Michael Harrison joins this week's podcast.

Welcome to Old School, New School, Next School with Dom Giordano, a podcast devoted to shedding light on issues pertaining to making America smart again. These include, among many topics, school choice and parental rights. This podcast is dedicated to reversing the deeply disturbing trend known as the dumbing down of America. Now, here's your host, Educator.

and noted talk media commentator, Dom Giordano. Welcome into a special edition this week of Old School, New School, Next School. A big part of our mission is to make America smart again. Now that is a Herculean task, to put it mildly, pushing back against the crippling dumbing down of America. And two of the planks to help us do that are school choice and parental rights. I have big updates this week on

school choice that we'll get to a little bit later.

Martina White, who's a state rep, big school choice person in Pennsylvania,

says if Josh Shapiro, the governor running for president of Pennsylvania,

does not accept the big, beautiful bill money, he will cost taxpayers in Pennsylvania a billion dollars.

And also, the governor of Kentucky is overridden on his veto of getting that money for Kentucky.

It's the first time this has happened. He's a Democrat. So we have two Democrat states now that have school choice statewide. The opportunity of that, we're up to 28. But joining us as we continue to talk about, as we did last week, is someone with a real passion for rooting out and stopping the dumbing down of America. Michael Harrison is the publisher and editor of Talkers, the Bible of Talk Radio.

what people are talking about nationally.

And this is a sub-passion of his.

He and his group, he's a founding member of the Heritage Rock Band, Gun Hill Road.

Gun Hill Road, one of their biggest hits, is the song that says it all, Idiots.

Here's a quote that Harris and Gabe were so grateful to radio for embracing the song

and giving it an amazing amount of airplay.

either in snippets or the entire piece that has driven interest in the song, downloads on the internet, and views of the video. Why is it so well received? Let's bring in Michael Harrison. Michael, it's beautifully done. It is a hit and a sustaining hit, but it must be that people are sensing what you and I are sensing incrementally, sometimes more than incrementally. America is becoming a dumbed-down,

That's the issue. And one of the reasons that the song Idiots has become so popular on the internet, you know, when you say a song is a hit, the definition of hit here in 2026 is a little different than it might have been in 1996 or 1966. It has a tremendous presence on the internet. And I think the reason for that is I think that there is a tremendous amount of concern among smart people about the

the pandemic, if you will, or certainly the epidemic that's sweeping the nation called the dumbing down of America. People are fascinated by and equally sick of idiots in our society. And idiots are permeating our society on every level. And, you know, I think everybody listening to this broadcast, because I can't imagine anybody who's an idiot listening to this podcast.

I just don't think a podcast about education is something idiots are going to be attracted to. So we're kind of talking. We're talking among our own here. Not that we're all so smart, but at least one thing we have in common is we understand that it's important to be smart. We can even be political about it. You cannot run a democracy, especially a complex democracy like the United States of America with an uneducated,

or foolish or imbecilic or idiotic or downright stupid population. It just cannot work out very well. That's why the aristocracy over the years never thought that democracy was a viable solution to how to govern a country because they didn't have confidence in the average people. Well, as it turns out now, it's not just the average people that have a monopoly on idiocy. There's idiocy on every level of our society.

And it's of deep concern. I applaud you for what you're doing with this podcast. Anybody that stands up for education, I think, is a hero. And I hope that we're able to reverse this trend. And that's why I think the song is popular. It is. Where do people find it? Where's the best place to hook up with Gun Hill Road? The best place to go, you'll be able to see Idiots, which the video was produced by the associate publisher of Talkers.

who also has my son, a leading internet attorney, Matthew B. Harrison, and the members of Gun Hill Road, Steve Goldrich, Paul Reich, and Brian Koonin, and me, Michael Harrison, are members of the band. And you can hear and see idiots along with some of the other provocative tunes that we have about modern times at GunHillRoadMusic.com. That's GunHillRoadMusic.

music. Check it out. And we're very proud of the stuff. It's great videos and very provocative songs like Artificial Intelligence. No Robots Were Injured in the recording of this song. Damn Scammers is one of our songs. If I Could Close My Ears, I Would, which is about all of the anxiety that's in the media today. Keep On Talking, which is a First Amendment anthem. We have a lot of tunes out there that would be of interest to the people listening.

to this talk today, it's not just you and me and our producers that see this. It's not just anecdotal. We had on one of the best guests and everybody agreed that listened to him. This James Cooney Harvath neuroscientist extraordinaire saying even globally, but particularly in America, the test results show that this current generation didn't just plateau. They're the first to go backwards at every level and every

So, you know, the pushback on what you and I are talking about is to say, well, prove it. Our experience proves it. Your song is so popular because people are glad that some artistic endeavor is recognizing something they vent about, that they want to be encouraged, that they're noticing it too. It's not just get off my lawn, older generation. It actually can be quantified. So nationwide,

talk radio and what you do with talkers and what I try to do. What is it that you think that you talk about in the song? Is there a remedy toward this after acknowledging it? What do we do? The first thing is we should stop being so extreme in our partisanship and paint the other side as having all the problems of being the cause of all the trouble of being completely bad, of being demonic.

We have to stop with this extreme partisan divide that we are engaging in right now. Because ironically, my friends on the left have told me that they think the song is about the people on the right. And my friends on the right tell me they think the song is about the people on the left. Both sides share in the cause and should share in the cure. So I think that that's one of the things we have to do.

to realize that we really have to play a role in our children's education. I think that part of the school choice campaign, certainly you're an outspoken activist in that arena, also is the parents' rights, parental rights, something that we have to really get behind based on the assumption that parents care about their kids. Now, we all know there are some parents that don't care about their kids, and it's a

It's a tragedy for a child to be born into a world where their parents don't live up to the responsibility that comes with parenthood. But for the most part, I think most parents do care deeply about their kids, no matter what their background. And they have to have an opportunity to be able to express that care and be involved in it. We have to go over the curricula in school and make sure that it's objective as possible. Of course, there's very little objectivity in the current world. It's very difficult to be objective. Everything becomes politicized. But if you stop

and think about some of the things that we were taught. And we grew up when even public school was good. Schools were good. It was hard to be a student. They taught us a lot of things that you look back at it now and it either was not true or they didn't get around to fixing the textbooks or they're biased. I mean, for example, and I don't want to offend anybody, but the idea that Christopher Columbus discovered America.

Well, he didn't. Not only is it factually untrue, but it's also kind of political. It's a worldview. It perpetrates something that is not necessarily ethical or principled. It's even racist in many ways. That type of thing. So we have a lot of work to do. I wish I had all the answers. I mean, what do you think?

Well, I think that school choice is the biggest part of this because public schools are a monopoly. There are great public schools, but they're becoming more and more limited. And what other enterprise can you spend the amount of money? Sometimes it's guesstimated a trillion dollars a year on education. And yet in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, you have entire schools where no one is proficient in reading or math on any of the tests that are given.

Chicago, Michael, we talked about recently and got a lot of response to this.

There's a school that was built for about 800 kids.

There are only 28 in it, 27 administrators and teachers, $94,000 a year.

It costs to educate those kids.

Zero percent of those kids are proficient in reading and math in Chicago.

So allowing parents who care about their kids and have knowledge of this to escape this

is a large part of it, and that's where parental rights come in.

It's not a panacea, but if you send your kid to a school and it's not working and you care,

then you're going to find another option until you find something that does work with the kid.

If you're in public schools like Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, many of them, it is going to be abysmal.

I speak, as you know, from the experience of being a teacher in schools like that.

The violence rate, the other difficulties that you have, make it almost impossible to deal with that. So if you have one or two kids in a classroom acting up repeatedly, you're going to be drained by that. You're not going to reach kids to their highest level. So that's why I think school choice is such a big part of this. Now, one of your songs, too, I wanted to talk about. On the horizon, I see this not even as a mixed blessing.

I see it as helping the idiocy. And that is AI. AI is a crutch. AI for kids to cheat in using it. AI is not reliable factually. And it is also so stilled it, so unemotional. It's a machine after all. The song that you did with Gun Hill Road, talk about that a little bit with AI.

Well, we, you know, AI is a great target to make fun of because you're dealing with robots and you're dealing with some of that stiltedness can be humorous. Basically, we recorded that song a couple of years ago. So we were early on the curve. You know, we were ahead of the curve in terms of conversation about AI. And AI is a double-edged sword, just as all technology is. The automobile is a double-edged sword.

The sword is a double-edged sword. Nuclear power is a double-edged sword. So I'm not terrified of AI that, oh my gosh, the demon, the genie is out of the bottle. I think that it's another form of power that we humans have to learn to harness in a positive way and be careful of the downside as well as the upside. The upside is extraordinary. It can be very helpful in terms of education.

and in terms of medicine, in terms of just productivity. On the other hand, AI feeds into the corruption that seems to be taking over our society. Idiocy is not just the only thing. Corruption is on the rise. Disingenuousness, having big tech, big pharma, big business, big religion, big media, big government, working to, you know, extract money from the world.

from your wallet at every turn. Scams, deep fakes, you know, you can't turn to video as easily in a court of law and go, well, we have it on video. What do you have on video? And eventually, even the experts won't be able to tell the difference. So those are the things that we basically discussed in the song. We saw it coming. But I am not a Luddite. I don't want anybody to think I'm against AI. I think AI is

is pretty far out, man. It's like, wow. But it comes back to education. We have to educate our children how to use the media, not just AI, how to use any kind of technology of communication. And that goes back to you. I was thinking the question you asked me before, what are some of the problems that we have to solve to combat idiocy, ignorance, illiteracy, and the idea that being dumb is cool, which is one of the driving forces of the

the dumbing of America. A lot of people think it's cool to be dumb. Smart people are elitists. Oh my gosh, how terrible. We have to make it cool to be smart. We have to change the whole psychology. A lot of that is the media's job. I think that journalism, I think that the press, newspapers, talk shows, any kind of marketing

of ideas here in the digital world has got to start acting with more responsibility to cover stories honestly and accurately. You take this disingenuous attitude on the part of the media and you add to it the element of artificial intelligence and it's a recipe for disaster. And the worst of, you remember the movie Idiocracy, which was really ahead of the curve on all of the world.

of this, that when we're starting to live in a world that seems like idiocracy now, and the worst is yet to come.

Well, the thing that I try to do, too, Michael, on this is, and again, I recognize each week I try to recommend books to parents and things of that nature. Several people have mapped out what your kids should know at the end of first grade, second grade, third grade.

One of the biggest problems inside schools that I've seen, I've seen schools where proficiency is not good. The kid is nice, basically does his homework, may try to answer in class. And that's a B right there, if not an A minus. So it's fraudulent, the grading. Even at Harvard, we see people, the number of people that are straight A students are pretty close to it. It's way out of whack from what it used to be.

So you can't go by what grade you're getting in school. If you're really concerned about your kid, this show tries to give you some of the tells, some of the things developmentally they ought to know, be involved with. And standardized testing is one thing, but this is deeper than that. And I think this is one of the biggest things all the way up and down from Harvard to pre-K that goes on. So far, what do you say to those? I'm sure when the song came out, said, yeah, you guys are artists.

This is really good. I do see some idiocy. How come America is still the greatest nation in the world if we have so many idiots? I get that all the time. Well, I mean, I don't want to say that America is not the greatest nation in the world, but that's a subjective statement. You know, prove it. You know, I mean, is it a healthy thing for us to just fall back on the idea that it's written in stone, that America is the greatest nation in the world and that we don't and that we can rest on those laurels?

I don't know if that's a very productive or healthy attitude to have. I don't know what the greatest nation in the world means. Now, I don't want to be interpreted here as being anti-American. I think it's very pro-American to hold one's family, one's organization, one's nation, one's religion, one's school to hold their feet to the fire, hold them to high standards. So I don't buy this, oh, America exceptionalism. I think that's a problem to begin with.

Yeah, well, I would argue that every, I'm sure every society was at the top, felt that way. And the erosion is certainly like a termite. You don't see it all at once. And we've had year after year after year of this. So, Michael, again, where did people find your work at Gun Hill Road? Gunhillroadmusic.com. And all the videos and songs are laid right out there.

and, you know, for easy clicking. And I think people will enjoy it. And I hope that they check it out. And I do hope that the message that you and I have discussed today, from the responsibility of the media, the responsibility of parents, the responsibility of the schools, the responsibility of our hearts and our minds being in the right place, that we have goodwill. We love our children. We care about them. We don't want to pollute their minds. We don't want them to

be stifled in terms of their exploration of the world, but we've got to be careful what they're looking at online, who they're hanging out with, what ideas they're having. We should keep them clear of drugs. We should be careful about cyberbullying. I mean, all of these things lend themselves to making us less than the greatest country in the world. And I hope that you continue to do what you're doing and are successful to one degree or another in your mission because you are on the right side of history.

with this mission, Dom. Thank you, Michael. Thanks so much, as always. My pleasure. All right. That's Michael Harrison. You know, one of the missions of this show is to take on idiocy. And sadly, the public schools are promoters of that because they are a monopoly. But the big story this week in the field of school choice is this guy, Andy Beshear. Andy Beshear is the governor of Kentucky. He bowed to the teachers unions.

And he knocked out of the box taking the big, beautiful bill money for school choice. Now, again, if you listen to the show or read a little bit on it, you know that that money is new money, meaning it's not taking anything away from the public schools. Why did he do it? The teachers unions see it as a threat. But he's in a state where the governor doesn't get to just decide. He vetoed it and they overran his own.

Vito. That's right. In Kentucky, it was overwhelming, both the House and the Senate. So now Kentucky is the second state controlled by a Democrat governor that will have the money from the big, beautiful bill in 2027. The other is, of course, Colorado with Governor Polis, who did it on his own. This is important because three other governors who are Democrats said they wouldn't take the money are now reconsidering it. It should be a no-brainer.

But school choice is winning and it's going to win in the end. And winning means opening up avenues for parents and kids who want better. That's what this is all about. I'm looking at an article from Public Citizen in my neck of the woods in Philadelphia that says Governor Shapiro, the head of Pennsylvania, give Pennsylvania kids access to this new scholarship program. The president of a free market think tank urges Pennsylvania to opt in to help students.

both public and private with school costs. That's all that this is about. Why is Governor Shapiro dragging his feet? He's afraid of the teachers union. He's running for president. So is Bashir. You see what happened to Bashir, though. Kentucky struck it down. That is a big moment. Are we going to get all 50? We'll see. And we'll see when the money starts flying around what people say when they're losing out on a billion dollars because of the teachers union's pressure.

on governors. Thanks for listening this week. Dom Giordano with you every week. Hit me with the email. Just go to domshow, D-O-M-S-H-O-W at AOL.com. Here for Old School, New School, Next School. Old School, New School, Next School with Dom Giordano is a presentation of Giordano Productions LLC. Copyright 2026. All rights reserved.