Ezra Levant reports from Maui’s devastating wildfire (August 21, 2023), where 500+ deaths are suspected despite disrupted warnings and emergency systems. He visits Honokawai Ohana, a grassroots relief camp rejecting FEMA, supplying displaced families with coffee, school supplies, and Starlink access. Meanwhile, Canada’s BC Premier Danielle Smith blames 650 fires (500 human-caused), while Justin Trudeau vacationed in luxury amid crises. Levant critiques Hawaii’s "holistic" water response and questions land acquisition motives, contrasting it with Maui’s community-driven recovery—highlighting systemic failures and resilience in natural disasters. [Automatically generated summary]
I am in Maui, Hawaii, the site of a massive wildfire that has taken what's estimated or predicted to be hundreds of lives.
The full death poll is not yet known.
I'm here to find the truth about Maui.
I'm here with Alexa Lavoie and Lincoln J. I'd like you to see the story I'm telling today.
It's a visual story as much as an audio one.
So please get the video version by going to RebelNewsPlus.com.
It's $8 a month.
You get all my daily shows in video form.
And frankly, the funds help keep Rebel News strong.
We take no government funding, which is why we're allowed to ask politically incorrect questions where no one else does.
That's RebelNewsPlus.com.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, what's the truth about Maui?
It's August 21st, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
I'm in Maui, one of the Hawaiian islands.
It really is a paradise, heaven on earth.
But about a week ago, hell broke loose in the form of, well, hell fire.
It was a shocking firestorm.
I mean, there's no other way to say it.
It consumed everything in his path, houses, businesses, cars, and people.
The death toll, locals say, is expected to be half a thousand, which is a staggering number by any count.
And given the small size of the island of Maui, it truly is the worst tragedy ever to befall this island.
There is an echo in some ways of the 9-11 massacre.
Of course, that was a deliberate, evil terrorist act.
But there is something similar about a massive torched area where bodies have to be painstakingly identified and people are wondering, where are my loved ones, hoping that they're simply lost rather than consumed in the fire.
It is a tremendous tragedy, and it is also a reason why it is difficult for outsiders, including journalists, to film certain things.
Just like 9-11, Ground Zero itself was off limits to reporters while they were discovering bodies and digging through the wreckage.
So too is it in this part of Maui.
For example, at night at 10 p.m., police have roadblocks in effect demanding to see proof of residence for anyone passing through.
I myself was stopped at one of these when I was coming to Lahaina, which is the town here.
I convinced the police officer to let me through because I was bringing with me a satellite dish, one of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite dishes.
I picked it up in Canada and I was bringing it here to Maui because two of our reporters were already on the ground, Lincoln Jay and Alexa Lavoie.
You surely know them.
Alexa, our Quebec Bureau chief, she and Lincoln had reported at length from the trucker convoy in Ottawa.
Alexa covered the wildfires in Quebec.
Lincoln went down to Ohio to cover the train derailment and explosion.
So these were two of our excellent reporters.
However, they got here and they reported back to me that it was very difficult for them to operate.
Cell phone service doesn't work here.
And of course, when we record video files, we send them over the internet.
The internet doesn't work here either.
They had to record things here and then drive about an hour away where internet is working to file them.
It was very impractical.
So I came to Maui with a Starlink satellite dish, not just for them, but for the larger community, because it's the kind of thing where you can give the internet password out and 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 people could use it.
So I arrived here late at night.
The police let me through because I was carrying one of these satellite dishes.
It was very dark.
I went straight to sleep.
But when I woke up, I came to this park just half a block from where I was staying.
Honokawai.
Park.
It's on a beach.
It's beautiful.
But many of the people behind me were dislocated.
Their houses have been burned.
They don't have anywhere to go.
And so the local citizens have built what they're calling a relief camp.
They call it Honokawa'i Ohana.
And those are about the only Hawaiian words I know.
That means Ohana means family.
And it really is.
This is not a government camp.
In fact, when the FEMA officials, FEMA stands for Federal Emergency Management Agency, when the FEMA officials came here looking to be all official and take over, they said, yeah, no, thanks.
We've got it covered.
And we were here long before you arrived.
It is all grassroots citizen to citizen helping.
And I was truly moved by that.
Now, the first thing I noticed is they already had Starlink dishes here.
So they thanked me for my offer of them, but didn't need it.
They had one that anyone could just come and log into, like I say.
They had another one just for the pharmacy they're operating.
They have doctors and they fill prescriptions and they run and get the medications.
They have a whole system.
They have food.
They have clothes.
They even have veterinary services.
Because, of course, what about your pet if your house has gone up in flames?
So we learned what they really needed and what they didn't need.
It was my best guess that they needed the Starlink.
They didn't.
They needed other things.
And I was frankly moved.
I was touched by the selflessness here.
There are no government bureaucrats here.
No one is here making money.
The opposite.
People are spending their own money.
And I, you know, how Rebel News operates, we like to crowdfund.
So I was a little bit overcome with emotion, I suppose.
And I said to the lady who runs the place, Amber, I said, what do you need?
Send a volunteer with me.
We'll go to, well, not the Walmart, but there's a big Target store about an hour away.
I said, send your volunteer with me.
I'm in for a thousand bucks.
And we went shopping and our reporter Lincoln came to.
And again, it wasn't the things I thought they would have needed, water.
No, no, they got all that.
They needed school supplies because they're having a little mini school here.
The kids were in school for just one week before it all went up in flames.
And we had a unique list of things that I just simply wouldn't have known what to do.
And there's a little bit of a lesson in there too.
Sometimes philanthropy, we want to choose what we give.
Oh, you need this.
This is what you need.
That's what I thought with the Starlink.
I mean, that wasn't a bad idea, if I do say so myself.
It's just not what they needed.
When I actually listened to them, what they needed, they said, well, we need stuff for school kids and we need socks and underwear.
And we need, they told me a list of things, including like pens and papers and name tags and stuff.
All right.
So we, oh, and you know what?
They also asked for, and I sort of chuckled at first.
They wanted coffee.
And I thought, come on.
Well, yeah, come on.
I mean, it was the first thing I wanted that day.
And, you know, it's Hawaii and they do love their coffee.
So we brought a ton of coffee, not just coffee fresh from Starbucks, but the instant coffee.
And again, think about it.
That's what people want.
I talked to a couple who were, I met them at the truck where we were all accessing the Starlink in the community.
And they talked about how devastating it is to lose all high-tech communication.
Think about it.
Not just your phone, but your email.
And so many things work on the internet like using a credit card at a store.
That doesn't work if the little credit card machine doesn't operate.
How do you get messages out?
It was incredible.
The husband and wife I was talking to said that about a week ago, the government sent an airplane around.
And I said, oh, was it towing like a banner with a message behind it?
No, it had loudspeak.
I thought that was very unusual to have loudspeakers, but they could overhear. the speakers despite the drone of the plane.
So imagine that.
And I was thinking, but what would happen to the larger society if electricity would go out?
It's like an EMP device, an electromagnetic pulse.
If it knocked out all electronics, we would be set.
We wouldn't know how to operate.
These people showed that there is kindness and there is civility in the community.
They didn't loot.
They didn't riot.
The opposite.
They came together as an ohana.
And we were delighted to be a part of that in a small way.
I really enjoyed going shopping.
I normally hate shopping, but I did it.
And then we set up a crowdfunding page for them on Give, Send, Go.
So it's got full transparency.
And I feel really good about that because if you, you know, I asked our reporters, Lincoln and Alexa, before they came over here, I said, look, tread very carefully.
Walk very lightly.
There are still dead bodies out there.
There are holes in hearts.
And be careful.
Do your journalism.
Do your accountability journalism.
But understand you're going into a place with raw emotion.
And I said, please make a donation, each of you, before you come out here.
And what would you do?
Well, I just thought, okay, Red Cross, you know, you can't go wrong with Red Cross.
So each of our reporters made $100 donation to the Red Cross.
But we've learned that that is absolutely not the best way to give.
And wouldn't you agree with me looking at this amazing grassroots little camp behind that that is a much better use?
So we set up a website called HonokawaiRelief.com and it's already raised some dough.
I'm feeling really good about that.
Of course, we're doing our crowdfunding too for Rebel News.
We took Economy Class Airfare to get over here, but we had Lincoln and Alexa and then I came out.
We're all staying at the same Airbnb.
So our costs really are very, very low.
But altogether, between the three of us, it's probably going to be about $3,000, including the Airbnb.
If you think this journalism is useful, please do chip in at the truthaboutmaui.com.
I want to show you some of the interviews and journalism that Lincoln and Alexa have done.
They're asking questions about how did the fire happen?
Why was there no notification?
Like even where I'm standing, you can see a tower with a bunch of green discs on it.
And you might say, what is that?
It's some sort of electrical transformer?
No, that is an alarm system, a warning system for these islands in case there's a tidal wave, in case there's another crisis.
Those sirens alert people.
It's sort of the 1970s version of the, you know, when you get an amber alert on your cell phone.
By the way, they do that alert on your cell phone also.
I don't know if you remember, but not too long ago, they accidentally sent an alert to everyone in Hawaii.
I think that there was a missile strike inbound.
So they have these emergency systems, but they were not deployed.
The sirens never went off.
The alarm was never called.
Why?
One of the excuses I saw was absurd that people would run to the fire.
What are people stupid animals or something like cattle that would be spooked?
It was the dumbest excuse I ever heard, but not as dumb as this from the official in charge of water who made decisions about how much water to deploy to fight the fires.
Listen to this woke gobbledygook.
Take a listen to this.
The commission is responsible per authorizing statute to protect and manage all water resources in the state.
One water is like taking it and looking at it from a holistic system perspective.
And that's not any different than how Hawaiians traditionally managed water.
You know, in essence, we treated Native Hawaiians treated water as one of the earthy manifestations of a god and a kua, kane.
And so that reverence for a resource and that reciprocity in relationship was something that was really, really important to our worldview and well-being, right?
And living in an island and isolated from other civilizations.
And so I think where it shifted to today or over time is that we've become used to looking at water as like something which we use and not necessarily something that we revere as that thing that gives us life, right?
I mean, to me, it's a shift in value set.
And, you know, if we can start to really look at how we as humans in an island can reconnect to that traditional value set.
So really my motto is always like, let water connect us and not divide us.
Like we can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity.
Yeah, did wokeism or was it just incompetence or what was it?
And how about after the fires when the governor started talking about buying up all the land that was burned?
Hang on.
That's a conspiracy, isn't it?
That these fires were just to have someone scoop up the land for development.
Well, I don't know if it's a conspiracy because here's the governor talking about it.
I'm already thinking about ways for the state to acquire that land so that we can put it into workforce housing, to put it back into families, or to make it open spaces in perpetuity as a memorial to people who were lost.
We want this to be something that we remember after the pain passes as a magic place.
And Lahaina will rebuild.
The tragedy right now is the loss of life.
The buildings can be rebuilt over time.
Even the banyan tree may survive.
But we don't want this to become a clear space where then, yes, people from overseas just come and decide they're going to take it.
The state will take it and preserve it first.
Yeah, now listen, I'm not here to chase conspiracy theories.
The opposite.
If there's a conspiracy theory that needs to be debunked, we will do that.
But if there are strange questions that are unanswered, we will ask those questions and we'll follow the facts wherever they lead.
Interesting is that Joe Biden, after first saying no comment to anything about these fires, has announced that he finally will come to Lahaina on Monday today.
Now, I'm recording this in advance, so I won't have the information about that, but we will have Lincoln and Alexa on the scene to tell you what is said.
I hear a rumor that he might even be speaking in this very area, which is highly inappropriate given it's the least government part of all of Maui.
Joe Biden's Lahaina Visit00:04:16
And maybe that's why it's the most successful relief camp.
And maybe that's why Joe Biden wants to piggyback on their success.
Let me now do two things.
I'm going to show you a little bit of my journey when we went shopping for the crowdfunding.
I'm going to show you a little bit of that, just a little.
I'm not going to show you that much.
It was sort of fun to go with one of the volunteers and go shopping.
And I really felt useful.
And then I'm going to leave you with a few interviews that Lincoln and Alexa did because they were here before me.
And they were talking to people heart to heart about some of the terrible things that happened.
Come back after those interviews, and then I have a word about the wildfires that are raging in Canada, including in British Columbia.
I'll talk about that after these words from Lincoln and Alexa.
I don't like the shit.
And then where are you going to go?
I'm going to go to the office of the class.
Okay, so should we meet you there when we're done with the other soft stuff?
You can buy it all, right?
You can buy a lot of it, right?
Yeah.
Yep.
And then we can even do some stuff here.
Coffee.
Oh, and then all of these ones travel.
If you want to go, yeah, those smaller packets would be good, actually.
Probably.
Yeah, because we've just had baked babies quite so fast, so the environmental impact is very minimal.
I don't know anything about companies if they're actually good or not.
But you can take these, cut them up, and you just get them wet like normal hand soap with a shampoo.
It says five in one, so you can probably use it on your body.
Should we make our way to the checkout?
Let's do it.
I think Alexa said bananas.
Or summer said bananas.
Did I do that right?
I don't think they hurt.
When you're in Hawaii, you gotta have dull bananas.
I don't need a drink for the relief.
Fires and Evacuations00:14:37
Sitting around like in the room, and then all of a sudden, my husband started to yell, Oh, we gotta get out of here, we gotta get out of here.
So, we just like we didn't have time to we grabbed what we could grab, which wasn't much.
And then we got into our car, and then we had our neighbors from upstairs.
We were the last two to get out of there.
And then, when we were trying to come out, the fire just dropped on this tree across to the street with all the traffic.
We couldn't get out.
So, we said, Oh, just go back and park the car and we'll just run, yeah.
So, our neighbors had already like get out of the car and run down the road.
And what we did was I said, No, we're not running down because it looks like the fire is coming that way.
Let's run this way to our apartments and up to Waini and to that village.
And that's where I was saved.
I went, I don't know how many miles that is, but I ran as far as I can to the Koma village.
And then the guy carried me, and then after went back and brought the truck to pick us up, so he saved us, you know.
It was very unreal.
It was one of those experiences where, like people say, oh, it's like a scene out of a movie.
It was, but it was real life passing by a building that was completely on fire inside and starting to actually burn out from the inside.
You know, the smoke billowing through, the, you know, having to duck and turn away from the wind so that we could actually catch a little bit of like air to breathe.
All right, so at the time we're filming this right now, it's about just about 48 hours since we started HanukkahiRelief.com, and we've just about hit our goal of $25,000.
So, Amber, how does this make you feel?
We feel so loved, and we feel the love coming in, and we're really proud of what we've built.
We're really happy that we get to continue building out the infrastructure that we have here to support the community because we're finding new portions of the community coming out and joining us with new needs that we didn't even know we had.
So, we're just delighted that we get to continue the work out here.
What's your message to everybody that's donated?
Thank you.
Thank you so much for your donations, for embracing our family here, for supporting us.
We've been also reading through the messages of prayers and thoughts and support coming in globally has been really touching because we are still kind of out of communication.
We're really in the work that we're doing.
So to take a moment and to read the messages that are coming in along with the donations, just keep our hearts full and really keep us going.
Is there anything else you'd like to say to the people watching?
Yeah, we're learning that this is going to be a long-term project and we're not even halfway done yet.
The rebuilding and the support for our community is going to be months, if not years.
And we're hoping that the end of this, we're finally getting permanent solutions in place.
And it's not just crisis management that we're now taking a look at what the deeper needs are of the community and not just addressing the moment.
So thank you.
Their reasoning is that they were to put on the sirens and then people would move up into the fire.
Okay.
I call bullshit because we're not stupid.
All right.
If we would have been warned at two in the afternoon, we could have saved everything out of that apartment instead of just ourselves.
All right.
And there wouldn't be all the death and the people jumping into the ocean on fire.
All right.
And the death toll is bullshit.
What is it?
Up to 110?
I have friends who the day they saw more than 300 people in the water.
Okay.
So they're not counting the bodies that sunk.
All right.
You're not surprised that the siren sirens didn't go out?
Definitely surprised.
I mean, even, you know, on your phones, like, shouldn't there be like emergency alerts that come through?
And like, even if you don't have service, the satellites can directly beam in and you know, give you an update, like, hey, here's the fire.
But nothing happened, you know.
So all of us as a community were, you know, confused.
And it would have been awesome if we could even have some sort of help saying, hey, like, there's a fucking emergency right now.
Like, get out.
You know, like, get out of there.
Like, it's not just like, oh, shoot, there's a fire.
You know, there's fires everywhere in the world.
But this is like, when it's happening like this, it's like, frick, sound the alarms, get out of there, better safe than sorry.
So yeah, there are no alarms, there were no alerts.
And checked out the area, checking what was, it was easier to describe what was still standing rather than saying what was down because everything for the most part was pretty much gone and wiped out, disappeared, and just left me in shock.
And I'm a combat vet and I like never seen anything like this.
It looked like a nuclear Holocaust.
I couldn't believe it.
We saw fire trucks that were abandoned where you could see that they were overcome by the flames and the smoke and they had to leave.
The whole time I thought about what can I do, you know, and God told me, he says, you can't help these people, they're dead.
Go help the people that are still living.
So I came back to this area and we started with four cases of water, just trying to make sure everybody had drinking water to drink.
We heard that the water was contaminated.
We ended up having more fires and we ended up having to evacuate this area.
But only then after that when we had the fire out here in Kaunapoly, we could see the black smoke from a distance and it was really heavy, thick black smoke.
We thought we were going to be okay, so we stayed for a little bit, but there was a lot of cars trying to get out of our neighborhood.
My daughter-in-law was in the midst of it, so she evacuated, came running with her kids, my grandkids, to us for safety.
But by the time she came to us, it looked like it was more, you know, coming towards our direction.
So she went further north.
But it was just a lot of chaos with the cars on the roads.
Nobody, there was no direction from anyone.
You know, nobody was out there.
No help, no police, no firemen, nothing was out there to help direct traffic or to let anybody know exactly to evacuate.
So we all went back in the house, you know, had dinner.
It wasn't until almost 8, I want to say, 7.30, 8 o'clock, was when we heard the loudspeakers telling us to evacuate.
So in our era where we live, that was Waikuli Road on that street, that area.
That's when we heard the loudspeakers for us to evacuate was between 7.45, 8 o'clock.
So by that point, then we loaded up our bags and we got in the vehicles and we drove to the Civic Center.
By 8.30, we were told to evacuate there.
And we went from there to Times over here on this Times Store.
And then we stayed there.
I got there about 10 o'clock and we've just been there.
We're there for till the next morning.
What does your situation look like?
Did you lose your home?
Can you just talk to us a little bit about that?
Yeah, so the area that we're in is a place called Waikuli in Laina.
And we were, I guess, one of the fortunate ones to have our house still standing, one of the three houses that are still standing on our corner.
Everything else around us kind of is gone.
And that is very unfortunate.
But we still have no access to it.
So they barricaded where we can't go in because they have to still clear it out.
You know, there's a lot of fumes and toxic in the air.
So we're still here, one of the displaced families.
We were able to have minutes, enough time for us to grab, you know, our papers and our IDs and a couple pairs of clothing and make it out before we were evacuated, before we had to leave that area.
Great journalism by Lincoln and Alexa.
Now, we decided to come out here to Maui about a week ago, and it took us a couple days to put those plans into effect.
And we knew there were wildfires in Canada because there always are.
There's wildfire season.
It comes every year.
This year, it seemed to be worse than before.
And as Danielle Smith has noted, the vast majority of those fires are human-caused, either campfires getting out of control or arson.
Here's Danielle Smith answering that question when it was put by a climate change activist posing as a reporter.
Take a look at that.
We are having this discussion, of course, at a time when there are critical conversations around the world on climate change.
Much of the country, including your province, has been ravaged by wildfires this season.
Do you believe there is a connection to climate change?
Well, look, everybody is on target on 2050.
That was decided a couple of years ago at COP26.
And so all of the industrialized provinces are moving in that direction for exactly that reason.
Everybody knows that we need to reduce emissions.
But I'm also watching that China is a billion-plus population.
They don't have a target until 2060.
India, as I understand it, doesn't have a target until 2070.
But in terms of a link, Premier, do you believe that climate change and the unprecedented wildfires we've been seeing this summer are at all related?
All I know is in my province.
We had 650 fires and 500 of them were human-caused.
So we have to make sure that when people know that when it's dry out there and we get into forest fire season, that they're being a lot more careful.
Because anytime you end up with an ignition that happens, it can have devastating consequences.
And so that's what I would hope that we can educate the public on that front as well.
Well, whether or not the fires are started by lightning, which is how it always happened historically, prehistorically, or started by accident, a campfire getting out of control, or started by eco-terrorists committing arson to generate the narrative of climate change is boiling, global boiling, I don't know.
But the fact is, a fire is a fire.
And in British Columbia, in particular, it has consumed a tremendous amount of land.
The entire province has been declared a state of emergency by the Premier.
By the way, that didn't stop Justin Trudeau and Sophie Trudeau from partying into Fino.
I thought they were split up.
I don't understand how they're still vacationing in luxury, but that was more important for them than attending to the fires in that province.
People have said, Ezra, why are you in Maui covering the fires and not in BC covering the fires?
I guess there's three answers.
The first is we came to Maui because of the shocking death poll.
We don't know what the final figures will be, but it will not surprise me if it's around 500 in the end.
That's one of the local estimates I've heard.
And there were so many strange questions, like the ones I put earlier.
So we came here because it didn't feel like the journalism was right.
The second reason we came here is because it happened first, and we moved first, and it took us a few days to get into action.
And the third reason I would say is that we are very much interested in the fires at home.
Thank God they haven't had the same toll in human life as it has here in Maui.
You might remember about seven years ago, Reb News actually had a major crowdfunding campaign, our largest one to date when Fort McMurray was consumed in wildfires.
We raised six figures for the Fort McMurray relief, and it was one of the most important stories and battles we ever fought.
I'm still very proud of that to this day.
It's hard to do journalism when a fire is actually raging.
We didn't come to Maui until the fires were out.
And as I said, it's still difficult to get into Lahaina.
I had to sort of sweet talk my way through by telling the cop I was bringing the satellite dish.
By the way, in the end, we did set the satellite dish up where we were staying, and we gave the login credentials to the neighbors in the area.
So we will certainly cover the wildfires in British Columbia, but we're not going to go into the fire as they burn.
Listen, these fires are terrible, and they're terrible whether they're natural or whether they're arson.
If they are arson, especially if they're planned eco-terrorist arsons, I think we have to take it seriously, much more seriously than the global warming regime media will.
But for now, from here at the Hono Wakia, I'm getting that wrong, Hanokawa'i.
I'm sorry, you can imagine these words are strange for me to say, Hanokawa'i, Ohana Civil Relief Camp, which is so impressive and something we can learn from.