Broadcasting across the state of Wisconsin on the Civic Media Radio Network and around the world on the Civic Media app.
This is the Dom Salvia show.
And now, here's your host, Dom Salvia.
Actually, not Dom Salvia.
Dom's on vacation.
I'm Matt Rothschild.
I'm subbing in again for Dom as I did yesterday afternoon.
Glad you can be with us.
And you can join the conversation at any time by dialing 855-752-4842.
That's 855-752-4842.
And we got a great show here.
I have Earl Ingram, of course, the host of the Earl Ingram show that runs on many of these civic media radio stations for the first half hour.
And then at 430, Joe Zappecki, the campaign and communications whizz will be joining me.
And then delighted to have Dave Zyram.
sports editor at The Nation magazine and a great activist joining at the five o'clock hour.
But first, I want to enter into conversation with Earl in grooms.
Nice to see you, Earl, as always.
It's good to see you.
You don't quite look like Dom.
No, no.
And I'm a little more low key sometime, but I love coming on Dom show, you know, I'm a regular on on what I like to call it.
The Dom and Jess show on Wednesday afternoons.
And it's fun to be on all the time with those two great people.
And then hosting is kind of a different ball of wax, but I enjoy doing that.
I love talking to people.
And I know you're a pro at that, or you're a great talker and a great listener.
Those two don't always go together, but they go together with you.
And I wanted to start off with some breaking news.
and sad news for Wisconsin progressive journalists and newspaper readers, especially for folks in the Milwaukee area.
The great columnist Joel McNally has passed away at 80.
For 27 years, he worked at the Journal.
And then for a couple of decades more at the Shepherd Express, he was a feature on radio in Milwaukee and on public TV in Milwaukee for many, many years.
Earl, your thoughts on the passing of Joel McNally.
And then, you know, you send me an email or text message, whatever it was, and it broke my heart.
Joe McNally was a dear, dear friend.
We both worked at a radio station.
We're missing a little bit of audio there.
Try coming back here for a second or I'll keep going.
All right.
Willie Davis, the former Green Bay Packer.
Hall of Famer on the radio station.
And because of that, we were able to, you know, work together on the same radio station at the same radio station for a number of years and became really good and dear friends.
And so I watched Joel's career from radio and other
and other things, so just heartbreaking.
Very heartbreaking.
He was a great liberal voice, progressive voice.
He wrote a couple times for me at the Progressive Magazine when I was there.
He was at Fighting Bob Fest a couple times.
He wrote for the Shepherd Express for the last couple decades.
He wrote a couple columns after Trump won.
And I want to just read a little bit of that, and then we're going to hear a little of his own voice.
But this is Joel McNally's column from November 18th at the Shepherd Express where he said, Trump has the worst presidential cabinet in history, which is 180 degrees from what Elon Musk told us yesterday.
And Joel McNally said, the ideology of the Republican Party is no longer conservatism,
but destroying democracy.
And he warned that the election was not a roaring mandate for Trump to destroy the Constitution, which is basically what he's doing.
He also talked about the Wisconsin Supreme Court race and said electing Susan Crawford will be critical to preserving the progressive majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
He noted that Chimmel tried to destroy our right to vote by filing a lawsuit to suspend the results here in Wisconsin.
And so he urged you and all of us at the very end of his life to, you know, keep involved in politics, both for Susan Crawford on April 1st.
He urged you and all of us at the very end of his life to stand up to Donald Trump.
Here's what he said in one of these columns, Trump can always be counted on to do everything he can to draw attention to himself.
It'll become increasingly outrageous, but it will keep Americans engaged in protecting our constitutional rights.
We somehow need, he said, to convince a majority of Americans that democracy is worth fighting for.
And Joe McNally always fought for our democracy.
What
more do you want to add to that?
I will miss him immensely.
He was a friend, a really good friend.
I could call Joe and he and his wife decided about seven years ago to move to Charlottesville.
Virginia and and just enjoy life He was so full of life and he was a battler the thing I loved about Joe McNally Joe McNally's was a bear knuckles brawler and and so if you ever got into a Debate with Joe McNally the kitchen sink would be thrown into the debate
Into he's just was just a guy who had so much fight in him Man, there's only gonna be one Joe McNally.
I miss him already knowing that he's gone He was he was a good friend and we just had some and when I got into this Type of environment he helped me so much because I didn't do this for a living and I came into it late
And he just helped me all the way through it.
So man, my heart breaks.
Yeah, it's heartbreaking.
Joe McNally's voice is no longer there.
Yeah.
And you have my condolences, Earl.
I didn't know him nearly as well as you did, but I respected him greatly.
He was a warrior.
He was a happy warrior.
You know, he'd throw the kitchen sink at you and then smile the next sentence, which is another nice aspect of his personality.
And you know that that land.
that was only Joel McNally's, right?
He always laughed.
He had this great laugh.
And yeah, that'll be missed.
Yeah, I think we got a little bit of his voice that Jess has prepared for us.
So let's just hear a minute of Joel McNally as we remember him.
A lot has changed since I've been here, but boy, a whole lot hasn't.
When I came to town, you know what?
I came to Milwaukee.
Henry Meyer was...
and I had an image of him as a young, progressive, democratic mayor.
I got here and found out he was at war with the whole Civil Rights Movement, James Gropy and Val Phillips, and pretty soon I found out that I was also one of his enemies and that he was at war with me and at war with all the press.
But he wasn't wrong about everything either.
He and Pat Lucy created the state-shared revenue so that municipalities and counties would have part of the income tax from this state to pay their bills, and it didn't all have to come out of the backs of the property taxpayers.
And that existed for decades until the current administration.
People are a little baffled by how confident I am that things are always going to get better, and progressing things are going to win out ultimately.
But I've seen it happen during my lifetime.
I saw Barack Obama elected president during my lifetime, which I never expected to see.
That was nine years ago the voice of Joel McNally.
How confident was he in your last conversations, Earl, about us turning things around?
Well, so Joel McNally always called himself a cacide optimist.
And I never will I never will forget because I think it's from Indiana As a matter of fact, I know it's from Indiana and so he was a real guy and And so I used to always laugh at him and we used to because I was always a pessimist and Every time I'd have him on the air he would he would always say but Earl you know me I'm the old cock-eyed optimist and I you know things always going he always believed
That things would get better.
He always had a belief in mankind It was at the root of who he was his spirit And and all of those things just a loving human being but man a fighter to the end Here's a guy who as I stated before was was going through Something the last year or so of his life with the dialysis and
and those kinds of things, but he never stopped being connected to what made him who he was.
At the root of who Joe McNally was is a man who was willing to stand up and fight for others.
And so I will continue his legacy until my last breath.
Joe, I'm a part of Joe McNally is in me.
And so I'll continue to make sure that what he fought for as long as I get the opportunity won't ever die.
And some of the things he fought for labor rights.
He was a big union organizer I think he was a shop steward at the journal at the journal before it became the journal sent No, he opposed that merger.
He got booted out after the merger Which was a horrible thing to do to such a great columnist He was a huge supporter of civil rights and civil liberties a great supporter of independent journalism a critic of monopoly journalism of this journalism is being gobbled up these papers gobbled up by one
corporation after another.
Now they're what six or seven huge corporations that own most newspapers in the country and our newspaper industry is dying as they keep laying off people.
So he was a champion of the First Amendment, champion of the trade of journalism and champion of a lot of our rights.
So if you the listener want to weigh in with your remembrances of Joel McNally, do so at 855-752-4842.
That's 855-75.
Civic you can call or text us.
And we'd be glad to hear from you about Joel McNally, who's died today at 80.
A tremendous progressive voice in this state and in Milwaukee.
Great journalist, a great colleague of Earl's, friend of Earl's, acquaintance of mine.
I don't want to overstate my relationship with Joel McNally.
But he was someone I always from afar admired greatly.
And I was saddened to hear the news.
You know, it's weird when you hear the news on Facebook.
You're not sure if it's true or not.
This has happened to me a couple of times in the last year.
of people I've really admired and one close friend who I found out on Facebook.
It's just a weird way to find this stuff out.
But there you have it, Joel McNally, the great voice from the Milwaukee Journal and the Shepherd Express, no longer with us and will be sorely missed.
We've got one more minute here, Earl.
Do you want to add anything more before we move on?
So may God rest his soul and his wonderful wife of all of those years who
who was with him and by him and they were inseparable.
And she did some great things in the city with her life.
And so may God rest his soul.
Job well done, well done, my faithful servant Joe McNally, well done.
Joe McNally, rest in peace, rest in power.
We'll be right back in the Dom Salvia
Show.
Matt Rothschild here, subbing in for a Dom on the Dom Salvia show.
I'm here with Jess P.S.
and with Earl Ingram of the Earl Ingram show that runs on many of these civic media radio stations in the mornings.
Earl, we got a text from Matt from Middleton who says, seems a big part of Project 2025 is going back to before the civil rights victories.
Can you explain what going back means for Americans, particularly people of color?
Do you want to take that, Earl?
Well, I can tell you I don't know if it was today or I Did commentary on my show this morning about What is transpiring right now and you know, we hear a lot about rural America and What's happening to rural America?
I live in urban America and I and I and I talked about if you
Look at poverty and the numbers were the in America 2023 native Americans 22% in poverty African Americans 18% Hispanic Americans no Yeah, Hispanic Americans 16.6% And it was others I think
9% but white Americans 7% and I talked about the fact that The constant talk about what's happening to real Americans and they're struggling and the pain they're feeling and yet nobody talks about the pain of people who live in the cities and especially people who Have been marginalized and who are going to get the worst end of this Donald Trump train
It's always the people at the bottom who are going to be damaged the most.
And let's not mistake ourselves.
Affirmative action two years ago was wiped off the books.
And now diversity, equity and inclusion, which is an attack.
that Donald Trump and others have basically shut down in major corporations across this nation, anybody who's willing to talk about equity and diversity in a nation that is that.
And so Project 2020, 2025 at the root of it is that and Donald Trump is not smart enough, a man.
to have concocted what is taking place in this nation.
People should be aware of that.
This is bigger than him.
He's nothing more than just a guy who's in a suit and who will be gone.
But this clearly is something that will happen.
And I don't know how we get out of it, Matt.
I really don't.
know the damage is going to be totally severe in this nation and the pain and suffering.
I don't see how it can be turned around.
You know, I heard you this morning on your show, Earl Ingram, saying a similar thing.
You said we're in a horrible, horrible place and I don't know how things are going to get better.
You must have an inkling of things that we could do that might make things better even though
the odds are stacked against us right now.
And they've got all the power.
I mean, they got the U.S.
Supreme Court, they've got the White House, they got the Senate, they got the House.
So, I mean, the power equation is not in our favor.
But we do have people.
We do know how to organize.
We do know how to speak up and you speak up every morning.
Dom speaks up every afternoon.
So does Jane, so does Maggie, so does Todd Albao, and so do, you know, a lot of people nationally like Robert Rice or...
or Heather Richardson, who my wife loves, and AOC and Bernie and folks like that, speaking up.
And I'm seeing more and more people at the grassroots.
So there was a protest in Milwaukee two days ago in defense of Medicaid.
There was a protest at Ron Johnson's office also here in Madison that I attended with foreign or other people.
I think people are getting over the shock of what happened in November and our...
furious at what Donald Trump and his co-president or deputy president, Elon Musk, whoever you want to call him, is doing.
And so I see the resistance building, don't you?
So let me say two things quickly, because we only got a couple minutes.
Let's understand that almost 50% of the American people don't vote.
The other 50% is split down the middle.
And so we're talking about a society that I don't see what's gonna bring them together, the people together, the people are divided.
So, you know, the United, we stand divided, we fall.
We're divided.
So who brings us back together?
There is no magic bullet.
There is no person who has the personality, I think, in the wings.
that is going to be able to show up and bring all these different factions of Americans back together.
These people have organized and done some damage.
Oh, the damage is quite substantial.
But, you know, I don't think we're not gonna get, there's no figure who's gonna ride, you know, out of the sunset or into the sunset and save us.
We gotta save ourselves.
And we need to talk to everybody in our community.
People who didn't vote especially people who have voters remorse right now who voted for Trump and now regret it may have gotten fired You know people who may still be clinging to some hope with Trump But we can have conversations with them not the folks flying the Confederate flags or having the Nazi swastikas on their biceps We shouldn't be talking with them.
We can't change their minds and might be dangerous But everybody else we need to have conversations and try to bring people around otherwise Otherwise we're not gonna get there
Well, at least we do have one thing in our favor and that's a civic media That we didn't have before and so there's always hope You know just at this age in my life and seeing things through the prism that I see them I hope that I'm wrong and for the sake of our society in the world We've got to turn this around
Yes, we do.
I want to thank Earl Ingram for being my guest.
If you want to hear more from Earl Ingram, I had a conversation, a podcast with Earl on Civic Media's website, civicmedia.us, on how racism infects our politics here in Wisconsin.
And I got to thank you, Earl.
You provided so much wisdom, so much insight, and also some very fascinating anecdotes about your own personal history that it was one of the best podcasts I've been able to do, really relished that opportunity.
So thank you again.
Hey Matt, it's an honor and a privilege in any time my friend.
Thank you.
Thank you
ladies.
We'll be right back on the down south issue.
I'm Matt Rothschild.
Hey, Matt Rothschild here, subbing in for Dom on the Dom Salvia Show.
We got Jess P.S.
on the board.
It was always great listening to Earl Ingram.
I could listen to him all day long.
What a voice, what a perspective.
I do want to take a couple texts that we've received about the passing of Joel McNally.
died today or at least we were notified that he died today great journalist and progressive voice down in Milwaukee wrote for the journal Sentinel for 27 years and the Shepherd Express for a couple decades We have Bob from Glendale who says he met Joel several times seemed like a genuine nice guy Certainly was genuine is the word and CJ who is often
The Bette Noir of Civic Media was kind enough to send a sympathetic text saying, sorry for the loss of your friend, Earl Mattendom.
That was really sweet of you, Jay.
We can disagree on politics and still be human beings.
So appreciate that.
I want you to call or text if you want to join the conversation, 855-752-4842.
That's 855-75 Civic.
And I'm delighted that...
We have, as my next guest, Joe Zipecki.
Joe Zipecki is the founder of Zipecki Communications.
He's a veteran of several political campaigns.
Too many to
count.
I was going to ask.
His friends call him Jay Z. And he lives in Milwaukee and he joins us.
Hi, Joe.
How are you doing?
I'm OK, man.
Thanks for having me.
I am also sending along
Warm thoughts to the McNally family.
I was talking to my wife in the car, Melissa Baldoff.
She also works in political communications and had occasion to work with Joel multiple times.
And it was very sad to hear about his passing.
So may his memory be a blessing and all our love to all those who he managed to touch in some way with his writing over the years.
Yeah, absolutely.
I know there are a lot of people on Facebook.
Weighing in the journal sentinel has an article they posted about two hours ago Jim Rohn Great journalist himself is coded in there Extensively and I'm sure it's a sad day for him and everyone who was called Joel McNally a close friend as Earl Ingram did I was just an acquaintance, but listen
Joe, I want to get your expertise.
Yesterday, I had Lisa Lucas on from all in Wisconsin.
She's a love Lisa expert.
Yeah, she's just a great person.
And we had a great conversation.
I love her do's and don'ts about how to message.
And I think it's I think it's very useful for our listeners here at Civic Media to get tips from pros like Lisa and from you.
So why don't you give us a communications tip about how we can talk with our neighbors who
you know, may have voted for Trump, but don't like Trump, don't like what he's doing now, or maybe they didn't vote, you know, they're not hardcore right-wingers, but, you know, they're not watching politics every day like we do and talking about politics every day.
What's the strategy you're attacking, communication
ones?
They're still the sane ones.
Well, I'm going to nerd out for just a second because yesterday, the season two teaser trailer for Andor.
was released.
And the soundtrack to the teaser trailer was Steve Earl's The Revolution Starts Now.
There wasn't a lot of dialogue in the trailer, but there was a line from Cassie and Andorra that jumped out to me.
Do you want to fight?
Or do you want to win?
We want to win.
And so we have to be conscious and smart and strategic about how we communicate all the time.
Earlier this week, I, for the first time, was in a room with Judge Crawford and her old boss, former governor Jim Doyle, gave a few remarks.
And I thought he hit the nail on the head, which is that we are all feeling all kinds of feels when it comes to what Donald Trump and co-president Elon Musk, who is literally a bond villain, are doing to this country, okay?
And we can be mad at them.
And we can take out our anger on them.
But we need to understand that the people who voted for Donald Trump are our neighbors.
They are the people we go to church with, or in a softball league with, or our kids are on the same t-ball team.
And we cannot let our anger at Trump and Musk consume ourselves to the point
where we stop viewing our neighbors as our neighbors.
We need to talk with them, we need to listen to them, we need to hear them, and we need to stand up for what we believe in all at the same time.
And we can do that respectfully, we can disagree respectfully, and we can hold our convictions dearly because they are important to us.
And given what Musk and Trump are up to, we are going to find
a lot of opportunity to pull people over to our side in these times.
When you look at issue after issue, from the corruption to the devastation of things the federal government should do and is the only entity that can do.
People who voted for Donald Trump are going to feel and disagree with slashing the VA.
making it harder for the men and women who wore this country's uniform in the armed services to get the health care they need.
Communities that voted for Donald Trump are going to feel the impact of dramatic cuts to Medicaid.
In fact, rural communities are going to be impacted more so than our cities are by this sledgehammer that they're taken to Medicaid.
And so we need to stick to the facts.
We need to.
I think respond to every nonsense charge and allegation, and we can be a little bit more forward-leaning when some knucklehead radio yacker starts claiming that Tony Evers wants to change the definition of anyone who carries a child to term and call it out for the BS that it is.
If we do all of those things, as Donald Trump and Elon Musk crash the economy and wreck the federal government and everything that it provides,
We're going to be just fine politically.
You know, this is one of the things that I've been talking about for months now.
We can't say that everybody who voted for Trump is an evil person or a far-right racist and that they're incorrigible.
And part of the problem, I think, for some of us, and maybe it's a Madisonismist problem more than anything, but, you know, it's...
You don't some depending on the neighborhood you live in you might not bump into someone for a week Who voted for Trump?
Exactly on your location and so that is and I used to live one block from West High in Madison I could go a long time without running into someone who voted for Donald Trump and so then you get a weird perspective that you know, they're just
you know, a different species of human being.
And that's a terrible thing for our democracy.
It's also a terrible thing for doing politics, because, you know, the art of politics is not only getting your side out, but convincing some other folks to come around to your side.
So I just I want people to
hear what you had to say there about talking to people at your book club or at your poker game or at your tennis match or wherever, who may not be with you now, but they'll be pushed.
Trump and Musk are pushing people into our arms as we speak.
Yes.
And this is not the first time that an American president has threatened the Constitution or American values.
I'm reading a book right now, the president versus the people that goes all the way back to John Adams in.
really trying to stretch the definition of executive authority.
And the thesis of this book is that it was not necessarily institutions of government that pushed back.
It wasn't always the Supreme Court.
In fact, there were American presidents who conspired with the US Supreme Court to make it take longer for black Americans to be recognized fully and equally under the law.
What made it possible for America to get through these trying times was we the people.
We are the sovereign and we have the ability to win back power, to claw back power, and to ensure that guardrails that erode or fall by the wayside are not only rebuilt, but are rebuilt back stronger for the future.
And that is what we have to try to figure out how to do.
We cannot fight for fighting's sake.
We have to win.
We have to win back political power so that we can reestablish these guardrails, reassert American values at home and around the world.
And if we are strategic and smart and committed, we can do that.
And by the way, I'm a coach.
If you need to take a player two off, that's OK.
Somebody else can step in for you.
If you've just had it and you're not able to not scream at people and you need to take a few plays, take a few plays off.
We've got time here.
Joe, what do you coach?
I coach football and I have coached basketball.
Last year I coached a fifth grade boys basketball team, my little buddies, and I went and saw them as sixth graders this year.
I wasn't able to coach the team this year because the election got in the way at the start of the season, but there was a lot of fun to see how much they've improved in a year.
And what age football are you coaching?
High school.
I
coach it.
Wittnell High School, which is where I played back in the 1900s as the kids like to remind me when they're being sassy.
And I have been coaching there for seven years.
What position did you play?
Defensive back.
I was a corner.
Oh, there you go.
A corner who hit Mr. Hit on the my senior year.
You'd like to hit.
That's right.
Within the
lines.
Legalized hitting.
Yeah, I did.
I did some I coach soccer for.
many years as my kids were very young until about fifth or sixth grade.
So that was fun.
I loved coaching.
Once in a while, someone will still call me coach, which is kind of a funny thing.
You probably get that all the time.
I do, and it's a great honor every time.
Yeah, it's just a great thing.
It's a great way to participate.
Sometimes the parents would get on my nerves, but I tried to let that go, you know.
They're rooting for their kid and want their kid to get more playing time.
I understand that.
But look, I mean, we have this
problem of, of just communicating within our tent.
And what I like about what you're saying here is we got to get outside the tent.
We got to communicate civilly.
And that's what we try to do here on civic media.
And one of the great things about civic media is we appreciate dialogue.
You know, I appreciate when CJ calls, you know, we can have dialogue unless he's
uh, just reading off a script or, uh, you know, just doing one, one argument after another that he hears on Fox news.
I like having conversation.
I believe in conversation.
You know, I'm kind of an old John Stuart mill guy.
You know, I think if we all could just have conversation, truth will out ideally.
Maybe Fox news has disproven that, but I still have some faith in
it.
And I, and I still, I think that is part of the challenge that we're all navigating is that the way that information environment has changed and evolved, it used to be.
there were just a couple of stories that humans could tell each other and themselves, right?
That mass media was only capable of carrying a couple narratives at a time.
And now we live in a world where everybody can find a story that is unique to them or unique to their smaller silo.
And in some ways, that's good and helpful.
In other ways, it's dangerous.
And as humans, we just haven't figured out how to navigate this new reality.
I mean, when you think about the power of story and what it means to our human
evolution.
What's the oldest thing that humanity still does?
Sit around a fire and tell stories.
There is something that we are wired for where we want to hear stories.
And we got to figure out what story to tell.
We got to tell a lot of stories, a lot of different ways through a lot of different mediums.
And if we figure out how to do that, we're going to win back some power.
We're going to be able to rebuild these guardrails and reestablish American leadership.
And that's what's so sad is to watch
places around the world where there is genuine suffering.
Here at home, listen, economic times are tough, but there is not the degree of suffering that we have now foisted upon starving children in Africa, people dealing with AIDS on the continent, the people on the front lines of the battlefield in Ukraine.
That is life and death, and they are feeling it much more acutely than we are so far.
Because of these cuts to USAID and other things that...
Elon Musk is doing.
And the story that Trump has been saying for a long time is, you know, it's all the immigrants fault or it's DEI.
And the story we need to say is this is a government right now of buying for the billionaires so they can enrich themselves even further.
And we're going to suffer as a consequence.
I think if we keep telling that story and reminding people about why we need government, why we need, you know, national parks, why we need Medicaid and the VA and these other things, then I think we'll be able to.
recapture some power, and it's about recapturing power, and maybe we'll talk after the break here, Joe, in about a minute or two about the upcoming Wisconsin Supreme Court, because that's when we can get some power.
We've got a couple callers on the line.
Gary and CJ, I see you.
We will take your call right after this break.
You're listening to The Dom Salvia Show.
I'm Matt Rothschild.
Subbin in for Dom.
Today was on vacation.
We'll be right back with Joseph Pecky.
Yeah, Rothschild with you on the Dom Salvia show.
Dom's on vacation, so Jess and I are still here, though.
And so is Joe Zipecki.
He's the founder of Zipecki Communications, a veteran of many political campaigns and a communications expert, of course.
We've got a couple of callers, Joe, so let's take the calls.
I think we got Gary from Sussex first, right, Jess?
Yep, you're on, Gary.
Oh, hi.
Hi, you guys.
I couldn't agree more.
with Joe when he was talking about talking to the neighbors.
That's exactly what I do.
Having discussions with people, I'm a heating contractor and I just got done with the job and I just left it.
And this guy is a staunch Democrat.
And when I got done with the job, we had a really nice time talking.
We joked around and he asked me what I thought and I told him what I thought and I give my opinion.
And I told him that, you know,
Trump said what he was going to do.
He's going to be a dictator in day one.
He still got voted in by 54% of the people.
So nobody should be surprised.
But let's just give him a chance and see what happens.
And if we can start paying off this $2 trillion that we might be able to get back and pay off the debt, that might be good.
Well, thanks, Gary.
You know, the reason they want to pay off that $2 trillion, though, is not to reduce the debt, but just to give themselves an allowance so that they can give the billionaires and the millionaires all that tax for that $2 billion back in tax breaks.
So it's not going to help out on the deficit.
It's just a cover for the deficit and them increasing the debt.
You know, I'm not surprised.
I think you're right, Gary.
And thanks for the call.
And thanks for the tone, too.
Appreciate it.
I don't think anybody should be surprised about what Trump is doing, because he told us pretty much what he was going to do.
And if you're a student of history, you know the kind of spots that Donald Trump has, and he's not going to change his spots.
So I'm not surprised what he's doing, but I don't think we should just sit back and wait and see how many people suffer.
I don't believe in going that way.
But I appreciate the call.
CJ, you're next.
And thanks again, CJ, for your comment about Joel McNally.
Appreciate that.
Yeah, that's sad.
It's never easy.
And my condolences to everybody and his family and friends.
But Matt, I think we're a pretty good example of people that can talk about things and not go off on the deep end on each other.
I actually agree with Gary that, you know, I wish they'd start covering.
He just had his fourth leader, country's leader here, the UK.
And, you know, it's a beautiful thing that we have a transparent president who actually answers any question right now.
And it's, I think it's amazing.
He's talking now peace, ending the Ukraine war with Russia or finding a peace agreement.
He's doing it with Israel.
I think now our allies respect us.
Well, I appreciate the call.
CJ, Joe wants to weigh in here, so it's all yours, Joe.
Yeah, listen, I will never...
Automatically line up behind someone who professes to want peace in the world.
I want to be really clear about that what I have a problem with is when For the first time in American history We've apparently changed sides in the middle of a conflict and are now on the side of Russia which rolled tanks across a border and tried to decapitate a democratically elected government in Zelensky's Ukraine and when yet
when Trump says we're going to negotiate and he sits down at a table with only Russia and doesn't even offer Ukraine a seat at the table, how much peace are we pursuing?
And when the president's national security advisor gets asked a point blank question, what concessions are you seeking from Russia?
And he cannot answer the question.
Sure, I appreciate the transparency that they're taking questions from the media, but that's not an acceptable answer.
to say that we want concessions from Ukraine, but not from Russia.
And for everybody who's concerned about all this money we've spent on Ukraine, more than 70% of it is money that went to American arms manufacturers to make things like new artillery shells because we shipped our old ones to Ukraine.
So we are investing in American manufacturing, we are hiring American workers, and we are modernizing our arsenal all at the same time.
So we need to understand that.
if we're going to have a conversation about what's going on in Europe.
Yeah.
And Norris, his peace plan, so called for, for guys are going to do any good.
And his idea about setting up a, you know, cancun in on the Mediterranean there.
That's just a non-starter.
The only thing I agree with CJ is that, you know, Trump is communicating, you know, every day with the American people.
And I wish Joe Biden had done a better job of that when he was president.
So I will, I'll plus
up
that one too.
I will give you that.
Do we have time for one more call, Jess?
We can probably squeeze in Joe from Madison.
All
right.
Hey, Joe, what's on your mind?
I just wanted to point out that we've been talking about DEI in this hour and Joe, you were talking about the stories that we tell ourselves.
Why can we not get the story across that the original, the best DEI defender ever was Vince Wombardi?
There's a great story in UpNorthNewsWI.com and it talks about, this has been talked about before, that this man, he absolutely nailed it.
In 1959, first time he was the Packers coach, he had, there was one black player, he immediately added 12 more and he hired the first black assistant in the NFL.
Sorry, Joe.
Thanks, Joe.
I
got to cut you off because we're at a heartbreak, but really appreciate the call.
And Joseph Peck, you really appreciate you being on as a guest here on The Dom Salvia Show.
We'll be right back.
Thanks for
having me, Coach.
