Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta, and today we bring back

Tyler Austin Harper, who is a contributing writer to The Atlantic, and he's also a professor at Bates College.

And Tyler and I touch on some subjects that are more timely, like all the executive orders from Trump, including

the sort of funding crisis and confusion that's going on in this country right now. And then we

broaden out to talk about how the media and the alternative media is treating the Trump

administration and also what Democrats should be doing and what should be the future of the party.

You know, and this has kind of been true of some of the recent episodes we have.

This is like gets into like debatey discussiony, like kind of like the overlap between

debate and discussion.

And it's kind of like my favorite kind of conversations where it's like he and I have

kind of sometimes competing theories, sometimes overlapping theories. And the conversation, I think sometimes sounds like if you're just

having dinner with your friend and you're kind of just trying to work stuff out and you're

not afraid to disagree, but you're also not afraid to agree. So that was just my feeling having

this conversation. And I say this because I think some new people come to the pod and they're like,

there's not enough debate. And those of you old time ads know, I've long retired the

sense that this is about crossfire style debate. And what I want are just really good faith discussions

around issues of importance where people are coming from different perspectives sometimes,

sometimes coming from common perspectives,

and hashing out ideas without being fully wedded to whatever stake they've put in the ground.

So I think you'll love this episode.

A quick disclaimer before we jump into this interview.

When I was talking to Tyler, it was before the Trump

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