Name: Tulsi Gabbard on the Response to the Maui Wildfires
Uploaded: 2023-09-07T19:14:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tulsi Gabbard on the Response to the Maui Wildfires' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tulsi Gabbard on the Response to the Maui Wildfires' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-07. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan experience.
- They know what they're doing out there, right?
The people in office, you know?
- Well, I mean Tulsi can speak to that better than anybody.
- I don't know Mayor Bis.
I may have met him in passing,
but this has been one of the big failures
around the aftermath of the wildfire on Maui
is this total vacuum of information
from government officials to the people.
And in that vacuum,
obviously people have all kinds of ideas
or theories or this or that,
but people were left without any kind of communication
from anyone in a position of authority
to provide help for days and weeks.
And it created massive problems.
And so, you know, the immediate line of response
needed to come from the county and from the mayor
and from their emergency response director.
And unfortunately they did not communicate.
They're still not communicating.
There's still a huge lack of transparency
and therefore an increasing level of distrust
in any of the levels of government
that should be bending over backwards
to answer questions and to say,
hey, here's what's going on every single day.
Here's what we're doing.
Here's what we're trying to do.
Here's what we're having a hard time doing.
Whatever the case may be, it has just,
it's been a major problem from the beginning.
Do you think that this is a complete lack,
because of a complete lack of preparedness,
that this is an unprecedented type of disaster,
never happened before.
It happens and they just weren't prepared.
They don't know what to do.
And they're just, it's incompetence?
- I think that is very true.
And there's, you know, in hindsight,
there are things going back is, you know,
Maui has experienced drought year after year after year.
Brush fires are a common occurrence,
especially on the west side of Maui, where Lahaina is,
the side of the island that was most, most impacted by this.
Um, you know, it is, you know,
being prepared for wildfires on Maui is something that if you look at their,
you know, emergency assessment documents,
it's mentioned almost as, as a bit of an afterthought.
Maui fire has been vastly undermanned and under-resourced for quite some time.
So there's all these different things you can look at from a preparedness level
that, that should have been addressed long before.
But from, uh, you know, the, you know, the county officials,
uh, yes, they were completely overwhelmed and unprepared for this unprecedented
wildfire.
It's the worst wildfire our country has seen in over a hundred years.
Uh, but the problem is once you get to that point, like,
oh shit, this is really, really, really bad.
Not only in, in the hundreds of lives lost in that fire,
but the surrounding communities of people who, who survived,
but who went without power, who went without any cell phone signal,
any ability to communicate with people who didn't have, you know,
all of the gas stations in their neighborhood,
they were empty.
There was no way to get gas.
They couldn't get food.
They couldn't get clean water.
The water, uh, supply systems were contaminated.
I mean, all of their, there was disaster upon disaster that came in the
aftermath of the fire
that went unaddressed.
And my biggest, I, I was, I went there a few days after, uh, the fire happened.
Maui was my district for eight years when I served in Congress and, uh, had a
lot of friends there
and went out to those affected communities.
And what I heard over and over again was no one from the county, the state, or
the federal government
has shown their face in our community.
It is neighbors helping neighbors, families helping families, people on the
island of Molokai,
which you know, they, they don't have much on their island.
Everything comes in by barge.
They're loading up whatever they have in their general store on these little
boats
and, and running them over to West Maui on a private boat dock because that was
the only
place that they wouldn't be blocked from bringing food and water and medical
supplies.
Now, why are people being blocked?
I keep hearing that about people being blocked.
Is it because they haven't gotten an accurate death count?
Is it because they have to make an assessment of how much was damaged?
And it's so massive.
It's so vast that they haven't been able to do that yet.
Like, why is it being blocked?
Things are, things, so things are being opened up now.
I think people are able to, to get in and out of the West Maui area.
I understand that the, the historic town of Lahaina is still being blocked off
and they're,
they're working on reopening it as we speak.
But in the, in the couple of weeks after the fire, I don't have a good answer.
Why they continue to block the roads again to those surrounding communities,
why they had,
why they blocked people like Kyle Lenny and others from using their jet skis
and boats to try to bring supplies in
through the water.
Um, you could say, well, we want, we were trying to secure the area, but you're
blocking,
you're blocking friends and family from coming in and bringing necessary
supplies, literally doing supply runs.
So, you know, I jumped on a plane that was doing supply runs from Kahului, the
main airport on Maui,
uh, out to this tiny little airport, um, uh, that serves that community.
And that was for a lot of days, the only way that they could get supplies, uh,
brought in.
I don't know. I really don't know. But again, this goes back to why aren't you
communicating to people
what's going on and why you're doing what you're doing all, all the results of
their decisions left
people and families and communities stranded in their most dire time of need.
And the mayor didn't
go out and show his face until almost two weeks after the fire happened.
That's insane.
It's crazy.
And then says he, he wants to take the land for the state. That's his first.
Now this is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this. Like, how is
that possible
that these people could lose their home and then lose their land? Like, how is
that possible?
It is, it is the number one concern of people there, uh, in Lahaina is that a
few days after this
happened, I haven't spoken to the governor, but he said in a press conference,
he said,
we're talking to the attorney general. He said, I'm talking to my attorney
general to explore options
for the state to take over that land and use it to build workforce housing or
build a memorial to
the life for, for the people who lost their lives. But the fears that the
people in Lahaina have,
some of whom like Archie Kalepa, famous surfer, community leader, native
Hawaiian leaders,
family has lived in Lahaina for nine generations. Now being told, well, the
state, the governor is
looking at taking that land, taking ownership of that land, that it is unconscionable.
And there's,
oh, you know, we'll, we'll, you know, for those who've been displaced, we'll
see about doing a
land swap and we'll send you to the big island to live in Puna.
Jesus.
It's taking away the sovereignty of people's rights to have a say over their
home. In many
cases, their generational lands is, is it is such an abuse of power. And so
this is, and I'm, I'm,
I'm glad that there are leaders in the community who are leaning into this
fight to make sure that
they are fighting this fight before anybody tries to do that, rather than
looking in the rear view
mirror and saying, gosh, I wish we had done something.
But just imagine a governor going on television after a massive tragedy where
you have,
we don't even know the number of people dead yet. You have this massive area
that's been burned to
the ground. And then he starts talking about taking it over from, for the state.
That's an insane
position to take.
It is.
Post tragedy. When people are suffering at their most, they can't even believe
it happened.
Yeah.
And then all of a sudden he's saying, we're going to take it for the state and
make a memorial.
How about give the fucking people their homes back?
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know, one of the things we went over yesterday, which is a crazy number, we
were looking at
the amount of money that was accidentally sent to Ukraine. Like they, they,
they over sent six
billion. And then I said, well, how much would it cost to rebuild every house
in the Maui fire?
And it's 5 billion, 5 billion something. Like they, that's just like accidental
money. But there's no
talk of doing that. There's no talk of doing that. Isn't that interesting?
The way, the way, and it had, it's happened two or three times now where the
Pentagon has said,
oh, we miscalculated how much money we had set aside for Ukraine. So we have an
extra 4 billion
to send now that we didn't know we had. And this has happened a few times.
Secretary of State,
Tony Blinken went to Kiev yesterday promising, Hey, we're going to give you
another billion now.
And this is the thing. When I was out there in Maui, person after person was
like, Tulsi,
tell me what would happen if we started to call ourselves Ukraine? You think
they would give us
some money then to take care of our families, to put, to fix our roofs, you
know, that, that have
been torn up by the hurricane winds that came through to make sure we have
clean water to drink.
You think they might pay attention to us then? And then the, and then FEMA
comes out,
the FEMA director comes out and does this press conference. I think it was at
the white house.
And she says, well, someone said, well, what are you doing for Maui? She's like,
oh,
we're giving a one-time $700 payment to everybody who's been impacted by the
wildfire. A one-time
$700 payment. It's insane. Hawaii has the highest cost of living in the entire
country,
the entire country. And how freaking insulting is it to have the rep, the lead
disaster response
administrator from the Biden administration stand there and proudly say, Hey,
we're giving everybody
one $700 payment. It's insane. And it's insane, especially because of how much
money we're sending
to Ukraine. Yeah. Because there's, there can be no doubt that these things are
financially motivated now.