https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sf3ZBevv6MI
Well, so I growing up here in Hawaii, it’s a beautiful place and from a young age, had a pretty deep appreciation for the importance of protecting this place, you know, protecting our oceans and the preservation of clean water. We get our water here from water aquifers and as the most remote island chain in the world, protecting those resources are essential for life. And so my motivation and drive to run for the state House of Representatives here in Hawaii when I was 21 years old in 2002, really came from that motivation to wanna be in a position where I could actually do that. You know, I previously, I had, they wanted to build a big landfill over one of our big water aquifers here, which, you know, even for me as a teenager, seemed like such an absurd idea and risk, because once that water is contaminated, then it’s done. And so I was part of, you know, I went out and got petitions and signatures and joined others to be able to try to stop that because it was being, the wheels were being greased by a corrupt politician essentially, who was trying to help his buddy who ran the landfill business. And it was a great experience for me as a young person to be a part of stopping that from happening. And that’s what drove me to run for office when I was 21 years old. It was not out of any kind of design, like, oh, I’m gonna have this big political career and this will be the first stepping stone to get to somewhere else. It was really driven by a desire to be of service and make that positive impact. I chose to be a Democrat. My family, it wasn’t one of those like legacy party affiliation things that you just did. I really was thoughtful at that time about which box I wanted to check in filing those papers to run for office. And, you know, for us here in Hawaii, the origins of the Democratic Party really came from a party that fought for people, kind of a more populist perspective. We had plantation workers who were being absolutely abused and taken advantage of by the huge landowners here in the state that was essentially being run by elite, wealthy Republicans at the time. And it was a Democratic Party that fought for those who didn’t have a voice. It was a Democratic Party that celebrated civil liberties, that celebrated freedom and individual thought, this big tent party that really was rooted in kind of those traditional liberal JFK-esque ideals. And it was a party that had many voices that spoke out for peace. And so all of these different things really drew me to the Democratic Party as a party that would fight for the voices of the people. You know, in Canada, we have a socialist tradition, the New Democratic Party, and I worked for them when I was a kid. The man I worked for was the father of Alberta’s last premier, second-to-last premier. And a lot of the people that were involved in the NDP were labor leaders, you know. It was well-known in Canada that the conservatives were the party of the establishment and the liberals were, well, they played both sides against the middle very effectively. And the socialists, the NDP, British socialists, rather than the communist type, were really, they’re really the voice of the working class. They’re the voice of the unions. The working class needs a voice, obviously. And I think, well, the NDP did provide that to some degree in Canada, and the Democrats historically did provide that. That seemed to go pretty damn sideways with Clinton. And I think it looked to me, from an outsider’s point of view, and I was rather appalled by this, that the Democrats had decided to sacrifice their traditional base, the working class, you know, the committed working class, for something approximating the politics of division and this, whatever this new narrative is of oppression and victimization. I don’t think that worked out very well either, as far as I could tell, because my sense of the Clinton-Trump debacle was that it wasn’t so much that Trump won, although he certainly did. It was definitely the case that Clinton lost. And I think she did that by sacrificing the interests of the working class. Trump just vacuumed that up in no time flat, masterfully, I thought. He seemed to have that ability to communicate with working class people, interestingly enough, and they trusted him, at least they trusted him in comparison to Clinton. So, okay, so you were interested in the Democrats because of that working class voice tradition. And you worked with the Democrats for a long time. How long was your, how long, you ran when you were 21, that was in when, 2002? That was in 2002. 2002, right, so, and when did you formally sever ties with the Democrats? In October of last year, 2022. Right, so it was basically 20 years. Yeah, yeah. I did not spend all of that time in politics. I left the state house when I volunteered to deploy with our Hawaii Army National Guard unit, because the events of 9-11, like so many Americans, changed my life, changed my perspective, and I had enlisted in the military motivated by what happened there to go after the Islamist terrorists who attacked us on that day. And so I was campaigning for reelection here in Hawaii in 2004, which looked to be a pretty easy reelection here and to continue the work I was doing. Our unit, or the National Guard unit, was activated for a deployment to Iraq. I was told by my commander, you know, congratulations, you don’t have to go. Your name is, you know, we’ve already got someone filling this job in the medical unit where I was serving. So you can stay home and you can continue doing what you’re doing, but I knew that there was no way, there was just no way that I could stay back and work in some plush office in the state capitol and watch my brothers and sisters in uniform go and deploy to war on the other side of the world. And so I left my reelection campaign and volunteered to deploy, got trained in a different job that they needed filling in that medical unit and went off on an 18 month long deployment. So what’d you learn from that? So you got hauled out of your life, what’d you learn? So much, so much about the cost of war, both in the loss of people who I was close to, people who I served with, as well as people who I had never met. One, the very first thing that I did in my job while I served in Iraq, we were in a camp about 40 miles north of Baghdad. And the very first thing that I did every single day that I was there was to go through a list of names of American service soldiers who were serving all across that country who had been injured or hurt in combat the day before. And I had to go through that list name by name to look to see if there were any of the soldiers from our brigade, which was about close to 3000 people who were serving in four different parts of Iraq at the time to make sure that, okay, well this person has been injured or they’ve been hurt. Where are they? Are they getting the care that they need? Are they able to get what they need in country and return to duty? Do they need to be evacuated quickly? And basically make sure that they had what they need, whether they were staying in country, we eventually got them back home to their families if they had to leave. But every single day being confronted with the high human cost of war that is just so often not discussed or talked about in the headlines or even thought about by politicians, even if they might give lip service to it. And also therefore coming from serving in the state house and even some of our local politicians in Hawaii, they would come out and visit the troops, get the photo op, be on the ground for maybe 24, 48 hours, and then go back and say all of these things as if they knew what was happening. And just the hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of the politicians in Washington that voted for that war in Iraq, but really without any care for the consequences of that decision, or even thinking through what are we actually doing here? Is it serving the interests of the American people? Is it- Yeah, well, and what were you doing there as far as you’re concerned? You’ve had lots of time to think about it now and you were actually there. And so- Well, for our unit, so our specific unit there was there to go after different terrorist elements. This was kind of where Al-Qaeda was growing stronger. And obviously the rise of ISIS would occur a little later after we left. But we had a number of different infantry units that were going around in different areas and trying to seek out those insurgents that were attacking Americans. And that was the specific mission that we had. I was served in a medical unit. And so we were providing care primarily for our American troops, but also going out and trying to help provide care for local Iraqis in the area where we were. I visited Abu Ghraib Prison. This was after the scandal occurred, but I visited the hospital at Abu Ghraib Prison and was struck there about the medical care that was being provided there to the prisoners, which was exactly the same kind of care that we were providing to injured service members who were also in the country. But it was seeing past kind of the day-to-day tasks there in being exposed literally on the front lines to the war profiteering and the military industrial complex, the monopoly of KBR Halliburton making an immeasurable amount of money off of this war. Again, I was there for all of 2005 in Iraq, and that was in the early days. And you look at what has happened since over the ensuing decades in Iraq and Afghanistan. And again, my exposure in Hawaii as a state legislator was very limited when it comes to foreign policy. There wasn’t a lot that I knew, but being there, experiencing it, and at a basic level understanding government spending and taxpayer dollars and how are we using it, the accountability and going and talking to these, they called them, they labeled them third country nationals. They would import in from places like Nepal and the Philippines and Sri Lanka, pay them pennies essentially compared to how much they were charging the federal government to do things like, okay, well, we’re gonna cook food for the troops every day. And I started asking, well, how, if I walk into the Chow Hall tent or building or whatever, and get a bowl of cereal and a banana for breakfast, how much is KBR Halliburton charging the US federal government for that? And it was some outrageous price in 2005, it was like 500 a month.