what's going on everybody you're in the right place yes this is the rational revolution i'm so glad that you're here every week here on civic media radio network you've got me mark becker and you've got a returning guest who pivoted better than lebron james did to come and hang out with us today
I asked him late yesterday, hey, can you, do you know anyone?
Would you be able to?
Cause, cause man, we gotta, we gotta sort out what's going in Iran.
And there's nobody better to do it than your friend and mine, Jeff Cabba Service from the NIS Canon Center.
What's up buddy?
Welcome back.
Hey, good to be with you again.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm so glad that you're here.
Your travels have looked amazing by the way.
You know, dude's been everywhere in the world and yeah.
But Iran, what is happening there?
That's a darn good question.
I mean, on the one hand, we are talking in a moment when things are unsettled.
There's been this two-week truce declared.
It's not quite clear if all sides are adhering to the truce as yet.
There's been a 10-point plan put forward by Iran, a 15-point plan put forward by us.
It's unclear if serious negotiation is going on regarding these points or what will result at the end of it all.
And we're also just not being told a lot about what goes on and there isn't good reporting on the scene for perhaps obvious reasons.
Nonetheless, it's looking a lot like
The whole conflict has been a case of operational excellence on the part of our military and Strategic incoherence on the part of the administration and I suspect the peace will pretty closely resemble the war in that regard
Like how how did we get to this point?
Well
You know, you could go all the way back to the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew the Iranian leader Mosul Day.
But I think, you know, more generally, we got here because Donald Trump got reelected to a second term.
And he said that he was not going to be constrained by the old Republican establishment.
And indeed, he has only had around him yes men and sycophants.
And I suspect, you know, without any actual demonstrated documentary evidence of this, that when it was time to think about.
what the United States should do vis-a-vis Iran, that his enablers, like Pete Hegseth, said to him things like, Mr. President, you've shown that you don't need to listen to experts.
military people who war-gamed out the whole Straits of Hormuz situation 10,000 times.
You don't need to listen to the statesmen who talk about prudence.
You've just shown that you can just do things.
If you want to go in and take Iran, then you can take it.
And the hell with expert advice.
And that's largely why we're here.
And, you know, like, I look at it, yes, I mean, the military is...
Brilliant and overwhelming and you know with incredible precision So like that's awesome But but seeing the the rollout and this looks like a ready-shoot aim type thing It doesn't look like there's a lot of thought into what happened
Well, I think you know again, there were assumptions that proved to be incorrect that were baked into this whole adventure
The assumption number one was that the regime would collapse.
Well, that didn't happen.
Or that the Iranian people would rise up against what they correctly regard as an evil and oppressive regime.
That also didn't happen.
I think the assumption was that if you decapitated Iran's top leadership, then what remained would be incoherent.
Maybe they too would run for the exits.
Maybe they would be more moderate than their predecessors.
That hasn't happened.
Trump assumed that Iran would not strike out at the neighboring Gulf countries.
That hasn't happened.
And I think Hegseth and Trump.
All right.
Sorry.
We
lost you.
We're back.
You were talking about how we thought that Iran was going to leave the Straits of Hormuz open.
They would be open.
And then we had a glitch and we are back.
So continue that thought.
Sorry about that.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I think it's probably on my end.
You know, I think the idea of putting military troops in the numbers needed to take over the country was never on the table.
And so Trump gambled and he lost, basically.
And now Iran is, you know, in some ways degraded militarily.
Some of their has been taken out.
But nonetheless, you know, they have now actually
in some ways, more leverage than before, given that they have decided that they are not going to allow the Strait of Hormuz to be international waters.
They're going to control it.
They're going to charge people to go through it, and they're going to not allow unfriendly powers to go through it.
In some ways, they actually emerge from this in a stronger position than they did before the war.
Right.
And so, I mean, if you'd like, because we have time, and there's a history lesson from someone like yourself that knows the history,
Do you mind like how, you know, an abridged version of when all of this started and now there's the, you know, the, you know, 57, you know, there's so much, but leading us to where we are today.
I
mean, the really, the really potted history is that Iran has always been a distinct, proud, distinguished civilization.
Iran are Persians, they're not Arabs.
The Shia religion is not quite the same thing as the Sunni version of Islam that's practiced in most of the surrounding countries.
There's been a distinctive element to that.
The United States has meddled in Iran, as we did in 1953, when it seemed like they were moving in the direction of socialism and anti-colonialism too much for the liking of some of the people around Dwight Eisenhower.
And we also overly invested in propping up the Shah of Iran despite what was evidently an unpopular and repressive regime.
Of course, there was the whole history of our hostage crisis in Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini and the bad relations that we got are from the start.
No U.S.
administration since then has really found the right footing vis-a-vis Iran.
We have alternately threatened and appeased them and never found the right balance.
Iran, for its part, has maintained a pretty consistent view of death to America and death to Israel.
They have never softened in their view of the United States.
And there has never really been what would properly be regarded as a moderate administration or regime in power there.
And it's a tragedy because, again, the Iranian people are among
What the proudest and most talented cultures and civilizations on earth they deserve better?
Yeah, right.
It's just Yeah, I mean all of that, you know, we're talking with Jeff Kappa servers from the NIS Canada Center on this Canada Center is a think tank in in Washington DC that advocates for market-oriented principles with environmentalism integration reform civil liberties and they just brilliant when it comes to history just like
our guy here.
So we're talking about the history about it.
You said that Iran is arguably a stronger position than they were when this whole thing started.
Talk about that.
So Iran has largely unfriendly relations with its neighbors, but it's also one of the major powers in that area.
It is also utterly ruthless.
It fought
a long war with Iraq under Saddam Hussein, in which they proved completely willing to put child soldiers forward to clear land mines and the like.
They are situated in a way that gives them a controlling position over the Strait of Hormuz, which is one of the choke points.
of the world's global economy.
Not much of the oil that goes to the United States goes through the Gulf of the Strait of Hormuz, but a lot of what goes to Asia and Europe does go through that critical.
choke point.
And so does a lot of the world's fertilizers.
So the United States, without consulting any of its allies before it decided to undertake this adventure in Iran, has caused enormous economic difficulties for them, but also put in question its own legitimacy as the guarantor of the post-World War II global trading order.
Because now it's been shown that a country like Iran can, if it so chooses, disregard the principle that the Strait of Hormuz is international waters.
it can effectively blockade that narrow passageway, and it can possibly charge tolls for powers to go through this, using this as a trade conduit.
And that could mean that it actually could gain hundreds of billions of dollars over the next several years to build up this military that we have allegedly obliterated.
What was the United States trying to accomplish with this?
I mean, every administration really, since Carter's, has wished to see the end of the radical Shia regime in Iran.
This is arguably one of the world's worst and most evil regimes.
The world would be better off without it.
And it has been the leading exporter of terrorism and has brought misery to many parts of the world.
However, again,
Hundreds, if not thousands, of military war games have gone into this and have concluded that it is too difficult militarily to take the Strait of Hormuz, particularly in an era of, you know, one-way suicide drone warfare.
The military has been very resistant to the idea that it would actually put the number of boots on the ground needed to maintain control of either Karg Island, which is the central area of oil production,
for Iran or the Strait of Hormuz.
We were talking about half a million men.
Who would be sitting ducks?
It would be a turkey shoot, frankly, because we are not able to defend against this kind of drone warfare.
Ukraine is actually much more advanced than we are in being able to counter that kind of new battlefield technology.
So since an occupation wasn't really a possibility, it has got it crazy.
Yeah, I mean, also crazy.
Also crazy when you think about it is that we have probably exhausted several years worth of our critical battlefield weaponry in terms of missiles and tomahawks and the rest of this, which also at the same time makes us less credible when it comes to standing up to whatever China might want to do with regard to Taiwan.
So, we're seeing a real situation where the United States is actually being exposed because of its bad governance and Donald Trump's chaotic penchant for decision-making, also his habit of treating allies as enemies and enemies as friends.
So, it's really not a good moment in our history, frankly.
No.
And, you know, it's interesting, too, because you hear...
Defense Secretary Hegseth talk about how, oh, we have so many more missiles and we're good, we're good for, we can fight this forever.
And it's very clearly, we can't.
You know, the optimistic way to look at this is that in what follows the Trump administration, the United States is going to think seriously about how to rebuild its defense industrial capabilities.
And it will also take more seriously the loss of trust that our allies have had in us.
It'll try to turn that around.
The problem is that there's an old diplomatic saying, which is that trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.
And we've lost a lot over the last several months of this Trump administration, beginning with his threat to take over Canada and make it our 51st state, his threat to invade a NATO ally in Denmark and take Greenland from them.
This is not the kind of behavior that the United States has ever engaged in since the end of World War II when we assumed, in effect, leadership of the global order.
We are now the leading disruptor of that order rather than its maintainer and protector.
Yeah, and I do really want to get into that in the third segment here because I want to, what we have disrupted is over 80 years of, you know,
allies and friendships and trade norms.
And it just, yeah, the damage that's been done over just the last couple of months has been staggering.
We got Jeff Cabba service here, VP from the Niscannon center in Washington, DC.
We're going to keep talking about this right after this on the rational revolution, right here on the civic media radio network, stick around.
Oh
Oh,
Foo Fighters here for you guys.
Mark Ragger here in the Ratchett Revolution.
We're sitting down with a returning friend, Jeff Cabba Service from the Miss Cannon Center.
And we're talking about Iran.
And what, you know, we're talking about what, what they're trying to accomplish and all that.
What are everyday Iranians experiencing right now?
Awfully hard to say.
I have not been to Iran myself.
It is not one of the countries that I've been to.
I've known a number of people who are part of the Persian diaspora.
There's actually a part of Los Angeles called Terangelis.
Yes.
Yes.
So populated with people who once upon a time came from that part of the world.
It's a huge country.
Do you want to realize that?
There's a big 90 million people.
It's five times the size of Iraq and look at the difficulties we had the last time we thought about trying to turn that country into something more friendly towards us So, you know, I think there's been very little appreciation on the part of this administration for the practical difficulties involved in
What kind of a military operation against this?
Like I said at the outset, you know, I have the greatest respect for our military and our troops I rejoice that we have mostly managed to keep them out of harm's way That we managed to recover both of those pilots from
yeah
16 that that Iran managed to shoot down It's it's been a wonderful performance and frankly in some ways
heartening to see that Iran's Russia and China supplied air defenses have actually proved largely ineffective.
Yeah,
against our military.
But again, the fact that the United States has the world's most powerful military does not mean that we are all powerful.
And even at a time in the wake of World War Two, when we were, you know, unarguably
the world's greatest military power by a long shot because so much of the world was just prostrate after the destruction of World War II.
Even then, at a moment of relatively greater power, we understood that we needed allies, that we simply were incapable of maintaining the kind of global order we wanted to see without assistance and cooperation with our friends.
And that memory has been...
with the loss, I think, of the generation that actually remembered World War II.
And we're now seeing what happens when you forget the lessons of history.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's wild.
And I think, you know, this week President Trump put out, I think, probably one of the most incendiary statements that an American president has ever done threatening to kill an entire civilization of people.
Does this, could this spiral into something much more dangerous, a regional conflict with other people that are involved?
I mean, we're, we're, and it's just all, you know, thinking because potentially it's going to be meeting in Pakistan and we're for peace talks, but then we're also lobbing missiles at each other and, oh, oh my God.
You
know, I think it's worth.
remembering here that there could have been much worse outcomes than what we've seen so far.
Not just in terms of loss of our troops, but in terms of a regional conflagration that so far has not broken out on the scale that it could have.
But Donald Trump's statement, condemned by the Pope, among others, really did suggest the possibility of nuclear war.
And this again, this kind of global saber-rattling in the
in pursuit of an absolutely incoherent plan alarms the rest of the world and makes us seem unfit for global leadership and it also makes China seem by comparison the moderate and stable global power.
And you're starting to see real world effects of this in that China is being credited for brokering this peace along with Pakistan and increasing numbers of citizens in countries that historically have been among our greatest allies are now saying that they trust China more than they trust us.
And this is really something I did not expect to see in my lifetime.
No, me neither.
And there was, I forget who.
At what interview I saw of a podcast that you know an ex ambassador was talking about how since COVID China has really opened up to the entire rest of the world to both try to bolster its leadership standing on the world stage but then also kind of rebrand itself as The the new up-and-coming for tech and for innovation and for all the you know for where businesses should be and yeah if they're
taking credit for brokering whatever peace deal that is here.
That's dangerous stuff, really.
Yeah.
Well, we're certainly giving them the ammunition they need to make their case.
And I think that we are in something very much resembling a Cold War with China.
Hopefully, it never becomes a shooting war.
But the fact is that they believe that they are on a path to global predominance.
because they plan to master the forthcoming suite of technologies around artificial intelligence.
And they think this will give them the kind of dominant position that was enjoyed by Great Britain around the Industrial Revolution and those technologies that Britain was the first to gain mastery over.
a possible inflection point in world history.
And I do not believe that a world dominated by the Chinese would be a better world than one in which we are the dominant power.
Oh, my God.
No, I don't think that would be at all.
But that would, no.
Yeah.
And to think that would happen in our lifetimes is beyond the pale, man.
Like, I don't know.
It's that's something you think of back in learning history class and high school and all this, like to think of
The United States is not the global leader in power.
And the president is not the leader of the free world.
It's something that I, it's not good.
It's not good at all.
Not good.
Not good.
I mean, you know, to some extent we're spinning out of bad case scenarios here, maybe not worst case scenarios.
Yeah.
And it's possible that this country can recover from the damage that's been done in this last year of Donald Trump.
But, you know, we've still got to get two and a half years through two and a half years of Trump.
And who knows what's going to happen over the course of this time.
Right.
And we're going to talk about that in our next segment with Jeff Cabba's service here from the Discanon Center.
We're going to talk about how do we regain our position on the world stage and what has to happen in order for us to get there.
Is this the worst case scenario, which is glad to say that that it's not what we'll finish that discussion here with Jeff Kebba service coming up next here on the rational revolution on the civic media radio network stick around
Welcome back.
Oh my goodness.
These times, they are changing.
We've got our friend, Jeff Cabba Service here.
If you like what you hear, feel free to like the show, subscribe, share all the things and check out what they do at the Niskanen Center.
It's really impressive stuff.
And if you want to learn and kind of grow in your knowledge of civics and history and all those things,
check out what they do.
I know Jeff has written a bunch of books and we can link them here to the show as well and it's definitely worth a look.
Okay, so one of the things that I think is some of the most dire things to come out of this first part of the Trump administration is our standing on the world stage.
You know the alliance of NATO that has held the world in check for the last 80 years is is I think running on fumes You know the the saber rattling from the president regarding our friends who are not our friends because they're not going to join our war really has has stretched some alliances to its limits is there how do we regain that trust from
leaders and from people and from civilizations all over the world.
Well, that's a good question.
And like I said, first we have to get through the Trump administration.
And then hope that there would be a change in attitude in the next administration.
It's not entirely clear that could happen because, you know, just to go back to the grubby business of domestic politics for a minute,
You know, historically what we've seen is within when the party that controls the White House and the Congress becomes more unpopular.
There's what the political scientists call a thermostatic reaction.
It's like decided that the temperature is too hot.
So you're going to turn it down to be cool.
That means you actually start to feel better about the party out of power.
We're not seeing that.
Even as people are starting to dislike the Republicans more and more, the Democrats are more unpopular than ever.
In fact, they're more unpopular than they've been in the history of polling at this point, which is why it might not be that idea to run for politics as independent, just saying.
And I think it's because the Democrats have become the party of the college educated.
And along with that has come a particular understanding of progressivism that is deeply alienating to the rest of the society.
And I don't know how the Democrats recover their brand.
You know, I think it would help certainly to move toward the center on a lot of issues, but there too is an issue of recovering trust.
And frankly, the Democrats don't understand or like a good two thirds of the country at this point, those without college degrees.
So.
They've got some work to do there.
I think they'll do fine in the midterms because, again, the party in power tends to suffer in those midterms.
But that's not quite the same thing as the people now giving a kind of mandate to the Democrats to undo what Trump has done.
And then the other thing is that the rest of the world now understands that
You know, the United States can go in some very bad directions, partly because people are upset about things that have nothing to do with the rest of the world, but they don't care about the rest of the world.
Not to put Wisconsin on the spot, but you know, the saying is because 10,000 people in Wisconsin are upset about the price of eggs.
The NATO alliance has to come apart.
You know, I don't think it's quite as simple as that.
But the fact is, again, I think that many Americans and not just Donald Trump have forgotten the lessons of World War II.
which is that as powerful as we are as a nation, we depend upon our alliances and we constantly have to work to maintain those alliances and we have to constantly sell the rest of the world on the idea of the United States as a benevolent protector of the kind of order that has in fact brought peace and prosperity to much of the world and has raised two billion people out of poverty over the last several decades.
So, you know, when we no longer believe in that story ourselves, it's awfully hard to sell it to the rest of the world.
And, you know, I was in Europe
last week.
And I have seen myself up close how they are de-risking by separating themselves from the United States, how they are building up their own independent military capability, how they are not going to buy from the United States, whether that means military goods, or whether that means Google.
or Facebook.
They're coming up with their own alternatives there.
So, you know, the United States is becoming more and more unpopular.
Other nations are recovering their own kind of nationalism and protectionism in response to ours.
And I'm not sure the world is going to be or the Western world, if you want to call it that, is going to come together in the same way ever again.
That's so sad to hear.
I'm my usual
bucket of optimism, you know, complete with rainbows and bunny rabbits today, you know.
Yeah, right.
But, you know, and like, if I guess the rest of the world can be like, ah, fool me once.
And then, you know, here's here's the fool me twice thing.
And like, I, you know, it's that is that's really unfortunate to hear.
And I think, yeah, that wouldn't be good.
That would that would be bad.
You know, if you're someone
in the administration, like Elbridge Colby, then you could say, if you wanted to make the devil's advocate case here, that the administration is only recognizing a reality of the United States becoming less powerful, relatively speaking, than it had been in the past.
That we are moving back toward a 19th century kind of world where there are great powers who have their own spheres of influence.
And that great power, Iran may be emerging as a great power with a sphere of influence that includes the Strait of Hormuz, this whole idea of international law may become increasingly obsolete.
It may be everyone is kind of on their own, but.
In a way, this could make for a more peaceful world if those great powers can negotiate among themselves about the boundaries between them and how to keep the peace.
But historically, great power rivalries do lead to big, scary conflagrations.
The hope had been that we'd surmounted that.
All things come to an end.
Well, because there are some things where...
the Trump administration and conservatives, they do have a point.
Talk about other nations stepping up for NATO in terms of paying dues and coming up with defense spending and all those kinds of things.
There is a point there, but then in true Trump fashion, he takes that all the way to the end and then just blows right past those barriers that are
long-standing traditions that we've had in the world for 80 years and then just completely blows them all to hell.
I don't understand how there was, like you said, there's no guardrails to stop any of
that.
There's a risk when we talk this way that people think, well, he's just talking about old fashioned, gentlemanly norms of civility that Trump has blown through.
It's his mean tweets that they're upset about.
I think what we're likely to appreciate more in the coming weeks and months is that the United States has benefited enormously from the global order over which we have presided for the last 80 years.
The US dollar is the world's reserve drawing currency.
We get to repay our own debts in our own currency.
No one else gets to do that.
So far, the petrodollar system has survived this war, but that's not a guarantee.
And at this point, most of the rest of the world's countries seem willing to subsidize our limitless bipartisan appetite for debts and deficits.
It's unclear whether that will continue.
And also, we have benefited, relatively speaking, from low interest rates and low price of oil.
And I'm not sure that that will continue to be true going forward either.
So, you know, I think I think well, it's it's it's you you would like you'd like quoting these these baby boomer Artists of the past, you know, don't it always seem to go you don't know what you got till it's
gone That's poetic man.
That's good.
You know, we're talking with Jeff Kabbas servers from the Niskanen Center if if you could Pull out your crystal ball because I know you have one What what is the next six to nine months?
You know
What do we have in store?
Man, there can be a lot of damage done yet before there is some sort of a power shake up here in Washington.
You know, I think relatively few people predicted that Donald Trump was going to go into Iran.
So he has shown us that none of us can play Nostradamus here without embarrassing ourselves.
You know, there's a better and a worse, especially not with him.
There's a better and a worse case scenario.
One of which is that maybe Trump has learned something from this experience.
and therefore he will be not a moderate prudent kind of guy, but someone who won't engage in stupid adventures to the extent that he has so far in the past, someone who actually might sort of make up a little bit.
to Europe, someone who actually might realize that Russia and China do not mean us well.
And therefore, we have something at stake in Ukraine, too, for example.
The other alternative, though, is that Donald Trump decides that he needs to change the narrative as fast as he can by doing something that's so big and scary that it'll actually wipe out people's memories of this whole Iran experience.
Maybe we'll go into Cuba.
Maybe he'll do something else.
Who can say?
Who can say?
We'll admit Cuba's next.
Yeah, that'll be our 51st state.
That's, oh my God.
Yeah, thanks for that, by the way, buddy.
I wasn't even thinking about that.
But is there a way, so do you see after when Trump is gone, do you see a United States still leading the world?
Or do you see the more fractured type of leadership with different great societies and we're kind of just floating on our own?
You know, I think a lot of countries still need us even if they don't like us as much as maybe they once did It's not clear to me.
For example, what alternative the Gulf countries have besides relying on us for some degree of protection And some degree of at least trying to to maintain the open global trading order that we have experienced Like I said, China is not really a country that either wants to be
the success of the United States or that can be.
It's simply not ideologically suited to that.
A number of commentators have been raising the possibility that Iran has been America's Suez moment.
It's a parallel to what Great Britain and France experienced after World War II when the United States basically put a stop to their military invasion of Egypt to try to maintain open control over the Suez Canal.
And it was this humiliating moment that really showed
the limits of their powers and the way that the world that they have become used to thinking about in the old imperial days had passed.
I don't think there's another power that's likely to supplant the United States in quite that way.
But I think Iran is one of several ways in which we're seeing that the United States is not just relatively less powerful than it was.
It's also absolutely less powerful in terms of what it can do if it's no longer operating.
along the old assumptions and with the same allies.
So yeah, it's probably going to be a slow but a continually downward slide in terms of America's reputation in global standing.
And limited time left.
Can someone take that back when the next president gets there?
Can they?
Sorry, guys.
That sucked.
Our bad.
Can they do something like that in a much more
professional way?
Much of the world was down on the United States during the George W. Bush presidency, and then along came Barack Obama and...
People were immensely relieved.
They gave him the Nobel Prize even before he'd really done anything.
The sense was America has a good face and a bad face, and they go back and forth.
But I think what we're now seeing is the rest of the world realizing the United States cannot be trusted and relied upon in the same way, and that our interests in some ways are diverging from the rest of the world, and that much of the American population no longer wants to play the role that we have played or understands.
why we have played it for the last 80 years.
And I think there are things that responsible political actors like yourself can do to try to educate the public.
And I think that will have some kind of impact.
People will not like, I think, the results of this particular Iran episode.
They will start to mistrust Donald Trump as a world leader.
But that's not quite the same as the understanding that we had in the wake of World War II.
The understanding of what would happen.
if America withdrew from the world, the consequences that could ensue.
I hope we don't have to learn it the hard way this time around.
I hope not, either.
And that's a good place to call her a day.
My friend, thank you so very much for spending some time with us.
I really genuinely appreciate it.
Appreciate your friendship.
Pleasure to be talking to you in bad times as well as good times,
you know?
Yes, same.
Keep in touch, my friend.
Thank you to Jeff Kever Service and this Canada Center.
Stick around right after this for my thoughts right here on the Rational Revolution on the Civic Media Radio Network.
Welcome back to the restaurant revolution.
You got Mark Becker Always check out civic media dot US for all the stuff from us and all of our other shows that we got there It's a lot of good stuff on there.
So, uh, yeah Hang out with us share the show like it all those things And such thanks to my friend Jeff Cabba service for hanging out, you know, I met him when During my whole the first Donald Trump is a bad guy
Experience and when I was speaking out He invited me to come talk to a group that he put together called the meeting of the concerned and it was like a zoom meeting and I thought it was just like telling people what and it was what the whole Ron Johnson thing of where he knew that Trump was lying and all of that and I get into this zoom meeting and it was like Who's who of?
former republicans like there was people that were cabinet secretaries from the bush administration and congressman and senators and i was like holy freaking balls like oh my god i always try to be the dumbest person in the room you know because then you're going to learn something and my god i was absolutely unquestionably the dumbest person in that zoom room it was just it was ridiculous um but i i i love jeff because
Even, you know, despite being so much dumber than him, he keeps me around.
And he's such a good friend.
And to be able to hang out with us, I wish the show was three hours because the amount of information he could have given to us was so great.
But that's a concern of where we are.
And, you know, seeing the things that are happening in Iran is bad.
But then seeing where
the United States is on the world stage is even worse.
And Jeff talked about that, where our allies are pissed at us and our relationships are fracturing.
And the stability of the world order that has held together for the better part of 80 years is on a knife's edge.
And that shouldn't make anyone feel good.
If there's one thing amongst so many things that Donald Trump is doing, taking the United States off of the pedestal of the most powerful country in the world is the most damaging thing that he could possibly do to the United States.
And he's doing it.
And, you know, people ask me about, you know, oh, your Trump derangement syndrome and all this stuff.
No, man.
ruining so much and it's not just conjecture.
It's not just, you know, a fake outrage.
It's legitimate.
Yeah, but what's not legitimate is what has happened in Wisconsin.
And this week it was incredible to see Chris Taylor defeat Maria Lazar, you know, 60 to 40.
And you see the shifts of counties
going left and you see people moderating and not just going left, but going away from extremism and rejecting the partisanship that has been polarizing the state for over 15 years.
And it's great.
That's awesome.
But we're not done, you know, Mike Holmgren.
It's glorious, but we're not done yet.
It's back in 1996 when, you know, they had their first Super Bowl in over 30 years.
We're not done yet.
We cannot be done yet.
Like what we can take out of what happened this week is that's awesome.
We can feel good about that, but we all need to know that a spring electorate is not the same thing as a November electorate.
I remember seeing Scott Walker win in a recall election in spring and then seeing Tammy Baldwin win in the fall.
Just like the violent swings that this state can have.
And if Jeff Cabba Service was right, which he probably is, about how the Democrats have a popularity problem too, we got to figure that out.
We have to figure that out.
We have to get back to a place where we can talk to one another and we can sit down and understand each other and boy I Don't know man.
We've got to do that We have to do that because we can feel really good about Chris Taylor winning and Maria Lazar losing And here locally we had a slate of candidates that were put up in local elections
by turning point USA.
And on the whole, most of them, almost all of them lost, which is great.
And they outspent their opponents by thousands and thousands of dollars, and they lost.
So what that tells me is people are paying attention.
What that tells me is people understand more than I think what they are getting credit for, which is a good thing.
Because if people understand and if people are paying attention that means that they can see through kind of the BS messages that a lot of people are putting out We have to Stay on message, you know Because all you say oh well what happens in national politics doesn't trickle down to state doesn't trickle down to local Unfortunately, it all does because you could have someone running for local office
who says, oh, and we do here in Green Bay.
We have a lady who is a city alderman, alder woman, and she was the leader of the Stop the Steel protest in Green Bay.
And so it's like this, I hate to say it, but it is connected.
And so we have to really understand values of reality, of working together, of not being so darn partisan.
and we have to stick together.
Y'all, this is fun.
I appreciate you sticking together.
We got some work to do, okay?
We can feel good about this, but hey, the job is not done.
Signing off, Mark Becker from the Rational Revolution on the Civic Media Ready Network.
We will see you next week.
Peace.
I'ma keep on running cause the winner don't quit on themselves.
