In this episode, we are joined by Jason Jones of the Vulnerable People Project to talk about the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Maui, Hawaii, and the impact it has had on the people on the ground.
00:07:41.580Now, Hawaiian Electric is suing Maui County and Maui County is suing Hawaiian Electric.
00:07:46.160Hawaiian Electric says they have definitive proof that they deep energize those lines eight hours before the fires broke.
00:07:55.880Now, if that's true, then that leads to some of the stranger conspiracy theories.
00:08:00.900And I've heard firsthand testimony to some very strange things that people witnessed.
00:08:06.040It is worth noting, I think, that BlackRock owns 8% of Hawaiian Electric.
00:08:12.380There were rumors that there were no brakes.
00:08:14.540But what I was told by a county official is that there were fire brakes, but they weren't maintained and they were overgrown.
00:08:20.600Also, it's been reported that Hawaiian Electric didn't bury those power lines because they didn't want to waste money on old energy, that they would rather use money for green energy.
00:08:33.700And so those power lines in a windy, dry area, by the way, an area that was made dry over a century of overdevelopment.
00:08:41.600So it was a very lush area before, but because of the plantations and then development, it's very dry.
00:08:52.040So they chose not to bury those power lines because of environmentalism.
00:08:56.860So at the very least, when I hear the word now green energy, it makes me sick to my stomach.
00:09:02.580Because this idea of green energy not only has young boys working to death in Africa, mining rare earth elements that are necessary for the batteries in these electric cars, it's led to famine and it's led to the decimation of Lahaina.
00:09:20.740And at the very least, we have a bureaucratic blunder and we have social justice virtue signaling and the climate lobby, the green lobby, effectively stopping progress.
00:09:35.420Forest fires have been down by 20% in the past 20 years, but yet we've had these catastrophes and these catastrophes are man-made.
00:09:43.700They're caused by not maintaining breaks or not doing fire breaks, where you burn areas to prevent the spread of a wildfire around inhabited areas, the not burying of power lines.
00:09:59.160People talk about why are the wealthy areas in Maui undamaged?
00:10:04.420And there are these theories of lasers or high energy weapons or heat energy weapons.
00:10:09.660I think just the fact that in those wealthy neighborhoods, the power lines were buried and they're allowed to water and they have lush, you know, they're allowed to water their yards and their water wasn't being turned off.
00:10:25.860But where the working class and the poor, the Hawaiians and the Kama'aina, the, the, you know, the, something else to know about Lahaina is it's, you know, it was first settled in 400 BC.
00:10:38.340So you've had Hawaiians there long before contact.
00:10:41.800It was the, it was the capital of the Hawaiian kingdom and it was where the gospel first landed and spread from in the Hawaiian Islands.
00:10:49.000Um, it's, it's, it was a very important town in the whaling industry.
00:10:54.080Lahaina is just this historic town, but the ethnic breakdown is native Hawaiian and Kama'aina.
00:11:01.400And what that means is it actually goes back to the kingdom of Hawaii days where, um, you had the, um, the Hawaiians, but you also, you didn't have to be an ethnically Hawaiian to be a citizen of the Hawaiian kingdom.
00:11:15.300You had Okinawans and Filipinos and Portuguese and Mexicans, yet all sorts of ethnicities, um, coming to Hawaii.
00:11:24.580Our cowboys or the Paniolos came from Mexican.
00:11:27.400They Paniolo, which is Hawaiian word for cowboy is Espanolo, Espanolo, those who spoke Spanish.
00:11:35.420Um, we had, uh, big ranches, like the largest ranch in the world until recently Parker ranches on the big island of Hawaii.
00:11:42.140So it was very ethnically diverse, the Hawaiian kingdom, uh, by the end of the 19th century.
00:11:47.800So, and then with the plantation industry, of course, they brought in a lot of Filipinos, especially unlike the rest of the United States, um, where they might be Tagalog or Visayan, they're Ilocano.
00:12:00.860They come from a Locos Norte and a Locos Sur.
00:12:03.340They were brought to work on the plantations.
00:12:05.180So you have a lot of Kama Aina, they're intermarried.
00:12:08.580So they're Filipino, Chinese, Portuguese, all mixed up and then native Hawaiian.
00:12:13.400But of course, in all healthy communities, uh, and the Hawaiian islands have had a very vibrant, faith-filled, healthy community, um, where your family ends and where one ethnic community ends.
00:12:25.120And the rest of it begins, it's kind of blurred.
00:13:06.560In Hawaii, we have a lot of aunties, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, kids, cousins, all living in one house because the cost of living is so high.
00:13:13.740And so it took seven incomes just to maintain that home with a house that's been in the family for generations.
00:13:20.880So that's another rumor that's actually true.
00:13:24.780These vultures have descended on Lahaina.
00:13:28.540And they haven't even identified the vast majority of the bodies yet.
00:13:31.820And they're trying to buy these people's land right out from underneath them.
00:13:35.300And thank God for the alternative press, because we have a catastrophe that is really at the level of Katrina or a 9-11 in its catastrophic scale.
00:13:46.200But it's not getting any kind of media.
00:13:49.740And what's very strange to me is Mark Zuckerberg lives on Maui, but you can't even do a frame.
00:13:55.140You know how they have these causes that they do for every other cause under the sun?
00:13:59.680You can't do a Maui strong or stand with Lahaina frame on Facebook.
00:14:05.460So the dissembling from the media, the misinformation, shutting off of the water, the locking people in, the lack of transparency and arrogance of the state and local government officials.
00:14:18.680Joe Biden's bizarre performance every step of the way on Lahaina, from I have no comment to going and telling silly stories about almost losing his car in a fire and then falling asleep at a Native Hawaiian town hall.
00:14:34.320It's just all been staggeringly disrespectful and unthoughtful.
00:14:40.720And now our organization, which is this Catholic apostolate, we've had three missions in all of this, which was to care for the living, honor and bury the dead, and to help keep Lahaina local.
00:14:53.180So we are committed to helping every family.
00:14:57.100You know, we want to honor the living by burying the dead.
00:14:59.900We want to honor the dead by caring for those who've survived.
00:15:02.420And then we want to tell the story about what really happened to Lahaina and make sure we stand with the people of Lahaina as they protect their homes, so many of them Catholics.
00:15:13.220So you had this Lanikila Church, which the whole world is talking about.
00:15:17.260The one thing, the sign of hope, is this Catholic church was left unscathed.
00:15:22.600And in fact, it's someone from the church, the parish committee that's become our VPP's liaison with the community for the funerals.
00:15:29.960So we're working very closely with that parish community, and we're working with and through.
00:15:35.400And that's something that VPP does around the world.
00:15:37.400We work with and through the communities we serve.
00:15:40.060So we don't have to descend with an army of do-gooders into a community that has a lot of people that are more than capable of caring for themselves.
00:15:48.100So we're working with the local community, especially the Catholic community, Epic Ministries, the Knights of Columbus, and the local parishes there.
00:16:00.300One of the—let me start with—tell us some of the stories of the families that you've already helped, that you've been involved with already, and what's been the reaction there.
00:16:12.300Hey, my friends, now is the time to stand up and fight.
00:16:15.600We are just about to have the Synod on Synodality, and everything that you've seen indicates that it's going to be an absolute disaster.
00:16:24.440We have Fr. James Martin as a personal appointee of the Pope speaking at it.
00:16:33.840These picks of the Pope to engage in this Synod are indicative of where we're going.
00:16:40.220We're going into heresy, and at these times of great crisis, the Church, especially those called in the laity to work for the glory of Christ and His Church, are called to gather and strategize.
00:16:56.580Back in 2014, LifeSite launched something called Rome Life Forum.
00:17:00.160It was a gathering at that point of some 75 life and family leaders from all around the world to strategize as to what we could do.
00:17:09.000And when we gathered, the majority of people were most concerned about what?
00:17:13.340About Pope Francis, about what was going on in Rome.
00:17:19.220But the life and family leaders saw it first.
00:17:22.360Now, a decade on, we are confronted with some of the most severe challenges the Church has ever faced.
00:17:31.000And so, our tradition at LifeSite is to continue with Rome Life Forum, which has continued every year until we had to take a break over COVID because we weren't permitted.
00:18:08.500Once the word got out that we were paying for funerals, John Henry, it was really, it was a bit overwhelming because my phone didn't stop ringing.
00:18:17.760And families would say, you know, would you pay for my father, even though we don't even have ashes and we don't think we'll even be able to identify?
00:18:26.520Will you help us do some sort of memorial or some sort of headstone?
00:18:30.700And we're like, of course, we, you know, we, there's the story of the father who was told his son was already evacuated.
00:18:40.640And then only to find out that his son had died under hiding under his bed with his dog.
00:18:47.080There's, I've been told that if you're not from Hawaii or have a lot of friends from Hawaii, you're not seeing this in your social media feeds.
00:18:52.580But I can tell you, my Instagram has been just flooded with the most tragic scenes.
00:19:00.020Countless live streams that people are live streaming as they were trying to escape.
00:19:07.000And it's live streaming and you're watching them die.
00:19:11.820Someone just sent me, I didn't even mean to click on it.
00:19:15.060You know, I, someone sent me one today.
00:19:27.300Within a minute, it went from like nervous laughter to, um, before it goes black, you just hear the girl saying, dear God, no, dear God, no.
00:19:51.140It is, uh, you know, maybe it does strike close to home to me, but I have to imagine that if in Orange County or in Santa Barbara, hundreds and hundreds of, you know, and look, we're conservatives.
00:20:05.240And people get mad at me for bringing this up and maybe because my kids are mixed race and maybe it's because I'm from Hawaii.
00:20:11.520I do believe there's structural racism.
00:20:13.800And I think the liberal media is the largest, is, is, is the most responsible for the structures of racism.
00:20:20.460And number one way is they don't allow a diversity of opinions to come from different ethnic communities.
00:20:27.680Um, that's the number one way I think there's a structure of racism, but, but I do think they don't value the lives of these Hawaiians and these Kama'ina.
00:20:35.580For the life of me, I just can't imagine if there were hundreds of children from Santa Barbara missing that this wouldn't be the number one new story in America.
00:20:46.220It's funny looking in the situation from Canada, even as close to America as Canada.
00:20:52.720It's almost like America is considering Hawaii is not part of America.
00:20:58.680Because I know you having lived there for so long and, and your, your, uh, your wife is from Hawaii and your kids therefore have whatever, but you get it.
00:21:10.080But it, it really does seem like it's a different country.
00:21:12.960Yes, it's far away, but it's still part of America.
00:21:15.120And yet it's being treated as if it's not, that that's the only thing I can make of it as a foreigner looking in thinking, they obviously don't think this is a big deal.
00:21:23.480It must be a foreign, like maybe they think it's like a colony or something they don't need to care about.
00:21:51.760They just, for all of their talk on race and equality and justice, they're, they're talking to themselves.
00:21:58.540They're fighting an internal war, I guess.
00:22:00.540And they're outwardly virtue signaling because of some internal battle.
00:22:04.180Because why there is no Maui strong Facebook, you know, meme, why are we not being inundated with memes and they're not offering frames to stand with the people of Lahaina?
00:22:15.740I think it's either intentional and malicious and part of some grander conspiracy, which a lot of Native Hawaiians can come on.
00:22:25.160And people are arguing that this is a massive land grab, which I'm fully open to the possibility of that.
00:22:31.300And it's, it's, it's, it's there by design, trying not to foment empathy for the people of Lahaina who are about to have their homes poached from them.
00:22:39.360Or what to me seems more likely is it's just some subtle bias.
00:22:44.360As you said, it's disgusting as it is to hear that they don't see them as Americans.
00:22:50.200But we've seen that from this administration.
00:22:52.180I mean, I don't want to bring politics into this again, because probably most of the, you know, it's Hawaii's a, you know, I don't want to, it's, it's, I don't want to bring politics into a catastrophe.
00:23:01.560But, you know, you have a Democrat president who said no comment in the face of a great catastrophe.
00:23:12.640You have a Democrat mayor of Maui County and a Democrat governor who held press conferences saying, effectively, we're open for business.
00:23:24.920And I'm not saying that it's not important to keep the economy going to support the local community and the small business owners and all of that.
00:23:31.580But could you imagine if Rudy Giuliani and 9-11 went out there and said, you know, hey, we still have great Broadway shows.
00:23:44.020When you look at the amount of people missing from Lahaina, a town of 13,000, is the equivalent of 800,000 New Yorkers dying or missing after 9-11.
00:23:52.860So how many people in New York, I think we all have friends from New York who can tell you a story about their, their roommate from college or their old neighbor or the kid they used to play Little League with who they lost on September 11th.
00:24:06.060Well, New York's a huge city and you had 3,000 deaths, not to diminish those.
00:24:11.220But when you're looking at over 1,000 dead or missing in Maui County, in Maui County, they lose about 1,000 people, 1,100 people a year or so die of all causes in a year.
00:24:24.680So you're looking at approximately dead and or missing about the same number of folks that die in an average year in the entire county of all causes.
00:24:41.600And so to see the media not paying attention to it, social media not saying, you remember when Russia invaded Ukraine, we could all make the little Ukraine flag memes and you could all have, we stand with Ukraine.
00:24:57.780And we remember after Katrina, that was the biggest news story in the world, as it should have been.
00:25:17.960You look at what the United States did in Afghanistan and in Sudan.
00:25:22.520So my organization was involved in both the evacuations of American citizens from Afghanistan two years ago.
00:25:29.660And we were involved this year in evacuating American citizens and Christians and nuns and others from Khartoum when the Civil War broke out in Sudan.
00:25:40.080What, you know, the Afghan Americans with blue passports were pulled to the back of the line in Afghanistan.
00:25:49.340For other Americans that look like me to go to the front.
00:26:44.520You know, I might do a documentary on this because I want to know.
00:26:47.580I want to know why this fire happened.
00:26:49.480I want to know why this response was so ham-fisted.
00:26:52.560And I want to know why the mainstream media in the United States didn't make this the biggest news story in the world.
00:26:58.140Because to me, as an American, it's one of the biggest news stories.
00:27:02.440And I have to think if Santa Monica or Santa Barbara was wiped from the face of the earth, it would be a bigger story than they're making out of Lahaina.
00:27:13.200I don't know that you have answers to them, but I've got to ask a few.
00:27:15.760So the thing with the children, we're being told that the children were off, out of school, parents didn't know, and they were at home, and many, many died.
00:27:28.320But there's not really clarity on that.
00:27:30.760We've got the story from you about the one dad who thought his kid was safe but was found, remains found, holding his dog under his bed.
00:27:47.060They're only telling us about 115 of those bodies.
00:27:51.440There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of more unaccounted for.
00:27:54.920The good news is that I will tell you the private Catholic schools were not in session.
00:27:59.140And the Vulnerable People Project, together with Epic Ministries, we brought over by plane what we call pop-up schools, so they relocated the school.
00:28:09.720And 100% of the Catholic school children are accounted for, so they didn't lose a single child.
00:28:15.720And so that's – yeah, God is great, and that is a beautiful story.
00:28:23.700Just before you continue there, I just want to delve on that for a second.
00:28:27.580So part of the funds that you're using that hopefully you get from LifeFunder as well is to provide interim education for these kids while their school is burned down.
00:28:39.060Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up, John Henry, because we haven't even announced this yet.
00:28:43.040So just talking with Tanada, the principal of the school, we – it was – you know when you feel helpless?
00:28:52.220When a tragedy happens, the only thing that takes away that sort of anxiety is to work.
00:28:57.180And so it was great that we, together with Epic Ministries and the Knights of Columbus, we funded a charter plane filled with basically what we call pop-up school.
00:29:06.740Then we met at the airport, we unloaded into trucks, and I had my own truck, and we drove our truck to Lahaina to Sacred Hearts Mission Church, where we then erected this pop-up school.
00:29:21.240And to be a part of unloading the planes and loading the trucks and unloading the trucks.
00:30:10.740So, yeah, we're going to be paying for funerals at this point, and we're going to be paying for Catholic education.
00:30:18.320So we're going to create up a structure of a scholarship fund.
00:30:22.000I made a proposal to them if rather than paying a semester of tuition, because we basically have to build a bridge as we're running across it,
00:30:29.500I asked the school, can we pay month to month for all the students?
00:30:34.380So instead of saying we're going to pay for these many students for the whole semester, if we can just pay month to month for all the students to make sure every student has the opportunity to go to school.
00:31:11.160Then jet skis shuttled the goods from the boats to near the beach, where then we were in the ocean, taking it from the jet skis, and we did a bucket brigade all the way up to the trucks.
00:31:21.040It reminded me of what I saw during World War II in the Solomon Islands and other places.
00:31:24.820You know, we were just – you know, we were unloading ship after ship through jet skis and bucket brigades.
00:31:33.740And then I – the hard part was, and it was also a grace, but I have the privilege of I drove to all the families, and we, you know, we delivered them the supplies of life.
00:31:48.040Now, being a Catholic apostolate, I can – you know, I like to make people smile.
00:31:51.940So I got – I bought coolers, and I filled coolers after coolers with ice on the other side of the island.
00:32:00.280And every family got – in each cooler, they were allowed one treat per family.
00:32:36.680You know, all the hard work we do in fundraising and media and logistics with planes and boats, you know, that's where you're getting work done.
00:32:46.040And so for me, to be able to – to be the – also the last guy at the very end of the supply chain, driving around Maui, delivering supplies to families, that was very rewarding.
00:32:57.180And to be able to see the smiles crack, you know, or they just would giggle that they couldn't believe this knucklehead brought a cooler full of beer, you know.
00:33:07.680So it was just worth it to see that – you're a Canadian, so you appreciate it.
00:33:12.080But just to see that – I showed it to the Red Cross guys.
00:33:14.480I'm like, Red Cross isn't delivering beer.
00:34:06.020These police are from this community, their family, their friends.
00:34:09.180So I know for a fact that these police officers would never do anything that they thought in any way would jeopardize the safety of those people.
00:34:18.460So just – I'm trying to wrap my mind around what were they doing.
00:34:23.040And obviously it was a catastrophic decision.
00:34:26.440I suspect they were afraid that they were down power lines in that direction or they were worried about which way the wind would blow.
00:34:34.780But again, at the very least, this is – and it's perfect rhyme.
00:35:38.100They said, well, we were afraid if we released the sirens that they would think it's for a tsunami or a hurricane and they would run up into the hills.
00:35:47.800And I heard one Hawaiian lady say they thought we were so stupid that we would run into a wall of flames because we heard a siren.
00:37:17.340They're responsive to ideology and not their constituents.
00:37:20.640And we see in this catastrophe, in a catastrophe, when you have elected officials that are trained to respond to ideology and outside interests rather than their community interest, this is what you're going to get.
00:37:39.160You know, the problem with the state of Hawaii is the greatest mistake in American political history is the direct election of the senators.
00:37:49.060Our senators used to be elected by the state legislatures, believe the state house.
00:37:53.500So when the state house would elect the U.S. Senate, that made the states, the Senate was responsive to the interests of the state.
00:38:00.820And it made it impossible for special interests to lock them up.
00:38:06.580Only the only special interest to lock them up was the state house.
00:38:10.300You can't have a special interest control 10,000 state representatives is what you'd have to do.
00:38:18.080But to control 51 senators, it's quite easy.
00:38:20.640And when you have small states like Hawaii or Delaware, where our president comes from, you basically have the perfect storm, a state without a lot of money and special interests come in and they own your senators.
00:38:35.380So our senators are not responsive at all to the people of Hawaii.
00:38:39.720Even our governor, it sounds like he's more interested in the green lobby than he is about the needs of his own people.
00:38:53.380John Henry, and I'm sure it's the same in Canada.
00:38:56.180When did this start that our elected officials and those civil servants that work for our bureaucracies, when did it start that they felt it was their job to hide the truth from us, that it was their job to dissemble, to lie when there's no even reason to lie?
00:39:12.720You know, when Joe Biden said no comment, the reason he didn't have a comment was because he knew that there was a party line that he needed to tell and he didn't have it memorized yet.
00:39:23.220Because just common sense would have said, when you're asked about a great catastrophe in one of these United States, what you would say is, my heart goes out for the people of Maui and Lahaina.
00:39:34.340We're praying for them, and I, as President of the United States, will make sure that the federal government working with your local and state governments and NGOs will do everything we can to support you.
00:39:49.400Because he knew that there was massive smoke screens being laid down, and he didn't want to contradict anything, any of the party line that was coming out, and it's still coming out.
00:40:03.040And so you're hearing things that people are suspicious about for no reason.
00:40:06.220And now a lot of people are talking about, why are they putting up this black cloth, blocking out Lahaina?
00:40:11.960I suspect it's to keep toxic chemicals and waste from blowing all over the island.
00:40:16.900But people's first response is, what are they doing?
00:52:31.320But with this decision by Facebook not to allow frames for Maui, you know, I was on Alex Jones' show, and I know that Elon Musk loves that show.
00:52:42.160And so I said, Elon, you know, you need to tweet out to Mark Zuckerberg.
00:52:47.240You need to tweet out Investigate Hawaii.
00:52:49.760Stand against Mark Zuckerberg and his friends.
00:52:51.380And within 48 hours, Elon Musk tweeted that out.
00:52:54.680So I don't know if it was me asking him to do it on the Alex Jones show or not, but it's just so bizarre.
00:53:00.860John Henry, the world's becoming very strange.
00:53:07.940And when you try to wrap your mind around it, it just becomes impossible.
00:53:12.320And that's why through my organization, the Vulnerable People Project, it's just a very simple, our job is to stand with the most vulnerable people in the world when the world is left.
00:53:21.360You wouldn't think Lahaina would fit that.
00:53:24.860You'd think that the world would be paying attention.
00:57:07.520And it's a privilege to be a part of the church.
00:57:09.500And as everything becomes confusing, to me, the simple thing for me to do as a lay Catholic man is stand with the child in the womb, stand with the Uyghur in Chinese Occupied East Turkestan, stand with that translator in a safe house in Afghanistan.
00:57:26.180And to stand with those the world has forgotten or hates that they're easy to find.
00:57:44.680I moved to Hawaii as a 17-year-old boy, a broken kid, an atheist kid.
00:57:50.020It was the Catholics, the Knights of Columbus of Council 5000 that led this pro-life atheist into the Catholic Church.
00:57:56.740It's my family that I made there and my friends that kind of watched this broken Haole kid from Chicago that tripped into Hawaii at 17 and had patience with me and mentored me and befriended me and made me parts of their family.
00:58:12.880My kids are now, you know, Hawaiian, Filipino, Pacific Islander, Filipino, Chinese, and me, Kama'aina.
00:58:22.800And we are committing to every funeral.
00:58:26.300The LDS Church is doing all the LDS funerals.
00:58:30.240And VPP is committing to every funeral.
00:58:33.000And so we would definitely appreciate your support.
00:58:35.960And why the funerals to me are so important, I even had a very prominent Catholic person tell me to let God take care of the dead, that I should focus on the living.
00:58:45.440And I said, well, no, I'm going to honor the living by burying their dead and remind the living that they have an eternal destiny.
00:58:54.740And when we treat the dead with respect, we're reminding people that we were created for an eternal life with our creator.
00:59:03.720And that's what we're reminding people.
00:59:06.160We're also telling the people of Lahaina that there's hope, not to despair.
00:59:11.100And we're helping to give them closure.
00:59:14.300These things are very important to the healing of a community.
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