Tulsi Gabbard and Joe Rogan critique the DEA’s cannabis rescheduling as insufficient, exposing how industrial giants like Hearst and Anslinger weaponized racial fear to ban hemp despite its historical utility. They warn of foreign data exploitation—China’s alleged $10B purchase of 23andMe DNA—and Apple/Google’s surveillance-driven business models, while Gabbard highlights the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech to silence dissent, including Harvard and Stanford experts. The Maui wildfires reveal systemic failures: FEMA’s $700 payouts, contaminated land, and Andaya’s dereliction amid 92 police department recommendations. Gabbard’s book For Love of Country urges rejecting power abuses and defending constitutional freedoms before they vanish like the 90% of ocean fish lost in 50 years. [Automatically generated summary]
There's some pretty reasonably priced options for coolers that you could actually do in a bathtub now.
There's a bunch of different ways you should do it, but if you've got the scratch, like one of these blue cubes or something similar, or Morosco makes a really good one too, they're really good.
And for years, he's been the state's biggest advocate for hemp as an economic driver and to try to help revive agriculture in Hawaii.
endlessly about the houses and just everything, all of the different benefits of hemp.
He's got some hemp aloha shirts and the whole deal.
This thing that you're talking about, though, the federal government and the classification is the biggest barrier to this actually becoming a really viable and thriving industry in our country because people are growing crops of hemp, but they've got to go through all of the federal government and the classification is the biggest barrier to this actually becoming a A really viable and thriving industry in our country because people are growing crops of hemp, but they've got to go through all of this crazy THC testing.
And I've talked to people who are farmers and business people who are investing in this, and they've had to throw entire crops away because of...
I don't know the details about the testing, but it just...
One plus one doesn't equal two when you look at the reality of the benefits of hemp and the farming process and the concerns that they have within the DEA. So is the concern if it has any level of THC at all becomes illegal, even if you're just processing it as a commodity and you're not using it?
What's interesting, I mean, for us in Hawaii, I mean, tourism is the biggest economic driver we have.
And every time there's, you know, in the post 9-11 when people weren't traveling so much, during COVID, when everything shut down, businesses go out of business.
Small businesses are driven out because if they don't have that driver.
So the conversation always comes up about, okay, well, we've got to diversify our economy.
And this is one of those areas that has huge potential for a small island state like ours in Hawaii to And what's interesting is Mitch McConnell...
I believe he's from Kentucky.
Their state is also a state that is promoting hemp as a major agriculture driver.
So there's opportunity there, but it requires a lot more education from those both in the administration and in Congress to actually take down those barriers and allow it to actually truly be an industry in America.
And their fear is like you're going to piss hot because you take the random urinalysis tests and everything else.
But it...
So, I laughed.
You know, I mean, again, it's lack of education, it's fear, and it's like, well, this is banned by the federal government, so the military must comply.
But at the same time, the guy within the army, the civilian who was putting out this policy...
He also said you're not allowed to eat anything with poppy seed.
You can't eat a poppy seed muffin because you might piss hot.
The wildest thing is how it happened in the first place.
The wildest thing how it happened in the first place is because it was all...
William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger.
And so what happened was William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst Publications, he also owned not just newspapers but he owned paper mills and he owned forests.
So he had all these forests that they would cut down the wood and use it to make paper.
Well, if they were going to transfer over to hemp, this is going to be very costly.
And the cover of Popular Science magazine in, I think it was 1930, find out what year that cover was.
It says, Because they came up with a new machine, and it was called a decorticator.
And this new device was a device that allows you to effectively process the hemp fiber in a much quicker and easier way.
So it's this machine that grinds it up.
And so once they do this, they go, oh boy, we figured out, they've solved this problem of hemp.
It's very durable.
But it's really difficult to break down to the actual fibers.
So 1938. Oh, wow.
So this comes out in 1938, Hemp the New Billion Dollar Crop.
And so it's the cover of Popular Science magazine.
Do they have the cover so you can see what it says?
So the article is from 1938. And so when they come out with this, they talk about this new invention.
See if you could find a photo of the decorticator.
Because it's like this grindy kind of thing.
Is that what it looks like?
Hemp the new billion-dollar crop.
So once they had this ability to really quickly turn it into fibers, then big industry starts getting involved.
And what they start doing is they start making these stories and putting them in the newspaper about Mexicans and black people smoking this new drug called marijuana and raping white women.
And marijuana was not Marijuana was a wild Mexican tobacco.
It was a slang for a wild Mexican tobacco.
It had nothing to do with marijuana.
So they started attaching this name to something and calling it a drug because they knew that cannabis was so ubiquitous.
And hemp as a commodity, everybody knew what it was good for.
In this film, you will see the ease with which this vicious plant can be grown in your neighbor's yard, rolled into harmless-looking cigarettes, hidden in an innocent shoe or watch case.
In this startling film, you will see dumpsters lure children to destruction.
We're going over to Joe's place.
Why don't you come along?
We have a date to play a set of doubles.
Oh, you can play anytime.
Come on, we'll have some laughs.
Can I go along with you?
Sure.
Hey, I'll see you at dinner, sis.
If you want a good smoke, try one of these.
You will meet Bill, who wants to pride in his strong will as he takes the first step toward enslavement.
And what's also important about it is, the problem with something like that is that now you don't trust the media, right?
Now if you don't trust the media, and then you go out and try it yourself, you don't have real accurate information.
Because now there's like this, there's these narratives that have been created that aren't based on truth, and so you don't know where to go.
You don't know what's real and what's not, and then you have people that tell you it's harmless, and then you have people tell you, well, there's people like me that go, Nah, because I'm like, it's not harmless.
Marijuana is not a harmless thing.
You definitely shouldn't take it when you're young.
And here's what's really important.
Some people can't handle it for whatever reason.
And it's most likely some biological thing, just like some people are allergic to aspirin or whatever.
Like there's some people, they don't mix well with that stuff.
And there's a real connection between schizophrenia with some people that maybe are susceptible to schizophrenia.
Alex Berenson wrote a great book about it called Tell Your Children.
It's very interesting because there's real instances of people taking high doses and getting schizophrenic.
But if we're being lied to about it, no one knows who's going to give me the information.
Where's the truth coming out?
Because if one group is saying that this is a Schedule I chemical and it's very dangerous, then all your friends are just smoking weed and going to the movies.
You're like, well, clearly...
This is not that dangerous.
Like jujitsu people and surfers, they're all getting high.
What's real here?
And because we don't have the ability to just honestly talk about things without everything getting so weird and like the hemp thing, like having a hemp flag, like this is a problem with the DEA. Hey guys, don't you have fentanyl to worry about?
The conflict here is, as you know, you know, as majority of states in the country have legalized it in some fashion, whether it's medicinal or recreational or whatever, all these different levels.
But because of the federal prohibition, essentially, you know, you've got banking.
It is a multi, I don't know, multi hundred million dollar industry, at least at this point.
But in order to be able to conduct business with the bank, the bank and the business owner faces a potential federal charge of a crime.
And so it's, you know, the second, third, fourth order of effects of this scheduling of cannabis is very, very far-reaching and creating a worse problem, which, you know, is, you know, okay, so we do this on the black market, does this just become a cash industry, or where does this go?
Yeah, and the problem also is by having some states have it legal and some states have it illegal, then you still open up a market for illegal sales in the country, and what happens is the cartel comes in and they start growing it on public lands.
I had a guy on the podcast, his name is John Norris, and he started off as a game warden.
So he started off as a guy who's going to check fishing licenses and stuff.
One day, they find that a stream has been diverted, and they're trying to figure out why, why the stream has dried up.
So they make their way up the stream, and they find this irrigation system that's set up for an illegal marijuana grow up in the middle of public land in California.
So then they develop a tactical team.
So it goes from him being a game ward to now they have dogs and bulletproof vests.
They're getting in shootouts with the cartel.
Because they're making millions of dollars, but they're using really dangerous chemicals and pesticides that are illegal to use on crops in America.
They're just using that shit up there.
So who knows what the fuck you're getting if you're living in one of these states that has illegal pot.
Because when California changed the law and made marijuana legal recreationally, they made growing marijuana without a license.
It's just a misdemeanor.
So these guys that are just doing it now from the cartel, they're like, you have nothing to risk.
It's a misdemeanor, and we can make millions and millions of dollars.
And so they have these guys up there.
They have rosaries and all those photos of Jesus and shit they find in campgrounds.
And they pay these guys to go out there, grow this stuff, and then bring it out.
Harvest it and bring it out.
And they're selling it.
He said that, I think, believe, John said at the time of our podcast that 90% of all the marijuana that's being sold in the states where it's illegal is all from these grow-ups, a lot of them in California, on public land by the cartels.
Even good old-fashioned American pot-growing entrepreneurs, the illegal ones, they can't keep up with the cartel.
And this is because it's illegal.
And this is the same reason why fentanyl's coming in.
I mean...
Don't do heroin, kids.
Okay?
But if you keep everything illegal, you're going to just prop up the government of these countries that is allowing this stuff to come in and they're allowing people to grow it or they can't do anything about it because the cartel has so much money and so much power that the government is basically helpless.
But also, if you don't do that, you're just going to empower our neighbors to the south who happen to be drug dealers, some of them, and they're making billions of dollars selling drugs to America.
And you're killing kids at a rate higher than ever in recorded history.
People are dying.
There's a hundred thousand plus people every year that are dying from opiate overdoses.
We went out to film a little mini-documentary about what's happening at the border in San Diego.
There's a lot of attention being put on Texas and Arizona, but California's border is a whole different dynamic, both because they've got You know, a long stretch of border where you're crossing in and you're going straight to mountains, you know, big open spaces.
But then you've got the very dense urban corridor, I suppose, where people, whether they're coming in through the water or they're just coming across the border, where they can disappear into neighborhoods very quickly.
But there's a few things that were very eye-opening and interesting.
Number one is we know that the borders are open because we know how many people are coming through.
The numbers that are being reported, I think, is close to 9 million now just over the course of the Biden administration.
What I saw there were...
People coming in and we were just driving around and we saw groups of people gathering in different locations from all over the world, illegal immigrants, and seemingly happy and going to the place where they were told to go or they knew that Border Patrol was going to pick them up.
And knowing that they will get processed, claim asylum, and most of them will be out with a plane ticket anywhere in the country within 24 hours.
That's crazy.
And I've talked to some of the Border Patrol agents and they're not allowed to say anything on the record, but just the frustration that's being felt where they can't even do their job.
They don't have the ability to house people where they are.
Where do you want to go?
Utah?
Okay, here you go.
Where do you want to go?
New York City?
And I went and I talked to a lot of them.
I sat down and talked with people from Brazil, from Egypt, from Colombia, from Venezuela, from different parts of Eastern Europe, people from all over the world coming here with the known plan in this well-oiled machine.
And I'm talking about this because it is very directed to the cartel, directly connected to the cartel's We're good to go.
And so we spent a couple of days at the border there and then went into the city of San Diego and went and started talking to some homeless people and talking to people who were clearly, clearly extremely high on multiple drugs.
And we're walking around with one of the community relations police officers there who's just plainclothes.
He's walking around and keeping an eye on what's going on there.
But we talked to this one guy who had a crack pipe in his hand.
He seemed barely conscious, but he was engaging in a long conversation with us.
And I was asking him about fentanyl.
And he's like, oh yeah, I take fentanyl sometimes.
But I usually take it at night to help me go to sleep.
I asked, like, aren't you afraid of not waking up?
He's like, yeah, I've had a lot of friends who died from fentanyl, but I know how much to take and I know how to manage it.
And have you?
He's like, yeah, I almost died twice and I was revived.
And then asking him, the police officer asked him, what would it take to get you off the street?
What would it take to get you to a place where you can get some help?
And to get off drugs.
And he said, he's a 27-year-old guy.
Nothing.
Nothing.
He said, there's too many rules in the places where I could go and stay.
And I want to live my life this way.
It was so heartbreaking to see him.
You know, his eyes were barely open and clearly in an altered state of mind.
But even in that state in this conversation, how do you help someone who doesn't want to be helped?
You could hope that they could get some information from you that shifts the way they think about things, but the addiction gets so deep.
And there's this thing that some addicts will say, is that...
I feel better when I'm high.
That it's the only time I feel good.
It's the only thing good that I have in my life is when I get high.
And if you take that away, my life is terrible.
And if you've been an addict for a long time, the longer you're an addict, in fact, the more that's true, right?
Because the more your life is a wreck, and then you're forced to deal with it when you come off and you realize, like, oh my god, I'm 45 years old and I'm a heroin addict.
And then now you're sober and your life is in shambles and you try to like figure out how did you go so wrong?
And then the only thing that made you feel good was heroin.
You want to go back.
You want to go back to that.
And it's also people like get really scared of success.
Even success and staying sober.
They get scared of doing things well.
And they seek comfort in failure because they've become accustomed to failure.
So the pressure of doing well and of staying sober and keeping healthy, it's almost too much.
Just the maintaining, the psychological, the anxiety, all the fear that comes with failing, that you just want to fail just so you can just feel comfortable again.
The human mind is so susceptible to so many different things, whether it's cults or addictions or, you know, I mean, we're very weirdly vulnerable to a lot of, like, very strange things.
And a lot of these things, I think, a lot of the mental issues are accentuated by social media.
They exacerbate them badly.
I think there's a lot of undiagnosed mentally ill people that are just killing themselves by being online all the time.
When that becomes your reality, dealing with people and perceptions and, you know, measuring yourself against whatever you're seeing and all of it, and you slip out of the real world and building real relationships and friendships and having real conversations.
And we're very, very fortunate because especially young girls today, and Jonathan Haidt's work on this has been really interesting.
His book, The Cobbling of the American Mind is a great one.
And it's all about what you could see, like, exactly when social media is invented, all this self-harm and all the suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation and suicide all goes up for girls.
It's such a bizarre thing that a person can get super-duper famous just dancing on an app that goes online and then they make millions of dollars and they're like your age.
And you're like, what's wrong with me?
I'm a loser.
You can't just live your life and hang out with your friends.
Everyone is in constant comparison with impossible people that shouldn't even exist.
There's this guy, they were doing this study on AI girlfriends where people have interactions with AI. This guy was spending $10,000 a month on his AI girlfriend.
The sense of purpose is, like, so attractive to people that there's so many kids that want to be, like, so righteous, and they just want to, like, criticize and yell at other people who don't feel the same way they do.
And so, like, you're seeing these Israel versus Palestine things on school campuses.
I'm like, my God.
Which brings me to, this is an interesting thought, like, what are your, what's your opinion on this potential TikTok ban?
I oppose it on the grounds of free speech and civil liberties.
Speaking of fomenting fear, this is one of those pieces of legislation that's, if you just read the talking points for those who support it, and it's supported by many people in Congress on both sides of the aisle, you think like, oh my gosh, we've got a national security risk and you've got concern for our kids and all of this other stuff.
But when you actually read the language and understand the implications of what this legislation does, it's not really about TikTok at all.
It's about government being able to choose what platforms are acceptable and what are not, and what we as Americans are able to either get information from or put information out.
And then you look at, okay, well, if they're giving themselves that authority, how will it then be enforced?
Then you get into the civil liberties concern of the Fourth Amendment of government overreach and trying to figure out, okay, well, now I'm going to have to look into your phone and figure out if you're the guy who's using the VPN to illegally download this app.
Then you're looking at You know, the designation is that if you have 20% or more ownership stake or stake in a business that has been designated by our government to be illegal because of its association with a foreign adversary,
there are a few countries listed there, but the president would have the power to designate any other country a foreign adversary without any kind of, you know...
Congress wouldn't have to take action.
It's a unilateral move.
You are also implicated if you are someone who the government determines to be influenced by or connected with one of these countries that is a foreign adversary.
And so, you know, Elon Musk has talked about this.
It is not outside of the realm of the—not only possible, but the probable—that if they wanted to say, okay, well, you know, Elon Musk is doing business with this country that we don't like, and oh, he also owns this platform called X— I think Ron Paul said it best when he said that this legislation is the most,
and I'm paraphrasing, but he said it's the most egregious violation of civil liberty since the Patriot Act was passed in the wake of 9-11.
And when you look at the arguments that are being made around both of those pushes, they are very eerily similar in invoking national security concerns.
And the language and the way that's written is intentionally vague that puts far more power into the hands of the executive branch, just like the Patriot Act did, to single-handedly say, well, this is a good guy and this is a bad guy.
And both of these things were actually wrapped up into that same bill.
It was the same bill?
Yeah, there are a whole bunch of different things.
They were separate previously, but the thing that the TikTok ban was lumped together with was the bill that would reinstate or extend the FISA authorities, the Foreign Intelligence Security Act authorities, for another two years.
Section 702 of FISA gives our government the authority to surveil foreign actors, essentially, to try to identify terrorist threats.
But part of that is they have the ability to capture all of the conversations.
If you talk to somebody in another country that they're interested in, they can then go in and capture all of your information as an American citizen.
And they can do this without a warrant.
This has been in place for quite some time.
But this legislation that was just passed recently expanded those authorities so they can go and actually look at like your Wi-Fi history.
If you're connected to Wi-Fi, they can look at everything that you did connected to that Wi-Fi signal and in some other ways.
It took an already bad problem and made it many, many times worse.
And again, they're just saying, well, it's for national security.
I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said, if you are choosing security over liberty, you will neither be secure, nor will you have liberty.
That's not an actual quote, but that's basically the point here.
And that's the false choice that so many of these politicians are forcing on the American people is...
You can either be less free and more safe, or you can be more free and, oh, by the way, you're going to invite more terrorist attacks or more national security incursions on our country.
And it's just BS. It is BS. It's also very un-American.
Like, you know, if you thought of them as something other than a three-letter name, like DEA, CIA, NSA, just a bunch of people, you would go, well, why is this like the DEA? Why is this 10,000 people?
Telling all these other people what to do.
That sounds crazy.
There's way more of them than there are of us.
If it was just in this room and Jamie turns out to be the cop and he says, hey, I'm going to put you two in prison because I heard you like hemp.
This is the problem is that, you know, every elected official swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution.
Yet, as we saw with this most recent example, they are so ready to undermine our Fourth Amendment rights in the Constitution that I know some of them are doing it with good intention, but without actually considering that the challenge and responsibility of those in government and those who have this power is to strike that correct balance between ensuring that our liberties and our constitutional rights Are protected.
You swear an oath to do this when you take this job while also ensuring, okay, well, we can do both and we must do both.
We can be safe and secure and also be able to live free without worrying about every time you pick up your phone or you make a phone call wondering if the government is surveilling us.
And then you add on to that what's happening now where, you know, like January 6, for example.
I was working out in the gym, a Marine Corps gym in Hawaii down the street from our house, bumped into a guy who I met.
It's a long story, but I met him when the Rocks stunt double was getting his traditional Samoan tattoo.
And it's a whole ceremony.
It was a seven day thing.
And so this other guy is Samoan.
We met, became friends.
So I saw him in the gym and he's with this 14 year old son.
How's it going?
This and that.
He's like, oh, the FBI just came to my house out in Laie, a small rural community on the island of Oahu.
I was like, what's going on?
He's like, yeah, they came and knocked on my door because, he said, I took my son to go and witness democracy.
So they were part of those thousands of people who were out there on the lawn of the Capitol.
And they didn't arrest him.
They didn't charge him with anything.
But how is it that, you know, years later, years later, they go and find this guy and his family in a rural Mormon community in Laie in Hawaii.
They're capturing all of the data.
Of people whose cell phones were pinging within that vicinity during that period of time, not only on January 6th.
And they are continuing to widen that net, looking at flight records and who bought tickets and who booked hotels and all of this stuff.
For what?
The FBI is going to go and investigate people who showed up there on the lawn on the Capitol?
You look at what they're...
And this is my thing.
It is absolutely scare tactics.
So we look at the power of the government and how they're now turning on the American people for political reasons.
We can see where even the best of intentions with some of these pieces of legislation can lead to the very worst places.
What to speak of the fact that...
We have limited resource and limited people.
What are they not investigating?
You talked about the DEA.
What about the FBI and all these millions of people are coming across our border?
Are they tracking who they are?
No, they're not.
Are they tracking where they're going?
No, they're not.
We have no idea.
People coming from the Middle East and Asia and Eastern Europe and Venezuela, gang members.
Like, all of this stuff is happening right before our very eyes.
And they're going and knocking on my friend's door in Laie because he brought his 14-year-old son to Washington, D.C. that week.
And these two dopes who just like, just dumbasses, like ADIQ dumbasses that just get tricked into this fucking, they cosplay and they go, we're going to kidnap her.
I mean, it's just, you know, you can say this in the militaries and law enforcement.
Everything.
You are going to find those few for sure.
They are there.
So I've talked to different people than the FBI and what they've shared is that there's kind of like a bifurcation in the agency where there are people who are really, really angry and frustrated about the politicization of the FBI that's occurring by the heads.
And then there are others who are just like, full send, we're on board, let's go.
And it's creating a lot of friction and a lot of fear within the agency.
I don't know if the agency had people get confused.
That's the CIA. That's probably some similar things going on there.
But within the FBI, a lot of fear that you got to watch what you say around even your own colleagues and your own peers.
because there are people who are on different sides, which is horrible.
You are on the side of America.
You are on the side of the American people and upholding the rule of law and securing our country, going after the bad guys, Well, when the bad guys now become your neighbor down the street, we're in a very different realm, a dangerous one.
I just saw one on Instagram the other day from like 1985 where a newscaster is, I think it might have even been black and white, and she's saying, the climate change scientists tell us that we may only have 10 years before the earth is destroyed.
1992 is gonna be the year.
And then whoever made this clip, they juxtaposed her clip with one from Bernie Sanders saying the exact same thing with a different date, you know, how many decades later.
Just imagine how psychotic it is to have a species that goes into another dimension that it's not a resident of and uses nets and just takes everything it can get and catches a bunch of dolphins and shit in there that it doesn't want anyway and they all die.
Meanwhile, China is opening hundreds of new coal power plants.
They're doubling down on coal.
And I think through TikTok and through probably Facebook and YouTube and all these different things, and Instagram, I'm sure, there's countless bots that are putting out videos and pushing narratives and find their way into your algorithm, and they affect the way people think about things.
And guess what?
If you go to Chinese TikTok, it's all Academic accomplishments, martial arts demonstrations, science achievements, and you can't go on after 10 p.m.
It was during the holiday of Passover, and this question came up about what would happen if another 9-11-style terrorist attack or some major incident like that came up in our country today?
Would it have that same kind of unifying effect that occurred after that attack on 9-11?
And when you look at things like that, like the Osama bin Laden letter, and you look at how there is – I mean, there's an entire – not an entire generation, but there's a lot of people now who I wouldn't be surprised if they said, well, you know, such an attack was justified.
outside.
And not have that same kind of sense of unity of like, hey, no matter our differences, we got to stand together as Americans.
It should be a serious concern also when you really take into consideration how many genuinely dumb people there are.
And when you have a situation like October 7th in Israel, I saw within days, before Israel did what they did in Palestine, within days, I saw people justifying the attacks on October 7th because of the treatment that Israel has given to the Palestinians.
I'm like, hey, that's crazy.
That's crazy.
That's crazy to say that you think people should be indiscriminately shot and killed and just in mass at a fucking rave, like paratrooping.
You think that's okay because of what Israel's done?
But guess what?
Those people didn't do that.
Those people at the rave and those people that are on the border, those are apparently according to Ari.
And that's where, you know, some of the things that they're chanting at, that these protesters are chanting at Columbia University and some of the other ones.
We hope that October 7th happens 10,000 times over, they say.
They've infiltrated universities, you know, the famous Yuri Besbinov speech from 1984, which is crazy when you hear it today, because he called it.
He knew it was going to happen, and it's happening, and it's happening from college campuses outward.
So the most...
Radical of these ideologies are being promoted on colleges because the kids are the youngest.
They don't have jobs and real-world experience.
They're young.
They have ideologies.
They're a little bit unrealistic, and they're all captured by this status game that's going on on campus where you're trying to be the most radical, like, oh, he's so radically pro-Palestine.
He's so hot.
You know, and then that really becomes a thing.
You become virtuous, and you become attractive.
You become interesting without actually being interesting, just because you have this rabid adherence to an ideology that's right now in vogue.
And that's really what it is.
And I think a lot of that is funded by foreign governments.
And there's a lot of evidence points to it, and we should consider it as a possibility.
And don't dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.
Consider it as a possibility.
This is the question about things like tick-tock like and and Twitter and all of them all of them because I guarantee you it's not just foreign countries kids I Guarantee you there are people in this country that are using it.
I know businesses do it.
Yes, I know I guarantee you people do it to try to influence the way people think about things and When you see posts, I've seen posts multiple times saying outrageous things.
And I'll just, okay, let me click on this guy.
And it's usually some letters and numbers and name maybe and a bunch of numbers.
There's no question that this is happening and the social media algorithms are feeding it and playing right into it in our attention and our minds are the commodity.
And that's the fallacy and that's kind of the falsehood of the argument for people who are pushing that TikTok ban bill is if they're claiming they're concerned about data security and privacy and making sure that our data is protected.
You got to do it across the board.
Because every single one of these social media or big tech companies is collecting as much as they possibly can.
And if you think they're not selling it to the highest bidder, whether they be an American company or a foreign company, of course they are.
A groundbreaking move that has sent shockwaves through the biotech industry.
23andMe, the leading personal geonomics and biotechnology companies, officially announced the sale of its entire DNA database to the Chinese government for an astonishing $10 billion.
Whether you call them Facebook or Google or the DEA, it's just a bunch of people.
And if they don't have to follow the same rules that you follow, then we have real problems.
And when you have entire groups of people that are dependent upon technology that's controlled almost entirely by one ideology, And then you let the government get involved, like they did with Twitter, and you see with the Twitter files, you're like, oh Jesus, this is bad.
You let the government have a back door, and they started sneaking around and telling you what to do and what not to do, and you were complying?
People were telling other people that they couldn't have experts from Harvard and Stanford talk about medical problems.
The FBI is calling and saying, hey, we'd really like you to do X, Y, or Z. In my mind, I'd be like, okay, what am I going to be investigated for outside of this if I say no?
If you're working at Twitter, and this old Twitter, and you're like super woke, and you've just been drinking lattes and going into the meditation room, then all of a sudden you get an email from the FBI like, I don't want to fuck up this job.
I got a cushy job!
And you're like, okay, what do I have to do?
Okay, I'll do that.
And so you do that.
And that's not good.
It's not good to have that kind of power being wielded by other people.
They're just people.
You could call them the FBI and call the DNA. They're human beings and human beings that have that kind of power over other human beings in a country that's supposed to value freedom.
And that's where this isn't just like some rogue FBI agent doing this or some rogue...
You know, bureaucrat in an agency who's going and doing this.
This is an expressed policy coming from the Biden administration in this example to go and use big tech to silence certain people's voices and to decide who does the government want to be heard and who needs to be silenced.
Obviously, we could talk all day about the cozy relationship that many politicians have with big pharma, and it's not a surprise that they're going to act in favor of big pharma rather than in favor of the truth or free speech or people's health and well-being.
But the fact that this was...
And is the Biden administration's policy to decide that they are the arbiter of what is misinformation, disinformation, what is information, what is true and what is not, and that they will use the tools available to them both within the government as well as outside of the government in the case of big tech and social media to be able to enforce that.
And that's really the, you know, for people who aren't paying attention to this stuff at home and are just trying to live their lives and, you know, go to work and take care of their kids and just live their life, it's easy to fall victim to, like, well, the government wants what's best for us and they don't want us to be manipulated by misinformation or disinformation.
And so this is the line that they use.
Like, we're doing this for you.
We're trying to protect you.
So once again, we're going to take away some of your freedom and some of your privacy and tell you who you should be listening to and what information you should be getting.
I also think that a lot of that stuff is being accentuated by social media, manipulated intentionally, because I think if you can just get those narratives out there enough, That affects the gullible people, that affects sensitive people, that affects people on the spectrum, it affects a lot of people, and then they start getting rewarded for leaning into one type of ideology, and then it's affecting people.
We are affected by our environment, and to pretend otherwise is just silly, especially when you're talking about young people.
Young people are particularly susceptible to propaganda, which is why they have young people wear suicide vests.
That's why.
You can't get a 50-year-old agnostic dude to wear a fucking suicide vest.
You know, he's gonna go, what am I gonna get when I blow up?
And it's just as sick to try to like indoctrinate them into these crazy ideologies because It's just people want other people to join their fucking team.
We're seeing the fruits of the shift in our education system away from actually teaching about the Constitution and the founding documents and the Federalist Papers and the thought process behind that went into forming the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
In our schools, basic government, basic 101 on what is this country really about?
What is the foundation that we were built upon?
And what does it mean to you in your everyday life?
And talking about the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment and going down the list.
Because that has been absent largely from our education system for so long, it creates, again, this vulnerability of young people being susceptible.
They're not rooted in an ideology of freedom and what that means in our lives and why it's important, why we will fight to defend and protect it.
And so then they're like, well, I don't know.
Maybe what Hamas is offering is a superior ideology or superior value system than what we have here in America, which a lot of these kids are saying.
Whether they realize fully what it is or not, they are falling victim to that ideology, that radicalismist ideology, which would be completely oppressive in the lives that they are trying to live here.
Well, that's that's where, you know, the this again, Hamas had this whole thing planned, like, you know, gaining the compassion, the sympathy of the world.
That they knew how Israel would react and they were ready with social media and all of the means of communication to play on the sympathies of people, the compassion and kind-hearted people around the world.
And turn people's attention away from the 1,200 people that were murdered and killed and the people that were raped on that attack on October 7th.
Their goal being ultimately to influence populations around the world towards this Islamist ideology that they want to govern the world under Islamic rule, under Sharia law.
And we've seen already how it's been successful in some parts of the world, even in Europe and France.
Somebody was saying that I think it's 25% of France is already living under Sharia law.
And so this ideological war that's being waged is not—it's being waged by one side, and there's not a counter-narrative.
There's not a counter-war being waged on the other side to defeat it with a superior ideology of freedom and what we value as a society.
And that puts— This mission and this effort, and it's not just Hamas, obviously, Al-Qaeda and ISIS and other terrorist organizations around the world, they all have that same objective, which poses the greatest short and long-term threat to people who value freedom and to civilization.
And we're also so uniquely vulnerable in that we do have this sort of democracy.
It's obviously heavily influenced by money.
And then with the open borders, so you have all these people funneling into the country, and so you have an erosion of confidence.
our entire system because people are very aware of that and the more people are let out of jail after they commit violent crimes the more people are aware of that if you looked at the whole picture and all the things that are in play right now particularly like with the open borders and giving people plane tickets and flying them to all these different cities like if I was gonna try to destroy the country that's how I would do it
If I was going to try to destroy the country, I would radicalize the kids, I would give them the stupidest ideas and run them in their head.
Boys can be girls, girls can be boys, boys can compete against girls in sports if they think they're a girl.
Queers for Palestine, you know, the death to the Jews, yell it out unironically.
On campuses.
And to have the presidents of those colleges and universities defend it Which was wild.
I was shocked, like everyone else, at not only their statements, but how every one of them sitting at that table on that day said almost the exact same thing.
And knowing how much preparation, because when people come, I don't care who you are, but when you come and testify before Congress, you go through preparation.
And if you're the president of an Ivy League university, you're gonna have a whole team of people sitting there telling you, okay, well, here are the questions you should probably be prepared to answer.
The question that Elise Stefanik asked was not outside of the realm of like, here's what the frequently asked questions would be.
And the fact that their answers were all the same and how they were smirking as they were giving that answer, I was very surprised by it.
Maybe I shouldn't have been as surprised given what they're doing.
And how much of the influence is coming from Russia?
How much of the influence like in the past has shaped these people?
So you have this system where academics go to school, they learn, they get indoctrinated and they start teaching and they never enter into the real world.
And they make this cycle and those are the people that keep indoctrinating more people and now they're infesting these social media apps and they're infesting all of these tech companies.
It's coming from the kids that get indoctrinated in these ideologies.
And I remember when I first started talking about this in like 2015 or 16, whenever the Jordan Peterson thing was happening, at first it was Brett Weinstein and Evergreen College.
And people were like, why do you care what's happening in these obscure colleges?
Like this is like you don't see that these kids are going to leave school.
They're so crazy.
They believe that you should have a day where you tell white people they have to stay home when it used to be that it was an appreciation of people of color so they could take the day off and they would get paid.
But telling people, white people, they have to stay home and then threatening them with baseball bats if they don't have people roaming the parking lot with bats.
The problem is not everyone is seeing what's really happening.
You still have the AOCs of the world and many people within the leadership of the Democratic Party This is the direction we are headed.
And that's a very dangerous thing for so many reasons, but obviously because they're in a position of power and how they're using that power and how they're undermining the rule of law and choosing, again, who gets to speak freely and who gets to go and do whatever they want, break the law, disturb the peace, acts of violence, no, because what you think that their cause is justified.
But meanwhile, others who would do the very same thing would be charged with a crime.
Maybe there's a whole Red Cross map that they could follow?
Hey guys!
Maybe some of the stops along the way, they only speak Chinese, and they have Chinese signs, and it seems like there's a concerted effort to get people in from China.
Well, the best one was, do you ever see the conversation that she had with the news reporter where the reporter was asking her to clarify her thoughts on Israel and Palestine?
There are these girls who, again, I don't know where this video is, I'm sure it's everywhere now, but they left Columbia to go and stand with the students protesting at NYU. And somebody said, well, why are you here?
They're like, oh, we're here to stand in solidarity with the protesters.
What is NYU doing that you're protesting?
Oh, I don't really know.
And then she turned to her friend.
She's like, why are we here?
What are they doing that's wrong?
And the friend said, I wish I was more educated because I don't really know either.
These were major drivers for me in leaving the insanity of what has become today's Democratic Party and where I have seen and heard directly from so many people who are or have already woken up to that fact of literally just being common-sense-minded Americans who are just...
There's no explanation.
There's no logic.
There's no rationale that you can give for these kinds of things happening, and not just by some rogue member of Congress.
It's the consequence of money being involved in politics and that seems like that web is so deep and those roots run so deep that to try to stop that now is almost impossible.
It's almost like the only way to solve this is to give corporations conscience.
It's like the only way to solve this is You've got to figure out, like, who is funding what and why?
Why is so much money being spent on this versus that?
And one of the things about AI is that If AI is asked at a certain point in time, when it becomes sentient or really super powerful, what is the solution between the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?
And what's the cause of it?
And AI gives a real comprehensive analysis of the US government-funded coup from 2014 and how NATO has been moving arms closer to Russia.
Lays it all out and like this is the definitive objective.
No ideology, no bullshit reason why this is happening.
And these are the companies that are pushing the conflict and this is the amount of money they're making from it.
And here's the amount of money that's missing because there's corruption involved in Ukraine.
As much as people don't want to admit, one of the wildest ones was Candace Owens on Twitter where the New York Times They tweet at her like, what evidence do you have of corruption in Ukraine?
And she's like, from your own fucking newspaper?
Posting links?
It's like, do you guys not even check before you tweet out publicly?
I mean, it's the same reason why with Julian Assange, you know, back when, you know, his criminal charges were first coming up, they were saying, hey, this is a threat to journalism, that you can't suppress the free press.
It is a violation of the First Amendment.
And if you go after Julian Assange today...
Mm-hmm.
Why?
They have become, unfortunately, a political arm of the Democrat elite.
And it's the same reason why they stopped reporting on actual corruption in Ukraine, because they get, okay, what's the narrative that we've got to push?
And they're not going to go against it.
Not allow facts and journalism to get in the way of that.
But even if that's a pretty tight turnaround when you look at that, but that doesn't negate all of the other provisions within that law that further violate our civil liberties.
Adam Curry used to be an MTV VJ. He's the original podcaster.
He's the podfather.
The real number one.
Brilliant guy.
But I had him on the podcast quite a while ago and he said that all this uproar over TikTok is total bullshit.
He said what it is is the Chinese are eating our lunch.
Like they've developed an app that is more addictive And collects data just like our apps do, and we don't like it.
We don't like it because their one is way better.
And so they're trying to do something to shut it down because they're using it to influence us and like, hey, we're the only ones allowed to do that.
And that's what he thinks.
And when he said that, I was like, I never really considered that because I always was like, oh, there's TikTok is like really bad.
You've got to like read the fine print, and it is bad.
I mean if you look at just the terms of service like when you're agreeing, you know, the conditions that you agree to, like they get to monitor your keystrokes.
So that means they can probably monitor your passwords.
They can probably check out all your emails.
They get to monitor other computers that are connected to the network even if they don't have TikTok on them.
When you and I are having a conversation and then all of a sudden we talk about Toyota trucks and there's an app for a Toyota truck, like, hey, did you guys know that we were talking about, are you listening, Google?
Elon and X, well, Elon specifically, was the only one who stood up amongst our American big tech companies to say, no, this is a very bad bill.
The others, to my knowledge, were very, very silent, or they were actually coming out in support of it.
Competition.
Makes sense.
The other piece of that is, other than X and TikTok, the Biden administration has been very successful at working with Google and Meta, Facebook, Instagram, in being able to control quote-unquote disinformation and information.
So when you look at from a government standpoint, well, if you're concerned about data security and privacy, why aren't you doing it across the board and treating every social media company that Americans use with that same standard?
Well, maybe they're just going after the ones that they can't actually control and intimidate into doing their work for them, which is why it makes sense why Elon Musk and others would say, well, of course, if today it's TikTok, then why wouldn't it be X tomorrow?
It's interesting to me that people don't seem to understand the value and importance of a guy like Elon, who's this wild billionaire character who likes to dunk on people.
Like, that guy being like, did you see that thing that he posted the other day?
Because there's a...
One of the guys who's from Facebook, I believe, said that what Elon is doing is corruption on an Enron level, I think you compared it to.
So Elon posted a photo of a dog laying its balls on another dog's head.
I mean, his brain is a fucking tornado of information just flying around all the time, and I think it helps him to be able to just fuck around and be silly.
But he was the only one that recognized that there's a real problem if you have the entire narrative Being controlled by one ideology through all the social media apps, and that's what's going on.
I don't know how it is now, but I guarantee some of that was fake, too.
I guarantee when they came up with these alternative platforms that people wanted to squash the idea of having people that were free outside of Twitter and Facebook that were reasonable people that just wanted objective conversation, which I guarantee most of them were.
Most of them were tired of being censored on Twitter and shadow ban and all that shit.
So they try these other, whether it's Gab or Truth Social or any of them.
I guarantee you, look, if I was an intelligence agent and I was inclined to do, I would get in there and start seeing Highland.
I'd go crazy.
I'd post the most racist memes and have everybody salute.
I'd go nutty.
I'd have fake accounts liking those things and getting excited about it and reposting it because that's how you make a place toxic.
And that's how you kill the competition.
I would do that.
I would do that if I was running Twitter.
If you were just a kid, I obviously wouldn't do it, me as a person.
But if I was an evil fuck, I would be like, this is the way to do it.
Yeah, and so then you don't have an alternative, and you go back to Twitter, and you just deal with the fact that you're being censored, and you deal with the fact that if you're a left-wing person, you can say the most outrageous shit, even call for violence against people.
Twitter caught selling data to government spies while complaining about surveillance.
It uses AI technology to constantly monitor public activity on social media and other parts of the web.
In doing so, its clients often law enforcement can receive customized real-time alerts on what's brewing online, which helps them to respond to natural disasters or, more ominously, spy on protests, notes The Intercept.
Okay.
But also...
Does allow them real-time alerts of what's brewing online.
So you're not saying they're censoring people.
You're saying that they're allowing them to look at data.
So that data could be like how many people are posting about some sort of a protest where they want to burn down a church or whatever the fuck it is.
You're talking about a different thing than banning people from posting things, especially these people that are experts from Harvard and MIT and This is a different thing.
It says, data miner has a unique contractual relationship with Twitter whereby they have real-time access to the full stream of all publicly available tweets.
But it's just publicly available tweets that are already available.
So it's like a very high-level search function?
A company representative sent an email to the government agency per the report.
So is that like a search function?
Because it's all public tweets.
So they have access to the stream of all publicly available tweets.
But doesn't everybody have access to the publicly available tweets?
That's part of what he's been complaining about online is how many people, and they blocked access to many programs that did have access to the API because it costs money for them every time someone's taking that, so they just kind of cut it all off.
Like I used to use TweetDeck to look at Twitter all the time.
There's certain there's certain things that Apple does that are thought to Be anti-competitive in it right in a kind of a creepy way and one of them that they just recently got rid of is the Lightning connection right so up until iPhone 15 or 16 16 What are we on now 16?
We're on 15 now?
So up until 15, you used to have to use a lightning connector, which only works on Apple devices.
It's better for connectivity, it's better for charging, get faster charging.
Like the Android phones, particularly like Samsung Galaxy, to go to full charge is like an hour less time.
Because it takes faster watt charging than the iPhone does.
And for the longest time, it would be a much better transfer of data because of USB-C. It's just a better, more efficient system.
But Apple's like, yeah, you gotta use...
So the European Union, I think that was the problem.
They couldn't sell them over there.
They were admitted illegal.
So then they had to switch it over to USB-C. So now everybody at least has a universal thing.
And then there's the problem with text messaging.
So...
If you have an Android and you send me a text message, it comes out green.
And I send you one that comes green.
Because it's text.
It's SMS. And so now they're going to adopt RCS. So the idea is, since you can't have iMessage on everything, at least you'll have encryption and you'll be able to send large file sizes.
And that's what RCS is.
Interesting.
Which is like a higher level of text messaging that's been enjoyed by people who use Androids, but not when they communicate with iPhones.
iPhones were forcing people to use SMS. It's shitty.
It's inferior.
You get blurry images and videos.
Not the same resolution.
It cuts it all down because it has to fit in the SMS format.
So now you'll be able to share photos just like you will with an iPhone to iPhone.
The thing with kids, I think with teenagers, see if this is true, I believe I read that it was something like 86% of all teenagers, it was some high number, of all teenagers use iPhones.
If you look at the moon with your iPhone and try to take a photo of it, it looks like dog shit.
It looks terrible because it's just like this blurry thing.
If you zoom in, it looks terrible.
But with Samsung's, when you zoom in, it holds a square over the moon and it enhances it.
And it gives you like 100x zoom.
So you get this crazy digital zoom, you zoom in on the moon, and it looks really clear.
But it turned out it was his AI. No!
Yes, yes.
Because some clever internet people...
Because you can't fool the internet.
What they did is they took a blurry image of the moon and they put it on a desktop computer and then took a photo with the camera of the blurry image on the desktop computer and it filled it in and made it pretty.
I tried using the Google Translate app when I was down at the border and talking to different people from different parts of the world and it sucked.
It's like the intent I think was for that to happen is like you just turn on the microphone and then I could speak and they could see in the screen like it's translating into their language and then they could respond in their language and you're just seeing it play out real time but it didn't work.
But it is what they're saying is the most secure means of communication.
Obviously, technology is never 100% secure.
But the fact that it does not have the same ad ID numbers that every one of our other phones has, Apple, Samsung, whatever, makes it so that we are able to protect more of our information than we would otherwise.
Or you would say, look, the kind of people that want a phone like this, these rah-rah-fuck-the-government people, these type of people that might get visited by the FBI, give them a phone, call it the Patriot phone or whatever the fuck you want to call it.
So I asked them, it sounds like this is the perfect kind of phone for people in the military or people who are conducting different kinds of operations because of all of these protections and so on and so forth.
And they said they're intentionally not selling to the U.S. government because they don't want that doubt to be in people's minds that this is some kind of op that's happening that will allow some kind of surveillance to take place.
Because when you look at the interconnectedness between, you know, Tesla and you look at obviously the power element and then the car element and then you look at the content platform that they are building X into, like the vision that they have for it to be the one-stop shop, not only for all different kinds of media, but for, you know, payment and interaction and business and commerce and everything else.
It's interesting when you look at that direction of connectivity.
Freedom of the Press Foundation acted as Signal's fiscal sponsor.
Between 2013 and 2016, the project received grants from the Knight Foundation, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and almost $3 million from the U.S. government.
Article claims signals origins as a U.S. government asset are...
Asset are public record and a lack of funding is because of the CIA? Found this article that makes it claim that Signal's origins as a U.S. government asset are a matter of extensive public record even if the scope and scale of the funding provided has until now.
Does anyone here know what public records they're referring to here?
It says if so, does anyone have links to these public records?
This means Signal is a honeypot.
Hmm.
They also say that Signal handed people over to the CIA. I'd like to know what actually evidence of that exists.
If it's true, that kind of sucks.
That's what it says there.
But Tucker said that he was communicating through Signal and that the government contacted him and said, we know that you're setting up a meeting with Putin.
Well, this connects directly back to the FISA Section 702 law.
Because if they are surveilling certain foreign entities in Russia, then an American citizen like Tucker Carlson communicating with them, the government is then able to just immediately go in again without a warrant and saying, OK, we got to go before a judge.
And even if they do go before a judge, it is a secret court.
There is there is only one side that's presented, which is the government saying we need to go and capture all of Tucker's data.
For example, I have no idea if this actually happened, but let's say that's the scenario.
That court, and this is public information, that court approves 99.9999999% of all requests that the government makes to go in and surveil American citizens.
It's essentially a rubber stamp, which is exactly the problem.
That's where I could foresee, okay, well, Tucker's communicating on Signal.
This surveillance law that just was strengthened recently when Congress passed it and Biden signed it into law allows that to happen.
If that's the case, if they have the ability to read signal, don't you think they have the ability to read every single piece of information that gets sent from your phone?
They can intercept it and read it.
It just makes sense that they can do that.
I don't know how you're going to protect that.
Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't understand how you could protect that.
With a different operating system, as long as it's using the same cell phone signals.
I understand that you're saying it's encrypted, but is that encryption impossible to crack?
Is there a source of that encryption?
Couldn't someone just get the phone and figure it out and back-engineer it?
An interesting thing about, I asked this same question about this unplugged phone.
And if you're using, which I hadn't heard before about any other app, but if you're using their version of Signal, their, you know, texting app that you can do calls and FaceTime and whatever through with another app on another unplugged phone, Every time you connect a call or you send a text message, it generates a new encryption key.
Versus Signal, which is when you download it and you set up your account or whatever, that is your key.
Never acknowledged in any serious way by the mainstream media.
Signals origins as a U.S. government asset or a matter of extensive public record, even if the scope and the scale of the funding provided has until now been secret.
The apt brainchild of shadowy tech guru, Moxie Marlinspike, by the way.
In 2013, by his now-defunct Open Whisper Systems, the company never published financial statements or disclosed the identities of its funders at any point during its operation.
Some's involved in developing, launching, and running a message app used by countless people globally will nonetheless be surely significant.
The newly published financial records indicate signals operating costs for 2023 alone are $40 million and projected to rise to $50 million by 2025. Rosenfeld boasted in 2018 that OWS never took VC venture capital funding or sought investment at any point, though mysteriously failed to mention millions were provided by the Open Technology Fund.
Yeah, and that's the money.
Oh, here we go.
Open Technology Fund was launched in 2012 as a pilot program of Radio Free Asia, an asset of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
Oh, boy.
Which is funded by U.S. Congress to the tune of over $1 billion annually.
In 2018, the then CEO openly acknowledged the agency's global priorities reflect U.S. national security and public diplomacy interests.
Yeah, it is very interesting because there are other phones that I've seen in the past who have tried this and not succeeded.
And I don't know whether it was a virtue of the time in our country where people maybe just weren't that interested in having a secure means of communication or a secure phone.
The problem is, when you have these walled gardens, like Apple's ecosystem, it's very difficult when you have everything over there, all your stuff, your email, your this, your that.
It is interesting to me that more and more people are paying attention to government surveillance, their ability to reach into our private information, and who is allowing that to happen.
Don't you think if they really thought that the oceans were going to rise 100 feet in the next week, that the fucking insurance companies would go, hey, you can't buy that.
Well, we had, you know, the active volcano that we've had on the Big Island for so long, but the actual...
The flow that happened through neighborhoods when the floor of the volcanic shelf within the crater fell through, the lava went down and started flowing through all these lava tubes that were running beneath fully occupied neighborhoods.
People had bought land and built houses in those neighborhoods knowing it was, I think it was a Lava 3 zone, which is like, you're building on top of an active volcano's lava tubes.
You have to know that you're assuming that risk.
When that happened, there were, you know, lava spouts and little mini craters that were formed within so many of these different communities.
We were going around there.
I was with the head of the roads division for Hawaii County.
We would go and look.
And as soon as there was a crack in the pavement, we'd be like, okay, we've got to mark that one down on the map.
Because that is, you know, the next day you see the steam coming up as though it's a lava vent.
And then within the next day or two, you would have an active, like, 20, 30, 40 feet in the air lava spilling up.
Right in the middle of, like, a normal kind of suburbia-ish neighborhood.
And this happened in over 20 different locations within this particular area.
And it was mind-blowing to go there one day after the other after the other and see how quickly a beautiful little neighborhood turned into a complete bed of lava.
So this then begs the question, like, oh, is your home insured?
There was one insurance company in the entire world that would insure homes that were built in a Lava 3 zone.
And the biggest challenge for the families who were directly impacted by that, who were left homeless, is the fact that they still don't have anywhere to go.
You know, they've been put up in Airbnbs or in hotel rooms for a period of time.
On Maui, the hotels are like, hey, we need to be able to start welcoming in tourists back into the island.
And so the governor is trying to work out a plan to be able to provide some form of semi-permanent housing for people.
If they were to try to go out and rent a house on the market, it is purely unaffordable.
And there are a number of families who are now faced with the tough decision of, do we just pick up and go and move our life out of Hawaii and to the mainland?
Which is heartbreaking, given how many of those families—I mean, they've been in that community in West Maui or in Lahaina for generations— What is happening with the people that had mortgages?
So if they had a mortgage and their home was burnt down and they haven't gotten money from the insurance company and they haven't been able to rebuild, do they still have to pay that mortgage while this is all going on?
Yeah, and they knew from the outset it was a known fact that it would take, I mean, if it only takes a year, that is an expedited timeline, is what I've been told.
You know, I remember specifically when the fires had just happened, the White House brought in the director of FEMA to talk to the White House press corps, and someone asked the question, what are you, FEMA, what are you actually doing for the people who've been impacted by this tragedy?
And the director stood there with a straight face and proudly said, well, we have provided a one-time payment of $700 to everyone who has been impacted by this fire or displaced by this fire.
And that was her big announcement that she was there to make.
And residents on Maui, they were being told, like, okay, well, hey, if you accept this kind of aid from FEMA, you are ceding some sense of your sovereignty or decision-making ability with regard to your land or your property.
And all of the red tape, essentially, that caused a people, a community...
Who are rightfully skeptical about government coming in and saying, okay, well, we're going to help you when that same government said, oh, yeah, hey, we may at that time, and the governor said this, and then he corrected himself later on, but he's like, oh, yeah, we're thinking about and talking about how we can turn this entire place, have the government take ownership of it and turn it into some kind of memorial or some kind of workforce housing.
Which obviously made people really freaking mad to say like, well, who the hell are you to come in here and say, you're just going to take our land?
You're just going to take it and do what you want with it?
So they're obviously very skeptical and rightfully so about, you know, the fine print.
What does it mean if I accept a few bucks here or there from the federal government?
What power am I ceding to you to determine my future, the future of my family and our home?
One of the things that has just recently come out, first of all, the Maui Police Department, they did an audit of what went wrong, what did we do wrong, what should we have done better, and kudos to them for actually doing this.
And I think they came up with like 92 recommendations on things that needed to be fixed.
They shared that with municipalities all across the country as like, hey, here are the hard lessons that we learned.
You guys should take note and try to protect yourselves from having to go through what we went through.
Other agencies at the county level and at the state level have not been so honest or transparent about their shortcomings.
And the most egregious one recently that our local news in Hawaii exposed was the head of Maui's emergency response division.
He was off island that day.
He was at, of all places, a FEMA conference on Oahu when the fires happened.
And instead of doing what any compassionate and responsible person and leader would do, you'd immediately get on the first plane out.
You get a notification there this, you know, this fire is happening on Maui.
I got to be there with my people and I got to lead my teams to respond to this emergency.
It took him a few days to go back to Maui, first of all.
But the thing that was, and I don't know if you can find this, Jamie, but they released his text exchanges that he had with his assistant.
Who was telling him, he's like, what's going on with the fire?
LOL. And the assistant responding, saying, ha ha ha, this place is like a circus.
Their exchange was so, so...
Disturbing doesn't even put it lightly when you know there are people who are being burned to ash, burned alive in their community, and their text exchange is like, oh, ha ha ha, is the fire still going?
LOL, yup, now it's going in another place.
I couldn't believe it when I read it.
And this was the same guy.
Herman Andaya is his name.
He didn't show up and show his face publicly until like seven days after the fire.
And then he went and he did one press conference and then he quit and resigned.
But there has not yet, and I hope investigations are ongoing, there has not been any kind of accountability at the various failure points that existed in this response.
There's a Native Hawaiian leader, famous surfer, navigator for the Hokulea and traditional Hawaiian navigation, Archie Kalepa.
He has been one of the most stalwart leaders for the community during this whole period in time, organizing emergency response and food and shelter and community gatherings.
People come and play music at the end of the day throughout this whole crisis period and has been leading the charge.
He's very well respected in the community in holding that line and saying we are not giving up our land.
But as you said, it becomes a much more difficult argument to make when people you got to live.
You got to be able to make sure your kids have what they need to go back to school and all of it.
And how can you do that when you're in a constant state of transition with no real timeline where they're not coming and saying, OK, hey, you can go and start rebuilding on this date.
I heard from one guy, they were looking at, well, hopefully, maybe it might be September, it might be October, but, you know, it's one of those things that one of the guys who's out there actually doing this is just saying, well, you don't know what you're going to deal with until you're actually dealing with it, and it might take longer, it might not take as long, but it's one of those things that they're not figuring out as they go, but they are being confronted with things as they go.
And I talked with leaders in Congress and people who I still know there and just calling for oversight and accountability from the federal government because we saw many points of failure, everything from the immediate response to the whole water issue and the fact that there wasn't any water coming through people's hoses during that time.
The history of water on Maui is complicated, and it's largely attributed to that, of the fact that the water is a privately owned utility and how that water is controlled.
There is limited use of water at different times, how it's controlled and where it goes.
And there was a state water management official apparently who had some say in this of saying, well, you know, I don't think that we should turn the water on for this period of time because we don't know exactly what's going to happen.
But my point is, all of these things need to be very clearly investigated because people's lives and property were absolutely destroyed because of this.
It was like, well, we want to make sure that the water is being distributed equitably, and so we don't want to give it to one group of people over another group of people.
It really didn't make any sense what the argument was, but it was like, hey, you missed that critical juncture in that window because you were trying to ruminate.
It was something to do with equity and some theoretical argument rather than this is a community in crisis.
There are fires burning in various different places.
At a place that experiences storms, but also on West Maui is traditionally a drier part of the island that also experiences wildfires, even small ones on a regular basis that if they're not immediately controlled, you end up with what happened.
That's where the opportunity, and it is such a dire picture, you know, it's a time where we're surrounded by literally insane people who are making decisions that further their own interests and their desire to either hold on to power or grow their power at the cost of the well-being of the people and at the cost of our fundamental freedoms.
And that's where this election, our using our voice, our defending our freedom of speech by speaking the truth and speaking freely, all of these things and our engagement with them as Americans, as citizens, It matters more than anything else.
Because if we continue to go down this track, we will continue to see our freedoms undermined until we wake up one day and this will no longer be the America that we know and that we love.
Because, I mean, we've gone through, you know, the political powers switch from one side to the other and back again.
And, you know, you figure like, okay, well, I disagree with this person or this issue or whatever.
But...
Being grounded and having the confidence in the Constitution and these fundamental rights and freedoms is kind of like, okay, well, you know, we'll figure out the rest.
But all of that, for everything that we've talked about, censorship and control and big government overreach and all of the government surveillance, all of these different things point to the very real risk and domestic threat that we face.
Special Forces Green Beret served over 30 years in uniform.
Great, great American who's dedicated his life to service.
He's about to retire.
His wife is from a European country.
And they want to invite her sister and her sister's family to come to the retirement ceremony.
They're residents of Italy.
They have been denied a tourist visa to come to America for two weeks to attend the Special Forces Warrant Officer's retirement.
How is that?
And these are like, hey, they got a family, they got young kids, they got school, they got jobs.
And they were denied saying, well, we don't think that you have...
We don't have confidence that you will come back to your life in Italy.
And yet, again, people are coming through the border every day, being picked up.
Border Patrol has become like this Uber drivers for people who are breaking our laws from the moment they step across the border into our country illegally.
And, okay, so then they go out in the country.
Nobody knows where they are, who they are.
Are they really going to show up for a court date in two years or three years?
And nothing is really truly being done about this.
It almost seems like it's all designed to erode our faith and to make this whole thing something that's way easier to control.
Because the way our system is set up right now, if you can express the freedom of speech, if you actually can do that, it makes it very difficult to really control a narrative.
And they're terrified of a truly free society where we can have a truly free open marketplace of ideas.
They're terrified of people being able to, you know, and I saw this when I ran for president in 2020.
We're seeing it again in different ways in 2024 where they want to control what information you get about certain candidates, what information you're not allowed to see, who is being pushed forward and who is not, and undermining our basic responsibility as citizens, which is to cast an informed vote and engage in our democracy and undermining our basic responsibility as citizens, which is to cast an informed vote and engage in our democracy and actually They're terrified of us doing that and making what they believe is the wrong choice.
So they're trying to take away our right to do it so they can remain in power.
And in their minds, I fully, I know many of these people and they feel justified in what they're doing, that they are the righteous ones, that they are standing up for America and standing up for democracy, so much so that they are willing to destroy our democracy to save it in their minds, which is a dangerous, dangerous so much so that they are willing to destroy our democracy That we could see foreign dictators in different parts of the world and throughout history.
I think that's where there is, you know, there is a silver lining in what we have been through through COVID and through everything that's happened since.
I think more and more people are waking up.
what they're being told.
Is this actually true?
Looking for information and news from other sources than maybe they had been before.
And just what you said, no one's coming to save us.
I think that is the message I'm carrying.
I'm on the road constantly, and I'm talking to people, whoever will listen at events and on different media platforms.
It's what I focused on in my book, For Love of Country.
The truth about what is happening in our country, the experiences that I had in the Democratic Party that caused me to leave the party.
And understanding that in this situation, and there's a lot to be fixed across both parties and the government, but in my experience and in the situation we are in right now with the Biden-Harris administration, they cannot be allowed to remain in power.
We can agree or disagree on different issues and it's good and we should and we should have those conversations.
But when you look at the unprecedented abuse of power, That they are engaging in, undermining their rule of law, politicizing our government entities, targeting Americans, targeting Americans who happen to be their political opposition, whether it's Donald Trump or the mom who's protesting at a Board of Education meeting to have a say in what kind of education her child is getting.
This is happening across the country.
And if we, the American people, don't do something about this and stop them and hold them accountable, What happens in these elections?
If they're allowed to remain in power, they will tell us, hey, you gave us a mandate.
You said, hey, good job, thumbs up, keep at it, and we'll see everything that's happened just continue to escalate to a point where I have no doubt that our freedoms will be eroded to a point where it'll be virtually impossible to get them back.
And where do we go from there?
America no longer becomes the land of the free and the home of the brave.
It becomes the land of people who are controlled by the government and forced to comply or else.
And if you dare to have the courage to speak up and speak the truth or say, hey, look, guys, the emperor has no clothes on.
Boys are boys and girls are girls, and that's just how it is, then you will experience the retaliation or the consequences of that action.
I appreciate your words, your friendship, your support, and your being such an incredible stalwart voice of truth and providing a platform for real discussion.
Where people can come and listen to those who have different viewpoints, different backgrounds, different experiences, and maybe they walk away agreeing or disagreeing.
It doesn't really even matter.
But having this kind of platform is such a powerful thing for everyone to benefit from.
I read every now and then, but most of the time I'm actually, like if I'm on a plane sometimes I read, but most of the time I'm sitting there listening to stuff in the sauna or listening to something when I'm driving.