Welcome to The Lost Debate Show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta. In a bit, we're going to hear from Richard Collenberg, who is the author of 17 books, all about education, everything from K-12 to higher education. He is an expert and leading thinker on affirmative action and higher education admissions. And he was like the kind of

person, everybody was quoting during the big debates over the Supreme Court decision on affirmative

action. And he's out with a new book called Class Matters that is about so much more than

affirmative action, although it gets into it. He talks about the future of universities, but really

about the question of class versus race

and how, whether it's Democrats, independents, Republicans, like his argument is that we should

be focusing more on class than race. And he makes a pretty spirited defense of that argument.

And so we'll get to that in a second. But before we do a couple of announcements on the front end

here, number one, we've been nominated for three Webby Awards, both for our show Killing Justice, which is this show that I did with Crooked Media and we did with Crooked Media about an alleged political murder in India. And two, for the fights in the Forgotten Burroughs, two-part series we did here on the lost debate feed all

about immigration and statin island and so we're a small and mighty media company going up against

like the likes of like NBC and you know New York Times yada yada yada so we could use your help go in

to the show description and vote in all three of those categories.

It takes you only a second. You don't have to vote for anything other than us and vote for us

in those three categories. I would really appreciate it. Also, if you haven't yet, go out and buy

and review, whether it's on Goodreads, Amazon, Story graph, et cetera, by my novel, Garbage Town,

which, you know, is just killing it. We're an Amazon bestseller. I think it's something like a

463 on Goodreads. Kirkus reviews recommended it. Publishers Weekly made it an editor's pick.

We're flying. We've been selling out events around the country, and this is a coming-of thriller about a group of kids growing up in Staten Island, in the early 90s, in the mid-90s in Staten Island. And it's really a period piece about what it was like growing up in the 90s. And so, especially for you millennials out there, you'll love it. Before we get to Rick Collenberg, though, I think it's important to talk about tariffs.

And I've got a lot of things to say about it. And I'll try to parse out enough here today to give you a sense of where my head is.

But let's start with a couple of clips. This is the Secretary of Treasury, Scott Besson, appearing on Tucker Carlson's podcast.

We are doing, on one side, the president is reordering trade.

On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings.

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