Tables Turned

by Joan Conrow, Kauai Eclectic, October 20, 2015 (excerpt)

Something monumental happened on Molokai last week. The people didn't get played.

Ashley Lukens, director of the Hawaii Center for Food Safety, brought her anti-GMO/anti-ag/anti-pesticide dog and pony show to Kaunakakai. And frankly, she got her ass whooped, metaphorically speaking.

Facing a crowd that included not her usual true believers, but folks who actually work in the seed fields, Lukens was peppered with questions she wouldn't answer and criticisms she couldn't deflect until she turned tail and ran.

“I'm gonna shut it down here because I don't see it going in a good direction,” she told a crowd that began calling out, “why won't you take all the questions?” and “why didn't you bring someone from the health department?” and “what kind of doctor are you?”

When Ashley replied she had a doctorate in political science, one man replied, “Yeah and you want to spin this politically, for your own agenda.”

Robert Stevenson, president of the Molokai Chamber of Commerce, asked Ashley, who was there pimping the biased CFS “Pesticides in Paradise” report, why she was using cherry-picked data “that promotes the entrepreneurial agenda of the conflict industry.”

Visibly shaken in the face of pushback far more polite than what her own movement regularly dishes out, Ashley folded and beat a quick retreat....

read ... Tables Turned

LINK: Audio of last five minutes of presentation before Lukens quit