 Welcome back to Think Tech. This is Community Matters more specifically. This is a preview of our Legal Chicken, Legal Egg program, which takes place as a webinar on September 30 at 10 o'clock in the morning. So if you want to register, you know, to see that, go to thinktechawaii.com's registration link. And one of the one of the six players in that program is Kimi Ide Foster. He joins us today. Hi, Kimi. So what do you think? You know, this program is interesting. It features you as moderated by Avi Stoifer. You're going to talk about abortion in America. Avi Stoifer moderates. As I said, Chris Marvin on the mainland will talk about gun violence prevention. Richard Walsh, a professor at UH Law School, talked about the challenges of climate change. That's what he teaches. And we have Sylvia Albert, Voting Rights in America. He was going to be with you, but she can't make it this morning. And Jeff Portnoy, beyond insurrection, five heavy hitters and five really critical and threatening issues. So what I wanted to do is the first thing I wanted to do, Kimi, if you'll permit me, is to play our promo on this. It's a couple of minutes long, so that people can get a handle on what we're saying about it. Okay. All right, we'll do that now. In transitional times, every action has a reaction. This cycle gives us an echo chamber. New events lead to legal changes of course, and legal changes lead to new events. Yes, it is chicken and egg. And these days, could it be that the interaction time is faster than before? Your host for this conversation is Avi Soyfer, Professor and Fuller Dean of the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. Panelist Kimi Ide Foster is a partner in the law firm of Chun Ker in Honolulu, Hawaii. In this program, she will discuss abortion in America. Panelist Chris Marvin is a former military helicopter pilot and principal of Marvin Strategies, a strategic communications firm specializing in cultural advocacy through socially-minded narrative building. In this program, he will discuss gun violence prevention. Panelist Richard Walsgrove is an assistant professor of law and co-director of the Environmental Law Program at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. In this program, he will discuss the challenges of climate change. Panelist Sylvia Albert is the Director of Voting and Elections at Common Cause in Washington, D.C. In this program, she will cover voting rights in America. Panelist Jeff Portnoy is a partner in Cade Shadee, a law firm in Honolulu, Hawaii. In this program, he will cover insurrection and beyond. Come join us for this important discussion. You can register to attend on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Please do, and we'll see you there. Aloha. Okay, you know when we first conceived of this discussion with Avi, we came up with the legal chicken and legal egg thing. And nobody understands that. What are we talking about chicken and egg? But hopefully you do, and we'll be able to make people who watch this program understand that the law is not static at all, especially at these times. And it moves quickly, and sometimes, you know, regrettably, it moves in what you and I would consider the wrong direction, and then you have to correct it, and then you have to deal with the consequences of that, and so forth. It's a spiral, not clear whether it's a spiral up or down. That's one of the baseline issues of this program. So abortion in America is, you know, it's really at the top of the list in the sense that, you know, you have the decision of the Supreme Court repealing Roe v. Wade, and then you have all this other legal action going on. And that foments, aside from unrest, it foments other legal action, and then you have this tit for tat sort of thing, and the federal, you know, system is deteriorating. And oh my God, you have a very difficult discussion to organize, Kimmy. So can you tell us your thinking? Can you tell us your thinking going in about where it is, you know, and how the country has reacted to it, and how the country will react to the reaction, and so forth? Yeah. Thanks, Jay. I first of all, I do really appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this, like you said, a really heavy hitting panel. Any time that I can spend in Dean Cypher's illustrious presence and learning more is time well spent, as far as I'm concerned, so I'm really excited about that. But yeah, probably a little bit about kind of just abortion and the fact that I think we're talking before the show in November elections coming up, abortions on the ballot. What do you want it to be or not? I think we've seen some states that have tried to not talk about it, and they're like, you know, maybe if we just don't say anything, people will forget that we tried to strip their rights away, and that's just not an option, especially with social media and with the national coverage covering everything. And I think I don't want to sound overly optimistic here because that hasn't really worked out the last, you know, six years or so. But I do think that with the Dobbs decision, the GOP may have overplayed its hand just a little bit. You know, it's one thing to have a theoretical discussion about abortion bands, and it's one thing to have kind of this like idealistic, you can say, well, I think abortion is wrong, and you don't actually have to go to the mat for it. You get to kind of have this like safe, cozy, like I'm a good conservative Christian, and I think it's wrong. And then Dobbs came down and took away Roe v. Wade, and all of a sudden, your face was very real world consequences. And I'm completely blanking on who the senator is now, but he came out in a minute, he's like, I'm sorry, when I voted for this, you know, when I voted against abortion access in my own state, when I did this year, I did not think about the, you know, the nine-year-old girl that's raped and has to carry a child, the young woman who wants to be a mother. And there's something horrifically wrong with her child. And if you don't have an abortion, you're both going to die. You know, and it's like, I think all of a sudden it became very, very real for people. And it has kind of pushed in the opposite direction. I mean, like, look at Kansas. Kansas is one of the most conservative states in the union. And when they put it up to a vote, people of Kansas were like, no, this goes too far. You know, it's one thing to be able to say it and kind of be abstract from another to look at very much in the eye and be like, oh, these are real people. These are, this is our mothers and our daughters and our sisters and the girl down the street. And this isn't, this is like kind of abstract for anymore. It's not the bogeyman. So like you said, it's kind of action reaction, right? It's Dobbsville or Robey Waite fell with Dobbs. Some states put a trigger bound to effect immediately. And then you started to see a whole mess of other things, medical professionals, thinking to use about what to do. There's a mass exodus of some people from other states. I don't think that they fully appreciate yet how much strain this is going to put on their social services in the next five to 10 years. You're going to force these women to have kids, then your foster system better be up to par. Your medical system better be up to par. And we all know it's not because these aren't states that put money into this kind of thing. So it's going to be just kind of this constant like, where does the ball is going to keep rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling? And it's like, well, where is it going to stop? And what's going to happen at the end of all of this? So I think it's a very, I think it's a very appropriate topic for your chicken and egg discussion. Yeah, well, it's not going to come to an end anytime soon. You know, you have some states doing the trigger laws that's really horrendous. And they will regret that for sure. They and all the people in them, because they're all the me I offer this all the people in them are human beings. And roughly half of those people are women, human beings, and they're going to suffer trigger law, especially under a trigger law. And then you have the states that are trying to beat the rap, you know, trying to get out from under it. And that, you know, that creates, you know, other problems. It's like, you know, when, when the Supreme Court did this, it had no perception of the consequences. None, none whatsoever. It's, it's, it's kind of shocking to think that these people who are charged with sitting on the highest court in the land, well, you have to, I mean, the personal politics aside, you have to believe that there is a somewhat common degree of common sense amongst these people. And it just doesn't show here. I mean, it's, it was stocking, it was shocking to me. Because like you said, they obviously didn't think this through. And then what really, sorry, digressing a little bit, like really, really burns me is the GOP did this whole like, well, let's return it to the state, the state's right issue. You know, if you, if you, if you don't like it, like, like Clarence, Justice Clarence says, then take it to the voting box. But then you have states like Indiana, where the people were also conservative state, but the people were vocally against an abortion ban. And they said, you know what, actually, we're not going to put on the ballot box. We're just going to pass it by legislative special session. It's like, so this has nothing to do with taking it to the people. You don't care about individual rights. Like you have an agenda, and you're going to push this no matter what, come hell or high water, no matter who gets hurt, because you think you can, you know, it's disgusting. Well, to say that it's really not a matter of federal law, let's put it on the states, is creating chaos. Because it means at the end of the day, you know, you'd need some kind of chart, a graph and a chart for every state. And the results will be different for every state. And the need for further legislation to accommodate it will be different for every state. So, you know, the federal system has essentially been torn asunder when some states, the women have rights and other states, they don't have rights. And in the middle, all their rights are different. It's shocking. And I mean, not even just for the women, which are obviously far and away the biggest losers in this entire fight. But I have friends who are doctors in Texas. I have friends who are doctors in Florida. And they kind of are like, you're upending an entire system. I mean, especially some of the doctors, like in Texas, for example, like, they've been instructed if they have to choose to choose the life of the child. They cannot perform it, you know. And my friend was looking and she was like, my very first oath is to do no harm. And if a woman's bleeding out of my operating cable, arrest me, I'm not going to let it happen. You know, and it's like you're interfering with a whole bunch of disciplines and belief systems. And it's like, this is crazy. And like you said, it's insane that it varies state by state. So if for whatever reason, you get stuck in a red state or one of the one of these trigger law states, you're screwed. You can't do anything about it. You know, it's wild. And it's, it's not an issue that we can afford to have that kind of state by state chaos. This is too, it's too important. It's too dangerous. When you and I, we sit down and try to figure out all the implications and the need for what you would call it, corrective action. It's huge. And it's everywhere. And it goes beyond just the issue of abortion. It's an attack on the federal system. It's an attack on uniformity among this thing. It's an attack on human rights, civil rights, personal rights, privacy, all that. And really extraordinary violence that this ob's case did. Thank you, Clarence Thomas. We really appreciate your concern for the lives of women. But let me, let me start, you know, drilling down on some of the, just some of the things you mentioned. I mean, for one thing, implication is the Supreme Court, they may have to be, the Supreme Court has shown that it's not, it doesn't care about consequences. You know, that is flawed to do a degree that we have to, you know, change the number of judges, change the tenure of judges. And that's got to be one implication of this. This calls for a reform of the Supreme Court. Before we talked about that in the abstract. Now we're talking about it as a real possibility, a real need. That's just one thing. If this is all in your wheelhouse, Kimmy. I wouldn't go that far. And then we're talking about, you know, these various states that are showing how imperfect they are, their legislatures, their judges, their politicians, all going off the side, all, you know, out of control here and all not caring about the consequences. So how do you fix that is a million issues in the States in this 50 of them. They're all different. Yeah, it's crazy. You know, this is something that we actually were talking about it. I just came back from Planned Parenthood board retreat last weekend, something like that. And we were talking about just kind of like, fly in the sky. If money and time and the fact that the country's on fire, we're not a pressing issue. You know, how do we fix, how do we fix what we've become? Because like you said, it goes well beyond abortion. I mean, I don't want to say we're irreparably broken. The country is showing some serious, serious cracks. But so much of it, at least I think goes back to we need to do something about the public education system in this country. I know I've said this on the show before, but I think we are largely in the mess we're in right now, because the average person off the street could not pass a fifth, like a sixth grade civics test if you put a gun to their head. I mean, look at the number of people that thought Trump could just stay president by just staying in the White House. Like, did you miss social studies? Did you miss any of those classes? And the sad answer is probably yes, because they went to a school that is either underfunded or doesn't prioritize it because there's no, there's no like national effort to have a curriculum that covers these things. And then undereducated kids turn into over aggressive teenagers who turn into adults that have these like, well, I know everything and I don't need to learn anything else about this. And it's like, you don't actually, you have a terrible grasp of how the country's supposed to work and run. And you're voting. Like, but it just, that's, I mean, to me, fixing our public education system would go a long way. That's, that's high in the sky. And like I said, if the country weren't on fire with about 10,000 other issues. Well, there's also the thing, you know, that goes to, you know, like Halloween tricks, like the electoral, the fraudulent electoral ballots, like all the, well, the insurrection itself. I mean, to me, all these subjects we're going to talk about in this program, they're all connected. And as you say, they all have a fundamental set of problems, you know, where the country is broken. You think of one, you can hardly not think of the others. And so I suppose, you know, you're, you're really right about that is that we have to, you know, dig deep and find the fundamental problems and change them. But that requires a reorientation of the citizenry. And, you know, talk about education. I mean, I've always said that you, you want to reeducate a, you know, a country, you got to start, you know, you got to start in grade school, and you got to spend, you know, like a generation teaching them. Absolutely. One of the, you know, there's a program, Ken Burns program on the Holocaust I was mentioning to you. Half of it was, you know, one night, the other half will be on another night. And what is extraordinary about this is that Hitler understood that you had to educate kids your way. And he created Hitler Youth, which was very effective to build, you know, a citizenry that would, that would follow him, that would support him no matter what. And very chilling to make the comparison between what happened in Germany. We've been thinking this for a long time, but it is emerging now. And the Burns film gives you footage and concept that makes the connection all the, all the more clear. So yes, it's a five alarm fire. But we don't have 10 or 20 years to fix it. Exactly. And that's the thing is it's like, I completely agree with you. The only way this is going to get fixed, we need a sea change. We need to start all the way at the ground and kind of redo this. That's, that's not, we don't have the time. And we don't have the resources. And we also don't, I mean, I hate to say this, the country doesn't have the inclination. These same people that are in power and passing these bananas laws, like they don't care. That doesn't serve their purposes at all. Yeah, it's hard to, it's hard to figure out what motivates them, but you know, it's not the same, the same motivation that the country has had over these years, the social compact of the country, you know, where everybody believes in the same form of government in the same moral structure, if you will. You know, it's like, you would have thought after Dobbs, you would have thought that it would rise up in every state and say, what are you doing to the women in the state? You can't do that. That's not what happened. It went into chaos immediately. I mean, Donald Trump likes chaos and his friends is autocratic, autocratic supporters like chaos. So what you have now is legal chaos. And that's a problem. And I'm resting this on your doorstep. The problem is, if you have different people in different states, different legislatures, different, everything, everywhere in the country, a complete chaos, you're not going to have a fix. If you have, you know, chaos is not a fix for anything. I want to go on record about that. So then when you have chaos, here's the question, Kimi. What follows? You know, I don't know. I've actually, I just recently had a very similar conversation with my dad, who is a wonderful, wonderful man. Probably one of the best, one of the best people I've ever known in my whole life. But he is a, he is a white male. So a lot of, there comes a lot of privilege with that. And he was kind of one of those people that in the early days of Trump, he only got elected. He was like, well, it's, it won't like stop catastrophizing Kimi. It won't be that bad. You know, this country's not going to fall apart. Kind of like, you know, downplaying it. And when, I mean, when all the things had happened, then when dogs happened, I had this discussion with him where I was like, do you see it now? Like, do you see what this man has created? I mean, he's completely upended American values. He like, we can't agree on anything anymore. The anniversary of 9-11, which should have been an amazing momentous time for the country to come together. It felt like all the media outlets were trying to trick us into feeling that way. Like, hey, remember when we all liked each other? And it's like, that is so sad. And I just don't know. I mean, this is going to sound so, so, so dramatic. I don't know if the multiple fact comes to America can be made whole. I don't know if we're going to splinter into a bunch of different smaller groups. I don't know. Like, I just don't know how the federalist system that we have, but you were just talking about how does it go on when you've got a state like California on one side and Texas on the other. You don't share values. You don't share agreement on how resources should be allocated. You don't share any agreement on how problems should be fixed. And so, to answer your question about what comes after the chaos, I think it's just more chaos. I don't know what the endpoint is or what the natural stopping point is other than we all go our separate ways. And I don't like to think of that as a realistic option, so she could also intertwine at this point, but it just seems like we're getting further and further and further apart. It does. I mean, is the solution to, you know, the fundamental problem that we're reaching for, is it, is it leadership? Is it some president strong, maybe stronger than Joe Biden? Although his, his talk to 60 minutes was pretty good this week, I have to say, surprising on some levels. His staff was surprised about some of the things. But suffice to say, if we had a really, I'll pull one out of history, JFK. If we had a JFK kind of president who everybody liked, everybody followed, he had a magic about them. You know, could that help alleviate the chaos? It would go a long way. It would go a really long way. I think you're right. We have not had a charismatic unifying leader in a long time. Of course, that kind of depends on who you ask, right? Because I thought Obama was great, but it totally depends on who you ask. But that would go a long way. I just also don't know if, I mean, part of why JFK was so charismatic and successful is that they got to write the narrative about themselves. They got to create Camelot. They got to, you know, I don't know if that era exists anymore because so much of what Donald Trump did was he stripped away kind of that shiny, even newer respect that we accord to people in the elected office. And he exposed this really awful underbelly of everything. And now you're kind of like, well, how do I, how do I trust elections? How do I trust that these people really, I'll have my best wishes at heart, you know. And I would like to think that sure, if one of the parties could put together, put forward a candidate that actually has the chance to unify the country, that'd be great. That's a huge start. I just don't know if they're out there. If you have chaos around the country, it's really hard to bring it back to where it was. Respect and, you know, law abiding country and caring for everyone and social safety net and all the moral things that, you know, we've seen in our lifetime. And unfortunately, they've been deteriorating. But one thing it offers, and if you look deeply into Trump's mind and possibility is that we wind up with an autocracy. We lose the democracy and a strong leader emerges not on the democratic side, but on the autocratic side. And then we, then we have the 1930s. We have a diminution of civil rights, human rights. We have horrible actions by the state against the citizens. We have concentration camps. We have disappearances, all the things that we have felt that, you know, would never happen here. That's, I think, one possible solution because you keep on spinning around in chaos and a strong autocratic leader emerges, such as Trump or some of the, you know, the autocrats of the 20th century. And now it's a natural progression, isn't it? It is. I think you're, I mean, I think you're right. I think it's more likely we're going to find someone like that and someone that unifies the country in a good way. Because that's who thrives in chaos, right? People who have dreams of kingship and grandeur. And it's, I also think it's true on the flip side that the population, it's mob thought, right? You get scared. So you follow somebody that you think is going to make things better. And it's also like you said, where people are like, well, that can happen here. And it's like, it can. It does already in some states. And it's, I think we talked about this in the last show I was on with you, but it's very much to me like that World War II poem about, you know, first they came for the clerics. And I didn't say thanks. I'm not cleric. And then they came for the teachers. I didn't say anything. I'm not a teacher. And then they came for the Jews. I didn't say anything because I'm not a Jew. And then they came for me. And there was no one left to say anything. And that's to me, that's kind of the direction that I unfortunately see us going in. Going circling full circle, you're back to the job decision. The very first thing a lot of people knows was like, oh my God, they're coming for the gates next. If you read the decision, it's like, you're coming for everybody that doesn't fit in your little square white box. And if you don't think that's true, you're not paying attention, you know? Well, I, yes, I think it is true. And it's coming faster than we think. You know, it's, it's going to explode in a little while, maybe in November, who knows. But one thing I want to ask you is this, let's assume, you know, that Dobbs is really a statement of civil rights, of the rights of women, the rights of citizens. And Dobbs represents much more than abortion. It represents, you know, civil rights. On the autonomy, 100%. Yeah. And so if that happens, this is very scary now. What is the role of the lawyer? What is the role of the bar association? What is the role of somebody who, you know, practices business law, but who is conscious of these issues like you are? What happens in the, what happens in the profession? They're supposed to be not only the merchants of words, but, you know, the protector of the precedent, the protector of the rule of law that changes things. You know, Shakespeare said the first thing we do is kill all the lawyers. I think that's the second thing. The first thing we do is, is kill all the media. And that is part of the scenario in this Holocaust movie, by the way. But it's very scary that the, those who are bound professionally to, you know, protect and preserve our civil rights will be at risk. And we'll have a burden, perhaps, that the average person won't, because, you know, the citizens haven't taken social studies, but the lawyers have, or most of them, what happens? Yeah. I mean, I mean, first of all, I totally agree with you. I think, but it's, and I think, at least what you're alluding to is, I think it's our duty and our obligation. You know, more than the average person, you have taken these classes. You, someone has to stand up and say something, do something. And you become responsible for that. You know, you, I think it's funny that we're having, you're having Bobby Soyfer as the moderator, because I sat with him on a H.S.P. leadership institute panel, where we talked about, you know, you as an attorney, I don't care if you do commercial real estate, criminal law, civil litigation, IP, all of those things. You have a fundamental set of tools that the average person does not. And you need to, you have a responsibility to share that and do it responsibly and make sure your friends and your family, the people who may not be, like you're saying, is up and up on the news or is up and up on like, look, these are real consequences. This is not just about abortion. This is not just about X, Y, and Z. Like, make people aware of that and make them realize what they can and can't do. So, I don't know, maybe that's an overly optimistic role for attorneys. Well, I mean, we saw the question is, what do the attorneys do? They do with those skills, the special skills that would allow them to do. They go to court, they argue in front of judges who may, who may be political appointees, such as that judge in Florida. They may go to the legislature and find that the legislature is in the other camp. That is, it hasn't taken social studies. They have a, you know, a burden and they may not be able to, you know, correct these problems. Furthermore, even in the state of Hawaii, the GOP is very organized and there are more GOP candidates this year in Hawaii than before. It's really interesting. And so what you have is an organized campaign on the other side of the issue who would support Trump and, you know, all those GOP destructive... In a heartbeat. Yeah. So, yeah, all I'm saying is in order to get back, in order to counteract what has happened and the implications of what will happen under DOBS, there's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of opposition to it. And as you said, we're in a kind of, you didn't use the term, but a kind of civil war over that. And so it's not so easy to fix it. And, and furthermore, the fixing may result in a situation that needs more fixing. Yeah. Yeah. Very true. Okay. Well, where does it come to an end? And on September 30 at 10 in the morning, Akeemah Idea Foster is going to tell us he's going to have this worked out. I don't know. I can't imagine how she's going to have it worked out. But she will be discussing the logical conclusion of all these considerations and, you know, phenomena that are now in place, now happening, now changing. The dynamic is impossible to watch. And Akeemah, I guarantee you that in the time, the two weeks time between now and September 30. Something else will have happened. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me, Jay. Yeah. Thanks for talking to me this morning and thanks for participating in the program. Have a good one. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.