America and Iran: Another Forever War? (Half the Answer #69, with Jeff Waldorf)

The United States and Israel have dropped bombs on Iran, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, several of his top-ranking officials, and many civilians, among them more than 160 little girls killed in the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school. Trent and Caitlin have Jeff Waldorf, the Logical Leftist, to hang out with while they process it all. They talk through the conflicting, nonsensical, and sometimes straight-up Orwellian justifications provided by US politicians for initiating a war of aggression against another country in the Middle East.

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Resources

The Logical Leftist on YouTube

Around the Nation with Jeff Waldorf on Facebook

The Logical Leftist on Instagram

The Logical Leftist on Bluesky

Pentagon tells Congress no sign that Iran was going to attack US first

Iran strikes were launched without approval from Congress, deeply dividing lawmakers

Nuclear program, missiles or regime change: Trump struggles to define Iran war goals

Day 4 of the US-Israeli war with Iran

6 U.S. soldiers have been killed as the war with Iran further engulfs the region

Iran strikes were launched without approval from Congress, deeply dividing lawmakers

UN 'deeply disturbed' by strike on Iran school that killed 160 children

He Hatched a Plot to Kill Trump on a Napkin. The F.B.I. Was Listening.

Transcript

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, for our listeners and our viewers who know that perhaps happy days are not here again — you may remember that we had John Ghazvinian on the program not so long ago, and we spoke about the history of Iran and the United States. And as Caitlin learned at that time, it goes back much farther than yesterday. It goes all the way back into the 18th century, and things were very nice between the two nations for a long stretch of time. In fact, as John noted, there was news coverage in one Philadelphia paper, I believe, that apologized for not having any new coverage of Persia at that time. Very interesting, very strange. But well, things have not been so good for many decades at this point. Lots of people like to look back on 1979, but we can look back further if we wish. We could look back on Mohammed Mosaddegh. We could look back even further than that, but you'll have to go watch the John Ghazvinian episode. Come on now. Caitlin, talk about what's happening right now — the fact that, hey, we bombed Iran and Israel did too. Well, we are speaking with Jeff Waldorf, and you probably know him as The Logical Leftist, a friend of the program, absolute brilliant feller. And well, we had to rap about what is cooking right now, because the kitchen is hot and no one wants to go in. To be short — Jeff, how are you today, sir?

**Caitlin M. Green:** Trent, I'm not gonna say the thing. I'm not gonna say "happy days are here again" because we bombed Iran. Like, I can't say happy days. So — Trent, days are here again, and here they are. And we're in them. We're living them, whether we like it or not. And this is Half The Answer — understanding a question is half the answer. I'm your co-host, Caitlin Green, with, of course, Trent Nelson. We're writers and editors for Liberal Currents. And I guess you being a history buff is really going to pay off today, because I don't know anything that happened before today, I'm going to need your help. So who have you brought me today?

**Caitlin M. Green:** How's your mood? Is it so good?

**Jeff Waldorf:** I mean, how am I? You're already starting out with the loaded questions, guys, wow. Not so much. Lot of bad things happening today. Lot of bad things been happening the past year. And so, you know, that's kind of where I'm at — you gotta basically just play every day by ear and ask yourself, ask the universe, I suppose: what kind of fresh hell are we gonna experience today? And that's basically it every single day.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Sometimes it's death from above, I guess. Like, okay, so we put you on the schedule for today. And I was like, oh great, we're gonna have The Logical Leftist, I can't wait to talk to him, I don't know which topic to choose. And then, like, the monkey's paw finger curled and it was like — I guess it's war with Iran. Well, shoot. Narrowed it down for me real fast.

**Trent R. Nelson:** So, Jeff, you have been covering life — we might call it — on your program for many years. Is that correct?

**Jeff Waldorf:** That would be correct. Yes, life under establishment Democrats — you know, like Barack Obama, Joe Biden — and life under Donald Trump right wing. And I mean, look, at the risk of alienating some of my long-time viewers, I do have to say life was a little bit better under Joe Biden and Obama compared to where we're at now, which is just a shit show. And it's not to say that being under the establishment was all that fantastic. We still had a lot of problems. But boy, do we have a lot more now. A hell of a lot more different problems.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, to that point, it's all a matter of perspective, is it not, Jeff? We see where we are on the mountain and we say, well, we've climbed a lot, but we've still got a long way to go. All of a sudden when you fall down the mountain a little bit, it looks a lot taller to climb up there where you want it to be. And right now we are farther away from where we want to be than where we were.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Yeah, I mean, look, there's subjective reality, of course, as you mentioned, but there's also objective reality. And the objective reality is we are actually in a worse spot than we were before. And part of that objective reality does mean accepting the fact that, yes, the establishment Democrats have had a hand in creating this current situation. Obama opened the door on some of these things, and Trump barreled right through it and broke the doorframe, and then took the door, hit somebody with it, and then set it on fire as well as the rest of the house. That's what happened. I mean, I think that's pretty apt.

**Caitlin M. Green:** No, I think that's right. It's okay to point out the responsibility that is borne by the Democrats in not safeguarding our democracy better, right? Not doing things that were, you know, it risked being unpopular or looking like too much. We're just constantly fighting this battle of, well, if I do a lot, then everybody's gonna go, "Oh my God, you're doing too much. You're overreacting." And it's like, I don't think it was overreacting — it was just accurate prediction.

**Trent R. Nelson:** So with that said, Jeff, you've been watching everyone say that Iran was going to develop nuclear weapons and attack us for just ever. You lived the montage. Is that correct?

**Jeff Waldorf:** Yes, every day, every day for the past — I don't know, a few decades that I could remember, at least. It was "they're two weeks away from a bomb, they've got the mushroom clouds." Gee, that sounds familiar. Didn't they make the same predictions about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? "Mushroom clouds, we've gotta go in, we got to take down Saddam Hussein because he's working with Osama bin Laden." And we're seeing that same playbook being used, except that this time there's no Osama bin Laden that you could point at. These guys are so stupid, okay? And our government right now — Pete Hegseth — he is such a dumb fuck. His brain has been replaced by driftwood. This guy is so stupid, they don't even have a villain, right? It's just "oh, Iran." That's it. If they were smart at all, they would at least try to create a narrative, lift up some scary Iranian guy as like, "This is the guy. This is the terrorist. We're trying to stop him."

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, they've been trying to say that Ali Khamenei, who, again, is not a great feller — they've been trying to paint him in that extreme light, and certainly the news that comes out of it, well, it's not great. They were a theocratic autocracy that replaced just a plain old autocracy in 1979. People have been asking me, "Haven't you seen everyone cheer?" Well, yeah, no one's thrilled that this feller is — lots of people didn't like him, and for good reason. But all one kind of has to do for a second is close your eyes and see that happening in any other country. Just replace Iran with any other country. Somebody comes in and kills your leader. A percentage of the population doesn't like that leader, right? But are they really super duper thrilled that some nation just assassinated the head of their state? And in this particular instance, not only is he the head of their state, but he's also a religious leader. And so, I believe it was recently published, noting that, yeah, he was not beloved by everyone, but in other ways he actually transcended a president or a prime minister, because he also has this religious authority attached to him.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Yeah, that's like an additional layer on top of, for example, what happened in Venezuela, where we literally came in and just kidnapped their president. Like, what are we doing? And it's not just killing or kidnapping a leader. In this case we killed their leader, but they were also a religious leader. So you've got a whole lot of Shia Muslims probably not thrilled with this, not thrilled with us, as if we need more things for them to not be thrilled about when it comes to the United States and our meddling in the Middle East, and our relationship with the right-wing government of Israel, which is filled with corruption — Netanyahu is a war criminal. So we've got all that. And well, when they talk about how we're "the great Satan" — I'm not a religious person, but I can see it.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Yeah, you know, people like Lindsey Graham — they're all like, "Oh yeah, they think of us as the great Satan. You know what we're gonna do? We're gonna totally be the Satan." No, that's not what we want to do here. And again, if we really cared — this gets to the ultimate heist part of this, right? Because this isn't about democracy. It's not about spreading freedom or anything like that, or even helping the people of Iran. You think any member of our government gives a fuck about anybody in Iran? No, of course not. It's always about several different things: distraction from the Epstein files — I think that's the big one. Secondly, enriching defense contractors. Third, Donald Trump being Donald Trump and acting like he's tough. And Christian nationalism. These are all the reasons that I think we're doing what we're doing right now.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, I would say, not necessarily just the Epstein files, but this is a thing that you can do if you're a leader of a country and your approval ratings are tanking — get us into a war, and then everybody's thinking about that instead of all the reasons why they hated you to start with. I don't know if this is going to save him in terms of approval.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Right, I mean, you bring up a great point about his approval, his poll numbers, the economy that has just completely tanked with the tariffs he's still trying to do. Even though the Supreme Court put the brakes on it, he's still out there pushing 10 to 15 percent tariffs on countries that are illegal. And then, "oh, we need a distraction — let's go to Iran."

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, because we've all had a chance to see that he did not lower anyone's prices on shit.

**Trent R. Nelson:** No, and again, all of this comes to a head. I cannot help but look back and think that this problem was already solved. Like, I lived through a time period where this problem was actually solved, and it was solved in a pragmatic, utopian-type manner — negotiations and diplomacy actually won the day. We were going to build trust up through a long-term, long-standing diplomatic agreement that was not only bilateral but multilateral. It even got people we don't like — and it's like, "Get rid of it. Blow it up." And as you noted, Jeff, anybody who was under the illusion that this was some humanitarian endeavor need only speak to the parents of the children who are dead now, and they will tell it to you straight — straighter than anybody you're going to hear. Because for them, they lost a tyrant, but most likely they also lost one of the most important parts of living. And so that is a trade that no parent, I suspect, would take. To be short.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Absolutely. And I want to go back for just a second, because I criticized Obama earlier, right? But what you brought up — the Iran agreement — was actually one of the best foreign policy wins of this entire era. That multilateral agreement to have inspectors come in and inspect all of Iran's nuclear facilities to make sure they're not enriching uranium — that was a huge win. And just as you mentioned, Trump came in and wiped his ass with it. Also, let's not forget — one of the sole reasons Trump does something to undo Obama's legacy is simply because he hates him.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, he just hates him personally. And this is part of that Trump personalist regime kind of structure, right? It's a lot about personal vendettas. And similarly, with these strikes on Iran, he thinks he's the star of an action movie, the way he's talking about it. Because right now they're prosecuting that assassination attempt — it was a Pakistani man, and they're accusing him of having been bankrolled by Iran. The whole thing stunk to high heaven. It was a terrible plan, and he had no way of accomplishing it. But whatever, it's what they have. So they're like, "Oh well, there was an assassination attempt that Iran did," and Trump's exact words are, "I got him before he got me." That's what he says about missile-striking Ayatollah Khamenei — "I got him before he got me."

**Jeff Waldorf:** Again, to get back to the not-haha-funny — when you think about "I got him before he got me" — all right, so I went and drone-struck Iran and killed the leader. You know, pretty much all the assassination attempts on Trump's life have not been from Iran or the radical left. It's been his own supporters, or people who are obsessively on the right — the groypers, people like that, the Nick Fuentes fans. Those are the people. And he certainly ain't gonna drone strike any of those people.

**Caitlin M. Green:** No, no, but like, yeah — he truly thinks it's *Die Hard* and that he just got Hans Gruber. He's in his own world.

**Trent R. Nelson:** You know, it's interesting, because from the 20th century forward, you get autocrats — would-be autocrats — and they just write books about, like, "Hey, if I had power, you want to know what I'd do?" And they just say it. And then they somehow reach a point of power and everyone's like, "Wow, God, I wish I had known what he was thinking." It's like, bro, he got it published. You just need to read what he's saying. You just have to hear him say, "I am essentially vengeance incarnate." If any person says that to you, go away — leave them or get them to leave you.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, and Trump didn't even write a book. He went on TV and said it.

**Caitlin M. Green:** He also said, "I'm going to be the president of unity. I'm going to be the president of peace. I am peace." He said "I am peace." And a bunch of centrist, reactionary lib pundits were like, "Oh, well, you know what the difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is? Donald Trump isn't gonna send you to the Middle East to die in a pointless fucking war." Oh, okay — so what are we doing now? Where are we at?

**Trent R. Nelson:** Every day, every day I wake up, one of the first images that flits through my mind — it's a white page with black type, and it says, "Donald the Dove and Hillary the Hawk." "Donald the Dove and Hillary the Hawk." We have had to live with that shit take for — I mean, that should go in the history books, right? Like, right at the start.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Yeah, and here's the thing — he didn't even have to attack Iran to have shown that he was never about peace. You can go back to the first Trump administration, where he literally dropped the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan and increased drone strikes in the Middle East. I forget what percentage he increased drone strikes during his first administration, but it was a lot. Not only did he take the so-called gloves off the military back then, which led to a massive increase in civilian casualties from our drone strikes, but also dropped the MOAB. Did saber-rattling with North Korea and continued basically all the conflicts that he claimed he was going to end. He's been a fraud the entire time, and somehow he got laundered. Somehow he is "Donald the Dove." No — I'm about "Donald the Dumbass."

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, at least "Donald the Dove" happened before Trump won — but see, this is why Tyler Austin Harper is on my shit list. Because he said that last year, where he was like, "Well, Trump won't send you to a pointless war." So that is why I'm calling for him to be brought before me to look me in the eyes and explain why he thought that was a reasonable thing to say.

**Trent R. Nelson:** We have been bombing countries or attacking at rates that make Sleepy Joe look like he was sleeping, in terms of drone strikes. The drone is, as an autocrat or as a leader, one would suspect it's one of the more attractive weapons. It's a small thing with guns on it that you can control from a mobile unit, right? There's no threat of an American getting killed.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Or maybe, you know, the drone pilot might have had too many Hot Pockets or something, and then had a heart attack while flying the drone. That's a possibility.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Yeah, well, again, as somebody who grew up on video games, I do understand part of the argument against violent video games, because the normalization of violence could lead to somebody getting a nice job with Hot Pockets and coffee. And we wouldn't want that to happen.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Now, interesting how you bring that up, because I am a lifelong gamer myself. I'm one of those people who always looked at the Jack Thompsons — I don't know if you were familiar with him — and even Ed Schultz, when he was alive. He was great on a lot of issues, but boy, you get him talking about video games and violence and mass shootings, and he just goes off into places we don't want to go. Because if you're a real gamer, you understand that no, it does not drive violence. They're not murder simulators. The real murder simulators are — well, it's actually more right-wing ideology. Because the right wing, the current right wing, is a death cult. I mean, I don't know if you agree with that, but that's a pretty strong statement. I do believe they are a death cult. They are extremely violent. You look at the rhetoric — during the Obama era you had Obama's face basically on a gun target, you had ads where they would take a machine gun to a bill they don't like. They've been steeped in violence and violent rhetoric for so long.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Right, and the focusing on certain groups — we talk about panics. There was a video game violence panic in the '90s. We go back and have spoken about the Satanic Panic during the '80s, heavy metal music, Ozzy Osbourne getting brought up because a child committed suicide — terrible thing, of course. And these discussions, as I think you alluded to, Jeff, they often end up intersecting with freedom of expression, freedom of speech. I think it's easy to suggest that the GOP, for some time — "death cult" is a term that you hear. They don't support things that protect people from getting sick. They support guns, which commit lots of violence all the time. They create bills that make it so women cannot get proper health care, which is certainly violent. The way they appraise the transgender community — that is steeped with violence. They don't support children through welfare programs. That's violence. I mean, there is really no "pro-life." It's very Darwinian, in a way that Darwin would absolutely be like, "This is fucking crazy." Malthus would be like, "What?"

**Jeff Waldorf:** Yeah, this really goes back to the core of what this movement actually is. It's not about any of the things that they're actually saying it's about. It is about punishment. It is about revenge. This is revenge against the liberal order, against liberalism itself. And that's really what it is — it's revenge, it's violence, it's about making sure our enemies pay in whatever way possible.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Right, exactly. People who are not the same religion, people who do not live the kinds of lives that we think are acceptable — we're going to go after those people. And you can see the threads between everything we're talking about and what we're doing now in Iran, when you have the focus of state power being directed towards not just the governmental officials in Iran — because again, I don't really care about the Ayatollah, honestly. But you have people there who are innocent people. There were 125 schoolchildren that were bombed — little girls — by our joint strikes. Those are innocent people. They didn't set policy for Iran.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, that is murder.

**Jeff Waldorf:** And of course the right wing — they don't care about that. That's not even — right, it didn't happen. We're just going to completely ignore the fact that children have been bombed to pieces, to death. There's nothing left of those kids. And for a party that supposedly believes in being pro-life and caring about children — what was that whole thing they used against trans people? "We've got to protect the kids." You're targeting other people's children in another country. And by the way, let me connect this to Cuba. You know what we're doing in Cuba right now? We are blockading the country. They have run out of energy. They have no oil because we have blockaded them. Everything shuts down — their entire economy, their entire country, completely. No medicine, no food, no sanitation, no clean water. People are starving. Children are starving. We're doing literal violence against them without having to fire a shot.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right? Oh, you leftists — you think everything is violence, including starving and directly causing the death of regular people. How dare you! Violence is only when I say it's violence!

**Caitlin M. Green:** Or when I go onto the college campus and imagine that somebody probably wants to punch me — that's violence. I'm gonna write about it in The Free Press. It's gonna be so bad. Yeah, well, okay, but have you considered that we have actually been at war with Iran for 47 years, and this is ending it, and you're welcome? Leftists, you don't like war — thank you, Mr. Trump. Jesus. Okay, so let me attribute that appropriately — that was Representative Pat Harrigan, who went on our television screens and said, "This is about the future of America. We've been at war with Iran for 47 years, whether it was Beirut, the Khobar Towers, US casualties in Iraq and even Afghanistan — it's been a long time." And then he forgot where his sentence was going and said some words that didn't make sense.

**Jeff Waldorf:** I really want him to tell me — "Hey, Mr. Harrigan" — is that his name? I already forgot. Just shows how much I care. Hey, what were we doing in Afghanistan again? Can you tell me why we were there? Can you tell me why we're in Iraq?

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, you know, they like to talk about those unfortunate moments in our recent decades-long history, but they do not like to mention the Iran-Iraq War, where certain individuals in the Reagan administration helped Iraq use chemical weapons on Iranians, which you're not allowed to do.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Yeah, and they don't like to talk about how we helped to get Mohammed Mosaddegh overthrown, and then after they eventually removed the Shah from power, they wanted to try him for crimes against their society — using the secret police known as SAVAK — and the Shah got to live out the rest of his life, I believe, in the United States.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right? Well, they really don't want to talk about Iran-Contra.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, we should probably bring that up. Well, if we've been at war with Iran for 47 years, if my mental math is right, that covers all of that time. So I guess it's fair game.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Of course — you're gonna bring that up? You know what's next? You're gonna talk about the death squads in South America funded by the CIA.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Oh yeah. Or — you know —

**Jeff Waldorf:** You're gonna talk about how we literally gave weapons and money to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Yeah, let's talk about that.

**Jeff Waldorf:** The careers of a lot of these politicians, by the way, also go back to some of those periods. You can find some of the same ghouls that are cheering on this particular conflict that were also cheering on those previous ones.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Sure, well, to your point, Jeff — that notion is represented by, I think, the very famous meme that we have all seen: 113 years old, Republican, wants war in Iran more than anything, and is a solid bipartisan voter. That is essentially what has been going on since 1979. And there is, to some degree, kind of like Cuba — this is not to justify any barbarous behavior by any of the regimes that have been in place over the decades in either country — but it would be easy to say that there's a bit of sour grapes involved. We really wanted Cuba. We really wanted Cuba forever. And then we also really enjoyed having Cuba as a place where capitalism could just go full capitalism. And the same thing with Iran — we really enjoyed having Iran as our regional ally, and we were very much hurt by their desire to nationalize their oil. And then we were very much hurt by their desire to get rid of their nice king, who we very much enjoyed hanging out with.

**Jeff Waldorf:** And funny enough, doing all that literally pushed them into the arms of religious fundamentalism, which then they get mad about — "Oh, those fundamentalist Muslims!" Bro, you literally —

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, they did this same thing with the PLO — the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They were like, "Oh man, the PLO, we can't get anything done with them, they're such a menace, they're so unreasonable." So, "Let's help fund some type of fundamentalist group to push them out."

**Caitlin M. Green:** Well, also — I wanted to go back to talking about how we all have lived through the whole Forever War on Terror, and apparently we're trying to shoehorn this into being part of it. But it also feels like with Iran, we are speed-running the Iraq War — like, weird fuckery. On Saturday, it's "senior administration officials are telling reporters, well, we got intel that Iran was going to strike, and so we needed to be really quick and do it." And that was Saturday. Meanwhile, on Monday, Pentagon briefers are like, "No, that's not true. There was no intelligence that was telling us that." So we got it done in a weekend, you guys. That whole process that we went through in 2003, 2004, 2005 — we got it done in three days. Aren't we proud?

**Jeff Waldorf:** Yeah, speed run — that's a perfect descriptor of what's going on.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, because he doesn't have a long attention span, right? And so everything is a speed run when you've got to get it done.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Okay, quick interlude. If there was ever any doubt — let's put this doubt to bed right now. Trump is never telling you that he got bit by a zombie. Never. You're looking at him, looking at the mess under his sleeve, and he's like, "No, I'm fine. It's fine. It's fake news." I mean, he is endangering your whole community. And this interlude is not only for pleasure — this is a good way of understanding him in general. He — you're gonna have to make sure he wasn't bit by a zombie, because he's not gonna be like *Where the Red Fern Grows*, right? He's not walking out to that tree to go die himself. He's taking everybody with him if he's going.

**Caitlin M. Green:** No, he'll hide it forever. He'll say, "No, I was taking anti-zombie cream and I had a reaction." No, let me into the fort. It's cool. It's fine. I got scraped up by the fence. Don't worry.

**Caitlin M. Green:** But it is, unfortunately, still the position of the Half The Answer podcast that that man is not currently alive and has not been alive for several months or even years, and that he is being animated by the spirit of evil itself. It's not actually — his body doesn't need to continue to function. There's something else happening in there.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Oh, yeah, that's true. That is our official position. That is accurate.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Let me tell you — zombies, they love me, okay? Nobody — nobody loves zombies more than I do. I feel for the zombies. Zombies are tremendous people when you get to know them. Fake news that I was bit by one. I wasn't — not yet, okay. But even if they did bite me, it wouldn't actually do anything, because I have tremendous genes. I'm the healthiest person that you could ever imagine. I've got great kids. Everybody tells me.

**Trent R. Nelson:** See — CNN journalist is like, "So we heard you got bit." He's like, "You are just the nastiest. You work for the nastiest company. It's absolute nonsense. Bit by a zombie — I wish I got bit by a zombie."

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right — I can draw a clock, no problem.

**Jeff Waldorf:** I can't believe they would say these things. Right in front of my face! You're saying those things to me — so nasty. Quiet, piggy.

**Caitlin M. Green:** There's just so many of them that it's amazing that you could forget "quiet piggy." And yet I was reminded of it earlier today and I was like — right, "quiet piggy." I forgot.

**Trent R. Nelson:** So — speed-running the War on Terror. It made me realize something that I did mention on Bluesky — that our childhood was for nothing. We didn't learn anything. Or, we learned something. But unfortunately we're being held hostage in a situation where septuagenarians are dominating power past their prime, and so we're not able to implement the lessons that we did actually learn. We are literally doing the same thing. And as you noted, Jeff, many of the same characters are kind of around the deal again.

**Jeff Waldorf:** What concerns me is not only being in the Middle East and letting this drag on, but then also saying, "Now let's go over here and do this too." Because that concern extends back to, for example, Cuba, or even — and I know this is going to sound crazy — Brazil. Think about it. His friend, the former president of Brazil, got locked up for his crimes, and now Lula da Silva is running Brazil. You don't think that chafes against him and Stephen Miller and all the rest of the ghouls there? Of course it does. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that was a consideration next as well. The thing about this administration is that it is so wild and unhinged that we can't really know what's going to happen next. Anything is possible. And normally people use that phrase as a way to encourage people — "Yay, anything's possible!" But in this case, "anything is possible" is basically your next harbinger of doom.

**Trent R. Nelson:** What are your thoughts — does this speed-running mean that, as some people conceive, with Trump's attention span, he'll be on to the next country by mid-March? Or does this thing drag on, as Caitlin noted, to be part of our new unbridled hell?

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, and it could come from anywhere. You're in a haunted house in the dark, and the next ghoul could come from any direction. We're feeling really Halloweeny today — a lot of zombies and ghouls. It's almost Easter. Come on, bunnies.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Chocolate eggs. Yeah.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right? Venezuela was emboldening, if nothing else — it made him feel like he could do it.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Yeah, it's spooky time. It may not be Halloween, but it's spooky time. This shit is scary. As A.J. Muste, the Dutch pacifist, wrote — and of course, pacifism has many problems of its own as it concerns living in an international world in which you can't avoid violence sometimes — but as per the idea that we continue to move on to different countries: "The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?" And this is the problem with imperial conquest. Once we take one over — once you have one Cheese Doodle, you have another, right?

**Trent R. Nelson:** We're talking about speed-running. The president is speed-running minor philosophical thought. You have a good amount of strength, and you're leading a country that has a great deal of strength. But the reason for multilateral cooperation and mutual coordination and friendship — it's because we cannot always anticipate that we're going to be strong. We cannot always anticipate that we're going to be able to do things unilaterally. This president only understands brute force. And as Sam has previously noted, his opportunism — Trump is not a person who looks around and says, "Let me pick strong countries to go after." He waits for them to look like they're tanking and then applies more pressure to see if he can pop the zit. Literally.

**Trent R. Nelson:** And so, Jeff, I think that is a very valid concern — that this doesn't stop. We end up appraising the past in several months, perhaps several years, and what we really end up seeing is like in a cartoon, where you look behind where the Tasmanian Devil was and everything's broken. That's certainly not how I wanted to spend my 30s and 40s. I feel for the children, because the children are the ones who are going to suffer most. We already had to suffer this as children. We got the primer, but we really didn't want any more children to have to go through one of these. And as you noted, Jeff — not only are our children having to live through this, but there are many other children who are not going to live through this. And that is horrifying, breathtaking, and we should all feel worse.

**Trent R. Nelson:** But Jeff, we know we've got to let you go sooner than later. It breaks our heart. We like to end our programs with something positive, so I'm going to ask you three questions. Number one: what's your favorite ice cream flavor? Number two: what are some things that people can do to fight back, to feel good about trying to make a difference? And number three: I need you to plug yourself — tell all the people where they can find you, subscribe, hear you rant.

**Jeff Waldorf:** All right, so question number one — cheesecake ice cream. Yeah — have you never had a strawberry cheesecake ice cream? It's delicious. It's really good. And look, I love a lot of different ice creams. Sometimes I'm in the mood for mint chocolate chip, or the cheesecake of course. And there's Superman — or Scooper Man, whatever you want to call it — that's also really good. Blue Moon. Lot of good ice cream. I'm an ice cream goodness. I love so many different flavors. I'm surprised I'm not 300 pounds heavier. I do love my ice cream though.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Okay, so let's go to the second one. What can we do? I think the immediate thing, since we are getting closer to primary season, one of the things that I have always wanted to see is more participation in Democratic primaries. Why is that important? What are you talking about, Democratic primaries, when we're fighting a fascist movement? Because we have to have representation that can actually fight a fascist movement. We currently don't have that. You think Chuck Schumer is really fighting against this? No. When you look at the polling, most Americans are not on board with striking Iran on behalf of the Israeli government. But he is.

**Jeff Waldorf:** And so it's one of those situations where it's like, bro, you care more about our relationship with Israel than you do about doing the right thing and not bombing children or getting us involved in another disastrous Middle Eastern war that is going to cost us lives, money, as well as the lives of people overseas — and bring up the costs of things like oil.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Right. The Strait of Hormuz is now under watch by Iran. They've closed it. That's going to raise prices. And I just want to add — international prestige. America has problems, and those criticisms have always been known. But while we should rightly critique all of our presidents, whether it's Joe Biden or Barack Obama or George Bush or Bill Clinton or this terrible fascist — we must remain realistic. I didn't like those establishment fellas very much, but I also think they were better than the worst president we've had — the one that James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson are like, "Oh boy, glad he came." He pushes us all up one rank. George Bush is like, "Finally, I could just go paint in peace — this guy totally has gotten me off the hook." It's important that we recognize that we've lost a lot.

**Jeff Waldorf:** And that's why I say primaries are so incredibly important. Because if you do want those fighters, it's not like those people aren't running. They are, but they are challenging incumbents or establishment folks who are getting that same kind of AIPAC money or big corporate money that is making them, in my view, weak — but it's a weakness that is on purpose. They lose to the right wing. And I know it's my own personal conspiracy theory, but the money and the influence from big corporations and mega-donors that are very pro-Israel — given money to members of both parties — that corruption, I believe, makes these Democrats weak and pathetic and subservient to other countries' interests and not American interests.

**Caitlin M. Green:** And you can see it in the polling. Democrats are disappointed with the lack of fight in their leadership, and they're looking for fighters. And so this primary season, we need to see those fighters stand up and say it's going to be me, and they're going to get some support for that.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Well, as Caitlin has noted before, it's this race to the middle, this race to be more palatable. We're just attempting to find this happy place where everyone will be content with what we did. Well, that doesn't exist. You've got to make a stand, and you're going to make some people upset.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, right. It's the golden mean fallacy.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, that's the other part. It's not a good sales pitch to say, "I'm going to give you policies that end up doing sort of what the Republicans wanted to do anyway, but without that evil little thrill of getting to hurt the yucky people." That's not a good sales pitch. That's what the Democrats have been trying to sell. And no one's buying it, because either we don't like those policies, or we want the thrill of hurting the people that we hate. So you kind of lose us on both sides.

**Jeff Waldorf:** And they still end up hurting some of those people anyway. All you have to do is look at some of the rhetoric coming from Gavin Newsom about the trans community and realize that guy is not going to be a friend to transgender folks. He's not a friend to homeless people, not a friend to any of those marginalized groups. As a leftist, I care about them, and I want to see their situations fixed through good government action. I actually believe we can have a government that cares for these people and does right by them. But we currently don't have that. People like Newsom are saying, "Let's just be slightly less bad, but generally I agree with Republicans."

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, but I'm still going to repeat all these right-wing myths about trans people and what they're like, and what's happening with young people and sports. And I'm gonna sit across from Charlie Kirk and nod along while he says some really evil shit.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right — this whole "oh, we can all agree there's a crisis at the border, we can all agree that some trans rights are just a bridge too far." It's like — no. We can't, and we shouldn't, because we like to say things that are true.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Right, and we have to stop. I did this the other day. I was having a discussion. Somebody asked me a question, and I said, "I'm not answering your question." And they said, "Well, because you can't answer my question." And I said, "No, your question is incorrect on its surface, so as a result of it not actually being connected to reality, I can't answer that question. You're going to have to come to reality with the rest of us, and then you can ask a question based on living in the world, and at that point I'll answer whatever question you'd like." We can disagree, we can agree, it is what it is — but we have to stop giving them anything that is incorrect. If it's incorrect, we have to say, "Nope." Once we come into the same world, then we'll go.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Well, what about Laken Riley? "You never protested about Laken Riley!" It's like — yeah, because that was a murder that got dealt with in the legal system. I don't know what we were supposed to be doing in the streets.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, but we're not going to protest the government over prosecuting a murder the normal way. They're doing it with Iran too — "Why aren't these college kids out there protesting Iran?" Well, because their university is not invested in the government of Iran the way that it is in Israel.

**Jeff Waldorf:** And of course, they always tend to move the goalposts. "Oh, well, you didn't protest against the murder of Laken Riley because the person that killed her was punished and everything. But yeah, they shouldn't have been here in the first place. Why aren't you mad about that? The border, the border security — poorest border, we don't have any borders anymore."

**Caitlin M. Green:** Yeah, my favorite thing is when they post a video or a photo of people moving through an immigration checkpoint and they're like, "Look, open borders! They don't have any!" And it's like — that's a photo of a checkpoint. That's them doing the procedure. They had to do the checkpoint.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Yeah, and the whole view they try to put in people's heads about the border is like a scene from *World War Z* — just a whole wave of zombies pouring over the border into the safe zone and murdering everybody inside. That's just not reality. These people don't live in the real world. One of the biggest issues at the border is not that it's porous and everybody can come through. It's actually the fact that we don't have enough immigration judges. That's the real problem — that's what's slowing down immigration. But again, that is the whole point. Republicans have always wanted to slow down immigration to make it harder for people to come here and become citizens, because they don't want other people here. They don't want people who are not white to be here.

**Caitlin M. Green:** No, we need weaponized drones every four feet along the entire border, or else we're not secure.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Social workers, immigration judges, all sorts of stuff, apps. Absolutely.

**Caitlin M. Green:** Right? They like it that their status is incomplete. As many immigrants as possible who cannot have finished the entire process, the better. And also, I don't want to pay for it, so we're not going to be funding the judicial system or the social workers or anything like that.

**Jeff Waldorf:** Right, they want to encourage illegal immigration, by the way — that's the other thing. They want to encourage it by making it as difficult as possible for people to become citizens, to come over and work and live here legally. You can go back to the very draconian border bill during the end of the Biden administration, and Trump said, "Oh, this is a very draconian bill. Can't pass it because I want to run on immigration." All it was was a narrative. It was never reality.

**Caitlin M. Green:** It can't be a solved issue.

**Trent R. Nelson:** To paraphrase *It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia* — the Republicans of today can't tell me about immigration because the Republicans of 1865 already told me about immigration and about citizenship and about birthright and about all of these things that they'd like to tell us we don't know about. We already know what it is, because after the Civil War, we got many positive things done that helped to highlight the fact that anyone here is an American, anyone born here is an American, and America is a beautiful idea that anyone can be a part of. And it's one of the reasons why we love it.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Mr. Jeff, we appreciate you so much. Can you tell everybody where they can find you, where they can subscribe, where they can hear your rants?

**Jeff Waldorf:** If you're interested in coming and watching some of my videos, go to our YouTube channel — youtube.com/logicallyleftist. Check it out. New videos five days a week. We've also got a Facebook page — facebook.com/jeffwaldorfshow. And you can find me on Bluesky, of course, at Logically Leftist. I'd love to see y'all there.

**Trent R. Nelson:** Absolutely — go follow Jeff. All the great stuff they're doing over there. Certainly Logically Leftist. It's been a pleasure. You'll come back and spend more time with us. It might even catch us over there sometime. But Caitlin, well — you know that understanding a question is half of an answer, and this has been Half The Answer with your hosts Trent R. Nelson and Caitlin M. Green. And until next time — bye.