Diabolical Lies - December 28, 2025


The Texasification of America


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

186.31

Word count

1,547

Sentence count

105

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This episode was brought to you by Highways, Tim Dunn, Ferris Wilkes, Texas SB3, Texas SB6,
00:00:07.660 Texas SB8, Texas SB10, and Texas SB12, Seven Mountain Dominionism, The Big and Bright,
00:00:14.100 Stars at Night, Ted Cruz's Favorite Suite at the Ritz-Carlton Cancun, and the Offshore
00:00:19.200 Bank Account in the Caymans, where Greg Abbott stores his kickbacks from the NRA.
00:00:24.320 Wait, I love the idea of, you know how when you're driving on a highway and it says,
00:00:27.840 who sponsored the highway.
00:00:29.740 I love the idea of a highway sponsoring us.
00:00:32.620 It's really meta.
00:00:34.380 Deeply American.
00:00:35.240 Much America.
00:00:36.180 Very patriotic.
00:00:37.500 It's a highway sponsorship
00:00:38.780 where we pay to put litter on the highway
00:00:42.380 so that the plastic recycling...
00:00:44.580 So that the companies will...
00:00:46.640 The metaphorical litter.
00:00:49.780 Okay, so my thesis today for today's episode
00:00:53.640 is that Texas is the America of America.
00:00:58.640 Everyone knows that New York City is the Athens of America.
00:01:02.660 It's the Istanbul of America.
00:01:04.560 It's the keys of America.
00:01:06.240 It's the soul of America.
00:01:07.460 We are the Tel Aviv of America.
00:01:09.160 New York City is the Islamabad of America.
00:01:12.540 The Zagreb of America.
00:01:14.660 We are the Lima of America.
00:01:16.040 Texas is to the United States as the United States is to the rest of the world.
00:01:22.440 And originally, when this idea came about, we were like, oh, the Texasification of America.
00:01:27.660 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.
00:01:34.280 And then I started looking into it, and I was like, oh, this is real. 0.53
00:01:40.120 So, un-fucking-fortunately, now we have to have a serious conversation about this.
00:01:45.280 I feel like this is true for so many things that we cover. 0.91
00:01:47.800 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.
00:01:57.300 Jump cut to me with my face in my hands like five pages into this outline being like, oh my god.
00:02:03.400 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.
00:02:11.040 So for part of 2016, for most of 2017, and then from then until spring 2021.
00:02:18.600 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.
00:02:29.060 And I'm actually kind of struck in retrospect by, like, the general environment of what Gia Tolentino called big money lawlessness.
00:02:38.600 Like, that really did feel resonant.
00:02:41.900 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.
00:02:48.360 Both of them had active shooter debacles.
00:02:50.820 Wow.
00:02:51.700 Like, two separate in five years.
00:02:54.020 The first one was more immediate.
00:02:55.480 I went home from work for lunch one day, and there was a bunch of cop cars in the parking garage.
00:03:00.440 And they were like, what unit are you in?
00:03:02.480 You need to go right there and, like, hurry.
00:03:05.480 And I was like, what's going on?
00:03:06.800 So turns out someone had, like, walked into the lobby minutes earlier and shot and killed the building manager.
00:03:13.280 So we were on lockdown for, like, the rest of the afternoon until they caught the guy that did it.
00:03:17.280 The other one was less proximate, but it does lead me to why we're doing this today.
00:03:22.160 It was in February 2021, okay?
00:03:24.560 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.
00:03:34.380 and the pipes underground were not insulated
00:03:37.880 or something like that.
00:03:38.940 I don't know.
00:03:39.460 I'm not an energy expert.
00:03:40.580 All I know is that they froze.
00:03:42.260 And so for like a week.
00:03:44.660 And a lot of people died, right?
00:03:45.960 People were freezing to death in their homes.
00:03:48.520 And that morning I was like on a,
00:03:51.100 I was like working on a PowerPoint,
00:03:52.480 like on a meeting using a hotspot.
00:03:55.020 It's like pandemic, deep freeze. 1.00
00:03:57.620 We're all fucking cold. 0.98
00:03:58.980 I'm trying to like- 0.97
00:03:59.820 I love how productive Katie was like,
00:04:01.480 I've got to get to work.
00:04:02.660 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.
00:04:14.700 And 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, someway. And that is why we were having this conversation today.
00:04:38.240 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. 0.74
00:04:47.920 Somehow. Somehow. The seed was planted. 0.95
00:04:51.160 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.
00:05:07.480 I had never experienced anything like this
00:05:09.860 until I went to the University of Alabama
00:05:11.720 and nearly all of my friends at Alabama were from Texas.
00:05:15.640 And they were obsessed with Texas
00:05:19.340 to the point that like by the time we were graduating,
00:05:21.560 I was like, well, obviously I need to move to Texas.
00:05:23.540 Like this is the greatest state on earth.
00:05:25.300 It's really contagious.
00:05:26.840 They were from Houston, they were from Fort Worth,
00:05:28.740 they were from Dallas.
00:05:29.600 And like the enthusiasm and the pride
00:05:31.960 that they had in their state was just completely singular.
00:05:35.800 What was your understanding then of, what did Texas mean when you were at that age?
00:05:40.220 Like, what did you think about it the way they described it?
00:05:42.260 Oh, it's like always margaritas and rodeos and cowboys and fun.
00:05:47.240 And like, I just, it was always, um.
00:05:49.720 Yeah, like Wild West.
00:05:50.820 Wild West, yeah.
00:05:52.000 Like, we would go there for breaks sometimes.
00:05:55.200 I would road trip with them back to their houses in DFW.
00:05:59.340 And we would go to Joe T's in Fort Worth, which was this fun outside margarita.
00:06:05.260 But 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.
00:06:10.680 It's like Louisiana, but richer, if that makes sense.
00:06:14.300 Right.
00:06:15.160 But Carol, I want to ask you, what do you know about Texas?
00:06:18.320 What do I know about Texas?
00:06:19.140 So when I was in high school, I started rowing.
00:06:22.200 I've mentioned that I rowed in college and we would every spring go to Austin.
00:06:26.820 And so that was when I first visited Texas.
00:06:29.540 We would spend a week in Austin and we would like get barbecue and we rowed on Lady Bird Lake.
00:06:34.280 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.
00:07:02.440 you you were going to pull over a reverse george w bush
00:07:06.880 exactly so yeah i think i thought of it as a home of a type of southern sentimentality that was not
00:07:14.500 that did not belong to me okay interesting so you thought about it as being southern well and i think
00:07:19.920 there are two types of patriotism right and so new england patriotism is very much it's old school
00:07:25.080 it's mayflower it's puritan villages and then the idea of texas is like yeah you're on that 0.99
00:07:29.840 pilgrim shit. I feel like I thought of Texas as those are the secessionists. Those are the ones 0.99
00:07:34.860 who are always fighting America. So I almost had this inverse of it. Ah, okay. But it's interesting
00:07:41.200 that you said like Southern sentimentality. And so maybe there are gradations of this for sure.
00:07:45.900 And I can see why someone who's from the Northeast or from New England would kind of think of like
00:07:52.100 everything below Ohio as the South. But I think for me growing up in Kentucky and then going to
00:07:58.840 Alabama. I'm like, that's like the South. And then Texas was the West. And we're going to kind
00:08:04.220 of get into like how that branding exercise played out. But the portal to this rabbit hole for me
00:08:11.060 was a press release that I saw on December 8th from the Texas governor's office saying that Greg