Texas Showdown | Roundtable

The Dispatch Podcast

The Dispatch

Politics, News

4.4 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jonah Goldberg grabs the host’s chair and steers Megan McArdle, Chris Stirewalt, and Kevin Williamson through a lively discussion into the political turbulence in Texas. The Agenda:—How upset should we be about redistricting in Texas?—Collin Allred versus Ken Paxton—Megan McArdle is mad about the BLS firing—Nielsen ratings are fake, but they are reliably fake—'It's a race to the bottom and everyone loses.'—The impact of postmodernism on politics—NWYT: Rule followers are suckers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:17.0	Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jonah Goldberg.
1:22.0	On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss Texas Democrats fleeing the state to avoid a hard vote on redistricting and gerrymandering that could put the House of Representatives in play.
1:27.9	And Trump's firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for delivering a report
1:31.9	he didn't like, we'll ask whether or not this is part of some larger war on the truth
1:36.3	besetting American politics and society.
1:39.3	And then for not worth your time, we address the thorny, eternal question that has divided households for
1:45.3	millennia. How early should you get to the airport? I'm joined today by my friends and colleagues,
1:51.5	Kevin Williamson, Chris Starwalt, and Megan McArdle from the Washington Post. Let's get to it.
1:57.4	So Kevin, I think you're the one who's actually writing right now about the redistricting
2:01.9	stuff. The gist is Donald Trump wants to gain five seats. They think they can gain five seats
2:06.5	by doing a mid-term, mid-decade redistricting in Texas. And this is spreading out across the
2:12.1	country where Democrats are claiming that they will do the same thing, but there are problems
	...

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