Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (2014) s11e20 Episode Script
Hawai'i
1
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight"!
I'm John Oliver,
thank you so much for joining us.
It's been a busy week.
Joe Rogan appeared to endorse
RFK only to walk it back,
these astronauts learned
they may be stuck
on the International Space Station
'til next year,
and the Olympics wrapped up, after
another week of inspiring stories,
including 14-year-old Australian
Arisa Trew,
who won a skateboarding gold,
then gave this spectacular interview
about what her win meant.
The gift I asked from my parents if I,
like, won was if I could get a pet duck
because ducks are really cute
and I really wanted a pet duck.
And what have they said?
My mum said yes, but my dad's been,
like, saying yes this whole time,
but my mum was saying no, but then,
like, I said if I, like, did win,
could I get a duck?
And she said yes.
Are you gonna teach the duck
to skateboard?
I'm going to take the duck to the skate
park as well, and take it on walks.
Listen to me: somebody get that girl
a fucking duck right now!
If anyone has ever earned one,
it is her. In fact, you know what?
Every Olympic medalist should get
a duck from now on.
They should all stand proudly on the
podium with a medal around their neck
and a duck in their arms.
That is the Olympics that I want
to see next time, or I'm out.
But sadly, we have to turn
to the U.S. election,
where the Trump team has been
desperately trying to blunt
the momentum of the Harris campaign,
and I do mean "desperately".
This week,
he started calling her "Kamabla",
which was immediately confusing.
Did it mean she was "blah"?
Or was he trying to evoke
that she's Black?
Was it a typo he doubled down on?
A journalist actually texted
his campaign spokesman and asked,
"Why is he misspelling her name
Kamabla?"
to which the spokesperson responded
and this is all real, "Kamabla".
The reporter then asked,
"What does that mean?"
and got the response, "Kamabla".
And when they eventually said,
"Can I use it on the record?"
his response was,
you guessed it, "Kamabla".
And I genuinely hope he responds
to all texts like that.
"Hey honey, can you pick up the kids
from baseball practice?" "Kamabla."
"Okay, but seriously, can you get
the kids? I have to work late."
"Kamabla."
"Steven, why are you like this?"
"Kamabla."
"I want a divorce."
"Kamabla."
That same spokesman also put out
this Venn diagram
of the words "kama" and "bla",
which not only failed
to explain anything,
it's not how Venn diagrams work!
Not to be a total chart bitch, but I am
what I am, and very basically,
a Venn diagram uses overlapping
circles to visually depict
the relationship between
two or more things,
with commonalities represented
by where they overlap.
For instance: a Venn diagram could
feature one circle with dolphins
and another with sharks,
overlapping with the shared
descriptor "lives in the ocean".
Or you could have a circle with me
and another with Big Bird,
with the overlap being "squawks
educational lessons on television."
Or you could have a circle with Jenna
Ortega and one with Pepé Le Pew,
with the intersection "can't say
where they were on 9/11".
Now, does it matter that one's fictional
and one wasn't born yet?
I can't answer that, I'm telling you
what the diagram logically highlights.
My point is, you can have lots of fun
with charts,
but this right here
is fucking nothing.
But it's not just "Kamabla"
that's been an unforced error.
Trump's VP choice, JD Vance,
a man with the face you get
if you Google "bachelor party arrest",
continues to underwhelm.
Here he is choosing the worst possible
answer to a pretty easy question.
You've been criticized as being a little
too serious, a little angry sometimes.
What makes you smile?
What makes you happy?
I smile at a lot of things, including
bogus questions from the media.
If you watch a full speech that I give,
I actually am having a good time
out here, and I'm enjoying this.
But look, sometimes, you gotta take
the good with the bad.
And right now, I am angry about what
Kamala Harris has done to this country
and done to the American southern
border.
Is he all right? He just got asked,
"What makes you smile?"
a question to which there
is almost no wrong answer.
You could say my kids,
dogs that sleep weird, a warm bath,
dogs that sleep weird,
Cheez-Its, which is incidentally also
the name of this dog that sleeps weird.
All good answers. But responding
to "what makes you smile?"
with "what makes me angry is what's
happening at the southern border"
is just plain wrong! Also, can we just
take a minute on that laugh?
What the fuck is that?
This is going to sound strange,
but have you ever had one of those
words that you'd only encountered
by reading it, and had never heard
in conversation?
Like you're pretty sure you know
how to pronounce this word,
but you never actually heard it,
so you didn't know that you were wrong
until you were at a dinner party
and described something
as "the epi-tome of strangeness"
and the other guests said,
"did you mean 'epitome?'"
It's not your fault, is it? No one had
ever used that word around you,
and you made
a pretty reasonable guess.
Well, that is how I genuinely think
JD Vance learned to laugh.
I think he read about laughter
in books or comics,
saw it written out phonetically,
and intellectually understood
the noises Archie made,
and when the opportunity arose,
when someone asked him
what makes him happy,
even though he'd never tried out
the noise before, he thought,
"I got this," and said "ha, ha, ha, ha".
And immediately knew
he had fucked up bad.
But the seeming panic in the Trump
campaign right now
is perhaps best exemplified by their
reaction to Harris's choice of Tim Walz,
your friend's nice dad,
as her VP candidate this week.
In terms of general vibe,
he's the exact opposite of JD Vance.
Here he is last year with his daughter
at the state fair.
Hey, Minnesota. Governor Walz here,
out at the state fair with my daughter.
Hope.
Every year we as a family do something
old and something new.
I get to pick something, a classic,
the old mill ride,
and then Hope gets
to pick something new.
I think we're going to go do
the slingshot.
Which, I don't know what it is,
and they're keeping it from me.
But then we're going to go get
some food. Corn dog?
- I'm vegetarian.
- Turkey then.
- Turkey's meat.
- Not in Minnesota. Turkey's special.
Excellent.
I have never enjoyed watching
a vegetarian get gaslit more than that.
All of that is delightful, from
the rapport with his daughter
to the corn dog exchange to the fact
that he kept his promise
and rode that slingshot.
Take a look.
That is genuinely nice!
Clearly, you don't have to ask Walz
what makes him smile.
You can see it right there, or in photos
of him doing everything
from holding a piglet,
to getting hugged by kids after signing
universal free school meals into law,
to him here, seemingly remembering
that he isn't JD fucking Vance.
Walz is a former geography teacher
and football coach,
and there is a lot to like
in his biography,
including that, as a teacher, he served
as the faculty adviser
for his school's gay-straight alliance,
explaining his decision to volunteer,
saying,
"It really needed to be
the football coach,
who was the soldier and was straight
and was married."
And to his credit,
he did that in 1999.
That wasn't easy to do back then,
especially given just
three years earlier,
a bill banning federal recognition
of same-sex marriage
had been signed
into law by Bill Clinton,
truly a moral compass when it comes
to marriages.
For the past week,
Republicans have struggled to find
a line of attack on Walz, branding him
as a socialist, which he isn't,
labeling him as "Tampon Tim"
for providing feminine hygiene products
in schools,
and even getting angry
at the fact that Minnesota's state flag
was changed on his watch.
Walz let his best city burn down,
flooded it with illegals,
and helped cancel the state flag
to make it look more like the flag
of Somalia.
Just over the last three months,
he changed Minnesota's flag
to look basically like a Somali flag.
So, there's the Minnesota flag.
Gorgeous flag.
Looks like any other state flag.
He changed it to this.
Go ahead and Google the Somali
flag and tell me they don't look alike.
What are you talking about?
Have you seen flags?
They're all some combination of colors,
stars, and, in the case of Sicily,
a three-legged monster
with a head for a vagina.
But that's really more of
a "Sicily's gonna Sicily" situation.
For what it's worth, the flag was mainly
changed as a result of objections
to the depiction of a Native American
on the old flag,
which had only been around
since 1957 anyway.
Also, Walz wasn't the one
who pushed for the change,
he just happened to be governor
at the time.
So, that criticism is more
than a little desperate,
as was Republicans' attempt to target
Walz's military service,
which consisted of serving 24 years
in various units and jobs
in the Army National Guard.
He was accused this week of "stolen
valor" for having said, in passing,
at one event in 2018,
that he'd carried weapons of war,
in war, which he hadn't.
He never actually saw combat, and the
campaign has said that he misspoke.
But Republicans didn't stop there,
with JD Vance and others also trying
this line of attack, regarding the
circumstances under which Walz left
the National Guard.
When Tim Walz was asked
by his country to go to Iraq,
do you know what he did?
He dropped out of the army and
allowed his unit to go without him.
I think it's shameful to prepare
your unit to go to Iraq,
to make a promise that
you're going to follow through,
and then to drop out right before
you actually have to go.
Okay, that is just not true.
Walz retired in May of 2005.
His unit wasn't ordered to mobilize
until July of that year,
and didn't deploy to Iraq until 2006.
Even the hard-right Wall Street Journal
editorial board said
"the charges leveled so far about his
military service look like thin gruel".
Which, as far as arguments go,
is just not enough gruel.
Making it official:
after 11 years of this show,
despite my best efforts to resist it,
we've somehow reached a point
where I, a British Oliver, have
inadvertently demanded more gruel.
It seems some stereotypes
are just deserved.
And look, there are 85 days
until Election Day.
While that might not seem like a lot,
it's gonna feel incredibly long.
And it's plenty of time for the GOP
to draw up attacks far more vicious
and hateful than "Kamabla,"
while also figuring out more inventive
ways to attack her running mate.
But for right now, it does seem telling
that so much of their attack strategy
seems to boil down to a nonsense word
and false accusations of stolen valor,
two desperate smear attempts
with one thing in common:
they reveal the Trump campaign has
currently got absolutely nothing.
And now, this.
And Now: Rachel Campos-Duffy Really,
Really Wants You to Know
She Has a Podcast.
Some fundamental level,
it's just anti-human being.
It's anti-human. And that's why on my
podcast, "From the Kitchen Table",
we talk a lot about these issues.
If you want to catch my podcast,
you have to go back a few months,
but we have a podcast that went viral
on the right way to find
a romantic partner, and it's called
"Going Back to the '80s".
Well, if you want more on this
conversation, and it's very deep,
you can go to my podcast. By the way,
you can catch her on my podcast.
She was on my podcast.
I had Kennedy on my podcast.
We did this podcast. Please go to my
podcast, "From the Kitchen Table."
I already did that on my podcast.
I have a podcast with my husband
on "From the Kitchen Table".
On my podcast, "From the Kitchen
Table," that I have with my husband.
I have "From the Kitchen" podcast,
"Table" podcast with my husband.
Check out the most recent episode
of my podcast.
I don't want to plug my podcast,
but I'm gonna plug my podcast.
This week on my podcast. I'm not
trying to promote my podcast,
but I am.
The primary is over. In fact, I have a
podcast that just came out this week
called "The Primary". The title of the
podcast is "The Primary's Over".
- I just think that.
- There you go.
Moving on. Our main story tonight
concerns Hawai'i.
A place often depicted as paradise
in movies and TV shows
like "Hawaii 5-0," "NCIS: Hawaii,"
and "Magnum PI",
where this magnificent clip is from.
Morning, sister.
Good morning, sir.
Nuns don't work on Sunday.
Yes! That happened!
This might come as a shock
to younger viewers,
but TV used to be really good.
And if you're thinking, "Why are you
showing me that for this story?"
Even if it took place in Hawai'i,
nothing indicated that it did",
shut up!
I wanted to remind you of a simpler
TV time when you could shoot a nun
to solve
all of your Hawai'i crime problems
without worrying that someone online
would point out
that "actually there's no rule that says
nuns can't work on Sundays
and given that nuns are by definition
committed to service
it wouldn't be uncommon to see
one performing maintenance,
even on a Sunday,
if so ordered by her superior."
Shut the fuck up!
TV used to be great not because
the people who wrote it were better,
but because the people
who watched it were!
Anyway, Hawai'i is famous for being one
of the most popular tourist destinations
on Earth, so much so, many visitors
can't seem to resist taking
a piece home with them.
Tourism officials are reminding
visitors not to take lava rocks home.
Taking things from national parks
is against the law,
so taking volcanic rocks from
Hawai'i's volcanoes is illegal.
But apart from being illegal,
legend has it that taking volcanic
rocks from Hawai'i is bad luck.
Because of that myth,
many people who take the rocks
end up shipping them back
to the island with notes of apology.
Officials say putting the rocks back
where they came from costs time
and money.
It's true, that apparently happens so
much, a national park official said,
"We would love for people
just to stop taking stuff
and then also please
just stop mailing us stuff."
And I get that, especially because
a rock with a note attached to it
is famously one of the most threatening
forms of communication there is.
It's right up there with notes where
all the letters are cut out
from different magazines,
a message scrawled in blood on
the wall, or literally any phone call.
Please, just text unless
you're planning on murdering me,
and even then, you know what?
Just do it. I've had a good run.
I've had a run. We're talking about
Hawai'i because a few days ago,
it marked a grim anniversary.
A year ago, the deadliest wildfire
to hit the U.S. in more than a century
ripped through the west Maui town
of Lahaina,
destroying more than 2,000 buildings,
causing five and a half billion dollars
in damage, and killing 102 people.
The aftermath exposed long-simmering
tensions under the surface
of Hawai'i's reputation
as a tourist paradise,
especially when just a month later,
its governor announced plans
to begin reopening Maui to tourism,
even while many locals
were still traumatized or missing,
something that, understandably,
went down poorly there.
It's just not right to go back
into full-force tourism.
We're still recovering.
Funerals just started
and they want us to go back in.
Are we supposed to be jovial when
tourists are here in bathing suits,
frolicking in the surf, driving these
roads like they're on a racetrack,
drinking Mai Tais,
and partying in our face?
You can see why
he might resent tourists.
No one wants people partying
while they are suffering.
It's the main reason
that they never did a season
of "MTV Spring Break: Kosovo".
And it got worse because developers
almost immediately started trying
to snatch up property there.
Lahaina's now-barren landscape
is being eyed by developers
who want to replace the community
with luxury properties.
To some here, it's a dark irony,
because development may have
contributed to the catastrophe here.
Over the years, to accommodate
the growing tourism industry,
much of Maui's water was diverted
to new hotels and golf courses
and away from communities
like Lahaina,
drying the town out and turning it
into a tinderbox.
If you walk right over here where
all of these hotels are,
everything's green and lush.
And you walk from here to town,
everything is dry.
That is infuriating.
And for Native Hawaiians, it must
be difficult to shake the feeling
that you're an afterthought.
It's like being introduced
by your parents saying,
"These are our sons, Tommy
and Tommy's brother,"
or having your TV show announced as,
"Stick around after
'House of the Dragon.'"
I imagine that might be hurtful.
It is frankly no wonder that around
two-thirds of Hawai'i residents
apparently believe that their state
is being run for tourists
at the expense of locals.
And the fact is, the more you look
at Hawai'i, the clearer it becomes,
they're not wrong about that,
but it's not just tourists.
Hawai'i has long been run for the
benefit of everyone but Hawaiians.
So, given that, tonight,
let's talk about Hawai'i.
And let's start
with some of its history,
which isn't actually taught much
in American schools.
Something that's a little bit weird,
given that it only became a state
in living memory.
Hawai'i was first settled by seafaring
Polynesians as early as the year 300.
But at least in white people's telling,
the really important stuff didn't happen
until around 14 centuries later.
On a January day in the year 1778,
two strange ships anchored off the
leeward coast of one of the islands.
The flag was English.
The man in command was
Captain James Cook.
In 1835, the first permanent plantation
was established on the island of Kauai.
Within three years,
there were 20 sugar mills.
From these modest beginnings,
a great industry was to grow.
Now, that clip leaves out a lot.
But you probably already knew that
the second you heard the most
ominous line in any historical film,
"The flag was English."
It's like seeing oranges
in "The Godfather".
When the British flag appears
on an old newsreel,
you know someone's about to die
and shit's about to go down.
That first western contact led to the
arrival of traders, and eventually,
American missionaries.
With them came diseases which would
eventually reduce the Native population
by as much as 90%.
Descendants of the missionaries
set up those sugar plantations,
and soon came to dominate politics
and economic life on the islands.
And while racist writings of the time
paint Hawai'i
as a primitive tyrannical society,
that wasn't the case.
It was a constitutional monarchy
that actually banned slavery in 1852,
before the U.S. did,
and had "one of the highest literacy
rates in the world."
Nevertheless, in 1887, a small group
of white plantation owners
and businessmen forced Hawai'i's king,
at gunpoint,
to sign what became known
as the Bayonet Constitution,
basically, transferring
much of his power to them.
When his sister, Queen Lilioukalani,
succeeded him,
she vowed to undo that,
so the businessmen planned a coup
to overthrow her.
Fun fact: one of the coup's leaders
was Sanford Dole,
of the pineapple Doles,
and also, the only man ever to have
a mustache
and a beard that is also a mustache.
He pushed for the U.S. to annex
the islands,
against the will of Native Hawaiians,
who collected over
38,000 signatures to oppose it.
Which, considering there were about
40,000 Native Hawaiians at the time,
is a whopping 95%.
But Dole and his conspirators got
their way,
and with the help of the U.S. military,
the queen was overthrown,
and Hawai'i was annexed
into the United States.
Although, again, when white people
tell the story of that era,
it tends to sound a bit different.
The queen, last of a long line
of Polynesian rulers,
signed the abdication that made
Hawai'i an American possession.
These Native troops became soldiers
of Uncle Sam.
Happy that her island kingdom became
an American protectorate,
the queen of Hawai'i bade farewell.
"Yes, there's the queen of Hawai'i now,
dressed in her celebratory black,
signing the islands over to America
completely of her own free will
surrounded by her closest friends,
several armed white men
with mustaches."
Hawai'i eventually became America's
50th state in 1959,
and 34 years later, Congress passed
a resolution formally apologizing
to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow
of the Hawaiian kingdom.
Which is nice, isn't it?
It's always nice to say sorry
for things,
whether it's for running late
or making your pretend wedding
to a cabbage nicer
than your actual wedding with your
human wife or violent imperialism.
People appreciate a sincere apology,
I think.
But despite that apology, over the past
century, a number of groups,
from the U.S. military, to tourists,
to the extremely wealthy,
have continued to exploit Hawai'i.
And let's start with the military.
Hawai'i's long been used as a strategic
military base in the Pacific.
Thanks to Michael Bay, we all now
know about the tragedies
suffered by beautiful white people
at Pearl Harbor.
But the military's long had
an extensive presence in Hawai'i,
more than you may even realize.
"There are 12 key military installations
and bases across the state."
And it hasn't exactly been a sensitive
custodian of the land that it occupies.
Take the Pohakuloa training area,
a 132,000-acre live-fire range
on the Big Island of Hawai'i.
Much of it is on federal land that was
confiscated after Hawai'i was annexed.
But the military also leased some
more land from the state
at a ridiculously low rate,
and, to put it mildly,
hasn't been a great tenant.
In 1964, the military secured a lease
for 30,000 acres of land
that they could train on
for the next 65 years,
all for $1.
Since then, they've dropped bombs
from planes,
launched rockets from helicopters,
shot targets with mortars
and artillery,
and left behind unknown amounts
of unexploded ordnance.
This happens every day?
Not necessarily every day,
but pretty regularly.
It must be a big task to go in
and clean all that up.
For the impact area,
where we're firing now,
we let that be.
It's never cleaned?
The impact area is left as it is
when we fire in there.
That's for safety reasons.
Does that mean decades and decades
and nobody picks this stuff up?
Correct.
Setting aside the fact the military got
their own 65-year playground for $1,
that is some nuclear-grade
euphemizing there.
The place we've been bombing?
That's an "impact area".
And it's not unclean, it's just
"left as is," for "safety reasons".
I could watch that man
spin awful things all night.
"I didn't cheat on my wife.
I merely discovered
an alternate penis holding area.
And I'm not telling her about it
for safety reasons."
But that is by no means
the only place the military's failed
to clean up after itself.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor,
the U.S. took over this island,
sacred to Native Hawaiians,
and used it as a training ground,
bombing the shit out of it.
But even after activists risked
their lives to stop the bombing,
and a multimillion-dollar effort
to clean it up had been completed,
a full quarter was still not cleared.
To this day, more shells and bombs
are sometimes revealed by erosion,
and additional ordnance sometimes
washes up on the beach.
Which really makes you wonder if that
famous Jesus and the footprints poem
should have ended,
"And I turned to Jesus and asked,
'Then why was there was only
one set of footprints in the sand?'
Jesus said, 'Because, my child, that
was when I jumped on your shoulders
because there was no fucking way
I was gonna step on a bomb!
No way, my guy.
They're fucking everywhere!'"
But that's not all. In 2002,
middle school kids working on their
school garden uncovered a live grenade,
and subsequently, ordnance experts
found three more in the same area.
And just three years ago, the military's
massive fuel storage facility
on Oahu was the site of a spill that
poisoned a water system
that serves 93,000 people.
Thousands of people
were made sick by it,
and the entire island's water supply
was put at risk.
The point is, the U.S. military has a
pattern of causing an absolute mess
in Hawai'i, with activists having
to struggle to then undo the damage.
Here is one last example, Makua
Valley, on Oahu's western shore.
The U.S. Army seized it
after Pearl Harbor,
evicting local families who'd lived
there for generations,
and promised their lands would
be returned to them six months
after the end of World War II.
But it still hasn't done that.
Instead, it's yet another of Hawai'i's
sacred spaces that's been used
for target practice.
Now, thankfully, after activists
took the army to court,
they finally got the military to stop.
Though the relationship between
the two remains, to put it mildly,
strained.
Activists with the group
Malama Makua sued the army,
and in 2004 successfully got it
to stop live-fire training here.
Now, the group is allowed to visit
the valley, but only twice a month.
So, the group has to walk behind this
representative from the military
who first has to scan the area
for potential unexploded ordnance.
We appreciate access into this valley,
but we don't appreciate the fact
that we have to ask permission
to be in this valley.
What is your relationship
to the army right now?
The reality is, it's pretty fucked up.
Sorry for the swearing, but it's not
like we're all best friends.
Okay, first, there is no need
to apologize for swearing.
If anyone is entitled to say "fuck"
on national TV, it should be you.
As for "not best friends," I get it.
You don't call an institution
who steals your shit
then makes you ask permission
to visit it your best friend.
As we all know, you call that
The British Museum.
As I said, it's not just the military
who can take precedence
over residents of Hawai'i.
That's true
of the tourism industry, too,
which is obviously a big part
of Hawai'i's economy,
contributing nearly 20% of its GDP.
But while tourists experience Hawai'i
as a carefree vacation spot,
many who live there experience
a very different reality.
For one thing, tourism jobs tend
to be pretty low-wage,
which is part of why more than
two-thirds of those who live in Hawai'i
show signs of financial stress,
like working multiple jobs,
living with relatives,
and dipping into savings.
Hawai'i does seem set up
to benefit wealthy outsiders.
Take housing. There are currently
32,000 short-term rentals
across the state, meaning one out
of every 18 housing units there
is a vacation rental, like an Airbnb.
And a majority of their owners
don't even live in Hawai'i.
In fact, nearly a quarter of Hawaiian
homes were purchased by buyers
from outside the state.
That is part of why Hawai'i is now the
most expensive state in the nation
for housing.
And given that, it's hardly surprising
that Hawai'i has consistently had
among the highest rates
of homelessness in the nation.
It's been an issue there for years now,
as this report from 2015 shows.
We've actually been told by some
of the city crews to be invisible,
and it's like,
how do you want us to do that?
Some of Hawai'i's homeless people
used to live
in much more visible Waikiki Beach.
Officials said that was hurting
the tourist industry,
crucial for the local economy.
It started to impact our guests.
They would comment about it
on Tripadvisor and elsewhere.
It is shitty to tell homeless people
to be invisible,
but it's extra shitty to do so
to protect your Tripadvisor reviews.
Do you have any idea how useless
they are? Here is an example of one:
"The museum itself was wonderful.
I was very disappointed that
the entry discount only applies
to American military. One star."
Guess what that was from?
The 9/11 Memorial Museum.
A different one-star
Tripadvisor review reads,
"This experience proves once more,
that NYC is best likened
to a gilded dumpster that is roaming
with every kind of vermin
as soon as night has been falling.
If you are looking for true urbanity,
visit Europe!"
That's an annoying thing to say
about anything,
but particularly irritating considering
it's a review of, again,
The 9/11 Museum.
Or how about a third Tripadvisor
review that reads,
"Absolutely woeful, avoid, avoid,
stay well clear of this establishment,"
a review that is for, and I think
we all know where this is going,
New York's TGI Friday's.
I admit,
the reviews aren't 100% wrong.
But it's not just housing costs. Food
is incredibly expensive in Hawai'i.
The islands used to be self-sustaining,
but one legacy of the sugar plantations
is that they destroyed
much of the agricultural diversity.
As a result, Hawai'i today imports
90% of its food,
with residents routinely paying some
of the highest prices in the nation
for basic staples,
as this woman in Hawai'i explains.
Let me show you how much
my groceries cost.
Gallon of milk: $9.
Five apples. I did eat two, 'cause
I was very hungry on the walk home.
$15.
$3 an apple.
Bag of grapes: $17.
$17 is too much
for that many grapes.
In fact, it's honestly too much
for any grapes. Grapes are terrible.
If you don't eat them in three days,
they just shrivel into skanky
little sugar balloons.
Let me be clear about this: you either
be a raisin or you be a grape.
I have no patience
for your fruit puberty.
And Hawai'i's government has said
it's addressing food costs.
In 2014, its governor set a goal
to double Hawai'i's food production
by 2020. Which sounds good!
But it's not a great sign that he later
changed the target date to 2030,
and it is not clear
they'll hit that either.
But maybe the ultimate expression
of the extent
to which Hawai'i is being reshaped
by wealthy outsiders
is its growing population
of billionaires.
11% of the private land there
is owned by just 37 billionaires,
among them Larry Ellison,
Mark Zuckerberg, and Oprah.
For a sense of just how much land
some of them have,
consider that, in 2019, when a different
brush fire broke out in Maui,
people trying to escape it
wound up tweeting at Oprah
to kindly share the code to the gate
for her private road on her estate,
so folks could evacuate.
Now, to her credit,
she did that immediately.
The state's governor at the time
even tweeted out,
"A big mahalo to Oprah for giving Maui
County access to your private road."
But it still feels a bit weird that
people had to ask in the first place.
And other billionaires have gone
much further
than just buying parts of an island.
The rugged shoreline, sparkling waters,
and pristine beaches
on the island of Lanai make this
Four Seasons resort
one of the world's most sought-after
vacation destinations.
Billionaire founder of Oracle
Larry Ellison loved
the remote Hawaiian getaway
so much he bought it,
along with 98% of the entire island,
for a reported $300 million.
Larry Ellison bought virtually
the entire island of Lanai,
along with most of what is on it.
Meaning he now owns its main grocery
store, its lone gas station,
and the community newspaper.
He's basically almost
everyone's boss and landlord.
And I know it went by quick, but let's
just at least acknowledge this image.
That is Larry Ellison. He's 79.
And no, that's not his daughter,
it's his granddaughter.
Except I'm kidding,
that was his girlfriend there.
She's 33, by the way.
Meaning he was 15
when Hawai'i became a state.
And she was 16 when he became
eligible for Social Security.
Aren't facts fun? It's just one of many
stories that you probably won't read
in Lanai's local newspaper.
But when it comes to billionaires
in Hawai'i,
nothing compares to what's being done
on Kauai by Mark Zuckerberg,
a real boy who wished upon a star
to become a wooden puppet.
He's currently building
a gigantic compound
that reportedly has more
than a dozen buildings,
with at least 30 bedrooms
and bathrooms,
centered around two mansions
connected by a tunnel
that branches into a 5,000-square-foot
underground bunker,
along with a web of 11 treehouses
connected by intricate rope bridges.
Zuckerberg also has a long stone wall
around his property,
which has ruffled feathers among
many Native Hawaiians,
for reasons that, as you're about
to see, are understandable.
So, the land that you own is just
across this fence right here?
Yes.
But Zuckerberg has put up this wall
and fence and it says no trespassing.
What would happen if you tried
to go over there?
I'd get arrested for trespassing.
- Even though it's your land?
- Yep.
The problem is, Kuleana Lands are
passed down through the generations
without a will or deed.
The lack of paper trail means some
descendants don't even know
they own land.
Other times, under a complicated
legal system called "quiet title",
a buyer like Zuckerberg can sue
Kuleana owners to force them
to sell their lands,
usually at auction for pennies
on the dollar.
And that's just what he did, suing
hundreds and infuriating many more.
Yeah, he's sued hundreds
of Native Hawaiians
with ancestral Kuleana claims
to the land,
using a legal maneuver pioneered
by white sugar planters.
It is the most on-brand
"white-guy-in-Hawai'i" thing
he could possibly do,
is a thing that I would say,
if I hadn't seen
whatever the fuck this was.
Zuckerberg ultimately withdrew
from those lawsuits,
writing an op-ed promising
to "work together with the community
on a new approach."
But you should know, not only did
he continue buying up parcels
of Kuleana land himself,
he also continued to support
his co-claimant in the lawsuit,
who was very conveniently
a Kuleana owner
who wanted to buy out the rights
of all the others.
That co-claimant successfully
forced the disputed parcels of land
to be put up for auction,
then bought them for $2 million,
though, as the local newspaper put it,
"How exactly the retired college
professor put together
over $2 million remains
a point of contention."
And look, who can say
where he got that money?
Apparently, not me, legally!
Maybe $2 million just fell out
of a random treehouse somewhere.
But basically, it does seem like that
"new approach for the community"
ended up with Zuckerberg getting
what he wanted anyway.
And billionaires like him will insist
that they contribute to local charities
and help the economy there.
But it's the larger dynamic
at work here,
where wealthy outsiders can
outpurchase and outmaneuver
a local population,
that can be so dispiriting.
It's instructive to contrast the ease
with which billionaires can snap up
whole islands in Hawai'i,
with how difficult it can be
for Native Hawaiians to navigate
even programs designed for them.
Take the Hawaiian Home Lands
program,
established to provide homesteads
to Native Hawaiians.
As a form of reparation,
Congress created a trust
of over 200,000 acres for it.
But there are some huge caveats here.
Not only was it chronically
underfunded from the start,
much of the land set aside is unusable.
In fact, on the Big Island,
hundreds of Native Hawaiians have
been awarded plots of land,
but can't build homes there
because the land is sitting within
a fucking unexploded ordnance zone.
What's more, the waitlist
is 29,000 people long.
And as this woman will tell you,
you can be on it for a while.
You'll see this, where it lists
as of December 2020,
the different islands.
You can see the Maui waitlist here.
I went on the waitlist in 2002.
This is 2021. So, 19 years
I've been on Maui's waitlist.
So, I have to wait for them
to give me a lot.
When that happens, in my lifetime,
you think? Probably not.
Yeah, probably not! And that is absurd.
She's waited 19 years.
Think about how frustrating it can be
to stare at your phone
waiting when your Uber Eats driver
is running six minutes late.
Now imagine that six minute
is 19 years,
and your spaghetti vongole is a home
that's your fucking birthright!
And when you take everything
you've seen tonight,
the cost-of-living crisis, the low wages
of a tourism-dominant economy,
the off-chance of being exploded
or poisoned by the U.S. military,
it's frankly no wonder that many are
simply choosing to leave the islands.
In fact, each year, 15,000
Native Hawaiians leave the state
for the mainland, which now boasts
a larger Hawaiian population
than Hawai'i itself.
So, where do we go from here?
When a situation is this complicated
and took this long to develop,
there aren't going to be quick
and easy solutions.
But there are still some obvious
steps that we could take.
When it comes to the military's absurd
$1, 65-year leases on state lands,
they actually expire in 2029.
And while the military's currently
trying to renew them
over the objections of many locals,
I would argue that
probably shouldn't happen.
As for Hawai'i's housing crisis,
there are, again, some small ways
to address that right now,
including restricting short-term rentals
or second homes,
and making sure what's being built
by developers
is actually affordable for residents.
And, in general, I'd argue the state
government should be focused
on growing a more diverse
and balanced local economy,
instead of prioritizing tourism
at the expense of all else.
In the wake of last year's fires,
there was a lot of talk
of "helping Maui rebuild,"
but maybe the question we should
be asking is, "For who, exactly?".
And to their credit, some community-led
groups like these
have been hard at work in Lahaina
to make sure
the community doesn't end up
permanently displaced,
and gets a real say in what
the future there looks like.
Honestly, when it comes to determining
the future of Hawai'i,
you should probably be listening less
to outsiders like me,
and more to groups like these.
Finally, when it comes to tourism, if
you're watching this right now thinking,
"I wanted to take a vacation
to Hawai'i, should I go?",
well, as you've seen, many people there
do depend on the tourism industry,
with others justifiably infuriated
by how it's exacerbated
so many problems that Hawai'i's
been struggling with.
The solution is not gonna come down
to any single trip you might take.
It's gonna require much bigger,
systemic choices.
That said, if you do end up visiting,
try to be aware of the history
of what you're stepping into,
a history I realize most of us
were never taught,
and remember that your vacation spot
is someone else's home.
Also, just a few quick extra tips.
Don't take any rocks, definitely
don't send any back with a note,
and if you see a nun on a ladder
on a Sunday,
shoot her before she shoots you!
That's just common sense.
And now, this.
And Now:
The Delightfully Bizarre Musings
of Phillies Color Commentator
John Kruk.
I was thinking about this today,
now that we have some time.
Why aren't we born with hair
on our chest as men?
I don't know that.
Why does it wait 'til, like, you're, you
know, 16, 17, 18, 20, whatever?
And then it starts growing. Like,
are those follicles dormant?
There's not a lot of shows I watch
with the kid. We banned him from one.
- I'm not even gonna ask which one.
- Well, I can tell you.
"Caillou".
All that kid did was complain.
We used to do stuff with ESPN down
at Disney, like Animal Kingdom.
They put us up. The first day,
I open up the shade.
There's a dang giraffe
looking in my window!
- I'm like, what the hell is this?
- Did you feed it anything?
I did not, I was scared of him.
So, Kenny Pierce decided, "I'd like
to get my girlfriend to come up here."
We go down there and pick her up.
Her dad comes out with
a dang shotgun trying to shoot at us.
Of course he does.
Did I ever tell you about playing
the prison team,
and when I was playing winter ball?
So, I asked the catcher,
I said, "What did he do?"
He said, "He found his girlfriend
cheating, and he burned up her car
with her and her boyfriend in it."
I'm like, "Oh, my gosh."
Very uncomfortable at bat.
That's our show,
thanks so much for watching.
We'll see you next week,
good night!
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight"!
I'm John Oliver,
thank you so much for joining us.
It's been a busy week.
Joe Rogan appeared to endorse
RFK only to walk it back,
these astronauts learned
they may be stuck
on the International Space Station
'til next year,
and the Olympics wrapped up, after
another week of inspiring stories,
including 14-year-old Australian
Arisa Trew,
who won a skateboarding gold,
then gave this spectacular interview
about what her win meant.
The gift I asked from my parents if I,
like, won was if I could get a pet duck
because ducks are really cute
and I really wanted a pet duck.
And what have they said?
My mum said yes, but my dad's been,
like, saying yes this whole time,
but my mum was saying no, but then,
like, I said if I, like, did win,
could I get a duck?
And she said yes.
Are you gonna teach the duck
to skateboard?
I'm going to take the duck to the skate
park as well, and take it on walks.
Listen to me: somebody get that girl
a fucking duck right now!
If anyone has ever earned one,
it is her. In fact, you know what?
Every Olympic medalist should get
a duck from now on.
They should all stand proudly on the
podium with a medal around their neck
and a duck in their arms.
That is the Olympics that I want
to see next time, or I'm out.
But sadly, we have to turn
to the U.S. election,
where the Trump team has been
desperately trying to blunt
the momentum of the Harris campaign,
and I do mean "desperately".
This week,
he started calling her "Kamabla",
which was immediately confusing.
Did it mean she was "blah"?
Or was he trying to evoke
that she's Black?
Was it a typo he doubled down on?
A journalist actually texted
his campaign spokesman and asked,
"Why is he misspelling her name
Kamabla?"
to which the spokesperson responded
and this is all real, "Kamabla".
The reporter then asked,
"What does that mean?"
and got the response, "Kamabla".
And when they eventually said,
"Can I use it on the record?"
his response was,
you guessed it, "Kamabla".
And I genuinely hope he responds
to all texts like that.
"Hey honey, can you pick up the kids
from baseball practice?" "Kamabla."
"Okay, but seriously, can you get
the kids? I have to work late."
"Kamabla."
"Steven, why are you like this?"
"Kamabla."
"I want a divorce."
"Kamabla."
That same spokesman also put out
this Venn diagram
of the words "kama" and "bla",
which not only failed
to explain anything,
it's not how Venn diagrams work!
Not to be a total chart bitch, but I am
what I am, and very basically,
a Venn diagram uses overlapping
circles to visually depict
the relationship between
two or more things,
with commonalities represented
by where they overlap.
For instance: a Venn diagram could
feature one circle with dolphins
and another with sharks,
overlapping with the shared
descriptor "lives in the ocean".
Or you could have a circle with me
and another with Big Bird,
with the overlap being "squawks
educational lessons on television."
Or you could have a circle with Jenna
Ortega and one with Pepé Le Pew,
with the intersection "can't say
where they were on 9/11".
Now, does it matter that one's fictional
and one wasn't born yet?
I can't answer that, I'm telling you
what the diagram logically highlights.
My point is, you can have lots of fun
with charts,
but this right here
is fucking nothing.
But it's not just "Kamabla"
that's been an unforced error.
Trump's VP choice, JD Vance,
a man with the face you get
if you Google "bachelor party arrest",
continues to underwhelm.
Here he is choosing the worst possible
answer to a pretty easy question.
You've been criticized as being a little
too serious, a little angry sometimes.
What makes you smile?
What makes you happy?
I smile at a lot of things, including
bogus questions from the media.
If you watch a full speech that I give,
I actually am having a good time
out here, and I'm enjoying this.
But look, sometimes, you gotta take
the good with the bad.
And right now, I am angry about what
Kamala Harris has done to this country
and done to the American southern
border.
Is he all right? He just got asked,
"What makes you smile?"
a question to which there
is almost no wrong answer.
You could say my kids,
dogs that sleep weird, a warm bath,
dogs that sleep weird,
Cheez-Its, which is incidentally also
the name of this dog that sleeps weird.
All good answers. But responding
to "what makes you smile?"
with "what makes me angry is what's
happening at the southern border"
is just plain wrong! Also, can we just
take a minute on that laugh?
What the fuck is that?
This is going to sound strange,
but have you ever had one of those
words that you'd only encountered
by reading it, and had never heard
in conversation?
Like you're pretty sure you know
how to pronounce this word,
but you never actually heard it,
so you didn't know that you were wrong
until you were at a dinner party
and described something
as "the epi-tome of strangeness"
and the other guests said,
"did you mean 'epitome?'"
It's not your fault, is it? No one had
ever used that word around you,
and you made
a pretty reasonable guess.
Well, that is how I genuinely think
JD Vance learned to laugh.
I think he read about laughter
in books or comics,
saw it written out phonetically,
and intellectually understood
the noises Archie made,
and when the opportunity arose,
when someone asked him
what makes him happy,
even though he'd never tried out
the noise before, he thought,
"I got this," and said "ha, ha, ha, ha".
And immediately knew
he had fucked up bad.
But the seeming panic in the Trump
campaign right now
is perhaps best exemplified by their
reaction to Harris's choice of Tim Walz,
your friend's nice dad,
as her VP candidate this week.
In terms of general vibe,
he's the exact opposite of JD Vance.
Here he is last year with his daughter
at the state fair.
Hey, Minnesota. Governor Walz here,
out at the state fair with my daughter.
Hope.
Every year we as a family do something
old and something new.
I get to pick something, a classic,
the old mill ride,
and then Hope gets
to pick something new.
I think we're going to go do
the slingshot.
Which, I don't know what it is,
and they're keeping it from me.
But then we're going to go get
some food. Corn dog?
- I'm vegetarian.
- Turkey then.
- Turkey's meat.
- Not in Minnesota. Turkey's special.
Excellent.
I have never enjoyed watching
a vegetarian get gaslit more than that.
All of that is delightful, from
the rapport with his daughter
to the corn dog exchange to the fact
that he kept his promise
and rode that slingshot.
Take a look.
That is genuinely nice!
Clearly, you don't have to ask Walz
what makes him smile.
You can see it right there, or in photos
of him doing everything
from holding a piglet,
to getting hugged by kids after signing
universal free school meals into law,
to him here, seemingly remembering
that he isn't JD fucking Vance.
Walz is a former geography teacher
and football coach,
and there is a lot to like
in his biography,
including that, as a teacher, he served
as the faculty adviser
for his school's gay-straight alliance,
explaining his decision to volunteer,
saying,
"It really needed to be
the football coach,
who was the soldier and was straight
and was married."
And to his credit,
he did that in 1999.
That wasn't easy to do back then,
especially given just
three years earlier,
a bill banning federal recognition
of same-sex marriage
had been signed
into law by Bill Clinton,
truly a moral compass when it comes
to marriages.
For the past week,
Republicans have struggled to find
a line of attack on Walz, branding him
as a socialist, which he isn't,
labeling him as "Tampon Tim"
for providing feminine hygiene products
in schools,
and even getting angry
at the fact that Minnesota's state flag
was changed on his watch.
Walz let his best city burn down,
flooded it with illegals,
and helped cancel the state flag
to make it look more like the flag
of Somalia.
Just over the last three months,
he changed Minnesota's flag
to look basically like a Somali flag.
So, there's the Minnesota flag.
Gorgeous flag.
Looks like any other state flag.
He changed it to this.
Go ahead and Google the Somali
flag and tell me they don't look alike.
What are you talking about?
Have you seen flags?
They're all some combination of colors,
stars, and, in the case of Sicily,
a three-legged monster
with a head for a vagina.
But that's really more of
a "Sicily's gonna Sicily" situation.
For what it's worth, the flag was mainly
changed as a result of objections
to the depiction of a Native American
on the old flag,
which had only been around
since 1957 anyway.
Also, Walz wasn't the one
who pushed for the change,
he just happened to be governor
at the time.
So, that criticism is more
than a little desperate,
as was Republicans' attempt to target
Walz's military service,
which consisted of serving 24 years
in various units and jobs
in the Army National Guard.
He was accused this week of "stolen
valor" for having said, in passing,
at one event in 2018,
that he'd carried weapons of war,
in war, which he hadn't.
He never actually saw combat, and the
campaign has said that he misspoke.
But Republicans didn't stop there,
with JD Vance and others also trying
this line of attack, regarding the
circumstances under which Walz left
the National Guard.
When Tim Walz was asked
by his country to go to Iraq,
do you know what he did?
He dropped out of the army and
allowed his unit to go without him.
I think it's shameful to prepare
your unit to go to Iraq,
to make a promise that
you're going to follow through,
and then to drop out right before
you actually have to go.
Okay, that is just not true.
Walz retired in May of 2005.
His unit wasn't ordered to mobilize
until July of that year,
and didn't deploy to Iraq until 2006.
Even the hard-right Wall Street Journal
editorial board said
"the charges leveled so far about his
military service look like thin gruel".
Which, as far as arguments go,
is just not enough gruel.
Making it official:
after 11 years of this show,
despite my best efforts to resist it,
we've somehow reached a point
where I, a British Oliver, have
inadvertently demanded more gruel.
It seems some stereotypes
are just deserved.
And look, there are 85 days
until Election Day.
While that might not seem like a lot,
it's gonna feel incredibly long.
And it's plenty of time for the GOP
to draw up attacks far more vicious
and hateful than "Kamabla,"
while also figuring out more inventive
ways to attack her running mate.
But for right now, it does seem telling
that so much of their attack strategy
seems to boil down to a nonsense word
and false accusations of stolen valor,
two desperate smear attempts
with one thing in common:
they reveal the Trump campaign has
currently got absolutely nothing.
And now, this.
And Now: Rachel Campos-Duffy Really,
Really Wants You to Know
She Has a Podcast.
Some fundamental level,
it's just anti-human being.
It's anti-human. And that's why on my
podcast, "From the Kitchen Table",
we talk a lot about these issues.
If you want to catch my podcast,
you have to go back a few months,
but we have a podcast that went viral
on the right way to find
a romantic partner, and it's called
"Going Back to the '80s".
Well, if you want more on this
conversation, and it's very deep,
you can go to my podcast. By the way,
you can catch her on my podcast.
She was on my podcast.
I had Kennedy on my podcast.
We did this podcast. Please go to my
podcast, "From the Kitchen Table."
I already did that on my podcast.
I have a podcast with my husband
on "From the Kitchen Table".
On my podcast, "From the Kitchen
Table," that I have with my husband.
I have "From the Kitchen" podcast,
"Table" podcast with my husband.
Check out the most recent episode
of my podcast.
I don't want to plug my podcast,
but I'm gonna plug my podcast.
This week on my podcast. I'm not
trying to promote my podcast,
but I am.
The primary is over. In fact, I have a
podcast that just came out this week
called "The Primary". The title of the
podcast is "The Primary's Over".
- I just think that.
- There you go.
Moving on. Our main story tonight
concerns Hawai'i.
A place often depicted as paradise
in movies and TV shows
like "Hawaii 5-0," "NCIS: Hawaii,"
and "Magnum PI",
where this magnificent clip is from.
Morning, sister.
Good morning, sir.
Nuns don't work on Sunday.
Yes! That happened!
This might come as a shock
to younger viewers,
but TV used to be really good.
And if you're thinking, "Why are you
showing me that for this story?"
Even if it took place in Hawai'i,
nothing indicated that it did",
shut up!
I wanted to remind you of a simpler
TV time when you could shoot a nun
to solve
all of your Hawai'i crime problems
without worrying that someone online
would point out
that "actually there's no rule that says
nuns can't work on Sundays
and given that nuns are by definition
committed to service
it wouldn't be uncommon to see
one performing maintenance,
even on a Sunday,
if so ordered by her superior."
Shut the fuck up!
TV used to be great not because
the people who wrote it were better,
but because the people
who watched it were!
Anyway, Hawai'i is famous for being one
of the most popular tourist destinations
on Earth, so much so, many visitors
can't seem to resist taking
a piece home with them.
Tourism officials are reminding
visitors not to take lava rocks home.
Taking things from national parks
is against the law,
so taking volcanic rocks from
Hawai'i's volcanoes is illegal.
But apart from being illegal,
legend has it that taking volcanic
rocks from Hawai'i is bad luck.
Because of that myth,
many people who take the rocks
end up shipping them back
to the island with notes of apology.
Officials say putting the rocks back
where they came from costs time
and money.
It's true, that apparently happens so
much, a national park official said,
"We would love for people
just to stop taking stuff
and then also please
just stop mailing us stuff."
And I get that, especially because
a rock with a note attached to it
is famously one of the most threatening
forms of communication there is.
It's right up there with notes where
all the letters are cut out
from different magazines,
a message scrawled in blood on
the wall, or literally any phone call.
Please, just text unless
you're planning on murdering me,
and even then, you know what?
Just do it. I've had a good run.
I've had a run. We're talking about
Hawai'i because a few days ago,
it marked a grim anniversary.
A year ago, the deadliest wildfire
to hit the U.S. in more than a century
ripped through the west Maui town
of Lahaina,
destroying more than 2,000 buildings,
causing five and a half billion dollars
in damage, and killing 102 people.
The aftermath exposed long-simmering
tensions under the surface
of Hawai'i's reputation
as a tourist paradise,
especially when just a month later,
its governor announced plans
to begin reopening Maui to tourism,
even while many locals
were still traumatized or missing,
something that, understandably,
went down poorly there.
It's just not right to go back
into full-force tourism.
We're still recovering.
Funerals just started
and they want us to go back in.
Are we supposed to be jovial when
tourists are here in bathing suits,
frolicking in the surf, driving these
roads like they're on a racetrack,
drinking Mai Tais,
and partying in our face?
You can see why
he might resent tourists.
No one wants people partying
while they are suffering.
It's the main reason
that they never did a season
of "MTV Spring Break: Kosovo".
And it got worse because developers
almost immediately started trying
to snatch up property there.
Lahaina's now-barren landscape
is being eyed by developers
who want to replace the community
with luxury properties.
To some here, it's a dark irony,
because development may have
contributed to the catastrophe here.
Over the years, to accommodate
the growing tourism industry,
much of Maui's water was diverted
to new hotels and golf courses
and away from communities
like Lahaina,
drying the town out and turning it
into a tinderbox.
If you walk right over here where
all of these hotels are,
everything's green and lush.
And you walk from here to town,
everything is dry.
That is infuriating.
And for Native Hawaiians, it must
be difficult to shake the feeling
that you're an afterthought.
It's like being introduced
by your parents saying,
"These are our sons, Tommy
and Tommy's brother,"
or having your TV show announced as,
"Stick around after
'House of the Dragon.'"
I imagine that might be hurtful.
It is frankly no wonder that around
two-thirds of Hawai'i residents
apparently believe that their state
is being run for tourists
at the expense of locals.
And the fact is, the more you look
at Hawai'i, the clearer it becomes,
they're not wrong about that,
but it's not just tourists.
Hawai'i has long been run for the
benefit of everyone but Hawaiians.
So, given that, tonight,
let's talk about Hawai'i.
And let's start
with some of its history,
which isn't actually taught much
in American schools.
Something that's a little bit weird,
given that it only became a state
in living memory.
Hawai'i was first settled by seafaring
Polynesians as early as the year 300.
But at least in white people's telling,
the really important stuff didn't happen
until around 14 centuries later.
On a January day in the year 1778,
two strange ships anchored off the
leeward coast of one of the islands.
The flag was English.
The man in command was
Captain James Cook.
In 1835, the first permanent plantation
was established on the island of Kauai.
Within three years,
there were 20 sugar mills.
From these modest beginnings,
a great industry was to grow.
Now, that clip leaves out a lot.
But you probably already knew that
the second you heard the most
ominous line in any historical film,
"The flag was English."
It's like seeing oranges
in "The Godfather".
When the British flag appears
on an old newsreel,
you know someone's about to die
and shit's about to go down.
That first western contact led to the
arrival of traders, and eventually,
American missionaries.
With them came diseases which would
eventually reduce the Native population
by as much as 90%.
Descendants of the missionaries
set up those sugar plantations,
and soon came to dominate politics
and economic life on the islands.
And while racist writings of the time
paint Hawai'i
as a primitive tyrannical society,
that wasn't the case.
It was a constitutional monarchy
that actually banned slavery in 1852,
before the U.S. did,
and had "one of the highest literacy
rates in the world."
Nevertheless, in 1887, a small group
of white plantation owners
and businessmen forced Hawai'i's king,
at gunpoint,
to sign what became known
as the Bayonet Constitution,
basically, transferring
much of his power to them.
When his sister, Queen Lilioukalani,
succeeded him,
she vowed to undo that,
so the businessmen planned a coup
to overthrow her.
Fun fact: one of the coup's leaders
was Sanford Dole,
of the pineapple Doles,
and also, the only man ever to have
a mustache
and a beard that is also a mustache.
He pushed for the U.S. to annex
the islands,
against the will of Native Hawaiians,
who collected over
38,000 signatures to oppose it.
Which, considering there were about
40,000 Native Hawaiians at the time,
is a whopping 95%.
But Dole and his conspirators got
their way,
and with the help of the U.S. military,
the queen was overthrown,
and Hawai'i was annexed
into the United States.
Although, again, when white people
tell the story of that era,
it tends to sound a bit different.
The queen, last of a long line
of Polynesian rulers,
signed the abdication that made
Hawai'i an American possession.
These Native troops became soldiers
of Uncle Sam.
Happy that her island kingdom became
an American protectorate,
the queen of Hawai'i bade farewell.
"Yes, there's the queen of Hawai'i now,
dressed in her celebratory black,
signing the islands over to America
completely of her own free will
surrounded by her closest friends,
several armed white men
with mustaches."
Hawai'i eventually became America's
50th state in 1959,
and 34 years later, Congress passed
a resolution formally apologizing
to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow
of the Hawaiian kingdom.
Which is nice, isn't it?
It's always nice to say sorry
for things,
whether it's for running late
or making your pretend wedding
to a cabbage nicer
than your actual wedding with your
human wife or violent imperialism.
People appreciate a sincere apology,
I think.
But despite that apology, over the past
century, a number of groups,
from the U.S. military, to tourists,
to the extremely wealthy,
have continued to exploit Hawai'i.
And let's start with the military.
Hawai'i's long been used as a strategic
military base in the Pacific.
Thanks to Michael Bay, we all now
know about the tragedies
suffered by beautiful white people
at Pearl Harbor.
But the military's long had
an extensive presence in Hawai'i,
more than you may even realize.
"There are 12 key military installations
and bases across the state."
And it hasn't exactly been a sensitive
custodian of the land that it occupies.
Take the Pohakuloa training area,
a 132,000-acre live-fire range
on the Big Island of Hawai'i.
Much of it is on federal land that was
confiscated after Hawai'i was annexed.
But the military also leased some
more land from the state
at a ridiculously low rate,
and, to put it mildly,
hasn't been a great tenant.
In 1964, the military secured a lease
for 30,000 acres of land
that they could train on
for the next 65 years,
all for $1.
Since then, they've dropped bombs
from planes,
launched rockets from helicopters,
shot targets with mortars
and artillery,
and left behind unknown amounts
of unexploded ordnance.
This happens every day?
Not necessarily every day,
but pretty regularly.
It must be a big task to go in
and clean all that up.
For the impact area,
where we're firing now,
we let that be.
It's never cleaned?
The impact area is left as it is
when we fire in there.
That's for safety reasons.
Does that mean decades and decades
and nobody picks this stuff up?
Correct.
Setting aside the fact the military got
their own 65-year playground for $1,
that is some nuclear-grade
euphemizing there.
The place we've been bombing?
That's an "impact area".
And it's not unclean, it's just
"left as is," for "safety reasons".
I could watch that man
spin awful things all night.
"I didn't cheat on my wife.
I merely discovered
an alternate penis holding area.
And I'm not telling her about it
for safety reasons."
But that is by no means
the only place the military's failed
to clean up after itself.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor,
the U.S. took over this island,
sacred to Native Hawaiians,
and used it as a training ground,
bombing the shit out of it.
But even after activists risked
their lives to stop the bombing,
and a multimillion-dollar effort
to clean it up had been completed,
a full quarter was still not cleared.
To this day, more shells and bombs
are sometimes revealed by erosion,
and additional ordnance sometimes
washes up on the beach.
Which really makes you wonder if that
famous Jesus and the footprints poem
should have ended,
"And I turned to Jesus and asked,
'Then why was there was only
one set of footprints in the sand?'
Jesus said, 'Because, my child, that
was when I jumped on your shoulders
because there was no fucking way
I was gonna step on a bomb!
No way, my guy.
They're fucking everywhere!'"
But that's not all. In 2002,
middle school kids working on their
school garden uncovered a live grenade,
and subsequently, ordnance experts
found three more in the same area.
And just three years ago, the military's
massive fuel storage facility
on Oahu was the site of a spill that
poisoned a water system
that serves 93,000 people.
Thousands of people
were made sick by it,
and the entire island's water supply
was put at risk.
The point is, the U.S. military has a
pattern of causing an absolute mess
in Hawai'i, with activists having
to struggle to then undo the damage.
Here is one last example, Makua
Valley, on Oahu's western shore.
The U.S. Army seized it
after Pearl Harbor,
evicting local families who'd lived
there for generations,
and promised their lands would
be returned to them six months
after the end of World War II.
But it still hasn't done that.
Instead, it's yet another of Hawai'i's
sacred spaces that's been used
for target practice.
Now, thankfully, after activists
took the army to court,
they finally got the military to stop.
Though the relationship between
the two remains, to put it mildly,
strained.
Activists with the group
Malama Makua sued the army,
and in 2004 successfully got it
to stop live-fire training here.
Now, the group is allowed to visit
the valley, but only twice a month.
So, the group has to walk behind this
representative from the military
who first has to scan the area
for potential unexploded ordnance.
We appreciate access into this valley,
but we don't appreciate the fact
that we have to ask permission
to be in this valley.
What is your relationship
to the army right now?
The reality is, it's pretty fucked up.
Sorry for the swearing, but it's not
like we're all best friends.
Okay, first, there is no need
to apologize for swearing.
If anyone is entitled to say "fuck"
on national TV, it should be you.
As for "not best friends," I get it.
You don't call an institution
who steals your shit
then makes you ask permission
to visit it your best friend.
As we all know, you call that
The British Museum.
As I said, it's not just the military
who can take precedence
over residents of Hawai'i.
That's true
of the tourism industry, too,
which is obviously a big part
of Hawai'i's economy,
contributing nearly 20% of its GDP.
But while tourists experience Hawai'i
as a carefree vacation spot,
many who live there experience
a very different reality.
For one thing, tourism jobs tend
to be pretty low-wage,
which is part of why more than
two-thirds of those who live in Hawai'i
show signs of financial stress,
like working multiple jobs,
living with relatives,
and dipping into savings.
Hawai'i does seem set up
to benefit wealthy outsiders.
Take housing. There are currently
32,000 short-term rentals
across the state, meaning one out
of every 18 housing units there
is a vacation rental, like an Airbnb.
And a majority of their owners
don't even live in Hawai'i.
In fact, nearly a quarter of Hawaiian
homes were purchased by buyers
from outside the state.
That is part of why Hawai'i is now the
most expensive state in the nation
for housing.
And given that, it's hardly surprising
that Hawai'i has consistently had
among the highest rates
of homelessness in the nation.
It's been an issue there for years now,
as this report from 2015 shows.
We've actually been told by some
of the city crews to be invisible,
and it's like,
how do you want us to do that?
Some of Hawai'i's homeless people
used to live
in much more visible Waikiki Beach.
Officials said that was hurting
the tourist industry,
crucial for the local economy.
It started to impact our guests.
They would comment about it
on Tripadvisor and elsewhere.
It is shitty to tell homeless people
to be invisible,
but it's extra shitty to do so
to protect your Tripadvisor reviews.
Do you have any idea how useless
they are? Here is an example of one:
"The museum itself was wonderful.
I was very disappointed that
the entry discount only applies
to American military. One star."
Guess what that was from?
The 9/11 Memorial Museum.
A different one-star
Tripadvisor review reads,
"This experience proves once more,
that NYC is best likened
to a gilded dumpster that is roaming
with every kind of vermin
as soon as night has been falling.
If you are looking for true urbanity,
visit Europe!"
That's an annoying thing to say
about anything,
but particularly irritating considering
it's a review of, again,
The 9/11 Museum.
Or how about a third Tripadvisor
review that reads,
"Absolutely woeful, avoid, avoid,
stay well clear of this establishment,"
a review that is for, and I think
we all know where this is going,
New York's TGI Friday's.
I admit,
the reviews aren't 100% wrong.
But it's not just housing costs. Food
is incredibly expensive in Hawai'i.
The islands used to be self-sustaining,
but one legacy of the sugar plantations
is that they destroyed
much of the agricultural diversity.
As a result, Hawai'i today imports
90% of its food,
with residents routinely paying some
of the highest prices in the nation
for basic staples,
as this woman in Hawai'i explains.
Let me show you how much
my groceries cost.
Gallon of milk: $9.
Five apples. I did eat two, 'cause
I was very hungry on the walk home.
$15.
$3 an apple.
Bag of grapes: $17.
$17 is too much
for that many grapes.
In fact, it's honestly too much
for any grapes. Grapes are terrible.
If you don't eat them in three days,
they just shrivel into skanky
little sugar balloons.
Let me be clear about this: you either
be a raisin or you be a grape.
I have no patience
for your fruit puberty.
And Hawai'i's government has said
it's addressing food costs.
In 2014, its governor set a goal
to double Hawai'i's food production
by 2020. Which sounds good!
But it's not a great sign that he later
changed the target date to 2030,
and it is not clear
they'll hit that either.
But maybe the ultimate expression
of the extent
to which Hawai'i is being reshaped
by wealthy outsiders
is its growing population
of billionaires.
11% of the private land there
is owned by just 37 billionaires,
among them Larry Ellison,
Mark Zuckerberg, and Oprah.
For a sense of just how much land
some of them have,
consider that, in 2019, when a different
brush fire broke out in Maui,
people trying to escape it
wound up tweeting at Oprah
to kindly share the code to the gate
for her private road on her estate,
so folks could evacuate.
Now, to her credit,
she did that immediately.
The state's governor at the time
even tweeted out,
"A big mahalo to Oprah for giving Maui
County access to your private road."
But it still feels a bit weird that
people had to ask in the first place.
And other billionaires have gone
much further
than just buying parts of an island.
The rugged shoreline, sparkling waters,
and pristine beaches
on the island of Lanai make this
Four Seasons resort
one of the world's most sought-after
vacation destinations.
Billionaire founder of Oracle
Larry Ellison loved
the remote Hawaiian getaway
so much he bought it,
along with 98% of the entire island,
for a reported $300 million.
Larry Ellison bought virtually
the entire island of Lanai,
along with most of what is on it.
Meaning he now owns its main grocery
store, its lone gas station,
and the community newspaper.
He's basically almost
everyone's boss and landlord.
And I know it went by quick, but let's
just at least acknowledge this image.
That is Larry Ellison. He's 79.
And no, that's not his daughter,
it's his granddaughter.
Except I'm kidding,
that was his girlfriend there.
She's 33, by the way.
Meaning he was 15
when Hawai'i became a state.
And she was 16 when he became
eligible for Social Security.
Aren't facts fun? It's just one of many
stories that you probably won't read
in Lanai's local newspaper.
But when it comes to billionaires
in Hawai'i,
nothing compares to what's being done
on Kauai by Mark Zuckerberg,
a real boy who wished upon a star
to become a wooden puppet.
He's currently building
a gigantic compound
that reportedly has more
than a dozen buildings,
with at least 30 bedrooms
and bathrooms,
centered around two mansions
connected by a tunnel
that branches into a 5,000-square-foot
underground bunker,
along with a web of 11 treehouses
connected by intricate rope bridges.
Zuckerberg also has a long stone wall
around his property,
which has ruffled feathers among
many Native Hawaiians,
for reasons that, as you're about
to see, are understandable.
So, the land that you own is just
across this fence right here?
Yes.
But Zuckerberg has put up this wall
and fence and it says no trespassing.
What would happen if you tried
to go over there?
I'd get arrested for trespassing.
- Even though it's your land?
- Yep.
The problem is, Kuleana Lands are
passed down through the generations
without a will or deed.
The lack of paper trail means some
descendants don't even know
they own land.
Other times, under a complicated
legal system called "quiet title",
a buyer like Zuckerberg can sue
Kuleana owners to force them
to sell their lands,
usually at auction for pennies
on the dollar.
And that's just what he did, suing
hundreds and infuriating many more.
Yeah, he's sued hundreds
of Native Hawaiians
with ancestral Kuleana claims
to the land,
using a legal maneuver pioneered
by white sugar planters.
It is the most on-brand
"white-guy-in-Hawai'i" thing
he could possibly do,
is a thing that I would say,
if I hadn't seen
whatever the fuck this was.
Zuckerberg ultimately withdrew
from those lawsuits,
writing an op-ed promising
to "work together with the community
on a new approach."
But you should know, not only did
he continue buying up parcels
of Kuleana land himself,
he also continued to support
his co-claimant in the lawsuit,
who was very conveniently
a Kuleana owner
who wanted to buy out the rights
of all the others.
That co-claimant successfully
forced the disputed parcels of land
to be put up for auction,
then bought them for $2 million,
though, as the local newspaper put it,
"How exactly the retired college
professor put together
over $2 million remains
a point of contention."
And look, who can say
where he got that money?
Apparently, not me, legally!
Maybe $2 million just fell out
of a random treehouse somewhere.
But basically, it does seem like that
"new approach for the community"
ended up with Zuckerberg getting
what he wanted anyway.
And billionaires like him will insist
that they contribute to local charities
and help the economy there.
But it's the larger dynamic
at work here,
where wealthy outsiders can
outpurchase and outmaneuver
a local population,
that can be so dispiriting.
It's instructive to contrast the ease
with which billionaires can snap up
whole islands in Hawai'i,
with how difficult it can be
for Native Hawaiians to navigate
even programs designed for them.
Take the Hawaiian Home Lands
program,
established to provide homesteads
to Native Hawaiians.
As a form of reparation,
Congress created a trust
of over 200,000 acres for it.
But there are some huge caveats here.
Not only was it chronically
underfunded from the start,
much of the land set aside is unusable.
In fact, on the Big Island,
hundreds of Native Hawaiians have
been awarded plots of land,
but can't build homes there
because the land is sitting within
a fucking unexploded ordnance zone.
What's more, the waitlist
is 29,000 people long.
And as this woman will tell you,
you can be on it for a while.
You'll see this, where it lists
as of December 2020,
the different islands.
You can see the Maui waitlist here.
I went on the waitlist in 2002.
This is 2021. So, 19 years
I've been on Maui's waitlist.
So, I have to wait for them
to give me a lot.
When that happens, in my lifetime,
you think? Probably not.
Yeah, probably not! And that is absurd.
She's waited 19 years.
Think about how frustrating it can be
to stare at your phone
waiting when your Uber Eats driver
is running six minutes late.
Now imagine that six minute
is 19 years,
and your spaghetti vongole is a home
that's your fucking birthright!
And when you take everything
you've seen tonight,
the cost-of-living crisis, the low wages
of a tourism-dominant economy,
the off-chance of being exploded
or poisoned by the U.S. military,
it's frankly no wonder that many are
simply choosing to leave the islands.
In fact, each year, 15,000
Native Hawaiians leave the state
for the mainland, which now boasts
a larger Hawaiian population
than Hawai'i itself.
So, where do we go from here?
When a situation is this complicated
and took this long to develop,
there aren't going to be quick
and easy solutions.
But there are still some obvious
steps that we could take.
When it comes to the military's absurd
$1, 65-year leases on state lands,
they actually expire in 2029.
And while the military's currently
trying to renew them
over the objections of many locals,
I would argue that
probably shouldn't happen.
As for Hawai'i's housing crisis,
there are, again, some small ways
to address that right now,
including restricting short-term rentals
or second homes,
and making sure what's being built
by developers
is actually affordable for residents.
And, in general, I'd argue the state
government should be focused
on growing a more diverse
and balanced local economy,
instead of prioritizing tourism
at the expense of all else.
In the wake of last year's fires,
there was a lot of talk
of "helping Maui rebuild,"
but maybe the question we should
be asking is, "For who, exactly?".
And to their credit, some community-led
groups like these
have been hard at work in Lahaina
to make sure
the community doesn't end up
permanently displaced,
and gets a real say in what
the future there looks like.
Honestly, when it comes to determining
the future of Hawai'i,
you should probably be listening less
to outsiders like me,
and more to groups like these.
Finally, when it comes to tourism, if
you're watching this right now thinking,
"I wanted to take a vacation
to Hawai'i, should I go?",
well, as you've seen, many people there
do depend on the tourism industry,
with others justifiably infuriated
by how it's exacerbated
so many problems that Hawai'i's
been struggling with.
The solution is not gonna come down
to any single trip you might take.
It's gonna require much bigger,
systemic choices.
That said, if you do end up visiting,
try to be aware of the history
of what you're stepping into,
a history I realize most of us
were never taught,
and remember that your vacation spot
is someone else's home.
Also, just a few quick extra tips.
Don't take any rocks, definitely
don't send any back with a note,
and if you see a nun on a ladder
on a Sunday,
shoot her before she shoots you!
That's just common sense.
And now, this.
And Now:
The Delightfully Bizarre Musings
of Phillies Color Commentator
John Kruk.
I was thinking about this today,
now that we have some time.
Why aren't we born with hair
on our chest as men?
I don't know that.
Why does it wait 'til, like, you're, you
know, 16, 17, 18, 20, whatever?
And then it starts growing. Like,
are those follicles dormant?
There's not a lot of shows I watch
with the kid. We banned him from one.
- I'm not even gonna ask which one.
- Well, I can tell you.
"Caillou".
All that kid did was complain.
We used to do stuff with ESPN down
at Disney, like Animal Kingdom.
They put us up. The first day,
I open up the shade.
There's a dang giraffe
looking in my window!
- I'm like, what the hell is this?
- Did you feed it anything?
I did not, I was scared of him.
So, Kenny Pierce decided, "I'd like
to get my girlfriend to come up here."
We go down there and pick her up.
Her dad comes out with
a dang shotgun trying to shoot at us.
Of course he does.
Did I ever tell you about playing
the prison team,
and when I was playing winter ball?
So, I asked the catcher,
I said, "What did he do?"
He said, "He found his girlfriend
cheating, and he burned up her car
with her and her boyfriend in it."
I'm like, "Oh, my gosh."
Very uncomfortable at bat.
That's our show,
thanks so much for watching.
We'll see you next week,
good night!