Political Gabfest | Civilizational Erasure

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Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss what will happen as the Supreme Court considers whether a president can remove leaders of independent agencies without cause, how the overt signals about immigration and “erasure” in the new National Security Strategy are meant to stir up cultural anxiety in Europe, and the high-stakes merger drama between Netflix, Paramount, and Warner Bros. with guest Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law School and author of the new book The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. For this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode, Emily, John, and David discuss a Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collective investigation that found Instacart quoting massive price differences for the same products, which they claim result from AI-enabled pricing experiments. In the latest Gabfest Reads, John talks with journalist and author Andrew Ross Sorkin about his new book, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation — the story of speculation, debt, and the human drives that fueled the Wall Street crash that changed everything. Email your chatters, questions, and comments to [email protected]. (Messages may be referenced by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.) Podcast production by Nina Porzucki Research by Emily Ditto You can find the full Political Gabfest show pages here. Want more Political Gabfest? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Political Gabfest show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or visit slate.com/gabfestplus to get access wherever you listen. Find out more about David Plotz's monthly tours of Ft. DeRussy, the secret Civil War fort hidden in Rock Creek Park. Follow @SlateGabfest on X / https://twitter.com/SlateGabfestSlate Political Gabfest on Facebook / https://www.facebook.com/Gabfest/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome for the Slate Political Gab Fest.
0:07.3	December 11th, 2025, the Civilizational Erasure Edition.
0:19.9	I am David Klotz of CityCast in Washington, D.C. From the New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School, Emily, Emily. Hey, David. In New Haven, hello, Emily. Hey, David. Hey, John. A new room of her house. I mean, I'm sure we've seen it 100 hundred times, but I don't recognize. Same room as last week.
0:38.9	Really?
0:39.5	Yeah.
0:40.1	And it's just the handsome flowers, too.
0:42.3	Yeah, I replaced the pansies with orchid.
0:45.6	And from his Garrett in Manhattan, John Dickerson, the co-anchor of the CBS Evening News for a little while.
0:56.1	We should play the 60 Minutes ticking clock.
0:59.5	Hi, gang, from the Garrett.
1:02.5	This is about to be my permanent location.
1:07.6	The way it wasn't COVID, I'm very excited to be with you.
1:10.2	It would be garaded, but not garotted. I'm very excited to be with you. It would be garrotted, but not garrotted. But not garrotted, yeah. Although, I was
1:17.6	a little bit like that. I was going to say, the garrotting, the garrotting is happening
1:22.8	in advance of the garriting. This week on the G Gab Fest, what will happen when the Supreme Court decides to destroy
1:31.5	America's independent government agencies?
1:33.5	Then the Trump administration's new national security strategy identifies America's most
1:38.8	devious and threatening new enemy, Europe.
1:42.0	Why this crazy shift?
1:47.3	Then we will talk to Columbia law professor Tim Wu about the bizarre battle to buy Warner Brothers Discovery and the weird antitrust and
1:56.1	corruption implications of it. Plus, we'll have cocktail chatter. This episode of the GabFest is
2:00.8	sponsored by
	...

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