Update On Where We Are

In this episode, we update everyone on what we've been doing and our thoughts on the primaries. We also talked about the event we participated in with the States Forum and our friends from the Why Should I Trust You Podcast. We will also be reaching out to everyone soon to share details about next steps, including helping with the Data Center Moratorium Petition signature gathering.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:06

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Maha Ohio podcast. My name is Elizabeth Frost. I am here with Maha Ohio co-founders and co-hosts of this pod, Mark Harris and Daniel DeLuca. It's been a while since we sat down to talk to everybody about what's new with the movement in Ohio. So we're probably looking at a little bit of a chaotic episode today, but that's okay. I'm excited to get into it. We're going to be covering everything from the outcome of the primaries, the data center petition ban that you may have heard about, or maybe you've seen it, signed it, circulated it. And we're also going to be talking about sitting down with Democrats in Columbus this spring, including Amy Ashton, to advocate for the victims of industrial contamination in Ohio. There are far too many people whose lives have been completely upended by toxic exposures that could have and should have been prevented, or a bare minimum, uh lessons that should have been learned, changes that should have been made. And so it was it was a pretty big day in Columbus last month. So we're gonna talk about that before we get into it. Congratulations to Maha Ohio endorsed candidate Jay Edwards on his victory in the Ohio primary for state treasurer. We look for Jay to be a great partner in our communities who have been impacted by toxic exposures, by corruption in their communities, backdoor deals with industry. We are really looking forward to Jay taking home that victory in November and supporting him between now and then. We're also really excited for Frank LaRose to advance on to the November ballot for state auditor. We think having Jay and Frank working together as treasurer and auditor is going to create a much more fair and honest financial ecosystem in the state. And that's very important to not just Maha, but all the things that we care about as Kennedy supporters and people who were brought together by this Kennedy coalition a few years ago. We also want to give our condolences to Wesley Davis, Bethlehr, and Nikki Frisco. They were not able to take home a victory in their primaries, but we do hope to support them in whatever's next. We are still very much in line and supportive of the values and the ideas that drove them to run for their respective offices. You know, we hope it's not the last that we see of them in Ohio politics and in public service. And obviously, we're all still reeling from the Thomas Matthew law in Kentucky. We're sure we haven't seen the last of him, and we're excited to see what's next for him. And, you know, I I I've been hearing people say that maybe there's a silver lining in all this, is it really pulled back the curtain on the levers of power that exist within our government and how powerful that not just foreign lobbies, but you know, elite money from within our own country can be in these local elections. We're really mindful of what kind of went wrong with both sides to get us there. Not just the power of money, but also that we kind of left a lot on the table in these races, especially with Frenchco, with Weslin, with Beth, and with all the passion and energy that we've witnessed from the Kennedy campaign, we know that this group uh specifically is able or is capable of some pretty incredible things. Um so that's really led us to ask ourselves what we can do and what should we be doing to harness that so we can put it all in the court and races like what we just saw with the primary, and really just harness that energy and what we know that we're capable of. So I'm gonna kick it over to Mark to tell us a little bit about you know some of the ideas that we've been having, what's in store, um, and what to expect. Because if you're listening to this, that means you are probably on uh the list of people who will be hearing from Mark soon. So to you, Mark.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Yeah, uh so I'm planning to reach out to everybody one-on-one, ask them where they're at and kind of how they're feeling. So expect to, you know, get get a phone call or an email from me. I'm gonna be doing both. But expect to hear from me soon talking about that. One of the things I am gonna make sure to share with everybody is some information about the data center petition in the state. We think that's something that's very important, that's going on right now, and it's very time sensitive to get that done. So that'll be something that you'll get more information directly from me during that conversation. But what I really want to do is hear from you and know what you guys are feeling at the moment, and then kind of let's figure out what we need to do next. As Elizabeth alluded to, you know, we've had some wins and some things have definitely gone our way, but also we've had significant setbacks and definitely things that haven't gone our way across the national political environment, but also here locally. And, you know, it's one of those things. The fight never ends, and we have to keep pushing for the things we want to see because we know the powers that gave aren't going away, and they're going to keep fighting for making us sicker, but also making things harder for average Americans in a variety of ways, not just through health issues. So obviously, uh, we want to hear what's on your mind and what's getting you excited and getting you motivated right now, and what we can do to activate you and make change for the better. Obviously, we're gonna be prioritizing the data center stuff, but there are many other things that we're still working on. And you know, there are still victories to be had and there are still battles to fight, even though maybe we feel a little bit down or a little bit shaken up at the moment. Uh, that's just motivation to keep fighting harder and keep seeing the change uh that we want to see because we know no matter what there's going to be change and whether we fight or not, it's going to happen. And if we fight, we can really make things better. And even if it doesn't work out every time, that's never a justification not to try our hardest every time. So I'll be reaching out to everybody, see where everybody's at, and I think we're going to just kind of reevaluate where we are and maybe you know focus in on some other things, but definitely look at this partition gathering effort for data centers. I know there's you know people out in the community already organizing and doing collection for this of finance, um, and we'll be passing along some more information if you want to volunteer in the efforts with collection. So also just expect to hear from my son. And I just I wanted to say briefly about some of the locks that here that Matthew fell heavy on me. I'm sure I did a lot of the listeners here as well. Uh it's it's very concerning to see where we are. Massie obviously was willing to push back on the administration that's part of and a big reason why he got primaried, and things went the way that they did. But I think we can all say that at least on the issues closest to Maha's interest, Massie was pushing back, you know, in the way we'd want to see someone push back within the, you know, admin and inside the Republican Party at the moment. And it's really sad to see him punished for that. I know some of the other stuff that maybe was more on the president's mind necessarily weren't the Maha issues, but I think we can all agree that the thing Mass stood for is actually a lot more of where people are in the country as a whole, but definitely here in our region of the country. So I think what we need to see from that is nothing's a guarantee. It doesn't matter that he was elected every race since 2012 by large margins of victory. There's never a moment where you can put down and say, okay, we're done, it's settled. Obviously, we all need to take breaks. Stuff is difficult and it's hard, and everyone needs to do what's best for them, but we can never say it's finished because it's never finished. So those are just kind of my thoughts where things are, and then what to look out from when I speak with you coming up here. And uh yeah, so I'm gonna pass it to Elizabeth here, and she's gonna share some of her thoughts as well. So um pass it to Elizabeth.

SPEAKER_02 8:53

Yeah, thank you, Mark. Um, I think you know, everything that you just said is very emblematic of what a lot of us are feeling and where a lot of our listeners are probably at right now. You know, I had the opportunity to join Thomas Massie at the People versus Poison Rally in DC last month. Mark and I also had the opportunity uh to attend his campaign headquartered launch party a few months ago. And so, you know, Massie has been someone who, in addition to seeing him on TV, you know, as this caricature, he's also you know become someone that it's just really high in my mind, a lot of people that are listeners of the show or members of the Kennedy Coalition may not totally realize you know how close to the ball uh along the river valley, which I know a lot of you are, like how close to Matthew really is. But his district is just on the other side of pretty much everything from Cincinnati to let's say uh Portsmouth area. And a lot of us probably spent a lot of time in that area of Kentucky. You know, and he's just he's just a far boy guy who uh made his way to kind of some of the highest levels of government through being someone who was a bit of a contrarian at times when we needed that energy. You know, he came into the Republican Party as part of that Tea Party generation of libertarians with Ron Paul and Rand Paul. And for so long, that was kind of this driving energy behind who he was. And you know, he represented, I think, that this part of the country so well in terms of our voices and our ideas that maybe this is a little bit, you know, more of a conservative or you know, right-leaning part of the country, broadly speaking. But we also have a lot of skepticism of corporate interests, and you know, we've suffered a lot from polluters, and even some of the most conservative communities, especially in Appalachian and the river valley, you know, regions of our state in Ohio, witness firsthand how toxic and damaging some of these chemicals and industrial contaminants are when they're put into our communities. You know, I can tell you, we all know that you should not ever eat anything that comes out of the Ohio River, and that's pretty sad. And Matthew really positioned himself as someone who, you know, was conservative financially, you know, very libertarian in his ideas and his principles, but also willing to stand up to power and acknowledge that you know when things have gone beyond capitalism and have turned into corporate bullying and the um you know abuse of this concept of sacrifices. And so beyond all the Epstein stuff, which I just like probably all of you listening, I'm very grateful to him for bringing so much of that to light and for standing up for what was clearly right. But I also just you know want to say that Matthew is he's emblematic of so many of us in this community, and you know, we certainly have not seen the end of him. What we really witnessed was more than just someone who stood up to Trump kind of being punished for that. We saw someone who represented the way that so many people in our community are feeling basically be extinguished by a billionaire casino owner and these super packs who took issue with the ideas that represent the way that so many of us feel. And so I think that that's something that should inspire the hell out of all of us to say whether you're you know, you identify with this appalacian part of the state or you're someone in a completely different region with you know completely different set of problems and things that you've dealt with by communities not being put first by our government. You know, I think that this is something that should inspire all of us to figure out, you know, what can we do to make sure that next time um the elites and big money want to take out someone who represents our ideas that we're not gonna let that happen. Um and so I encourage all of you, as Mark reaches out to you, to just think about um what's it worth to you and you know how much how might you be willing to um contribute and to get involved because we definitely need more people who are willing, you know, to just show up and be leaders, uh, because there are definitely times we know that it doesn't seem clear maybe what it is that we could or should be doing. Um, but it's obvious after moments like what happened with the Ohio and Kentucky primaries that there is more that we could have been doing and should have been doing. And honestly, to be able to deploy and activate the way that we were on the Kennedy campaign, um, we need more leaders. We need more people who are willing to show up and and be creative and help us come up with ways to engage people and get the work done. So with that being said, I am going to pass it over to Danny to tell y'all a little bit about the policy accelerator event that we did in Columbus with State Forum and our friends at Why Should I Trust You?

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Yeah, thanks. It was a really awesome event. I'm glad I got to talk about it a little bit. It really brought a whole bunch of people together that we didn't even know if everyone was gonna be able to make it or if everyone was gonna be a part of it, but it brought so many people from different parts of the political spectrum and the knowledge spectrum and just a whole different understanding of policy. So it was a good to have all these different opinions. There were Maha people, doctors, Democrats, Republicans, lawmakers. So, and we also had people who were affected from the East Palestine chemical spill that were there to talk about their story and what was happening to them. So it was a really awesome event to have all these people in the room who usually don't end up talking to each other. They kind of maybe hear about their stories from one side or the other, maybe kind of get a reference of it. But to have everyone in a room to actually speak was really nice. I know it's kind of an old school idea, but if people aren't talking and people aren't coming together, then it is hard for ideas to grow and to be shared. Talked about a few different things throughout the policy accelerator. We talked about glyphosate and if it's good for farmers, if it's not good for farmers, the chemical issues that are involved with it, is it causing cancer? We went through a whole bunch of different issues that are glyphosate related and really diving deep into that. We had kind of both sides in a way talking about how for glyphosate for some farmers they consider it not as bad of an issue because they don't do it stuff for so many acres. Other people saying that glyphosate has really negatively affected them. So it was very nice to kind of hear all sides that went without without somebody else's interpretation, but hearing from people who were involved there. And then we also talked about the chemical disaster of East Palestine and how it wasn't handled correctly in a lot of aspects, and how a lot of people are still suffering from the issues of the chemical spill and not retrieving the money that they should have gotten, or not being able to actually be identified or or taken care of. And it's a really sad situation that people are still affected by all this uh problems from uh a company that uh didn't really do their job or wasn't responsible enough to take care of the safety on their side. So it allowed for all these people to have their whole lives change, the whole community change. And now the community uh struggles to even come together on what they really think or know what is happening because so many people have gotten involved and said so many different things. So it's been, you know, an upsetting course of event for all the people in East Palestine and and the areas around East Palestine. It wasn't just there that was affected, you know, it was an awesome Pennsylvania area. It's really good to be able to talk to these people and hear their stories and have them even talking to the researchers who are on the ground and the professors who are involved with doing all that. It was nice for them to be able to have a dialogue. And then the other area we talked about was data centers and what they're affecting our farmland and our water system and our electricity, and how it's not that we don't we want all AI to end and we don't, you know, we want all technology to stop. It's that data centers need to be kind of done in a more responsible way, at least in Ohio, because they're not being done uh properly from what how we look at it as far as putting in these giant infrastructures who are gonna only end up hiring maybe five or six people after everything is said and done, and in five years could be obsolete based off of the technology we we don't know. So if they could uh have smaller, more efficient ones, that would be more of an ideal situation than having these large acre-long data centers that might uh be shut down in five years because they're obsolete and they don't need them anymore, and they're gonna poison the water and the ground, and people are gonna lose their communities and lose their sense of the town that they're in, and uh generation of farmers are gonna be gone, and there's not gonna be any kind of repercussion for it. It's just they got paid for their land. We put in the data centers, you guys chose this, and that's not really the right way to look at it. So data centers are definitely a major issue, especially for uh rural areas, poor rural areas where there's been farmers who have been struggling for generations without being able to make any kind of money. So they're taking these opportunities because their family is either getting out of the farming business altogether or they just can't afford it anymore because they're being taxed out of out of their farms or just losing all their land. And so they are taking some of these people are taking the data centers, and it's not that they're bad people, and it's not that they're should be you know criticized for any of this kind of stuff because it's literally some of their only options to like uh keep their family going. So that makes it a difficult situation because you can't uh necessarily be mad at the farmers for finally being able to make uh a living for their family. That should be that we should be providing a better way for farmers to make a living for their family instead of data centers taking over and uh taking over land. I mean, that's uh that's what the option really should be. So having the state forum uh event in Ohio and Columbus was really good because uh you know it's the center of Ohio and it's where our lawmakers are. And it was Ohio is one of these areas that are being affected by chemicals and rural, we have all kinds of different things going on in Ohio that need to be resolved. So having an policy accelerate aimed at solving these problems instead of just you know talking about them and not really having any resolutions. And we came up with a lot of good ideas at this accelerator. We had a lot of you know interesting people there. You had uh Tim Ryan was there, for example, he's a former congressman, he's a consultant, he was there. Uh, he spoke at a Mahop and DC later, and you know, we even had a few different professors come in. We had a few different people that were there just really giving a bunch of educated sponsors things. So it was really nice to have a States Forum event like this, and we are probably gonna gain some good knowledge out of this event. We hope to have more because the more that we have, the more knowledge we'll be able to collect and actually come up with better resolutions instead of just uh ideas on the situation. So when we have more states forums events or events like state forum events, policy accelerators that we'll definitely let everyone know about them before we have them and afterwards. So that's kind of my opinion on the state forums event. So I guess I'll pass it over to uh Mark.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Yeah, and uh one other person who was at the States Forum event was Amy Acton. Uh she was also there. Um I will say she did not participate near as much as Tim Ryan. So kind of put a little flowers at Tim Ryan's feet there for staying and being a little more active and involved. But uh she did appear and uh want to say we did get a chance to speak with her and she was able to hear these concerns from the you know, from the actual residents in East Palestine and people directly affected by those things.

SPEAKER_02 22:22

And and Danny Isaacson as well, who is the Democratic House minority leader, was also there and stayed for the whole event, participated, especially in the data center conversation, which we really appreciated. And you know, we were we were quite impressed by the willingness of some of the leaders within the democratic um you know within the state to join us and participate. Obviously, we need a lot more of that energy to you know fully create a bipartisan ecosystem for Maha policy in the state, but it was a great start, and you know, we're particularly grateful to Tim Ryan and to Danny Isaacson for staying and participating with such rigor and curiosity. It was it was really it was really an honor for us to have them with us that day.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

Well, thank you all for uh tuning in. Um we've been very busy, there's a lot going on in the country right now, and we're just kind of, you know, like we were saying throughout the episode today, refocusing and looking at what we're going to be doing. So do expect to hear from me individually. Please do sign up on the Maha Ohio website. If you're not sure if you're signed up there or signed up and on the list that I'll be calling through and you really do want to hear from me, uh make sure you sign up on the Maha Ohio website or you know, you can reach out to me directly if you have my contact info. I'd love to hear from you. But I am also going to try to reach out to everybody that I can. So if for some reason uh you aren't hearing from me and you want to, I'm just gonna go ahead and say you can always contact me. And the best way to share your contact information with the Maha movement here in Ohio in general is through the Maha Ohio website. So thank you all so much for what you're doing. Stay strong through these really trying and changing times and do look forward to speaking with you all individually. And then uh thank you, Elizabeth and Danny, for being on the call with me today. And I'm gonna pass it to you guys to say anything you want to say here at the end.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

Thank you all. We look forward to engaging with you all more again soon, and we're just so grateful for everything that each of you have done, starting with your contributions on the Kennedy campaign. It really has made all the difference for us to have the political saliencies that we do have today, even when we um you know have even when we have to take losses to the chin, like with what happened with Massey. We really are, you know, an incredibly strong and powerful movement of people and ideas. And we're just, you know, Mark, Danny, and I are super grateful to be a part of this with each of you guys and look forward to sharing more updates about everything coming soon in the next episode.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Yeah, thank you guys for everything. We appreciate your support and being there. And we are gonna keep doing everything we can on our end to keep things going in the right direction. So appreciate everyone listening and participating. Thank you very much. The power of God.