WHAT WE'RE TRYING TO DOWe take local politics seriously. Ourselves, less so.
Bar Politics exists to make the decisions happening around Dallas easier to understand and harder to ignore.
Budgets. Bonds. Zoning. Taxes. Transit. Libraries. Streets. A lot of decisions that eventually show up in your neighborhood first show up in an agenda, ordinance or meeting you probably did not spend your week preparing to read.
That does not mean you don’t care. It means you have a job.
So we do the homework. Then we make a show out of it. And when the facts are inherently absurd?
Great. The jokes just wrote themselves.
THE RULESReality, then commentary.
We establish what happened before we start making jokes about it.
Keep the receipts.
Documents, numbers, votes and actual quotes are better material than outrage bait.
Fair doesn't mean boring.
We question assumptions, contradictions and decisions wherever we find them. We represent the facts accurately and trust you to make up your own mind.
People aren't the punchline.
Public decisions, systems, political theater and tortured logic are all material.
The people living with the consequences are not.
A LITTLE HISTORY
Yes, Bar Politics has been here before.
Josh Kumler created Bar Politics in 2015, when the show began bringing Dallas politics into bars with a late-night-style mix of research, interviews and comedy.
It ran for more than 30 performances through 2017, featuring conversations with City Council members, Dallas ISD leaders, reporters and then-City Manager T.C. Broadnax.
Then everybody went back to their day jobs.
Now the show has a new run, a bigger digital life and the same basic idea:
Take local politics seriously without requiring everyone involved to take themselves quite so seriously.
Never saw the original?
Even better. You haven’t missed any required reading.
WHO’S DOING THISJosh Kumler
Josh created and hosts Bar Politics. He started the show because he believed more people would pay attention to local government if somebody made it worth paying attention to.
Turns out he still thinks that.
The Shearer Group
Bar Politics is produced by The Shearer Group, a Dallas communications firm working with organizations tackling big public problems.
Child Poverty Action Lab
Bar Politics is sponsored by the Child Poverty Action Lab, a Dallas-based nonprofit that uses data, research, and cross-sector collaboration to identify and scale solutions aimed at cutting childhood poverty in Dallas by 50% within a single generation.
COME SEE FOR YOURSELF