SMITH: Trouble in Paradise. The Left’s Agenda Unleashed In Hawaii Serves As A Warning

The land of pineapples and Aloha is usually reserved as a honeymoon destination for the majority of Mainlanders. Like most vacation desti...

The land of pineapples and Aloha is usually reserved as a honeymoon destination for the majority of Mainlanders. Like most vacation destinations, it’s oft forgotten about as a place where people actually live. And yet upon closer examination, Hawai’i is a good forecast of where other, more politically influential, states are headed.

While California is generally looked to as the cultural canary in the coalmine for the rest of the U.S., there’s a conservative nudge within California that sometimes effectively slows down the Golden State’s worst impulses.

But Hawai’i has no such contrary undercurrent. We’ve only had one Republican governor in the history of the state, and one election that cast our 4 electoral votes to a Republican (Reagan’s 2ndelection).

Long before Obamacare was mandated, Hawai’i functioned under the same method of providing healthcare to all within its borders. And before Virginia allowed for abortions up to the point of birth, Hawai’i was the first state to legalize abortion (before the Roe v. Wade decision) and the Guttmacher Institute lists Hawai’i as one of the “freest” for abortion access using the same vague language of “health” of the mother as a factor that was so shocking when it passed in Virginia.

With zero restrictions on parental notification, waiting periods or public funding, it’s unsurprising that Hawai’i is in the top ten list for states that spend the most on publicly funded abortions despite being #40 in the U.S. for population.

While our laws may be reason enough to reconsider moving to our state, our open corruption should seal the deal.

This year the FBI has labeled the amount of investigations into Hawai’i as “unprecedented.” The most populous county Honolulu alone is under investigations into our island-wide Honolulu Police Department, the Chief Prosecutorindividually as well as his whole department, and fighting off a variety of potential FTA investigations into the mysteriously disappearing funding for a boondoggle of a rail system that has increased into the $9.2 billion range (though likely much higher) for a track that only ever potentially projected to 20 miles in length.

Hawai’i’s Department of Education is uniquely a state department, and one of the largest, receiving somewhere in the realm of $3 billion. Despite a spate of local probes into HIDOE’s reported corruptions and crumbling infrastructure (a majority of classrooms do not even have air conditioning in this tropical climate), the department has not been audited in the last 50 years.

Homelessness is in the public conversation nationally but Hawai’i has been living with rising homeless persons, very often the mentally ill or drug-addicted, in public parks and business district streets for many years. Attacks on pedestrians and tourists are ramping up, with HPD citing low arrests on difficulty in locating attackers and mental illness as their reason to send violent attackers to the hospital instead of jail only to be released back on the streets within an hour or two of capture.

Looking from the outside, Hawai’i may still seem far away. But how does the Hawai’i state government get away with so much abuse for those who call Hawai’i home?

The Hawai’i State Legislature is effectively a single-party body with only 5 Republicans of its 51 members and 0 of 25 in the Senate.

The Democratic Party is supported by the highest rate of unionized employees and the lowest voter turnout in the country. Voter registration does not require any identification without even an address requirement (you may describe landmarks in the area you claim to reside).

On June 24th, our governor, David Ige, announced that he does not intend to veto a bevy of bills that will further harm the civil liberties of residents of the 50thstate. These bills include:

• Expansion of our aforementioned weak voting protections by expanding absentee voting statewideand even allowing electronic voting for disabled persons, making them more vulnerable to abuse.
• Removal of firearms before a hearing based on the request of another person (anyone from a family member to a vague "colleague") who deems a person mentally ill and prone to violence.
• A ban on importation of firearms for anyone under the age of 21.
• Gender transitions to be legally changed on state licensure (we already allow birth certificate changes) including to a third gender of "X."
• A ban on therapy if it concerns "gender conversion" without religious exemption.

With only 4 electoral votes, Hawai’i may be the last state you worry about, but we are the usually among the first states to push the boundaries of civil liberties for the more influential states to follow.