Censorship is destroying Free Speech

It’s most alarming that social media censorship is out of control. Ideas and questioning of status quo posts on Facebook are censored regularly. It’s done easily by “reporting” of posts another deem offensive or “dangerous”.

My FACEBOOK PAGE gets censored for “violating community standards” just about every month. Unequivocally, I never swear. I never threaten. I never call names. I’m always civil and respectful. I like to raise critical thinking and promote ideas and solutions in the Public Square.

Apparently, there are people out there who are afraid of diversification of thoughts and ideas. Usually what happens is someone “report” your post and FB automatically shuts a post down or puts a person in facebook jail for a period of time to deny further posting. Or you’re not allowed to post photos. I must be up on the “most wanted list” on FB now because I’m regularly censored for no good reason. It’s becoming a harassment. ( I will probably send this to FB the next time they have a stockholder meeting. i own stocks in FB/Meta however meager to Zukerberg’s shares.)

Here is one example. What an irritation and what a waste of time and so anti-democratic.

I posted similar comments on my post along with this YOU TUBE:

Putting politics aside, RFK is rocking the Public Health and Corruption Boat. We’ve all become captives of Big Pharma, Big Corporations and Big Government. I included this You Tube post.

This is the censorship that kicks in:

House collapse in north shore of Oahu

The Hawaii State DLNR – Department of Land and Natural Resources provided a press release, along with a video and photographs.

We have yet to hear from the owner’s side of the story.

DEPARTMENT OF LAND AND NATURAL RESOURCES

JOSH GREEN, M.D.

GOVERNOR

DEPARTMENT OF PLANNING AND PERMITTING

RICK BLANGIARDI

MAYOR

JOINT NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 28, 2024

EROSION IMPACTS ON OʻAHU’S NORTH SHORE

(HONOLULU) – The DLNR and City and County of Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting (DPP) are notifying neighborhood homeowners and the community of the potential risk to property, health and safety, based on recent events and the history of erosion in the area of Ke Nui Road on Oʻahu’s north shore.

Debris from temporary shoreline hardening measures like sandbag seawalls currently litter the beach. One home along that stretch partially collapsed onto the beach and is actively being demolished, while a second is scheduled to be demolished soon. DLNR is concerned with the unpredictable situation, as more of the coastal dune beneath the residences is undermined. This will potentially place other neighboring homes in a similar predicament.

The DLNR is working with the DPP to raise awareness of these volatile conditions and encourage homeowners to take proactive measures. As wave energy generates sand shifting and undercuts these properties, the integrity of the structures is at risk. The threats to public health and the safety of residents and beachgoers are real concerns.

“While the circumstances are unfortunate, debris on the public beach or falling into the ocean endangering the community and marine life is unacceptable and we will take all appropriate action to protect the public and our natural and cultural resources,” said DLNR Chair Dawn Chang.

Signage along this stretch of Ke Nui Road states that the beach is closed. Community members and visitors are cautioned to avoid walking through the affected area due to safety concerns.

“Understanding the gravity of the situation for beachfront property owners along this stretch, we urge them to heed this warning, for their own benefit and the safety of the community,” said DPP Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna.

Landowners are urged to be proactive and take all necessary precautionary measures to avoid potential damage to their property, impacts to adjacent state and/or county lands, and public access to transit the beach. If the private landowners fail to take appropriate action, the DLNR and DPP may be compelled to take administrative or legal action to protect the public health and safety.

# # #

RESOURCES

(All images/video courtesy: DLNR)

HD Video – Sunset Beach collapse hazard (September 27, 2024): https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1013730064

Photos – OCCL Drone Survey (September 27, 2024): https://www.dropbox.com/…/AGaADVjb5_a0hjTpbteU49A…

Photos – Sunset Beach shoreline collapse hazard (September 27, 2024): https://www.dropbox.com/…/AFG5QMPvhXwz7FXsFyplSlU…

Elections 2024: Good Ole Honesty, Integrity & Honesty

This is an inspiring read on Abraham Lincoln’s mindset of being honest and accountable to the donations he had received during his political campaign. (This book is nearly a hundred years old).

It appears elections is now about raising lots of money to help a candidate promote a narrative to sell to the public Whatever happened to issues and record of candidates?

Elections 2024 – – The numbing and dumbing down of America

2024 American Elections have been very troublesome to watch. Robust intelligent dialogue based on a candidate’s record and policies have been absent.

I have received solicitations from political parties pitting one candidate against another. Each side is accusing the other of “destroying democracy” with a straight face. Even non-partisan public interest groups have become very partisan and shrill.

Candidates who try to focus on substance and solutions usually demand more effort through reading and analyzing. These are often drowned by the louder noises of partisan clamoring and quick superficial soundbites.

This election process has mainly become a war of social media prowess and madness. Instead of respecting the Public Intelligent and Democratic Processes, the goal seems to be how to circumvent the civil dialogue process.

The days of civil and intelligent debates with intelligent questions and answers have disappeared. Intead of allow the public to listen and analyze the intelligence and values of the candidate, the public is forced to staged narratives through 30-seconds videos, tic-toks, instagram and facebook reels. Hollywood stars, talk-show hosts, musicians and whatever there is out there jump into in the quarrelsome fray.

Even former politicians jump into shrill partisan mud-fights, displaying no statesmanship, if in fact there was any to begin with.

Substance, policies, ideas, solutions, through analytical robust discussions about how a candidate can provide the best way forward are absent.

It has become a social media war to stoke the anger and fear in the American population. “If you’re not for us, you’re against us!”

” And please donate. Donate now. Donate to save Democracy! “

I was curious to see how much money is involved in these elections. This seems like an awful lot — ” In the 2020 U.S. presidential race, candidates spent a total of roughly 3.16 trillion U.S. dollars, more than any other election. The total spending of presidential candidates is reflected in the number of major presidential candidates running. See here for more information on how many candidates have run in past U.S. elections.” 

Is this information correct? If it is, it’s a sad state of affairs! God Bless America.

Independent Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. raises many underlying issues in USA that warrant our personal action.



Why I am suspending my campaign for President Transcript of my address to the nation
CHARLES EISENSTEIN AUG 23 2024

Sixteen months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat — the party of my father and my uncle, the party to which I pledged my allegiance long before I was old enough to vote. 

I attended my first Democratic convention at age six in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, and civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

As you all know, I left that party last October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money. When it abandoned democracy by cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent.

The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision. Conventional wisdom said it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent, because each state poses a tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million of them, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved, and then I’d need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle the legal challenges. The naysayers told us we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible. 

So, the first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong. We did it because beneath the radar of mainstream media organs, we inspired a massive independent political movement. More than a hundred thousand volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation’s decline. Many worked ten-hour days, sometimes in blizzards and blazing heat. They sacrificed family time, personal commitments, and sleep month after month, energized by a shared vision of a nation healed of its divisions. They set up tables at farmers’ markets. They canvassed door-to-door. In Utah and New Hampshire, volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, take off their gloves, and sign legibly. During a heat wave in Nevada, I met a tall, athletic volunteer who cheerfully told me he had lost 25 pounds collecting signatures in 117-degree heat. To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money, and senior citizens gave from their Social Security checks. Our 50-state organization collected those million signatures, and more. No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that.

And so, I want to thank all of these dedicated volunteers, and congratulate all of the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat. You accomplished the impossible. You carried me up that glass mountain. You pulled off a miracle. You achieved what all the pundits said could never be done. You have my deepest gratitude. I will never forget that — not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made because of your love for our country. You showed everyone that democracy is still possible here. It continues to survive in the breasts and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive beneath the canvas of neglect and official and institutional corruption.

Today I am here to tell you that I WILL NOT ALLOW YOUR EFFORTS TO GO TO WASTE.

I am here today to tell you how I will leverage your tremendous accomplishment to serve the ideals we share, the ideals of peace, prosperity, freedom, and health that motivated our campaign. I am here today to describe the path forward that you have opened with your commitment and hard labors.

In an honest system, I believe I would have won this election. In a system of open, fair primaries, with regularly scheduled debates, with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, in a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different. After all, polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates in both favorability and in every head-to-head matchup. 

But I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grass roots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government, and most sadly of all, for the Democratic Party.    

In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself.

Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court state by state attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me — and other candidates — off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham of a primary, rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.

Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor — also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate. My uncles and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days.

This is profoundly undemocratic.

How are the people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?

My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world.Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon, well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates — only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus.

There, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times on just the first day. Who needs policy when you have a Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention President Biden was mentioned twice in 4 days.I do interviews every day. Some days, as many as 10. President Trump, who actually was nominated in an election, also does interviews daily.

How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?

We know the answer.

They did it by weaponizing the government and agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising voters. 

What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of federal agencies. When a U.S. president colludes with — or outright coerces — media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.

President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88% landslide in Russian elections, observing that Putin’s party controlled the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from getting on the ballot and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs.

Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times into the high 20s, the DNC-aligned mainstream networks maintained a near-total embargo on interviews with me.

During his 10-month Presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave interviews 34 times on the mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave me only two live interviews.

Those same networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejorative, and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage. Representatives of these networks are in the room right now. I will take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that you have abdicated your responsibility — the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and challenge the party in power. Instead of maintaining a posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, you have made yourselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power.

You did not alone cause the devolution of America’s democracy, but you could have prevented it.

The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was an even more naked exercise of executive power. This week a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House censorship project “the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.” 

Doughty’s previous 155-page decision details how 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the constitution, President Biden’s White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, FBI, CISA, DHS, IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents. Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that “this content violates community standards.”

Two days after Judge Doughty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.

The mainstream media, once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, has joined a systematic attack on democracy. It always justifies its censorship on the grounds of “combating misinformation,” but oppressors don’t fear lies. They fear the truth.

But here’s the good news. While mainstream outlets denied me a critical platform, they didn’t shut down my ideas, which have especially flourished among young and independent voters thanks to the alternative media. Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler.

A “spoiler” is someone who will alter the outcome of the election but has no chance of winning. In my heart, I no longer believe I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of relentless, systemic censorship and media control.

I cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working long hours, or ask my donors to keep giving, when I cannot honestly tell them we have a path to the White House.

Furthermore, our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election to the Democrats with whom I disagree on the existential issues of censorship, war, and chronic disease. 

I want everyone to know that I am only suspending my campaign, not terminating it. My name will still be on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. In red states — the same applies. I encourage you to do so.

And if enough of you vote for me and neither of the major party candidates win 270 electoral votes, I could still end up in the White House in a contingent election. 

But in about ten battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I will remove my name and urge voters not to vote for me. 

It is with a sense of victory, and not defeat, that I am suspending my campaign activities. Not only did we do the impossible by collecting a million signatures, but we changed the national political conversation forever.

Chronic disease, free speech, government corruption, and breaking our addiction to war have moved to the center of politics. I can say to all who have worked so hard for the last year and a half: “Thanks for a job well done!” Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place.

These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party, and then as an Independent, and now throw my support to President Trump.

The cause of free speech.
The war in Ukraine.
The war on our children.


I’ve already described some of my personal experiences with government censorship-industrial complex.

I want to say a word about the Ukraine war. The military-industrial complex has provided us with the familiar comic-book justification that this war is a noble effort to stop supervillain Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe. In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the U.S. Neocons for U.S. global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options. But the war is Russia’s predictable response to the reckless Neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia.The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia, and then put nuclear-ready Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland, and that the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle the dispute pCharles VersionSixteen months ago,

In April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat — the party of my father and my uncle, the party to which I pledged my allegiance long before I was old enough to vote. I attended my first Democratic convention at age six in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, and civil rights.

The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

As you all know, I left that party last October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money. When it abandoned democracy by cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent.

The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision. Conventional wisdom said it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent, because each state poses a tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million of them, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved, and then I’d need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle the legal challenges. The naysayers told us we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible. 

So, the first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong. We did it because beneath the radar of mainstream media organs, we inspired a massive independent political movement.

More than a hundred thousand volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation’s decline. Many worked ten-hour days, sometimes in blizzards and blazing heat. They sacrificed family time, personal commitments, and sleep month after month, energized by a shared vision of a nation healed of its divisions. They set up tables at farmers’ markets. They canvassed door-to-door. In Utah and New Hampshire, volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, take off their gloves, and sign legibly. During a heat wave in Nevada, I met a tall, athletic volunteer who cheerfully told me he had lost 25 pounds collecting signatures in 117-degree heat. To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money, and senior citizens gave from their Social Security checks. Our 50-state organization collected those million signatures, and more. No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that.

And so, I want to thank all of these dedicated volunteers, and congratulate all of the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat. You accomplished the impossible. You carried me up that glass mountain. You pulled off a miracle. You achieved what all the pundits said could never be done.

You have my deepest gratitude. I will never forget that — not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made because of your love for our country. You showed everyone that democracy is still possible here. It continues to survive in the breasts and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive beneath the canvas of neglect and official and institutional corruption.

Today I am here to tell you that I WILL NOT ALLOW YOUR EFFORTS TO GO TO WASTE.

I am here today to tell you how I will leverage your tremendous accomplishment to serve the ideals we share, the ideals of peace, prosperity, freedom, and health that motivated our campaign.

I am here today to describe the path forward that you have opened with your commitment and hard labors.In an honest system, I believe I would have won this election. In a system of open, fair primaries, with regularly scheduled debates, with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, in a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different.

After all, polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates in both favorability and in every head-to-head matchup. 

But I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grass roots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government, and most sadly of all, for the Democratic Party.

In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it.

Lacking confidence that its candidate could win at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself.

Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court state by state attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me — and other candidates — off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham of a primary, rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.

Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor — also without an election.

They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate. My uncle and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas.

They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic.

How are the people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?

My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world.Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon, well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates — only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus.

There, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times on just the first day. Who needs policy when you have a Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention President Biden was mentioned twice in 4 days.I do interviews every day. Some days, as many as 10. President Trump, who actually was nominated in an election, also does interviews daily. How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?

We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government and agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising voters. 

What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of federal agencies.

When a U.S. president colludes with — or outright coerces — media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.

President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88% landslide in Russian elections, observing that Putin’s party controlled the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from getting on the ballot and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs. Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times into the high 20s, the DNC-aligned mainstream networks maintained a near-total embargo on interviews with me.

During his 10-month Presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave interviews 34 times on the mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave me only two live interviews.

Those same networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejorative, and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage. Representatives of these networks are in the room right now. I will take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that you have abdicated your responsibility — the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and challenge the party in power.

Instead of maintaining a posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, you have made yourselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power. You did not alone cause the devolution of America’s democracy, but you could have prevented it.

The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was an even more naked exercise of executive power.

This week a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House censorship project “the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.” 

Doughty’s previous 155-page decision details how 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the constitution, President Biden’s White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, FBI, CISA, DHS, IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents. Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that “this content violates community standards.” Two days after Judge Doughty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.

The mainstream media, once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, has joined a systematic attack on democracy. It always justifies its censorship on the grounds of “combating misinformation,” but oppressors don’t fear lies. They fear the truth.

But here’s the good news. While mainstream outlets denied me a critical platform, they didn’t shut down my ideas, which have especially flourished among young and independent voters thanks to the alternative media. 

Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler. A “spoiler” is someone who will alter the outcome of the election but has no chance of winning. In my heart, I no longer believe I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of relentless, systemic censorship and media control. I cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working long hours, or ask my donors to keep giving, when I cannot honestly tell them we have a path to the White House.

Furthermore, our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election to the Democrats with whom I disagree on the existential issues of censorship, war, and chronic disease.

 I want everyone to know that I am only suspending my campaign, not terminating it. My name will still be on the ballot in most states.

If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris.

In red states — the same applies. I encourage you to do so.

And if enough of you vote for me and neither of the major party candidates win 270 electoral votes, I could still end up in the White House in a contingent election. 

But in about ten battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I will remove my name and urge voters not to vote for me. 

It is with a sense of victory, and not defeat, that I am suspending my campaign activities. Not only did we do the impossible by collecting a million signatures, but we changed the national political conversation forever. Chronic disease, free speech, government corruption, and breaking our addiction to war have moved to the center of politics. I can say to all who have worked so hard for the last year and a half: “Thanks for a job well done!” 

Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place. These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party, and then as an Independent, and now throw my support to President Trump.

The cause of free speech.

The war in Ukraine.

The war on our children.

I’ve already described some of my personal experiences with government censorship-industrial complex.

I want to say a word about the Ukraine war.

The military-industrial complex has provided us with the familiar comic-book justification that this war is a noble effort to stop supervillain Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe.

 In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the U.S. Neocons for U.S. global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options. But the war is Russia’s predictable response to the reckless Neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia.

The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia, and then put nuclear-ready Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland, and that the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle the dispute peacefully.

The Ukraine war began in 2014, when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked pro-West government that launched a civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk agreement that had been negotiated by European leadership.In April 2022, President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelensky to tear up a peace treaty with President Putin that would have brought peace and left Donbass and Ukraine as part of Ukraine.President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. His Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, said that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army to degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else.

These objectives of course had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty.Since then, we have squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth. As many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids have died and Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed.Charles Version

Sixteen months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat — the party of my father and my uncle, the party to which I pledged my allegiance long before I was old enough to vote. 

I attended my first Democratic convention at age six in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, and civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

As you all know, I left that party last October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money. When it abandoned democracy by cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent.

The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision. Conventional wisdom said it would be impossible even to get on the ballot as an independent, because each state poses a tangle of arbitrary rules for collecting signatures. I would need over a million of them, something no presidential candidate in history had ever achieved, and then I’d need a team of attorneys and millions of dollars to handle the legal challenges. The naysayers told us we were climbing a glass version of Mount Impossible. 

So, the first thing I want to tell you is that we proved them wrong. We did it because beneath the radar of mainstream media organs, we inspired a massive independent political movement.

More than a hundred thousand volunteers sprang into action, hopeful that they could reverse our nation’s decline. Many worked ten-hour days, sometimes in blizzards and blazing heat. They sacrificed family time, personal commitments, and sleep month after month, energized by a shared vision of a nation healed of its divisions. They set up tables at farmers’ markets. They canvassed door-to-door. In Utah and New Hampshire, volunteers collected signatures in snowstorms, convincing each supporter to stop in the frigid cold, take off their gloves, and sign legibly.

During a heat wave in Nevada, I met a tall, athletic volunteer who cheerfully told me he had lost 25 pounds collecting signatures in 117-degree heat. To finance this effort, young Americans donated their lunch money, and senior citizens gave from their Social Security checks. Our 50-state organization collected those million signatures, and more.

No presidential campaign in American political history has ever done that.

And so, I want to thank all of these dedicated volunteers, and congratulate all of the campaign staff who coordinated this enormous logistical feat. You accomplished the impossible. You carried me up that glass mountain. You pulled off a miracle. You achieved what all the pundits said could never be done. You have my deepest gratitude. I will never forget that — not just for what you did for my campaign, but for the sacrifices you made because of your love for our country. You showed everyone that democracy is still possible here. It continues to survive in the breasts and in the idealistic human energies that still thrive beneath the canvas of neglect and official and institutional corruption.

Today I am here to tell you that I WILL NOT ALLOW YOUR EFFORTS TO GO TO WASTE.

I am here today to tell you how I will leverage your tremendous accomplishment to serve the ideals we share, the ideals of peace, prosperity, freedom, and health that motivated our campaign.

I am here today to describe the path forward that you have opened with your commitment and hard labors.In an honest system, I believe I would have won this election. In a system of open, fair primaries, with regularly scheduled debates, with a truly independent media untainted by government propaganda and censorship, in a system of nonpartisan courts and election boards, everything would be different.

After all, polls consistently showed me beating each of the other candidates in both favorability and in every head-to-head matchup. But I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grass roots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government, and most sadly of all, for the Democratic Party. In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court state by state attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me — and other candidates — off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham of a primary, rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.

Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor — also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate. My uncle and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days. This is profoundly undemocratic. How are the people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?

My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world.Instead of showing us her substance and character, the DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon, well, nothing. No policies, no interviews, no debates — only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus. There, a string of Democratic speakers mentioned Donald Trump 147 times on just the first day. Who needs policy when you have a Trump to hate? In contrast, at the RNC convention President Biden was mentioned twice in 4 days.I do interviews every day. Some days, as many as 10. President Trump, who actually was nominated in an election, also does interviews daily. How did the Democratic Party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle? We know the answer. They did it by weaponizing the government and agencies. They did it by abandoning democracy. They did it by suing the opposition and by disenfranchising voters. What most alarms me isn’t how the Democratic Party conducts its internal affairs or runs its candidates. What alarms me is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponization of federal agencies. When a U.S. president colludes with — or outright coerces — media companies to censor political speech, it is an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.

President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin’s 88% landslide in Russian elections, observing that Putin’s party controlled the Russian press, and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot. But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from getting on the ballot and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs.

Over the course of more than a year, in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times into the high 20s, the DNC-aligned mainstream networks maintained a near-total embargo on interviews with me. During his 10-month Presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave interviews 34 times on the mainstream networks.

In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave me only two live interviews. Those same networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile, pejorative, and defamatory smears.

Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage. Representatives of these networks are in the room right now. I will take a moment to ask you to consider the many ways that you have abdicated your responsibility — the duty of a free press to safeguard democracy and challenge the party in power. Instead of maintaining a posture of fierce skepticism toward authority, you have made yourselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power.

You did not alone cause the devolution of America’s democracy, but you could have prevented it.The Democratic Party’s censorship of social media was an even more naked exercise of executive power.

This week a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House censorship project “the most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.” Doughty’s previous 155-page decision details how 37 hours after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold the constitution, President Biden’s White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, FBI, CISA, DHS, IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents. Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that “this content violates community standards.” Two days after Judge Doughty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.

The mainstream media, once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, has joined a systematic attack on democracy. It always justifies its censorship on the grounds of “combating misinformation,” but oppressors don’t fear lies. They fear the truth.

But here’s the good news. While mainstream outlets denied me a critical platform, they didn’t shut down my ideas, which have especially flourished among young and independent voters thanks to the alternative media. Many months ago, I promised the American people that I would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler. A “spoiler” is someone who will alter the outcome of the election but has no chance of winning. In my heart, I no longer believe I have a realistic path to electoral victory in the face of relentless, systemic censorship and media control. I cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working long hours, or ask my donors to keep giving, when I cannot honestly tell them we have a path to the White House.Furthermore, our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election to the Democrats with whom I disagree on the existential issues of censorship, war, and chronic disease. I want everyone to know that I am only suspending my campaign, not terminating it. My name will still be on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. In red states — the same applies. I encourage you to do so. And if enough of you vote for me and neither of the major party candidates win 270 electoral votes, I could still end up in the White House in a contingent election. But in about ten battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I will remove my name and urge voters not to vote for me. It is with a sense of victory, and not defeat, that I am suspending my campaign activities. Not only did we do the impossible by collecting a million signatures, but we changed the national political conversation forever. Chronic disease, free speech, government corruption, and breaking our addiction to war have moved to the center of politics. I can say to all who have worked so hard for the last year and a half: “Thanks for a job well done!” Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place. These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party, and then as an Independent, and now throw my support to President Trump.T

he cause of free speech.

The war in Ukraine.The war on our children.I’ve already described some of my personal experiences with government censorship-industrial complex.I want to say a word about the Ukraine war. The military-industrial complex has provided us with the familiar comic-book justification that this war is a noble effort to stop supervillain Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and to thwart his Hitler-like march across Europe. In fact, tiny Ukraine is a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the U.S. Neocons for U.S. global hegemony. I’m not excusing Putin for invading Ukraine. He had other options. But the war is Russia’s predictable response to the reckless Neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia.The credulous media rarely explain to Americans that we unilaterally walked away from our two intermediate nuclear weapons treaties with Russia, and then put nuclear-ready Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland, and that the Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offer to settle the dispute peacefully.

The Ukraine war began in 2014, when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked pro-West government that launched a civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk agreement that had been negotiated by European leadership.In April 2022, President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelensky to tear up a peace treaty with President Putin that would have brought peace and left Donbass and Ukraine as part of Ukraine.President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. His Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, said that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army to degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else.

These objectives of course had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty.Since then, we have squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth. As many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids have died and Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed.The war has been a disaster for our country. We squandered nearly $200 billion badly needed dollars. The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which formed the bulwark of U.S. national security. We have pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran.

We are closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any other time since 1962.

Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.Judging by her bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other Neocon military adventures.President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with Putin and end the war overnight. This alone would justify my support for his campaign. Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech and restore our Constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of government, or to defy the Neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now, one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own, to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration to tackle those issues. I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, soil regeneration, and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying American health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, NIH, HHS, and USDA that has caused the epidemic. Calley had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects, which have been my primary focus for the last twenty years. I was delighted when Calley told me, that day, that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease — and other subjects — and to explore avenues of cooperation. He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day.

A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and closest advisors in Florida. In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately on the issues over which we differ, while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a fierce critic of many of the policies of his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to dispute.

But we are aligned with each other on key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting our freedom of speech, unraveling corporate capture of the regulatory agencies, and getting U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, and interfering in our elections.

Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open up similar discussions with the Harris campaign. Vice President Harris declined to meet or speak with me.

Suspending my candidacy is a heartrending decision for me. But I am convinced that it is the best hope for ending the Ukraine war and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside and for protecting free speech. I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children. In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is of our children’s health and chronic disease in general, I urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, who was the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School. This is an issue that affects us far more directly and urgently than the culture war issues that are tearing the country apart. Therefore, it has the potential to bring us together. So let me share just a little bit about why I believe it is so urgent.Today, two-thirds of American adults and half of children suffer chronic health issues.

Fifty years ago, the number for children was less than one percent. In America, 74% of adults are now overweight or obese, and close to 50% of children. One hundred and twenty years ago, when someone was obese, they were sent to the circus.

In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%. Half of Americans now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. When my uncle was president, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. The average pediatrician would see a single case in their lifetime.

Today, one of every three kids who walk through their office door is diabetic or prediabetic.There’s been an explosion of neurological diseases that I never saw as a child. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s, narcolepsy, ASD, and Asperger’s.

In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally, and 1 in 22 in California. The screening has not changed. Nor has the definition. The incidence has changed. About 18% of teens have fatty liver disease, a disease that primarily used to be found only in late-stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%. One in four American women is on an antidepressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis.

Today, 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children are on SSRIs. So what’s causing all this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First is ultra-processed foods. About 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed — industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils. Lab scientists concoct thousands of other ingredients to make these foods more palatable, more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago, and humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in America’s processed foods. 

The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The assault on a child’s cells and hormones is unrelenting. To name just one problem, many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting hormone disruptors, the average girl in America is reaching puberty at age 10 to 13 — six years earlier than girls were in 1900.

Our country has the earliest puberty rates on any continent. And no, this isn’t because of “better nutrition.” This is not normal. Breast cancer, an estrogen-driven cancer, now strikes one in eight women.

Considering the grievous human cost of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy. But I’ll say, it is crippling our nation’s finances. When my uncle was President, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is mostly for chronic disease, and it is double the military budget. And chronic disease costs the economy as a whole at least $4 trillion. Probably more when you consider the indirect costs. That’s a 20% drag on everything we could aspire to. And it is the fastest-growing cost.

Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately. Industry lobbyists make sure that most of the food stamp and school lunch program dollars are funding processed foods. We are systematically mass-poisoning America’s poorest citizens. 

The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to the commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry. The policies are destroying small farms and our soils.

The good news is that we can change all of this, and change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that we need to do three things. First, root out the corruption in our health agencies.

Second, change the incentives of the healthcare system. And third, inspire Americans to get healthy again. Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, the CDC, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations. 75% of the FDA’s funding doesn’t come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. 

With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding. We will make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.  

A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children, or adults, get sick with a chronic condition, they are put on medications for their entire life. Imagine what will happen when Medicaid starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month and is being recommended for children as young as six. All for a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed a hundred years ago. Since 74% of Americans are obese, the costs could be as high as $3 trillion a year.

With a fraction of that money, we could buy organic food for every American and get rid of diabetes altogether. We will bring healthy food back to school lunches. We will stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We will get the toxic chemicals out of our food. We will reform the entire food system.

And for that, we need new leadership in Washington, because unfortunately, both the Democratic and Republican Parties are in cahoots with the food producers, Big Pharma, and Big Ag, which are among their major donors. Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and Neocon power. And our children will be the ones who suffer the most.

I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to. It was thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement, but it was widely ignored by all the institutions that should have been protecting our kids against toxins. It was an orphaned issue — I had a weakness for orphans. 

I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker in front of my eyes. And nobody in power seemed to care or even notice. For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for running for President. Along with ending the censorship, and the Ukraine war, it is the reason I have made this heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump. This decision is agonizing for me, because of the difficulties it causes to my wife, my children, my family, and my friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do and that certainly gives me internal peace even in storms. If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years, America will be a healthy country. We will be stronger, more resilient, more optimistic, and happier. I won’t fail. Ultimately the future is in the hands of God, the American voters, and President Trump. If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country, will disappear.

This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer and hard-nosed logic. I ask myself, what choices must I make to maximize my chances to save America’s children and restore national health? I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror, knowing I could have saved the lives of countless children and reversed this country’s chronic disease epidemic.

I’m 70 years old. I have maybe a decade to be effective. I cannot imagine that a President Harris will allow me or anyone else to solve these problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever. President Trump has told me he wants this as his legacy. I’m choosing to believe that this time, he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, and closest friends also support this objective. My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children, but worthwhile if there is even a small chance of success.

Ultimately the only thing that will save our children and our country is if we choose to love them more than we hate each other. That’s why I launched my campaign to unify this country. My dad and my uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation not so much because of any particular policy, but because they were able to inspire profound love for our country and to fortify our sense of ourselves as a national community held together by shared ideals. They were able to put their love into the intentions and hearts of ordinary Americans, and to unify a national populist movement of all Americans — of Blacks and Whites and Hispanics, urban and rural. They inspired affection, love, high hopes, and a culture of kindness that continue to radiate from their memories. 

That is the spirit on which I ran my campaign, and that I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump. Instead of vitriol and polarization, I will appeal to the values that unite us, the goals we could achieve if only we weren’t at each others’ throats. The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children. If we all unite around this issue now, we will finally give them protection, the health, and the future that they deserve.]

The war has been a disaster for our country. We squandered nearly $200 billion badly needed dollars. The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which formed the bulwark of U.S. national security. We have pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran. We are closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any other time since 1962.

Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.

Judging by her bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other Neocon military adventures.

President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with Putin and end the war overnight. This alone would justify my support for his campaign. 

Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech and restore our Constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of government, or to defy the Neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now, one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own, to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration to tackle those issues. I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, soil regeneration, and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying American health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, NIH, HHS, and USDA that has caused the epidemic. Calley had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects, which have been my primary focus for the last twenty years. I was delighted when Calley told me, that day, that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease — and other subjects — and to explore avenues of cooperation. He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day.

A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and closest advisors in Florida. In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately on the issues over which we differ, while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a fierce critic of many of the policies of his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to dispute. But we are aligned with each other on key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting our freedom of speech, unraveling corporate capture of the regulatory agencies, and getting U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, and interfering in our elections.

Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open up similar discussions with the Harris campaign. Vice President Harris declined to meet or speak with me.

Suspending my candidacy is a heartrending decision for me. But I am convinced that it is the best hope for ending the Ukraine war and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside and for protecting free speech. I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children. 

In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is of our children’s health and chronic disease in general, I urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, who was the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School. This is an issue that affects us far more directly and urgently than the culture war issues that are tearing the country apart. Therefore, it has the potential to bring us together. So let me share just a little bit about why I believe it is so urgent.

Today, two-thirds of American adults and half of children suffer chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, the number for children was less than one percent. 

In America, 74% of adults are now overweight or obese, and close to 50% of children. One hundred and twenty years ago, when someone was obese, they were sent to the circus. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%. Half of Americans now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. When my uncle was president, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. The average pediatrician would see a single case in their lifetime. Today, one of every three kids who walk through their office door is diabetic or prediabetic.

There’s been an explosion of neurological diseases that I never saw as a child. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s, narcolepsy, ASD, and Asperger’s. In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally, and 1 in 22 in California. The screening has not changed. Nor has the definition. The incidence has changed. About 18% of teens have fatty liver disease, a disease that primarily used to be found only in late-stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%. 

One in four American women is on an antidepressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis. Today, 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children are on SSRIs. 

So what’s causing all this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First is ultra-processed foods. About 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed — industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils. Lab scientists concoct thousands of other ingredients to make these foods more palatable, more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago, and humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in America’s processed foods. 

The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The assault on a child’s cells and hormones is unrelenting. To name just one problem, many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting hormone disruptors, the average girl in America is reaching puberty at age 10 to 13 — six years earlier than girls were in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates on any continent. And no, this isn’t because of “better nutrition.” This is not normal. Breast cancer, an estrogen-driven cancer, now strikes one in eight women.

Considering the grievous human cost of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy. But I’ll say, it is crippling our nation’s finances. When my uncle was President, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is mostly for chronic disease, and it is double the military budget. And chronic disease costs the economy as a whole at least $4 trillion. Probably more when you consider the indirect costs. That’s a 20% drag on everything we could aspire to. And it is the fastest-growing cost.

Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately. Industry lobbyists make sure that most of the food stamp and school lunch program dollars are funding processed foods. We are systematically mass-poisoning America’s poorest citizens. 

The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to the commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry. The policies are destroying small farms and our soils.

The good news is that we can change all of this, and change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that we need to do three things. First, root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, change the incentives of the healthcare system. And third, inspire Americans to get healthy again. 

Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, the CDC, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations. 75% of the FDA’s funding doesn’t come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. 

With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding. We will make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.  

A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children, or adults, get sick with a chronic condition, they are put on medications for their entire life. Imagine what will happen when Medicaid starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month and is being recommended for children as young as six. All for a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed a hundred years ago. Since 74% of Americans are obese, the costs could be as high as $3 trillion a year. With a fraction of that money, we could buy organic food for every American and get rid of diabetes altogether. We will bring healthy food back to school lunches. We will stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We will get the toxic chemicals out of our food. We will reform the entire food system.

And for that, we need new leadership in Washington, because unfortunately, both the Democratic and Republican Parties are in cahoots with the food producers, Big Pharma, and Big Ag, which are among their major donors. Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and Neocon power. And our children will be the ones who suffer the most.

I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to. It was thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement, but it was widely ignored by all the institutions that should have been protecting our kids against toxins. It was an orphaned issue — I had a weakness for orphans. 

I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker in front of my eyes. And nobody in power seemed to care or even notice. For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for running for President. Along with ending the censorship, and the Ukraine war, it is the reason I have made this heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump. This decision is agonizing for me, because of the difficulties it causes to my wife, my children, my family, and my friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do and that certainly gives me internal peace even in storms. If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years, America will be a healthy country. We will be stronger, more resilient, more optimistic, and happier. I won’t fail. Ultimately the future is in the hands of God, the American voters, and President Trump. If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country, will disappear.

This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer and hard-nosed logic. I ask myself, what choices must I make to maximize my chances to save America’s children and restore national health? I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror, knowing I could have saved the lives of countless children and reversed this country’s chronic disease epidemic.

I’m 70 years old. I have maybe a decade to be effective. I cannot imagine that a President Harris will allow me or anyone else to solve these problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever. President Trump has told me he wants this as his legacy. I’m choosing to believe that this time, he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, and closest friends also support this objective. My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children, but worthwhile if there is even a small chance of success.

Ultimately the only thing that will save our children and our country is if we choose to love them more than we hate each other. That’s why I launched my campaign to unify this country. My dad and my uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation not so much because of any particular policy, but because they were able to inspire profound love for our country and to fortify our sense of ourselves as a national community held together by shared ideals. They were able to put their love into the intentions and hearts of ordinary Americans, and to unify a national populist movement of all Americans — of Blacks and Whites and Hispanics, urban and rural. They inspired affection, love, high hopes, and a culture of kindness that continue to radiate from their memories. 

That is the spirit on which I ran my campaign, and that I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump. Instead of vitriol and polarization, I will appeal to the values that unite us, the goals we could achieve if only we weren’t at each others’ throats. The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children. If we all unite around this issue now, we will finally give them protection, the health, and the future that they deserve.

Peace

The Ukraine war began in 2014, when US agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine and installed a handpicked pro-West government that launched a civil war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

In 2019, America walked away from a peace treaty, the Minsk agreement that had been negotiated by European leadership.

In April 2022, President Biden sent Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President Zelensky to tear up a peace treaty with President Putin that would have brought peace and left Donbass and Ukraine as part of Ukraine.President Biden stated that month that his objective in the war was regime change in Russia. 

His Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, said that America’s purpose in the war was to exhaust the Russian army to degrade its capacity to fight anywhere else.

These objectives of course had nothing to do with what they were telling Americans about protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Since then, we have squandered the flower of Ukrainian youth. As many as 600,000 Ukrainian kids have died and Ukraine’s infrastructure is destroyed.

The war has been a disaster for our country. We squandered nearly $200 billion badly needed dollars. The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and sanctions have destroyed Europe’s industrial base, which formed the bulwark of U.S. national security. We have pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran. We are closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than at any other time since 1962.

Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICS, which now threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.

Judging by her bellicose, belligerent speech last night in Chicago, we can assume that President Harris will be an enthusiastic advocate for this and other Neocon military adventures.

President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with Putin and end the war overnight. This alone would justify my support for his campaign. 

Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech and restore our Constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of government, or to defy the Neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now, one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own, to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration to tackle those issues. I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

Less than two hours after President Trump narrowly escaped assassination, Calley Means called me on my cell phone. Calley is arguably the leading advocate for food safety, soil regeneration, and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is destroying American health and ruining our economy. Calley has exposed the insidious corruption at the FDA, NIH, HHS, and USDA that has caused the epidemic. Calley had been working on and off for my campaign, advising me on those subjects, which have been my primary focus for the last twenty years. I was delighted when Calley told me, that day, that he had also been advising President Trump. He told me President Trump was anxious to talk to me about chronic disease — and other subjects — and to explore avenues of cooperation. He asked if I would take a call from the President. President Trump telephoned me a few minutes later, and I met with him the following day.

A few weeks later, I met again with President Trump and his family members and closest advisors in Florida. In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately on the issues over which we differ, while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance. I was a fierce critic of many of the policies of his first administration, and there are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to dispute. But we are aligned with each other on key issues like ending the forever wars, ending the childhood disease epidemics, securing the border, protecting our freedom of speech, unraveling corporate capture of the regulatory agencies, and getting U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing, censoring, and surveilling Americans, and interfering in our elections.

Following my first discussion with President Trump, I tried unsuccessfully to open up similar discussions with the Harris campaign. Vice President Harris declined to meet or speak with me.

Suspending my candidacy is a heartrending decision for me. But I am convinced that it is the best hope for ending the Ukraine war and ending the chronic disease epidemic that is eroding our nation’s vitality from the inside and for protecting free speech. I feel a moral obligation to use this opportunity to save millions of American children. 

In case some of you don’t realize how dire the condition is of our children’s health and chronic disease in general, I urge you to view Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Calley Means and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, who was the top graduate of her class at Stanford Medical School. This is an issue that affects us far more directly and urgently than the culture war issues that are tearing the country apart. Therefore, it has the potential to bring us together. So let me share just a little bit about why I believe it is so urgent.

Today, two-thirds of American adults and half of children suffer chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, the number for children was less than one percent. 

In America, 74% of adults are now overweight or obese, and close to 50% of children. One hundred and twenty years ago, when someone was obese, they were sent to the circus. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%. Half of Americans now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. When my uncle was president, juvenile diabetes was effectively nonexistent. The average pediatrician would see a single case in their lifetime. Today, one of every three kids who walk through their office door is diabetic or prediabetic.

There’s been an explosion of neurological diseases that I never saw as a child. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s, narcolepsy, ASD, and Asperger’s. In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally, and 1 in 22 in California. The screening has not changed. Nor has the definition. The incidence has changed. 

About 18% of teens have fatty liver disease, a disease that primarily used to be found only in late-stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79%. 

One in four American women is on an antidepressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis. Today, 15% of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children are on SSRIs. 

So what’s causing all this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First is ultra-processed foods. About 70% of American children’s diet is ultra-processed — industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils. Lab scientists concoct thousands of other ingredients to make these foods more palatable, more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago, and humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in America’s processed foods. 

The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The assault on a child’s cells and hormones is unrelenting. To name just one problem, many of these chemicals increase estrogen. Because young children are ingesting hormone disruptors, the average girl in America is reaching puberty at age 10 to 13 — six years earlier than girls were in 1900. Our country has the earliest puberty rates on any continent. And no, this isn’t because of “better nutrition.” This is not normal. Breast cancer, an estrogen-driven cancer, now strikes one in eight women.

Considering the grievous human cost of this tragic epidemic of chronic disease, it seems almost crass to mention the damage it does to our economy. But I’ll say, it is crippling our nation’s finances. When my uncle was President, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is mostly for chronic disease, and it is double the military budget. And chronic disease costs the economy as a whole at least $4 trillion. Probably more when you consider the indirect costs. That’s a 20% drag on everything we could aspire to. And it is the fastest-growing cost.

Poor and minority communities suffer disproportionately. Industry lobbyists make sure that most of the food stamp and school lunch program dollars are funding processed foods. We are systematically mass-poisoning America’s poorest citizens. 

The same food industry lobbied to make sure that nearly all agricultural subsidies go to the commodity crops that are the feedstock of the processed food industry. The policies are destroying small farms and our soils.

The good news is that we can change all of this, and change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that we need to do three things. First, root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, change the incentives of the healthcare system. And third, inspire Americans to get healthy again. 

Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, the CDC, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations. 75% of the FDA’s funding doesn’t come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies. 

With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding. We will make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.  

A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children, or adults, get sick with a chronic condition, they are put on medications for their entire life. Imagine what will happen when Medicaid starts paying for Ozempic, which costs $1,500 a month and is being recommended for children as young as six. All for a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed a hundred years ago. Since 74% of Americans are obese, the costs could be as high as $3 trillion a year. With a fraction of that money, we could buy organic food for every American and get rid of diabetes altogether. We will bring healthy food back to school lunches. We will stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We will get the toxic chemicals out of our food. We will reform the entire food system.

And for that, we need new leadership in Washington, because unfortunately, both the Democratic and Republican Parties are in cahoots with the food producers, Big Pharma, and Big Ag, which are among their major donors. Vice President Harris has expressed no interest in addressing this issue. Four more years of Democratic rule will complete the consolidation of corporate and Neocon power. And our children will be the ones who suffer the most.

I got involved with chronic disease 20 years ago, not because I chose to. It was thrust upon me. It was an issue that should have been central to the environmental movement, but it was widely ignored by all the institutions that should have been protecting our kids against toxins. It was an orphaned issue — I had a weakness for orphans. 

I watched generations of children get sicker and sicker in front of my eyes. And nobody in power seemed to care or even notice. For 19 years, I prayed every morning that God would put me in a position to end this calamity. The chronic disease crisis was one of the primary reasons for running for President. Along with ending the censorship, and the Ukraine war, it is the reason I have made this heart-wrenching decision to suspend my campaign and to support President Trump. This decision is agonizing for me, because of the difficulties it causes to my wife, my children, my family, and my friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do and that certainly gives me internal peace even in storms. If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically. We will make Americans healthy again. Within four years, America will be a healthy country. We will be stronger, more resilient, more optimistic, and happier. I won’t fail. Ultimately the future is in the hands of God, the American voters, and President Trump. If President Trump is elected and honors his word, the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country, will disappear.

This is a spiritual journey for me. I reached my decision through deep prayer and hard-nosed logic. I ask myself, what choices must I make to maximize my chances to save America’s children and restore national health? I felt that if I refused this opportunity, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror, knowing I could have saved the lives of countless children and reversed this country’s chronic disease epidemic.

I’m 70 years old. I have maybe a decade to be effective. I cannot imagine that a President Harris will allow me or anyone else to solve these problems. After eight years of President Harris, any opportunity for me to fix the problem will be out of my reach forever. President Trump has told me he wants this as his legacy. I’m choosing to believe that this time, he will follow through. His son, his biggest donors, and closest friends also support this objective. My joining the Trump campaign will be a difficult sacrifice for my wife and children, but worthwhile if there is even a small chance of success.

Ultimately the only thing that will save our children and our country is if we choose to love them more than we hate each other. That’s why I launched my campaign to unify this country. My dad and my uncle made such an enduring mark on the character of our nation not so much because of any particular policy, but because they were able to inspire profound love for our country and to fortify our sense of ourselves as a national community held together by shared ideals. They were able to put their love into the intentions and hearts of ordinary Americans, and to unify a national populist movement of all Americans — of Blacks and Whites and Hispanics, urban and rural. They inspired affection, love, high hopes, and a culture of kindness that continue to radiate from their memories. 

That is the spirit on which I ran my campaign, and that I intend to bring into the campaign of President Trump. Instead of vitriol and polarization, I will appeal to the values that unite us, the goals we could achieve if only we weren’t at each others’ throats. The most unifying theme for all Americans is that we all love our children. If we all unite around this issue now, we will finally give them protection, the health, and the future that they deserve.

Honolulu Mayoral Elections 2024: Media Disinformation or sloppy reporting?

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For education purposes, we’re going to use this USA Today post as an example. Does this look like it’s a copied Press Release Reporting (PRR)?

Hawaii’s election season is here. What to expect from House, mayoral races


JEREMY YUROW   USA TODAY

Hawaii’s 2024 election season is well underway, with few surprises. There are no competitive races at the federal level, and well-known incumbents like Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi and Prosecutor Steve Alm, both running in nonpartisan races, face minimal opposition.

Blangiardi’s handling of the city’s rail project and his strong communication skills contribute to his solid position. Similarly, Alm’s name recognition and uncontroversial tenure, along with his stance against recreational marijuana legalization and efforts to combat crime in Waikiki, fortify his position.

“Normally, these races on Oahu are seriously fought, but in this case, there has yet to be any serious competitors,” said Colin Moore, a public policy expert at the University of Hawaii in Manoa.

Review Notes:

  1. Blangiardi’s handling of the city’s rail project and his strong communication skills contribute to his solid position. This is the most curious statement. Anyone who lives in Oahu will easily see that every time an article is written about the troubled Rail boondoggle, there are significant negative reactions towards it. Yet, this writer is putting a positive spin to it.

2. “Normally, these races on Oahu are seriously fought, but in this case, there has yet to be any serious competitors,” said Colin Moore, a public policy expert at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. Is this a propaganda tactic to discourage the public from participating? Is the writer even curious who Colin Moore is?

A quick check would reveal that the only way this political talking head knows how to promote Democracy is to look at how much money a candidate has.

Moore, a fixture political consultant to the few corporate media here in Oahu, has no understanding nor interest in grassroots civic participation. Moore has no interest in promoting robust dialogue of ideas or solutions in the Public Square. This is despite all the bellyaching of how money is buying elections. All he’s fixated on is the amounts of campaign donations of candidates. He has no interest in even encouraging grassroots through promoting a basic fair democratic process called forums or debate. For the first time in the Oahu’s Mayoral Race, there is NO corporate media hosted forum or debate.

Moore is also a consultant to Hawaii News Now. Hawaii News Now ( KGMB) happens to be related professionally to the incumbent Mayor Rick Blangiardi who was a former Manager. On top of that, Mayor Blangiardi’s Director of Communications is a former News Manager for Hawaii News Now. Blangiardi’s recently hired Chief of Staff is a former TV executive from New York.

No corporate media is also questioning the election over-all statistics but instead describe the election as a “blowout” and “landslide” election. No corporate media was concerned that it did not host any forum. No corporate media was concerned that Mayor Blangiardi was in hiding and ran away from mayoral forums.

Elections 2024: Deceased Legislator won Primary elections.

Representative Nakashima passed away on July 11, 2024. But on the August 10, 2024 Primary Elections, he garnered 3,852 which is 62.9% Blank Votes: 2,170 is 35.5% 

Rep. Nakashima was unopposed.

The Governor would be choosing his replacement, I assume. If he had other opponents from the Democratic or other Party, the results may be different?

Here is some information about Rep. Nakashima. We offer our aloha and condolences to his ohana. Excerpt from ncsl.org

Hawaii Rep. Mark Nakashima died Thursday in Honolulu. He was 61.

“Mark served his community and our state with dignity and respect,” House Speaker Scott Saiki said. “He will be missed.”

A former public school teacher and education advocate, Nakashima made the transition from teaching to elected office in 2008 when he won House District 1 to represent Hāmākua, portion of Hilo, and Kaūmana on the Big Island.

Nakashima was a proponent for the development of geothermal energy to advance the state’s clean energy goals. As chair of the Committee on Labor and Public Employment, he helped raise Hawaii’s minimum wage.

“Rep. Nakashima’s legacy of service, dedication to education, and commitment to sustainable energy

will continue to inspire us all. He was a gentle yet fierce advocate for the residents of Hawaii, and we honor his memory and his contributions to our community and state,” Gov. Josh Green said in a statement.

Green ordered the U.S. and Hawaii flags flown at half-staff effective from today through Monday in recognition of Nakashima’s “unwavering service.”

Nakashima dedicated his time to helping local organizations such as the Hāmākua Lions Club, U.S.-Japan Council and Hawaii State Jaycees.

“Rep. Nakashima was an unselfish public servant who will be remembered for his wry sense of humor, easygoing manner, and establishing the benchmark in dealing with life’s adversities with quiet strength and resilience,” Senate President Ron Kouchi said in a press release.

Nakashima is survived by his mother, Betty Nakashima, sister Sandra Jakob, wife Yvette Lee-Nakashima and stepchildren Royce Hirai and Loryn Hirai.

Uyen Vong is NCSL’s associate director of public affairs.

Choon James For Mayor – Questions & Answers

This is an excerpt from the Honolulu Star Advertiser – For educational purposes.

Name on ballot:

Choon James

Running for:

Honolulu mayor

Political party:

NON-PARTISAN OFFICE

Campaign website:

www.votechoon.com

Current occupation:

Residential Real Estate Broker, Organic Farmer

Age:

66

Previous job history:

Residential Real Estate Broker for over 30 years. Student waitress, janitor, and grounds crew.

Previous elected office, if any:

Elected Community Association President. VOLUNTEER:Oahu General Plan Working Group; Hawaii2050 Working Group; Koolauloa Sustainable Communities Advisory Planning Committee; Hospital board member; Defend Oahu Coalition–Keep the Country Country; Laniloa Point Community Association, president; Laie Community Association Board; BYU-Hawaii Alumni Association, president; BYU-Provo Alumni Board; Save Oahu Farmlands Alliance; Redhill Water Alliance; Hawaii’s Thousand Friends; Sierra Club; Amnesty International Freedom, writer; Olelo Community Media; pro bono real estate advisor; Immigrants Volunteer Tutor.

Please describe your qualifications to represent the people of Oahu.

My 20 years as citizen advocate for good governance at Honolulu Hale shows a consistent commitment to our island home. I notice what’s happening to your hard-earn money.

My 34-year as a successful small businesswoman require that I solve challenges and obstacles promptly and fairly. I mitigate all the issues at hand to bring about agreed-upon solutions. Our industry standard requires a 100% consensus with full disclosure, transparency, and fairness with all affected parties. I’ve worked with billions of dollars through the years. We respect and keep personal transactions in full confidence.

I recognize it’s the 10,000 hardworking employees who keep Honolulu in operation. The Mayor does not do the real work; the Mayor sets the culture and direction for Honolulu Hale.

I want to be the independent Mayor who puts Residents First! I want to be the Mayor who lifts all boats!

I don’t have a big ego. I don’t feel the need to self-promote or elevate myself as a “leader”. My door will always be open to all. I will always be respectful and fair to all.

I have zero donations from lobbyists, bankers, rail lobbyists or developers. My only loyalty is to the Residents First. The fact that Mayor Blangiardi has collected over $1.75 Million from bankers, developers, rail lobbyists raises many questions.

What is the most pressing issue facing Oahu residents, and how would you address the problem?

Oahu has an oligarchy that holds the power, money, opportunities and decision-making. Too many decisions are made against local residents’ best interests.
Residents are frustrated with the Disconnect at City Hall. Property taxes and Rents escalated exponentially. Rail costs are out of control. Residents work two to three jobs. Seniors work to survive. Residents cannot save to buy homes. Businesses and communities do not feel safe.
Oahu is being fed with social media narratives that the oligarchy wants us to hear. On the other hand, Oahu is kept in the dark about certain sea-change legislative actions that affect them.
Here are three actions that were hidden from the public:
1. The Mayor’s legislative package to the State Legislature for the past three years, requesting of the Department of Planning and Permitting (DPP) to be the police, judge, jury, and executioner — non-judicial power of sale – based on fines from DPP. What could possibly go wrong?
2. Everyone is for “affordable” housing. But SB 3202 (does not protect housing for local residents) upends Home Rule and residential communities. This undermines the Oahu General Plan, ordinances, and land-use planning that involved decades of public participation. I was the only mayoral candidate there testify for more public participation from affected communities.
3.City Hall bullies residents too much and has no compassion. The Government should have the mindset to help residents thrive and succeed.

What are the best ways for Honolulu to alleviate its homelessness crisis and to increase the availability of affordable housing?

Change begins with questioning. How many billions of dollars has Oahu received from the federal, state, county and private funding for the past 10 years?

Is Oahu obligated to provide “housing” for every resident who comes here?

What is the definition of a “Hawaii resident”?

How “affordable” is “affordable”?

Short-term “bandage job” or long-term planning for housing?

Why is the “affordable” Kokua Hale building struggling to get renters in Chinatown?

The “Singapore Housing Model” is often quoted by politicians in Hawaii. Singapore has a Central Provident Fund for Education, Health and Housing. All employees pay into this fund. The Singapore government invests this fund and pays positive annual dividends.

Note that Singapore does not have lobbyists or developers or unions as their middleman in its housing agenda.

I’ve been in residential real estate for over 30 years. There are preparations needed for qualifications into homeownership or rentals.

“Putting residents first” also means local building. Financial and real estate industries have first opportunities, not out of state, to help Oahu’s housing needs.

What measures, if any, should city government take to regulate short-term vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods?

Bill 85 & Bill 89 in 2019 pitted neighbors against neighbors. Enforcement is always the city’s Achilles heel. There were so many red-tape conditions that it was confusing. Local kupuna who had bed and breakfast were worried that their property would be taxed as “resort” rates and having to pay more registration fees and so on.

In the meanwhile, DPP authorized the entire Kuilima Estates East and Kuilima Estates West for vacation rentals per administrative approval. The prices escalated immediately pushing local renters out.

Just about everybody knew that Mayor Blangiardi was going to lose the 30-day rental lawsuit filed against the city. The decision by Federal Judge was not surprising.

This vacation rental has ballooned into over 10,000 units. Although the Mayor claims victory, with sending 20 accounts for collection. What became of that?

I personally testified that the city should take care of the “Neighbors from Hell” first and incrementally work with our local residents.

What reforms, if any, would you propose to make the Honolulu Police Department more transparent to the public?

We love our HPD and other emergency personnel. We cannot pay them and their families enough for their public service. These warriors put their life on the line for public tranquility and peace for our communities. They deserve gratitude and respect. We want our HPD and other emergency personnel to return home in peace each time they step out of their door.

HPD already has existing good organizational principles: Integrity. Respect. Fairness. We need to completely and consistently adhere to these principles.

We must continue provide them with all the resources and training needed. There can be bad apples in every organization. We must deal fairly and legally with alleged wrongdoing with the Police Commission and SHOPO. We must protect and safeguard the public trust in these institutions. No corruption can be tolerated. Transparency is a given.

Oversight and reform is a constant. We must always assess and improve. We must include constitutional civil rights education. Every one needs to understand that violations of these rights can cost the city millions of dollars from lawsuits.

We must also work with the judiciary side. The revolving door between crime, arrest and release is frustrating the public and HPD to no end.

Additionally, we must always focus on root causes of crime and other unrest for preventative measures. Residents, businesses and visitors deserve a safe environment. We must all work together to ensure a safe, prosperous and thriving Oahu. We can.

Do you support capping the pay of Council members and removing them from process of approving their own pay raises?

As a private citizen, I testified about this Resolution 24-105.

NO. Because an “elected” position is tied to a “hired salaried” city employee rate. There is a fundamental difference between a “Career” City Employee versus an “Elected” person who campaigns for the Public Interest position.

NO. Because the “elected” city council person must be accountable and answer to the public who voted for them. The Salary Commission is temporarily “appointed” by the Mayor/City Council.

Long answer:

Below is the amendment to the City Charter per Resolution 24-105 and approved by the Mayor on June 2024:

“Shall the Revised City Charter provisions relating to the salaries for
Councilmembers be amended to cap any annual increase at no more than five
percent, require that any changes be tied to the average annual salary changes
of city employees in the City’s collective bargaining units, and remove the
Council’s authority to vote on its own raises?”

Resolution 24-105 was a response to overwhelming public protests against the 2023 pay raise of 64%.

Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s salary increases about $186,432 to $218,256.
Managing Director Mike Formby’s salary increases about $178,759 to $208,759.

Council Chair Tommy Waters’s $76,969 increases to to $194,992. The other City Council will increase to $185,017. ( Augie Tulba, Andria Tupola & Radiant Cordera declined the raise.)

Has the city done enough to reduce the building permit backlog at the city Department of Planning and Permitting? What more could it do? Please explain.

The Mayor says he’s doing transformational improvements. But residents continue to have severe concerns. It’s very hard to buy raw land because it’s very hard to find conventional lenders who will finance land purchases or construction loans. Their biggest obstacles is getting a permit to build. These lenders do not want to hold land/construction forever as time is money.

I currently do not have the privilege to know the insides of this organization. I know everyone is trying. But based on my citizen knowledge, DPP can segregate the work further. Licensed Professional Architects and Engineers who are willing to put their name on the line for their work should be much more appreciated. Other counties on the Mainland provide permit approvals within weeks.

Should the city continue to use Waimanalo Gulch Landfill in Leeward Oahu or find a new location? If you favor a new location, where?

We’ve been talking about this for decades. Oahu is only an island of about 597 square miles. The Koolau and the Waianae mountain ranges take up 50% of our land surface.

It’s now 2024. We’re still lamenting about landfills and kicking the can down the road.

We were talking with Ernie Lau, our Board of Water engineer, recently about the Red Hill Water contamination and our water resources.

Water is life. We need to do much more to protect public health, public drinking water and Oahu’s environment. How many landfills can Oahu duplicate?

We must plan for the next seven generations.

On a personal and community level, we can do more. Every time I go to a city convenience center, I see tons of appliances and I wonder if we can support a cottage industry for more repairs and recycling.

We need to seek federal funds to help us come up with a more serious sustainable plan. Many countries have achieved higher efficiency.

Singapore focuses on recycling and minimizing waste to limit landfill space by incineration at Waste-to-Energy (WtE) plants. Steam from the incineration heat then produces steam that powers turbine-generators to generate electricity. Oahu must act now.

Do you support the continued construction of Honolulu’s rail system to Kakaako? Do you support extending the rail line to Ala Moana?

NO.
NO.

We must CONTROL the Rail costs. Rail started in 2006 at $2.7Billion.
It’s now at $12 Billion and incomplete.

I’m originally from Singapore and I appreciate efficient multimodal transportation.
My trusted friend Natalie Iwasa, CPA and Certified Fraud
Examiner, and I have been participating at City Hall for 20
years. We know the good, the bad and the ugly.

Taxpayers are being fleeced. $500K consultants for HART without
much accountability are unacceptable. HART wanting to hire
another $110,000 PR position to control its image is
unacceptable.

If we do not control these costs, our children will pay for today’s
mistakes.

As mayor, I will invite all stakeholders, including City Council and
HART, back to re-assess this project. INDEPENDENT experts in
related rail industry issues will be invited.

The public will have its say in this critical re-assessment.

How to best contain this out-of-control rail?

Should HART be abolished?

Should Rail Skyline totally be transferred back to the Transportation
Department?

Portions of the Rail route from Middle Street to Ala Moana Center are in the Honolulu Sea Level Rise Inundation Zone. Why is the Mayor ignoring the City’s own Climate Change data?

What other options are available for traffic relief to help affected
residents?

There will be no sacred cows; no tail wagging the dogs. There will
be no hiding behind or blaming the FTA.

Imagine the billions of dollars that Oahu could use for other nice things
when we contain the runaway costs.

What more needs to be done to reduce crime in Honolulu? Should more police surveillance cameras be part of that effort?

I lived in Singapore where you could walk any time of the day and night and not be concerned about safety. Here, women and kupuna are leery of waiting at bus-stops during off-hours. Too many residents are now forced to have locked gates, multi-locks, surveillance cameras, and vicious dogs to feel secure.

I believe in the Broken Windows Theory i.e. the early intervention of minor crimes to prevent further escalation into major crimes. Early interventions will help the perpetrators as well. Government should have the mindset to help perpetrators change course instead of waiting to reaching legal punitive stages. This process is not done overnight. But we must work with the countless wonderful sectors – social services, ecclesiastical, schools, mentoring clubs, community groups, and individuals are already putting their shoulder to the wheel. We can coordinate more. As Mayor, I would be most willing to participate in your neighborhood watch walks.

We must support our families. When parents or grandparents have to work 2-3 jobs to survive, who’s nurturing the children? Some affluent may think it’s not their problem; but gated communities are not immune to crime.

We have to balance surveillance cameras of a “Big Brother” versus Civil Rights. This issue must be discussed thoroughly among the most affected people.

What will be your top priority if elected?

1. Control the runaway rail costs. Cities Rise and Fall through their fiscal management. I’m the only one who can INDEPENDENTLY reassess this. I have ZERO donations from Special Interests. We must control the costs or our children will pay for today’s mistakes.

2. Help with affordable housing and also protecting kamaaina families from being priced out of paradise with a property tax cap for owner-occupants of over 20 years.

3. When we contain the rail costs, Oahu can have much more nice things. Residents don’t have to beg for basic amenities like swimming pools, community centers, restrooms and so forth.

4. I will always put Residents First. Your happiness, prosperity, and welfare matter to me!

It shouldn’t matter if we’re young or old, rich or poor, Democrat or Republican, military or civilian, unionized or not, we all have the same dreams for ourselves and our children. We are all in the same canoe. We can be fair and reasonable in decision-making; we can all win!

We all deserve to live in a safe, clean, healthy, and prosperous Hawaiʻi.
Together, let’s plan for the next seven generations.

Is there anything more that you would like voters to know about you?

It’s an honor and privilege to occupy this Public Office. I don’t have a big
ego. I’m not a bully. I’m always fair. I don’t feel the need to promote
myself as a “leader”.

I recognize that it’s the 10,000.00 hard working employees who operate the
city. A Mayor could go on a long vacation and not be missed.

But a Mayor sets the direction and the culture at City Hall.

I will be the Mayor who is ALWAYS respectful. I want to be the Mayor
who lifts all boats. My door will always be open to YOU. It is all about
YOU.

Women tend to get “dismissed” sometimes. But, my 34-years as a
successful small businesswoman require that I solve challenges and
obstacles promptly. Our industry standard requires 100% consensus
solutions – – with full disclosure, transparency, and fairness with all
affected parties. I’ve worked with billions of dollars through the years.
We respect and keep personal transactions in full confidence.

You have one (1) powerful vote. Let’s vote for ourselves! What’s there to
lose?

Choon James for Mayor 2024

In a world of Tic Tok and Instagram 30 seconds soundbites, here are some more reading for those of you who are interested in more information for this Elections.

Im sharing a few excerpts from various printed sources. Choon James for Mayor.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS/PRIOR OFFICES HELD

Oahu General Plan Working Group; Hawaii2050 Working Group; Koolauloa Sustainable Communities Advisory Planning Committee; Hospital board member; Defend Oahu Coalition–Keep the Country Country; Laniloa Point Community Association, president; Laie Community Association Board; BYU-Hawaii Alumni Association, president; BYU-Provo Alumni Board; Save Oahu Farmlands Alliance; Redhill Water Alliance; Hawaii’s Thousand Friends; Sierra Club; Amnesty International Freedom, writer; Olelo Community Media; CountryTalkStory.com; Friends of South Pass City; International Relief Society Women’s Organization; Young Women Group; Children’s Primary Organization, president; Aloha Council BSA, merit badge counselor; pro bono real estate advisor; immigrants volunteer tutor.

1. What’s the biggest issue facing the City and County of Honolulu and what will you do about it?

Oahu has an oligarchy that holds the power, money, opportunities and decision-making. Too many decisions are made against local residents’ best interests.

Residents are frustrated with the disconnect at City Hall. Property taxes escalated exponentially. Rail costs are out of control. Residents work two to three jobs. Seniors work to survive. Businesses and communities do not feel safe. I’m from Singapore and I know what a safe, clean, beautiful, efficient and thriving city is.  

City Hall cannot be managed by social media narratives that the oligarchy wants us to hear.  

3. In Hawaii, the term affordable housing has lost its meaning. What would you do to help people buy homes or move into rental units?

Change begins with questioning. How many billions of dollars has Oahu received from the federal, state, county and private funding for the past 10 years?

Is Oahu obligated to provide “housing” for every resident who comes here?

What is the definition of a “Hawaii resident”?

How “affordable” is “affordable”?

Short-term “bandage job” or long-term planning for housing?

Why is the “affordable” Kokua Hale building struggling to get renters in Chinatown?

The “Singapore Housing Model” is often quoted by politicians in Hawaii. Singapore has a Central Provident Fund for Education, Health and Housing. All employees pay into this fund. The Singapore government invests this fund and pays positive annual dividends.

Note that Singapore does not have lobbyists or developers or unions as their middleman in its housing agenda.

There is no one magic bullet to “affordable” housing. This is a worldwide problem. Oahu competes with international and out-of-state rich investors due to the U.S. Constitution.

I’ve been in residential real estate for over 30 years. There are preparations needed for qualifications into homeownership or rentals.

“Putting residents first” also means local building. Financial and real estate industries have first opportunities, not out of state, to help Oahu’s housing needs.

5. What should be the future of the Honolulu rail project? How do you to resolve this seemingly endless drain on public money and continuing delays? Should the line continue to Ala Moana as originally planned and how will you keep operating costs under control?

I’m from Singapore and appreciate its efficient rapid transit and related multi-modal transportation.

Rail needs a major re-assessment. As mayor, I will gather all stakeholders back to the roundtable. Independent contracts, legal, cost-analysis, engineering, budget experts and others will be invited. The public will have its say.

There are no sacred cows. No hiding behind or blaming FTA. I have zero donations from lobbyists or PACs. I can be 100% independent.

No managing Skyline through public relations handlers and insulting the public intelligence.

Natalie Iwasa, CPA and certified fraud examiner, and I have been at this for decades. We know what’s going on.

One tragic part of this boondoggle is Oahu can develop “transit-oriented developments” (TOD) without this fiscal black hole.

The city can create “special districts” for developments. Our local construction and building industries can benefit more without this financial albatross and without losing contracts to foreign players.

Oahu cares about climate crisis issues. But the inconvenient information — portions of the route from Middle Street to Ala Moana Center are in the Honolulu sea level rise inundation zone — is ignored. Why?

Oahu needs transformative leadership for our residents first. Our children must not suffer for our mistakes. Let’s work together.

 What should be done to improve policing and police accountability in Honolulu? Should oversight of the police department be strengthened or reformed?

We love our HPD and other emergency personnel. We cannot pay them and their families enough for their public service. These warriors put their life on the line for public tranquility and peace for our communities. They deserve gratitude and respect.

We want our HPD and other emergency personnel to return home in peace each time they step out of their door.

We must provide them with all the resources and training needed. There can be bad apples in every organization. We must deal fairly and legally with alleged wrongdoing with the Police Commission and SHOPO. We all want to protect and safeguard the public trust in these institutions. No corruption can be tolerated.

Oversight and reform is a constant. We must always assess and improve.

This includes working with the prosecution side. The revolving door between crime, arrest and release is frustrating the public and HPD to no end.

Additionally, we must always focus on root causes of crime and other unrest for preventative measures. Residents, businesses and visitors deserve a safe environment. We must all work together to ensure a safe, prosperous and thriving Oahu. We can.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to fill vacancies on the police department, the parks department and in many other city agencies. The city is struggling to provide basic services. What would you do to solve this problem and attract qualified people to fill essential services?

I’ve been advocating for public interest at Honolulu Hale for over 20 years. 

This “vacancies” angst has been a constant concern all this time. On the other hand, residents say they don’t get a response or they can’t seem to get an interview.

It’s our 10,000 workers who keep the city in operation. The mayor provides the direction and culture. The mayor could be on vacation and not be missed. 

I will always be respectful of all our city employees. I will always support them in their efforts to make Oahu a safe and efficient place. My door will always be open to their ideas and concerns.

The pay and benefits package is a big consideration. The culture and working conditions are also important.

Over $712 million is earmarked for the Honolulu rail this Fiscal 2025. Imagine when we can contain the rail costs and take care of our employees better.

Civil Beat pseudonym Keala_Kaanui regurgitates his falsehoods about the Hauula Fire Station Relocation Project again. What’s the motive?

It’s Elections Time again! Civil Beat allows Candidates to answer their questions.

Choon James’ answers to Civil Beat’s Questions & Answers can be found here.

What is puzzling is that pseudonym Keala_Kaanui, perhaps the most prolific daily commenter for Civil Beat, is allowed to continue to post fake news like this:

Keala_Kaanuii: The great irony of someone lauding the first responders, who spent a good five years trying to prevent the City from building a badly needed new fire station because she realized she could have negotiated a higher price for her vacant parcel of land after she had signed the contract. Choon forced the city to spend thousands of dollars to condem the property after she tried to back out…

But, here is a quick summary collected by a supporter:

Hawaii Fire Station Relocation Controversy YOU-TUBE #1.

This youtube is a must to watch. Once you watch this, you will get how off-base Civil Beat pseudonym Keala_Kaanui continues to be.

The Hauula folks were authentic in their opposition towards this project. Choon James sided with the Hauula folks. There was no legal contract to sell to the City.

The Honolulu City Council deleted the budget for this project for five years. Yet Mayor Caldwell fought on. In the end, the Hauula folks even correctly predicted who the contractor was for this project.

The community of Hauula did not want a new fire station that the Laie Community Association was pushing and testifying for. Hauula felt that it was a public facility checklist for Laie to pursue more developments like Envision Laie. Public facilities like a fire station is not a profiteering project. Just like the Kahuku Police Station is not a profiteering project.

Hauula wanted to keep the two remaining Commercial-zoned parcels for Recycling and small business. They and the homeless people depended on the Recycling. The homeless would collect in the area and then buy themselves a hot meal with their profit.

“Public Use” can also be very arbitrary. In the case of the Hauula Fire Station Relocation in the rural town of Hauula. The people overwhelming were against it. But Mayor Kirk Caldwell bullied his way through despite the city council of Honolulu continuously deleted the funding.

Hawaii needs to know that Mayor Kirk Caldwell SECRETLY siphoned $1.4 Million (in August 2014) from Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) funds for homeless shelter renovations such as Hale Pauahi in Chinatown to “plan and design” his Neiman Marcus firehouse in rural Hauula.

The City Council had deleted and defunded the extravagant project for 5 years but Caldwell is fixated on this $13M relocation project that will not increase personnel or area of service. The relocation project will decimate the last two commercial lots that locals want to keep for Recycling as well as other business start-ups. Ironically, the homeless in Hau’ula sustain themselves by recycling daily to buy themselves a hot meal. Caldwell governs by misguided agenda, not sound public policy.

Condemnation Honolulu Style – You-Tube #2

This is another compulsory watch.

Honolulu City Council adopted Resolution to condemn two commercial lots on February 24, 2010. This process was advanced in 42 days. It’s Hau’ula today, are you next? Do you live along the Rail Transit route?

UPDATE:  The legislative Honolulu City Council has not funded the project since 2011. But Mayor Kirk Caldwell is still pursuing eminent domain by alleged necessity in court. http://www.kitv.com/news/1200-signature-petition-protests-plans-for-new-hauula-fire-station/25103002#!bmO9B4 The city ‘expert witness’ is saying they need a fire station to bring in bigger – from 8′ x 25′ to 8′ x 32′  fire engines! Hello! The garbage trucks are already having a tough time with our country roads. This is going from ‘ridiculous’ to ‘insane’.

Update: May 15, 2010 Mufi Hannemann city corporation attorneys have filed lawsuit against owners for possession of the land.. Owners have filed lawsuit against city. What a waste of taxpayers’ money in today’s budget crisis!

Update: Owners subpoenaed city officials but Mufi Hannemann’s attorneys quashed on basis that public officials are very busy; owners are a nuisance, harassing and inconveniencing these officials. Ironically, on their way home to Hauula, owners saw Bryan Mick – City Community Relations sign-waving for Mufi Hannemann in front of Nimitz City Mill at 11:34 am August 11, 201

Here’s more information:

Woman Criticizes Honolulu’s Government, Has Her Protest Signs Bulldozed

Nick Sibilla Senior Contributor Institute For Justice

Updated Sep 1, 2014, 10:36am EDT

This article is more than 10 years old.

How people respond to criticism can reveal a lot about their character.  Some might try to debate or reason with those they disagree with.  Others prefer to ignore critics.  City officials in Honolulu take a different approach: They use a bulldozer.

Choon James is a successful real estate broker with over two decades of experience in Hawaii.  But the city of Honolulu is seeking to seize property she’s owned for almost a decade to build what she calls a “super-sized” fire station in rural Hauula.

Since January 2010, she has put up signs to protest Honolulu’s use of eminent domain.  These signs declare “Eminent Domain Abuse: Who’s Next?” and “YouTube Eminent Domain Abuse—Hawaii.”  For more than three years these signs have been up without any incident.

Bulldozing Free Speech

But now the city is showing a callous disregard for Choon’s freedom of speech.  Back in May, Honolulu seized two of her eminent domain protest signs.  Without her consent, city employees went onto the property and seized and impounded her signs before damaging them. Even worse, the city slapped her with a notice for trespassing, for property she is trying to defend in court.

After these signs were torn down, Choon placed three more signs there.  These lasted just a few months before the city once again seized the signs.  This time, Honolulu was much more dramatic.  On October 18, city workers, backed by police officers, squad cars and a bulldozer, came by and literally bulldozed those protest signs.

The city’s actions show a shameful lack of respect for the First and Fourth Amendments.  Citizens have a right to protest government actions.  The First Amendment was enacted precisely to protect citizens who criticize the government from retaliation.  Lawsuits challenging Honolulu’s unreasonable seizures and chilling attacks on free speech are now pending in federal court.

Unfortunately, Honolulu is not alone in trying to silence critics who question eminent domain.  The Institute for Justice has represented citizens in St. Louis, Mo., Norfolk, Va., Tennessee, and Texas who protested abusive property seizures and faced censorship.  Out of these four cases, IJ successfully defended free speech in three cases, while the fourth is currently in litigation.

After 24 of his buildings were taken by St. Louis, Jim Roos painted a giant mural on a building he owned advocating “End Eminent Domain Abuse.”  But St. Louis labeled the mural an “illegal sign” and wanted to force Jim to remove

the sign (and stifle his right to protest) or face code violations.  He teamed up with the Institute for Justice and sued the city.  In a major win for the First Amendment, in July 2011, the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Jim and allowed the mural to stay up.

In a similar vein, IJ has defended grassroots activists from a frivolous defamation lawsuit and protected an investigative journalist’s right to free speech from a vindictive private developer.

More recently, the Institute for Justice is suing the city of Norfolk for trying to squash a small business owner’s eminent domain protest sign.  The Central Radio Company,

a repair shop, has been in Norfolk for almost eight decades.  But Norfolk had plans to seize the property with eminent domain for a private redevelopment project.

To protest, owner Bob Wilson displayed a huge banner on-site.  The city responded by telling Bob he had to take down the sign or face fines of up to $1,000 per day.  Fortunately, the Virginia Supreme Court unanimously struck down the city’s attempt to seize Bob’s land; his free speech case is still in federal court.

As the cases make clear, courts routinely respect Americans’ First Amendment rights.  Honolulu should do the same.

Nick Sibilla

I’m a policy wonk and legal correspondent with a decade of experience analyzing and reporting on legislation and court cases. 

Outside of Forbes, my work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Slate, Wired, Reason, and numerous other outlets nationwide.