids the whole time, good luck with that, because I won the lottery.
[00:14:20]  There's no excuse, no reason I'm the success that I am.
[00:14:26]  Here's what I want you to do.
[00:14:28]  My dream for you is this that you're happier than I am, that you have found peace faster than I found it.
[00:14:40]  Others make us feel needy, make us want to make us need to follow our wants and to fear one another.
[00:14:48]  Don't share the real you with people, and you just might be surprised in the end how much you've contributed to a better society.
[00:15:07]  This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
[00:15:10]  I'm going to go to Jason Whitlock.
[00:15:12]  He is the Blaze TV host of Fearless.
[00:15:16]  And he's one of the nicest guys and most decent men that I know.
[00:15:21]  Welcome to the program.
[00:15:22]  Jason, how are you?
[00:15:23]  I'm great, Glenn.
[00:15:24]  Thanks for having me.
[00:15:26]  You bet.

=== The Michael Orr Lie (12:40) ===

[00:15:27]  So all week, we just haven't had time to get into the Michael Orr story about the movie Blindside.
[00:15:35]  And I wanted to ask you, because I think you probably know all of the players, maybe even personally, but I wanted to get your take on this because, you know, yesterday I saw a tweet that, you know, the Oscars should be given back because it was all a lie.
[00:15:54]  And is it a lie?
[00:15:56]  Was this all a lie?
[00:15:58]  No, not at all.
[00:16:00]  And I can say that having reread the book, The Blindside, published in 2006, read Michael Orr's memoir, his first one in 2011, I Beat the Odds, having re-watched the movie, I did all this this week.
[00:16:23]  No, it's not all a lie.
[00:16:26]  It's actually, the movie is actually pretty accurate to the book and to, and Michael Orr endorsed the book in his 2011 memoir and in subsequent interviews the year since.
[00:16:41]  He has said he liked the book, but he didn't like the way the movie portrayed him as dumb and as, you know, not totally responsible for his own success.
[00:16:55]  And so then you go back and reread the book, The Blindside, which he says he endorses, and the movie portrays him not only fairly, but probably in a far more positive and uplifting light than the book did.
[00:17:13]  This kid came to that family with some severe problems.
[00:17:17]  He couldn't read at age 16.
[00:17:20]  And he had to be taught how to shake hands.
[00:17:23]  He didn't engage with people.
[00:17:25]  He had faced so much neglect, trauma, abandonment from ages 0 to 15 or 16 that, you know, he was embarrassingly shy and reclusive, couldn't read.
[00:17:42]  I didn't get the impression that he was stupid in the movie.
[00:17:46]  I didn't read the book, but I didn't get the impression he was stupid.
[00:17:49]  I got the impression that he had been neglected and he had never been taught any of these things.
[00:17:54]  And I actually came out of the movie having tremendous respect for him because of what he had conquered.
[00:18:00]  Exactly.
[00:18:02]  And again, one of the subtle points of this remaking, recasting of the blind side and the way the media is covering it, the underlying message is that, hey, the nuclear family being raised properly, that's all irrelevant.
[00:18:21]  The only thing that's relevant is, you know, did you face racism?
[00:18:27]  And it's like family and upbringing, we're pretending like this didn't damage this young man incredibly, and that the TUI family and many other families at this private school and friends tried to put a broken child back together and send him along his way.
[00:18:50]  And it's all being denigrated right now.
[00:18:52]  And this rewriting of history that we, it's just, the blind side is just another statue being torn down, Glenn.
[00:19:00]  So before we get to motivation, the one thing that I heard that I've heard differently since, but I want you to address it, was that the TUI family, they were using him.
[00:19:13]  They never adopted him.
[00:19:14]  He thought he was adopted, and it was all a lie.
[00:19:18]  Any of that true, Jason?
[00:19:20]  No.
[00:19:20]  In his 2011 memoir, he writes about the conservatorship, knew that he was not adopted.
[00:19:28]  This is all a rewriting of history.
[00:19:30]  As it relates to their motivation, Sean Tue, the dad, was an all-time great old miss basketball player.
[00:19:38]  His background is basketball.
[00:19:40]  He was a volunteer assistant coach at the Christian high school that brought Michael Orr in.
[00:19:46]  His original interest in Michael was as a basketball player and was writing letters to small colleges thinking if we could ever get this kid academically straight, he could be a 6'5, 300-pound Division III, Division II basketball player, and that's how we'll push him along.
[00:20:08]  They discover the football talent after he's moved into their home.
[00:20:13]  And so this whole thing, like they knew there was NFL riches and he was this great prospect.
[00:20:19]  No, he was a 6'5, 345-pound kid when they got him, and they hoped they could turn him into some Division II, Division III basketball player and get him educated that way.
[00:20:32]  It's a whole recreation of history.
[00:20:34]  The facts just don't line up with what was written in the 2006 book, what Michael Orr cops to in his own original memoir.
[00:20:46]  It's another rewriting of history.
[00:20:49]  So let me go to motivation.
[00:20:52]  I can see the motivation in the press.
[00:20:54]  They love this kind of story.
[00:20:56]  Here you had some heroes.
[00:20:57]  They were, you know, God-centered people, showed the truth about families and what happens when there isn't a family.
[00:21:03]  So I can understand that.
[00:21:05]  But Michael to be involved in this, is it true that he was blackmailing the family for a while?
[00:21:15]  I guess that was the right word and saying, look, I'm going to come out with this unless you pay me.
[00:21:20]  Is that true?
[00:21:22]  That's certainly the allegations that the TUI's lawyers have raised and the TUI son has stated.
[00:21:32]  I guess we'll have to find out over time.
[00:21:34]  But I think as it relates to Michael Orr's motivation, read the book, read his memoir.
[00:21:42]  This is a broken child who has never been put back together.
[00:21:48]  And he's still a broken person.
[00:21:50]  And so there's reason to have great sympathy.
[00:21:53]  And again, this is where it goes back to the message everybody should be taking from this is just like, hey, man, family and upbringing, those first formative years of a child are so vital, so important.
[00:22:06]  If they're damaged in the womb from not being properly cared for, the mother being a crack addict, and if they're abandoned and neglected as a child, these ramifications will go on for a lifetime.
[00:22:19]  And as best I could tell from his 2011 memoir and from reading The Blind Side, he's never gotten that type of therapy and treatment that he obviously needs.
[00:22:31]  And so I think he's come up on hard times.
[00:22:34]  He's written a new book when your back's against the wall.
[00:22:38]  It's out right now.
[00:22:40]  I think he's hyping his book.
[00:22:42]  I think he hopes that someone, some Hollywood producer, Netflix, someone will say, hey, let's do a remake of The Blind Side and tell it the proper way and make the black kid the hero and the white people evil.
[00:22:56]  And let's cut Michael Orr a big check for the new blind side.
[00:23:00]  I think that's his angle.
[00:23:02]  Oh.
[00:23:03]  Wow, that is tragically sad, and it probably will happen.
[00:23:10]  The TUI family, have you had a chance to talk to them or anybody talk to them personally without attorneys and not to say, hey, what's the real score?
[00:23:19]  But how do they feel?
[00:23:22]  They have made a public statement, the dad has, that they're devastated and they should be.
[00:23:28]  This relationship deteriorated years ago.
[00:23:33]  And again, it's not uncommon, Glenn.
[00:23:37]  I have not talked to the TUIs.
[00:23:38]  I want to be perfectly clear with that.
[00:23:39]  I have talked to people that say, contend they know the TUIs, but I'll just talk about myself having been involved with, let's call it, at-risk kids.
[00:23:53]  Took a cousin into my home when I lived in Kansas City for two years to get him up out of a gang lifestyle.
[00:24:01]  After two years, we fell out.
[00:24:04]  He went back home to Indianapolis, got in trouble.
[00:24:07]  We are now very close.
[00:24:09]  He now acknowledges, you know, all the things I was trying to teach him when he was younger were legitimate, and he wished he had listened closer then.
[00:24:19]  But Glenn, and I know, or I can speculate about the amount of charitable work and the people you've tried to help.
[00:24:27]  Sometimes they're just ungrateful.
[00:24:30]  And sometimes the damage that they experience at a young age is too much to overcome.
[00:24:37]  And they eventually lash out at the very people who have shown them love and have tried to help them because they don't know what to do with their emotions.
[00:24:48]  Michael Orr's mom and dad failed him horribly.
[00:24:55]  And the dad is dead.
[00:24:58]  The mom is strung out on drugs or has been for many years.
[00:25:02]  Maybe today, hopefully she's sober.
[00:25:05]  But he's lashing out at some people that have a lot of money and, you know, had showered him with a lot of resources.
[00:25:18]  And sometimes I hate to make the analogy, but you feed a cat and the cat never leaves your doorstep.
[00:25:24]  No matter where you might set them up in a new home, they may make $30, $40 million in the NFL, but eventually may blow that money and return to you, the people that previously surprised them resources and ask again.
[00:25:43]  Well, I will tell you, you know, I learned several years back that if you're doing charity to get love back, you know, good luck with that.
[00:25:59]  You know, it can't change you because so many times you will do something, you know, because you just feel it's right.
[00:26:07]  And, you know, the thing that I learned, and I say this all the time, I'll do something.
[00:26:13]  People say, really?
[00:26:16]  You're expecting that to go well?
[00:26:18]  I'm like, no, I feel compelled to do that.
[00:26:22]  Now, that's up to them with what they do with it.
[00:26:27]  But, you know, I just, I don't ever want to close my heart because you will get burned several times.
[00:26:34]  But there is also those who occasionally will step up and something will happen and it will be glorious, absolutely glorious.
[00:26:45]  And that's much, that's what we should concentrate on, not necessarily the ones that don't work out.
[00:26:51]  Because also, he's got the rest of his life.
[00:26:54]  I mean, this thing may turn around yet again.
[00:26:58]  Who knows?
[00:26:58]  It certainly could.
[00:27:00]  And I do want to back up your hopeful note and just say that I got involved with a Ball State football player.
[00:27:07]  I played football at Ball State.
[00:27:08]  He broke his neck in 2007.
[00:27:12]  Kid named Dante Love.
[00:27:13]  It's been one of the greatest experiences of my life.
[00:27:16]  And Dante's probably now 36, 37 years old, married, two kids, great career, very appreciative of all the things that I did for him.
[00:27:30]  He's like an adopted son to me.
[00:27:33]  And so a lot of these things work out.
[00:27:35]  And Dante comes from a very, very tough, similar, very similar to Michael Orr's background.
[00:27:41]  When he was a student at Ball State, we had to do a lot of things.
[00:27:45]  Coaches, coaches' wives, do a lot of things to help him get through school and to help him catch up from all the neglect he experienced at 10, 11, 12, 13 years old.
[00:27:57]  This is a great young man, knows the Bible forward and backwards.
[00:28:02]  I call him for biblical interpretations.
[00:28:05]  I mean, he's just a great young man.

=== Missing Answers in Maui's Crisis (13:06) ===

[00:28:07]  Great.
[00:28:07]  And so all the time, resources, well worth it.
[00:28:11]  And was it easy?
[00:28:12]  No.
[00:28:13]  Did we have some bad moments?
[00:28:15]  Yes.
[00:28:16]  On the other side, is it awesome and is it great?
[00:28:18]  And I agree with you.
[00:28:20]  Don't do any of it looking for anything other than hopefully you'll get to heaven one day and God will say, hey, I'm well pleased with what you did there.
[00:28:30]  That will be your only reward.
[00:28:32]  Yeah.
[00:28:33]  Jason, thank you so much, as always.
[00:28:35]  Just love you, man.
[00:28:36]  Jason Whitlock, Blaze TV host of Fearless.
[00:28:39]  If you have not seen Fearless yet, you need to.
[00:28:43]  Jason is just doing a tremendous, tremendous job and comes at things at a completely different angle that I think you'll really enjoy.
[00:28:50]  Jason Whitlock, thank you so much, Jason.
[00:28:52]  I appreciate it.
[00:28:53]  You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
[00:28:57]  Thank you so much for everything that you're doing for Maui.
[00:29:02]  Mentioned this a couple of days ago.
[00:29:04]  We're approaching a million dollars in aid just from this audience.
[00:29:09]  The average donation is about $100, and I just, I love you.
[00:29:14]  I just love you.
[00:29:15]  Thank you for caring about people's plight no matter where they are.
[00:29:22]  This is just growing into a disturbing story, and I'm not sure exactly what's going on, except at least incompetence seems to be coming forward.
[00:29:35]  I hope it doesn't get worse than that.
[00:29:38]  Tulsi Gabbard is here.
[00:29:40]  This used to be one of her districts that she would frequently visit when she was a congresswoman.
[00:29:46]  Tulsi Gabbard is on reserve duty right now, so we can't talk at all about politics, and I don't want to get her into trouble.
[00:29:55]  So we're just going to talk about the situation because I don't know what's happening, and I'm hearing all kinds of things.
[00:30:04]  I don't know if those are true or not.
[00:30:06]  I'm just seeing things that I've never seen as a broadcaster before, so I don't know how to answer them.
[00:30:11]  Tulsi, welcome.
[00:30:13]  Hey, and to all of your listeners for all of their support.
[00:30:20]  It really means so much to our community there on Maui that is continuing now nine days after this crisis began, really struggling and suffering and is having a hard time looking to see what that road towards rebuilding looks like.
[00:30:35]  But your support means the world.
[00:30:38]  Thank you, Tulsi.
[00:30:39]  So we're hearing things like homeowners are not allowed to go back.
[00:30:46]  We are nine days after this, and we still have 1,000 people missing.
[00:30:52]  I don't know of a natural disaster in America that has been in such a tight area where this many days after, we are still missing 1,000 people.
[00:31:06]  We've heard stories that these numbers are being quashed intentionally, that the National Guard has closed this whole area off.
[00:31:15]  I've never seen that before.
[00:31:17]  What's happening?
[00:31:20]  These are all a lot of questions that folks on the ground have and are very appropriate.
[00:31:28]  It's unfortunate there has been so little communication coming through official channels at a time where the mayor needs to be out there on social media or on TV every single day giving extensive and open update briefs to be as completely transparent as possible so that people know what's going on.
[00:31:51]  There's been a vacuum of communication, and as you know, in that vacuum, a lot of questions and a lot of fears and concerns arise.
[00:32:00]  So let's just kind of start with the first, you know, some of the first questions that you asked there.
[00:32:07]  This is an unprecedented crisis in the last hundred years in our country.
[00:32:13]  Right now we have first responders out there on the island of Maui who are from across the country who are helping to support the foremost mission, which is remains recovery.
[00:32:24]  This wildfire started with a small brush fire that quickly grew out of control because of these 100 mile an hour winds.
[00:32:32]  It's suspected that downed electric lines contributed to its spread.
[00:32:38]  But really the word that I have heard best describe this wildfire is it was like a blowtorch.
[00:32:45]  It was an out-of-control wildfire that swept horizontally and very quickly in less than an hour across the historic town of Lahaina, taking down and turning into ash everything in its path.
[00:33:02]  People have explained how these flames sometimes hopped and skipped, which is why you saw boats that were a little bit far off of land get completely destroyed.
[00:33:17]  The questions about how is it possible that there are still over a thousand people missing?
[00:33:23]  How is it possible that at last count they have only identified the remains?
[00:33:27]  Actually, they haven't identified the who, but they have recovered the remains of 111 people.
[00:33:34]  When you think about the quickness of this fire and the destruction, just imagine you have a three or four story boutique hotel there in Lahaina.
[00:33:48]  This fire comes in and levels that hotel down to the ground.
[00:33:54]  We don't know how many people were in their hotel rooms.
[00:33:59]  From what I'm told, they're not able to recover records of who might have been in that hotel.
[00:34:08]  And then you take that example and just spread that across the entire town and homes and shops.
[00:34:14]  Front Street in Lahaina had shops lining both sides of the streets.
[00:34:18]  You had restaurants.
[00:34:19]  You have tourists.
[00:34:19]  You have residents.
[00:34:20]  You have service workers.
[00:34:23]  You have a lot of people in a very small area who very sadly perished in a very short period of time.
[00:34:34]  Now, there's a Google spreadsheet that's going around where family members have listed the names of their loved ones as missing.
[00:34:43]  But this recovery is going, this remains recovery mission is so slow because it requires cadaver dogs to go and find these remains.
[00:34:56]  Unfortunately, the destruction is so great that the human eye is not enough in many of these cases to identify these remains.
[00:35:06]  And so, this process is going to go on.
[00:35:09]  And I expect the mayor or the governor will be making an announcement with a time estimate soon.
[00:35:15]  But there are not very many cadaver dogs in the United States of America, trained cadaver dogs.
[00:35:22]  I've been told that there are 20 on the ground there.
[00:35:25]  They can work for 20 minutes, then they need 20 minutes' rest.
[00:35:29]  So they're rotating these cadaver dogs so that they can go through and do their work.
[00:35:36]  But they are not moving from one area to the next until all the remains in that specific area have been identified by these dogs and then allowing the humans to come in and do that work.
[00:35:51]  It's a very slow, slow process.
[00:35:54]  And that's not, sorry, just to finish that, that's not even beginning the process of the identification of DNA and figuring out, you know, matching these remains to people, correct?
[00:36:06]  So this would put to rest another question that I have had.
[00:36:10]  I've never seen anything where people can't return in to go through their own rubble.
[00:36:16]  Insurance ingestors are not allowed to go in, and they've blocked everything so nobody can go back in.
[00:36:22]  That would answer the question on why that's happening.
[00:36:26]  There's two main reasons.
[00:36:27]  They don't want anything touched too many people.
[00:36:29]  Go ahead.
[00:36:29]  Correct.
[00:36:30]  There's two main reasons for that.
[00:36:31]  They need to preserve the area for the remains recovery mission to go on undisturbed, number one.
[00:36:38]  Number two, as you can imagine, along with all of the different buildings and houses, there were two gas stations completely leveled to the ground.
[00:36:50]  Those gas stations had underground fuel tanks.
[00:36:53]  The level of toxicity in this area is very, very serious.
[00:37:02]  And so that is another factor that local officials are rightly taking into account of coming up with a plan on both for the near term, you know, okay, well, we've got to make sure that anybody going in there at the point where they are able to open it up to families to be able to go back to their homes, which needs to happen as soon as possible, if nothing else but for closure.
[00:37:26]  They've got to make sure they've got the protective respirators and gear to make sure that they're not causing a medical crisis in the process.
[00:37:40]  The removal of the toxic, you know, this is not just going to be about clearing debris in this case.
[00:37:46]  I've been told in order to remove the toxic elements that have been caused by this fire, they're going to have to dig down, you know, five to ten feet to be able to remove all of that and then figure out where does it go, how do they transport it, and everything else that follows there.
[00:38:01]  All right.
[00:38:01]  So I've only got a couple of minutes.
[00:38:02]  I have a couple more questions left.
[00:38:04]  One of them is about the guy who has just resigned.
[00:38:10]  And I actually feel bad for him because I think he probably thought he was doing the right thing by not turning on the air siren.
[00:38:19]  Because what I read, he said, if I would have turned it on, people would have gone to the top of the mountain because that's what they're trained to do and they would have gone right into the fire.
[00:38:29]  Do you believe that?
[00:38:31]  Or, I mean, I don't want to throw this guy underneath the bus.
[00:38:35]  Well, you know what?
[00:38:37]  I call bullshit on that.
[00:38:38]  And hearing that response really pissed me off.
[00:38:41]  It really pissed me off because of a couple of reasons.
[00:38:45]  He's the Department of Emergency Management director.
[00:38:48]  Why did it take him, what is it, eight days for him to show up in front of the media and answer questions?
[00:38:54]  He should have been the first guy out there when this thing happened, answering questions, fielding concerns.
[00:39:00]  It took him eight days to show up at that podium and show his face to the public, number one.
[00:39:05]  Number two, we have a highly sophisticated alarm system across the state of Hawaii because of our proximity to hurricanes and tsunamis and all sorts of different natural disasters.
[00:39:17]  We know that if it's a tsunami, we get days warning.
[00:39:21]  If there's an earthquake in Japan, they say, hey, tsunami alert.
[00:39:25]  A tsunami may be headed your way.
[00:39:27]  That didn't happen, and we're smart enough to know that.
[00:39:30]  These alarm systems are used in the case of any form of natural disaster.
[00:39:34]  A tsunami alert could have been ruled out immediately because they don't just show up out of nowhere.
[00:39:40]  We will get that notice.
[00:39:42]  That alarm sounding could have, could have possibly prevented loss of life.
[00:39:49]  So I don't buy that.
[00:39:50]  I don't buy that reasoning at all.
[00:39:52]  Tell me about the water guy who seems to have some love affair with water being more sacred than people in some of his former statements that didn't act to turn on the water.
[00:40:04]  And it looks now like it was because of water equity.
[00:40:08]  Is that true?
[00:40:10]  This is a much longer question, unfortunately, than you have time for.
[00:40:14]  Maui has a long history of different entities fighting over who owns the water on Maui.
[00:40:22]  And unfortunately, for decades now, people, the people have been suffering as a result.
[00:40:29]  So I'm still learning the details of, you know, they say they made the request to use the water for the fire trucks.
[00:40:35]  The state didn't approve it quickly enough.
[00:40:37]  You know, I could tell you what I would do in that position.
[00:40:41]  I would have just said, use the water.
[00:40:42]  I'll ask for permission later.
[00:40:44]  But, you know, it's a really complex problem that ultimately can be summed up to corporations buying water rights to irrigate plantation fields and local people suffering from drought and lack of water as a result.
[00:41:04]  That's the historical context that we're operating under.
[00:41:09]  This is just a mess.

=== Prayers and Supplies for Maui (01:21) ===

[00:41:13]  And I wish you and your family all the luck in the world and our love and prayers and our hard-earned money are going out to everybody who's affected.
[00:41:25]  I don't know how this ends up, but it's really bad so far.
[00:41:30]  Good things we'll come up with.
[00:41:31]  I would love to keep in touch with you, keep in touch with you and your listeners and just ask you to stand with us for the long haul, even though there has been and we will continue to learn about incompetency and failures and perhaps negligence on the part of the government.
[00:41:47]  And, you know, who knows the electric company, who knows who else is really culpable for things that should have been done but didn't.
[00:41:54]  But ultimately, I just ask that your hearts and prayers stay with the people of Maui who are, you know, who need our support in every way as this recovery and rebuild goes on.
[00:42:07]  I want you to know, at least with my audience, I'm pretty sure their hearts are with the people of Maui.
[00:42:16]  They're responding, as usual, they're responding in a big way.
[00:42:21]  And we've already sent a gigantic plan load of supplies out.
[00:42:27]  We're on the ground.
[00:42:28]  I think we were one of the first people on the ground and will be the last to leave.
[00:42:32]  So, Tulsi, thank you.
[00:42:33]  Thank you so much.
[00:42:34]  Thank you, Gwen.