 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Tim Apichella. In our show this time, we'll check in on Donald Trump's war against the press. And we'll see what role Think Tech and you can play in that war. Crisis of civic engagement was the star advertiser's headline on August 15. Although it related to decline and voter turnout, it also relates to many other issues in our community. Can the people of Hawaii afford not to care? Given this crisis of engagement, Think Tech's role as a nonprofit citizen journalist platform is more important, more necessary than ever. Indeed, the flip side of public engagement is freedom of the press. And that's why we're doing this editorial. The press is an advocate for citizens to ensure that institutions, government and private, operate with transparency in a free society. The press gives voice to those who do not possess the power to hold office and makes office holders accountable for their words and actions. There is no substitute for and no alternative to a free press. All this is intertwined with the duties of this citizen. Freedom of the press is a right and guarantee of the First Amendment. And adherence to that freedom is central to our democracy. We have fought and died to preserve it, and we cannot afford to take it lightly. The language of the First Amendment is as follows. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The idea is that for a free society, we in our media must be free to openly criticize the government or corruption, tyranny or worse will follow. We can't permit any official to undermine that freedom. Incredible as it may seem, freedom of the press is under attack by the Trump administration. It began with Trump's claims of fake news and then his declaration of war against the press as the enemy of the people, ripening daily into a new normal of exclusion, insult and threat with the creation of lists of journalists in the name of national security. This war is not a war against all media, just a war against the media that criticizes him. It is a war to manipulate the media, the news and the truth. It is exactly what the founding fathers sought to avoid. It is as frightening and threatening to the republic as anything else we have ever seen. As the media is the enemy of the people, that in spreading their fake news they are lying and in contrast that he's telling the truth. But we know that he lies shamelessly and often. We see the confusion thus created. This is how democracy is undermined. This is the stuff of which dictators are made. For some he, the president, has the pulpit. They believe his lies and declarations. To denigrate the credibility of the press, while at the same time using the power of his office to propagate outrageous lies is as bad as it can get. Truth gives way to confusion, ignorance prevails, civic engagement is obstructed, and the electorate is effectively disenfranchised. What Trump is doing is in reckless, willful disregard of the First Amendment. By attacking the press, he's advancing his own power in his unpredictable and increasingly destructive agenda. All the while, he's pulling the wings out of the constitution and its guarantees. Some people and some elected officials, notably the republicans now in Congress, nevertheless support him in this. Do they not know that he is coming for them too? 350 editorials on this from media around the country were the right thing. And we can only hope those courageous responses will continue. Trump's war is certainly not over. So what can the press and we the people do about it? We can engage. We can ask who is more likely to be lying? Is it the most venerable newspapers in the country, including the New York Times and the Washington Post? Or is it a narcissistic president who has been caught lying to us on a regular basis? What's in your critical thinking on this? We as an electorate cannot go one more minute without addressing this outrage to our democracy. Every public statement, every public act, especially voting, must be governed by the examination of who's telling us the truth and who is not. Lying by a public official, especially a president, is inexcusable. ThinkTech, as an organization of citizen journalists, can make its own editorials too. In our efforts to raise public awareness, ThinkTech has many talk shows covering state and national issues, including the First Amendment and the events in Washington. Here's a list of the shows we've done over the past 60 days. Many of them deal with public issues affecting our state and country. Today, we'd like to show you clips from a few of them. We'll keep doing shows like this and continue to provide our platform for civic engagement. We hope more people will become more engaged as we move forward. We have a lot of shows going on about politicians running for office here in Hawaii, and I think they all ought to be asked, all these campaigners ought to be asked, how do you feel about what's going on in Washington and the country, because I think everybody ought to talk about it. Yeah, they should not only be asked peripherally, but they should also be kind of stuck to the answers because a lot of people will just gloss over, oh, I think we live in interesting times. But when you dig into how they are reacting to immigration issues, how they're reacting to foreign policy issues, how they're reacting to any of the hot topic issues that we're dealing with, that's how you really find out where they lean on the political spectrum and how you can rely on them or not. Yeah, because if you know where somebody stands, fair, you know, it's full disclosure kind of thing, then you can, you know, assign a certain level of credibility or acceptance to what they're saying, or at least understand the context of what they're saying, because everything, everybody is so polarized these days. The barrel tax was structured to take a certain amount, a dollar or five cents if I remember right, out of every barrel that's going into production of oil that comes into the state in an effort to ensure that we have food security, that we have cleanup funds for oil spills, that we have energy planning and work being done in an energy area to reduce our dependence on oil, and that's what's supposed to fund some of the big projects and it's basically split up between four entities within the state, Department of Health, Department of Ag, Energy Office and University of Hawaii, HNEI, and they get those funds to do this stuff. But they don't even get half of the funds that are generated every year by the barrel tax. Why don't you talk a little bit about, you know, what we should be doing with that barrel tax and where we should be focused on it? You know, I think because the money has been sort of fragmented as it goes forward and it's, I get, the department gets, you know, so much and I don't know, they haven't had oil spills for a while, so I think they're funding staff or whatever they fund. There's no accountability for what comes in and what goes out. What happens if they acquire Tribune? What happens if they're permitted to do whatever they want in this arena? What happens to the country? Well, I think, I mean, it's a likely scenario that the money talks and there's no real guard here protecting public interests. So what we're going to be dealing with here is a media sphere with less people having more influence and their message getting larger and larger and less diversity of opinions and diversity of information for the public to have in their hands. There's always been this talk like, how do you get real change in politics in America? And that's to bring a very divisive, polarizing candidate to the forefront. And Trump, Trump basically is the embodiment of what this proposal would be like, like bring the most radical, offensive to one side of the equation party or person to the forefront and let them do all sorts of damage and then see, does that actually inspire and get people off their couches to protect democracy or are we just going to let it go? You were here two, three weeks ago and we were, it was right after the debate at Kamehameha schools and we were talking about who were going to be the winners and losers and so forth. Now we know, at least we know from the primary election. So what are your thoughts in general? Tell us a little bit about this election. Well, I guess a lot of what we predicted was going to happen, did happen, but it was really up and down. Tim, what's on the agenda for our sea changes today? Well, you know, it's what's been in the headlines for the last week. I mean, it's been, you talk about sea changes, you know, if this was an airship, we would call it turbulence. And I would say that the headlines and the news articles in the last three or four days has been filled with turbulence. I agree. Bottom bottom line is we've got, you know, we have the summit about North Korea. We've had the immigration, the separation of children from parents. We've had Kilauea, literally a turbulence. And then, of course, I think one that's going to affect Hawaii quite a bit is the Supreme Court decision about taxation on internet sales. Yeah, good choice. Yeah, no, these are these are things that are in the headlines that, you know, really should catch our attention and strike a chord within us. Why in the world would a nice person like your own self run for the state Senate? What made you do that? Well, you know, this is what I keep telling people. It really depends on what your cause is, what your mission is. And for me, it started five years ago in Kakaoka, as you know, with all the high rise development. A lot of the buildings were getting through variances, building too close to high to densely, not following the rules that were in place. And so the community got together, and we did topple that board, and we made changes to the law. But it still wasn't the same because we still had to be vigilant about the senator who was supposedly representing us. And it didn't change. And I was really afraid that it would not change, and we couldn't stand another four years. So it was based on that cause that we, the people need to speak, and you've got to stand up for what you believe in. You just went right ahead, it will be and decided that as far as you're concerned, editorially, you are spousing that we have a constitutional convention. We are, and it's for a couple of reasons. One reason is that we've actually polled it. We have surveyed voters and back in December, two thirds of the people that we spoke to, registered voters in the state of Hawaii who plan to vote, said they'd like to have a con con. The same thing in May, the numbers went down a little bit, but still pretty healthy majority. So that's one reason. Another reason is a number of our people that are sit on our Ed board are from the mainland or have worked on the mainland in states like California and Oregon and Washington state, a fairly progressive states fairly advanced liberally, if you will, politically. And there was a sense of frustration watching our own legislature, not move on some issues that we thought they should move on. MIT study reported in the paper, the New York Times I know a couple of days ago, you know, on when people are more likely to accept and pass on fake news is really interesting. So, you know, you've thought about this question. What for that discussion for that analysis? What is fake news? It's not an easy question. What is fake news? Well, I would argue any, any part of any story that's not true makes the entire thing fake. Okay, so you'll find what we've discovered in research about fake news is that these Russian bots will actually scoop up a bunch of real news and circulate that as well to mix with their fake news. So they give this appearance that yes, we're a legitimate channel, and then they will take these real stories and change a couple words or add a couple sentences right in the middle of it. It's very, very difficult to figure out what's fake and what's not. This is the first time in my lifetime, but any president has tried to manipulate the Federal Reserve. It's been sacrosanct all these years, and it is by law sacrosanct. So it's really interesting, unusual and a little gross, that he would try to manipulate the Fed. He doesn't know that it's a separate entity. He doesn't understand that. Okay, let's let's give Elise a chance. What do you think? Okay, well, I think it's a bit deceptive to even call it a war on a trade war, because I mean, the other countries have had tariffs higher tariffs than we have had by far for years. It's kind of the status quo. And so we're just matching, you know, what they've been doing. Not a trade war. No, what else you got? Well, I just think that, you know, if he's, are we better off? Are we better off? Why are we better off? We're okay. So we're better off because we've been apologizing for the US for the last, you know, at least the last eight years. The mobile media helped me understand what you mean there. Well, in 2007, we had this miraculous device that came into our consciousness, the iPhone, that basically changed the way people communicate in dramatic ways, as the fastest diffusing technology, communication technology in human history, the smartphone is the smartphone along with all of the various applications out there that provide the opportunity to do like real time. This is what's happening with my camera phone. Right, but I mean, just the hardware. Okay, people have like you have a phone in your pocket. Yeah, one in mine. Probably everybody watching has one in theirs. And it's it's really changed a lot about humanity. Okay, I think it has. Do you think and it's affected the way even we understand politics to the sense that things are crunched down into these, you know, 140 character messages, or, you know, Facebook posts or whatever that really aren't vetted in the way they were before. And before the smartphone, there wasn't easy access to social media. Like think if you had to go to your desktop computer and log into Facebook and do it and the most people wouldn't do that. The headlines are 2000 kids have been detained and separated from their parents over the last five to six weeks. But the bigger issue is immigration. And so I'm just curious what you think about the recent developments. And then let's talk a little bit about your background and what you've been studying for quite some time. Right, okay. I know that the information that we've been seeing on the news recently about the separation of parents and children. It's a tough issue. But I think that we have to consider the facts, the reality of what immigration is doing to the United States and the citizens, the native citizens. It's a difficult situation. Immigration has been a difficult situation for so many years, that it's not going to be resolved in a short period of time, because it's gone on too long and been tangled up in political issues. In the words of Lincoln, our government is by for and of the people, not by or for someone else. If you leave it to someone else, you wind up with Europe in the 30s. If we don't study and respect history, yes, it will repeat itself. And that will not be a pretty picture. We cannot afford civic disengagement. To be faithful to our own principles, we need to insist on freedom of the press. And we must stay informed and engaged on every issue. That's the price we pay to preserve our democracy. If you want to try it the other way, we'll all be sorry. Like it or not, how the union goes, so goes Hawaii. It's time that we be a model of caring and concern here and in Washington. We need the country and the country needs us. Let's not turn inward. Let's turn outward and be good citizens. Hawaii is beautiful in so many ways. Let's show them how it's done. If you want to know more about civic engagement, just Google it on the web. If you want to know more about the First Amendment and its place in the national firmament, Google that too. If you want to know more about Think Tech's mission, we'll see more of our shows. Visit thinktechhawaii.com or download our brand new Think Tech Hawaii app on your iPhone or Android. Become a friend. Get on our Think Tech platform for civic engagement today. And now let's check out our Think Tech schedule of events going forward. Think Tech broadcasts talk shows live on the internet from 11am to 5pm on weekdays. You can see our shows live on thinktechhawaii.com And we also broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. And some people listen to them all night long and on the weekend. If you missed the show or if you want to replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on thinktechhawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to thinktechhawaii.com slash audio. And we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes. Visit thinktechhawaii.com for our weekly calendar and YouTube links or, better yet, sign up on our email list and get our daily email advisories. Think Tech has a high-tech green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you want to see it or be part of our live audience or if you want to participate in our shows, contact shows at thinktechhawaii.com. If you want to pose a question or make a comment during a show, call 808-374-2014 and help us raise public awareness on Think Tech. Go ahead. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube. Or send us a tweet at thinktechhawaii. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives in these islands and in this country. We want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. And now here's this week's Think Tech commentary. The new Colossus is a sonnet that American poet Emma Lazarus wrote in 1883 to raise money for the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. In 1903, the poem was cast onto the bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's lower level. Here is the famous and important poem. Not like the ancient giant of Greek fame whose conquering limbs astride from land to land. Here at our seawashed sunset gate shall stand a mighty woman with a torch whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and whose name, mother of exiles. From her beacon hand glows worldwide welcome. Her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp cries she with silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest toss to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of Think Tech. But first, we want to thank our underwriters. The Atherton Family Foundation, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, Collateral Analytics, The Cook Foundation, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, Hawaiian Electric Companies, the High Tech Development Corporation, Galen Ho of BAE Systems, Integrated Security Technologies, Kamehameha Schools, Dwayne Kurisu, Calamon Lee, and the Friends of ThinkTech, MW Group Limited, the Schuyler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, the Volo Foundation, Eureko J. Sugimura.