Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Season 11 Episode 20
Aired on August 11, 2024
Main segment: History,annexation, andexploitationofHawaii
Other segments: Arisa Trew’s gold medal inwomen’s park skateboarding, Attack strategies of the Trump campaign againstHarrisandWalz
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[Cheers and applause]
John: Welcome, welcome, welcome to “Last Week Tonight!” I’m John Oliver. Thank you so much for joining us. It has 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 till 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 can I get a duck? And she said yes. Are you going to teach the duck to skateboard? Yeah, I’m going to take the duck to the skatepark as well and take it on walks.
John: Yes! Listen to me, someone get that girl a f*cking duck right now! If anyone’s ever earned one, it’s 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’s the Olympics 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’s 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?” 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 spokesman 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 this 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 Pepe Lepew, 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 just telling you what the diagram logically highlights. My point is, you can have lots of fun with charts, but this right here is f*cking nothing.
But it’s not just “Kamabla” that’s been an unforced error. Trump’s VP choice J.D. 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?”
Well, I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media man. [Laughs] Look, I think 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 southern border.
John: Is he all right? He just got asked “What makes you smile?”—a question to which there’s almost no wrong answer. You could say my kids, dogs that sleep weird, a warm bath, Cheez-Its, which is incidentally also the name of this dog that sleeps weird. But he just responded 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 take a minute on that laugh? [Laughs]
John: What the f*ck 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 never heard in conversation? Like you’re “pretty sure” you know how to pronounce this word, but you never actually heard it, so didn’t know 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. No one had ever used that word around you, and you made a pretty reasonable guess.
Well, that’s how I genuinely think J.D. 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,” said “ah ha ha ha ha” and immediately knew he was wrong.
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 basically the exact opposite of J.D. 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 to do that, 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. And then—turkey’s meat. Not in Minnesota. Turkey’s special.”
John: Excellent. I’ve 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 he kept his promise and rode that slingshot. Take a look.
[Laughing and screaming]
John: 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 J.D. f*cking Vance.
Walz is a former geography teacher and football coach and there’s 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 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, you know, looks like any other state flag. He changed it to this. Now, go ahead and Google the Somali flag and tell me they don’t look alike.
John: 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 vagin*. But that’s kind of more a “Sicily’s gonna Sicily” situation.
For what it’s worth, the flag was changed mainly 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’s said he misspoke. But Republicans didn’t stop there—with J.D. Vance and others also trying this line of attack, regarding the circ*mstances 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.”
John: Okay, that’s 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, and 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, and while that might not seem like a lot, it’s going to 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’s currently got absolutely nothing.
[…]
John: Moving on. Our main story tonight concerns Hawaii, a place often depicted as paradise in movies and TV shows like “Hawaii 5-0,” “NCIS: Hawaii,” and “Magnum P.I.,” where this magnificent clip is from:
“Morning, sister. Good morning, sir. ♪ ♪ Nuns don’t work on Sunday. ♪ ♪”
John: 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 Hawaii, nothing in that clip indicated it did.” Hey, shut up. I wanted to remind you of a simpler TV time when you could shoot a nun to solve all of your Hawaii 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 even on a Sunday, if so ordered by her superior.” Shut the f*ck up. TV used to be great not because the people who wrote it were better, but because the people who watched it were.
Anyway, Hawaii 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 in Hawaii are reminding visitors not to take lava rocks home with them. Taking things from national parks is against the law, so taking volcanic rocks from Hawaii’s volcanoes is illegal. But apart from being illegal, legend has it that taking volcanic rocks from Hawaii 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.
John: It’s true, it apparently happens so much, a national park official even 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, 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—just do it, I’ve had a good run. Well. A run.
We’re talking about Hawaii because this week, 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 $5.5 billion in damage, and killing 102 people. The aftermath exposed long-simmering tensions under the surface of Hawaii’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 their bathing suits, frolicking in the surf, driving these roads like they’re on the racetrack, drinking Mai Tais, and partying in our face?”
John: Yeah, you can see why he might resent tourists. No one wants people partying while they’re suffering. It’s the main reason 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.”
John: That’s 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. I imagine that might be hurtful.
It’s frankly no wonder that around two-thirds of Hawaii residents apparently believe their state is being run for tourists at the expense of locals. And the fact is, the more you look at Hawaii, the clearer it becomes, they’re not wrong—but it’s not just tourists. Hawaii has long been run for the benefit of everyone but Hawaiians.
So given that, tonight, let’s talk about Hawaii. And let’s start with some of its history—which isn’t actually taught much in American schools. Something that’s a little weird, given it only became a state in living memory. Hawaii 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 till 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.”
John: 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 sh*t’s about to go down.
That first Western contact led to the arrival of traders, and eventually, American missionaries. With them came diseases that 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 Hawaii 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 Hawaii’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 Liliuokalani, 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 Hawaii was annexed into the United States.
Although, again, when white people tell the story of that era, it tends to sound a little different.
“The Queen, last of a long line of Polynesian rulers, signed the application that made Hawaii an American possession. These native troops became soldiers of Uncle Sam. Happy that her island kingdom became an American protectorate, the Queen of Hawaii bid farewell.”
John: “Yes, there’s the Queen of Hawaii 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.”
Hawaii 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. It’s always nice to say “sorry” for things, isn’t it? 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 Hawaii. And let’s start with the military.
Hawaii’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 Hawaii—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 Hawaii. Much of it is on federal land that was confiscated after Hawaii 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?”
“It happens, not necessarily every day, but pretty regularly.”
“It must be a big task to go in and clean all that up.”
“So, for the—for the impact area where—where we’re firing now, we—that’s—we let that—we let that be.”
“Oh! It’s never cleaned?”
“The impact area is—is—is, uh, is left as it is when we fire in there. And that’s for—that’s for safety—safety reasons.”
“Does that mean, like, decades and decades and nobody goes in and picks this stuff up?”
“Correct.”
John: Wow. Setting aside the fact the military got their own 65-year playground for $1—that is some nuclear-grade euphemizing. 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 for safety reasons.”
But that’s 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 sh*t 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? And Jesus said ‘because, my child, that was when I jumped up on your shoulders because there was no f*cking way I was gonna step on a bomb. No way, my guy. They’re f*cking 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 Hawaii, with activists having to struggle to then undo the damage. Here’s 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. They 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 Hawaii’s sacred spaces that’s been used for target practice.
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 [bleep] up. Sorry for the swearing, but it’s not like we’re all best friends.”
John: Okay, first, there is no need to apologize for swearing. If anyone’s entitled to say “f*ck” on national TV, it should be you. As for “not best friends,” I get it. You don’t call an institution that steals your sh*t then makes you ask permission to visit it your best friend. As we all know, you call that “the British Museum.”
But as I said—it’s not just the military that can take precedence over native residents of Hawaiians. That’s true of the tourism industry, too—which is obviously a big part of Hawaii’s economy, contributing nearly 20% of its GDP. But while tourists experience Hawaii 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 Hawaii show signs of financial stress, like working multiple jobs, living with relatives, and dipping into savings. Hawaii 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 Hawaii. In fact, nearly a quarter of Hawaiian homes were purchased by buyers from outside the state.
That is part of why Hawaii is now the most expensive state in the nation for housing. And given that, it’s not surprising that Hawaii 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? [Laughs] Some of Hawaii’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.”
John: Okay, it is sh*tty to tell homeless people to be invisible, but it’s extra sh*tty to do so to protect your TripAdvisor reviews. Do you have any idea how useless they are? Here’s 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 Memorial Museum.
Or how about a third TripAdvisor review that reads, “Absolutely woeful, avoid 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 Fridays. I admit, the reviews aren’t 100% wrong.
But it’s not just housing costs—food is incredibly expensive in Hawaii. 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, Hawaii 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 Hawaii explains:
“Okay, let me show you how much my groceries cost. Gallon of milk: $9. Five apples. I did eat two, because I was very hungry on the walk home. $15. $3 an apple. Bag of grapes. $17.”
John: $17 is too much for that many grapes. In fact, it’s too much for any grapes. Grapes are terrible. If you don’t eat grapes in three days, they just shrivel into skan*y little sugar balloons. Let me be clear about this, either be a raisin or a grape, I’ve no patience for your fruit puberty.
And Hawaii’s government has said it’s addressing food costs—in 2014, its governor set a goal to double Hawaii’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’s not clear they’ll hit that, either.
But maybe the ultimate expression of the extent to which Hawaii 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 Corporation Larry Ellison loved the remote Hawaiian getaway so much he bought it, along with 98% of the entire island, for a reported $300 million.
John: It’s true. Larry Ellison bought virtually the entire island of Lanai, along with most of what’s 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 at least acknowledge this image. That’s 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 Hawaii became a state. And she was 16 when he became eligible for Social Security. Aren’t facts fun? Just one of many stories you probably won’t read in Lanai’s local newspaper.
But when it comes to billionaires in Hawaii, 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’ll see, are understandable.
“So, the land that you own is just across this fence right here?”
“Yes.”
“But Mark Zuckerberg has put up this wall and fence and it says no trespassing?”
“Yeah.”
“What would happen if you tried to go over that?”
“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.
John: 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’s the most on-brand white-guy-in-Hawaii thing he could possibly do, is a thing I would say, if I hadn’t seen whatever the f*ck this was.
Now, 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 a friend of his, and very conveniently, a kuleana owner who wanted to buy out the rights of all the others. In the end, his friend won and bought the disputed parcels of land 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 it 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 they contribute to local charities and help the economy there. But it’s the larger kind of dynamic here where wealthy outsiders can outpurchase and outmaneuver a local population that can be so dispiriting.
And it’s instructive to contrast the ease with which billionaires can snap up whole islands in Hawaii, 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. Not only was it chronically underfunded from the start, some 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 f*cking unexploded ordnance zone.
What’s more, the wait list 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.”
John: Yeah, probably not! And that’s absurd. She’s waited 19 years. Think about how frustrating it can be to stare at your phone waiting when your UberEats driver is running six minutes late. Now imagine that six minutes is 19 years, and your spaghetti vongole is a home in your ancestral homeland.
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 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 Hawaii itself.”
So, where do we go from here? Well, when a situation’s 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 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’d argue that probably shouldn’t happen.
As for Hawaii’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 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 Hawaii, you should probably be listening less to outsiders like me, and more to groups like these. And finally, when it comes to tourism—if you’re watching this thinking, “I wanted to take a vacation to Hawaii, 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 Hawaii’s been struggling with.
I will say, though—the solution’s not going to come down to any single trip you might take. It’s going to 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, a few 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.
[…]
John: That’s our show, thank you so much for watching. We will see you next week. Good night!
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