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- [00:00]
A
This episode was brought to you by Highways. Tim Dunn, Ferris Wilkes. Texas SB3, Texas SB6, Texas SB8, Texas SB10 and Texas SB12. 7 Mountain Dominionism. The big and bright stars at night. Ted Cruz's favorite suite at the Ritz Carlton, Cancun. And the offshore bank account in the Caymans where Greg Abbott stores his kickbacks from the nra.
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B
Wait, I love the idea of. You know how when you're driving on a highway and it says, who sponsored the highway? I love the idea of a highway sponsoring really meta. Deeply American much America. Very patriotic.
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A
It's a highway sponsorship where we pay to put litter on the highway so that the plastic recycling so that the.
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B
Companies will the metaphorical litter.
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A
Okay, so my thesis today for today's episode is that Texas is the America of America.
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C
Everyone knows that New York City is the Athens of America, is the Istanbul of America, is the key of America, the soul of America. We are the Tel Aviv of America. New York City is the Islamabad of America. The Zabreb of America. We are the Lima of Texas is.
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A
To the United States as the United States is to the rest of the world. And originally, when this idea came about, we were like, oh, the Texas Ification of America. Like, this will be a fun little holiday bonus episode where we can, like, make a bunch of jokes about brisket tacos and Ted Cruz. And then I started looking into it and I was like, oh, this is real. So unfucking. Fortunately, now we have to have a serious conversation about this.
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B
I feel like this is true for so many things that we cover. And our little snarky thing is, like, it really is that deep. But the outcome is that you and I perpetually feel like we're falling through a trapdoor of epiphany. And it is really overwhelming.
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A
Jump cut to me with my face in my hands, like, five pages into this outline being like, oh, my God. So one thing that I'm not sure if listeners know and I want to start with is that I lived in Dallas for about five years, so for part of 2016, for most of 2017, and then from then until spring 2021. And so when I was writing this outline, I was reflecting on it now, having lived in several other states, growing up in Kentucky, going to school in Alabama, living in Colorado, living in California. California. And I'm actually kind of struck in retrospect by, like, the general environment of what Gia Tolentino called big money lawlessness. Like, that really did feel resonant. And to give you an idea of what I mean, during the time that I lived in Dallas, I lived in two different apartment complexes. Both of them had active shooter debacles.
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B
Wow.
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A
Like, two separate in five years. The first one was more immediate. I went home from work for lunch one day, and there was a bunch of cop cars in the parking garage, and they were like, what unit are you in? You need to go right there and, like, hurry. And I was like, what's going on? So turns out someone had, like, walked into the lobby minutes earlier and shot and killed the building manager. So we were on lockdown for, like, the rest of the afternoon until they. They caught the guy that did it. The other one was less proximate, but it does lead me to why we're doing this today. It was in February 2021. Okay, so we're, like, less than a year into the pandemic, and Texas was undergoing a deep freeze because the energy infrastructure in Texas is deregulated, and the pipes underground were not insulated or something like that. I don't know. I'm not an energy expert. All I know is that they froze. And so for, like, a week.
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B
And a lot of people died, right?
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A
People were freezing to death in their homes. And that morning, I was, like, on a. I was, like, working on a PowerPoint, like, on a meeting, using a hotspot spot. It's like, pandemic deep freeze. We're all cold. I'm trying to, like.
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B
I love how productive Katie was. Like, I've got to get to work.
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A
I was obviously trying to continue to bring shareholder value, as is my want. And there was a shooting down the street from my apartment. So we got an emergency alert that was like, stay inside.
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B
Oh, my God.
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A
That's when I saw it on my Twitter feed. A picture of Ted Cruz on a flight to Cancun, escaping to Mexico for a better life. And I snapped. That was the last straw. That is when this vendetta was born. And I vowed right then and there that I would ruin Ted Cruz's life somehow, some way. And that is why we were having.
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B
This conversation today when, like, political deconstruction was just, like a glimmer in your little blonde girl eye. You were like, I'm not sure how, but I will ruin his life.
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A
Somehow. Somehow the seed was planted. So the other thing that I think is really interesting about Texas, just, like, having lived there and knowing what it was that got me to live there, much like many Americans have a lot of pride and fervor and, like, a sense of exceptionalism about their country. Texans are sort of the same way, but for Texas. I had never experienced anything like this until I went to the University of Alabama. And nearly all of my friends at Alabama were from Texas. And they were obsessed with Texas to the point that, like, by the time we were graduating, I was like, well, obviously I need to move to Texas. Like, this is the greatest state on earth. It's really contagious. They were from Houston, they were from Fort Worth, they were from Dallas. And like, the enthusiasm and the pride that they had in their state was just completely singular.
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B
What was your understanding then of what did Texas mean when you were at that age? Like, what did you think about it, the way they described it?
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A
Oh, it's like always margaritas and rodeos and cowboys and fun and like, I just.
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B
It was always, yeah, like Wild West.
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A
Wild West, Yeah. Like, we would go there for breaks sometimes I would road trip with them back to their houses in dfw and we would go to Jyoti's in Fort Worth, which was this fun outside margarita. We like went there in February and it was like warm and fun and everyone there's like drive throughs where you can get liquor. It's like Louisiana, but richer, if that makes sense.
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B
Right.
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A
But Carol, I want to ask you, what do you know about Texas?
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B
What do I know about Texas? So when I was in high school, I started rowing. I've mentioned that I rode in college. And we would every spring go to Austin. And so that was when I first visited Texas. We would spend a week in Austin and we would like, get barbecue and we rode on Ladybird Lake. So but the thing was funny is that Austin, when we were there, people would make a great effort to be like, but Austin is weird. Austin isn't like the rest of Texas. So I feel like I had. I had the traditional New Englanders skepticism of these states. I feel like I thought of Texas as like, yeah, that seems cool, but it's probably just a bunch of rednecks. I feel like when you're from New England, you're like, all this nouveau riche bullshit is none of my concern. And I will one day live in like, Connecticut at the farthest you.
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A
You are going to pull a reverse George W. Bush.
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B
Exactly. So, yeah, I think I thought of it as a home of a type of Southern sentimentality that was not. That did not belong to me.
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A
Okay, interesting. So you thought about it as being Southern.
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B
Well, and I think there are two types of patriotism, right? And so New England patriotism is very much. It's old school, it's Mayflower, it's Puritan villages. And then the idea of Texas is.
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A
Like, yeah, you're on that pilgrim shit.
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B
I feel like I thought of Texas as those are the secessionists. Those are the ones who are always fighting America. So I almost had this inverse of it.
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A
Ah, okay. But it's interesting that you said like Southern sentimentality and so maybe there are gradations of this for sure. And I can see why someone who's from the Northeast or from New England would kind of think of like everything below Ohio as the South.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
But I think for me growing up in Kentucky and then going to Alabama, I'm like, that's like the south. And then Texas was the West. And we're going to kind of get into like how that branding exercise played out. But the portal to this rabbit hole for me was a press release that I saw on December 8 from the Texas governor's office saying that Greg Abbott.