Welcome to The Lost Debata Show for Politically Ecclectics.

I'm Robbie Gupta.

And I think it was a couple weeks ago, the New York Magazine had a whole issue called The Stupid Issue.

And when I saw it, I was like, oh, Lord, is this another, like, blaming Red America for the decline in our cognitive capacity?

You know, there's this kind of this parlor game that I think

a lot of people in neighborhoods like my old neighborhood of Brooklyn play where they kind of blame

other people like my friends in the South for the decline of our civilization. And look, like,

there is a lot of blame to throw around. And if you listen to this podcast long enough,

you know I am unsparing of some trends across the aisle. But what New York Magazine did a masterful job of,

particularly in a piece by Andrew Rice, who are about to hear from, is they looked in the mirror

and meaning like New York Magazine tends to be read by liberals. It's called New York Magazine after all,

and New York has a lot more liberals than than conservatives or mega people.

And Andrew wrote this piece that was a long piece talking about the decline in our educational

results and points the finger mostly, not fully, but mostly at liberals and says,

hey, what are you doing to improve things for kids? And the answer he comes up with is actually

that the current trajectory of liberals, progressives, has been to dismantle policies that were improving kids' lives and replace

them with, well, we don't really know. It's a bunch of gobbly gook, incomprehensible educational

policies. What we're seeing is stagnation. And Andrew, in his piece, examines neighbors that we don't

spend a lot of time talking about on this

podcast because often when I talk about the decline of our educational standards, I talk about

places like North Nashville where I serve kids that are predominantly black and brown. And we do

get around to those neighborhoods, but he centers his piece in, you know, some of these more

...