There’s two ways of looking at this, Isaac. One is that Texas is very much like the rest of the country. If you look at, for instance, where people voted for Trump, you’ll see splashes of blue along either coastline, and then you see a big red country with blue freckles on it. If you’re looking at that map, you can’t tell where Texas ends and where it begins. It looks just like the rest of the middle of the country. On the other hand, Texas has a very profound cultural imprint, and there are few places in the country where you have such a defined identity as you do in Texas. This cultural imprint is a gift, in a way. It’s a powerful brand. All over the world people have images of Texas and what Texas is like. I wouldn’t want to lose that. It certainly doesn’t define what Texas is today and maybe it limits our imagination about what Texas really stands for.

So then how do you define what Texas is today?

Let’s start with the fact that Texas is far more progressive and diverse than people imagine. Take the city of Houston, for instance, which is considered the most ethnically diverse city in America. Twenty percent of the population was born in some other country. It had more political refugees than any other city in America. It’s had two black mayors and America’s first lesbian mayor. It’s considered by some metrics to have the highest standards of living in the whole country. These are not the images that people have of Houston or of Texas.

But in terms of the flip-side of that: To what degree do you think what’s happened with the Republican Party in Texas is, again, specific to Texas, and to what degree do you think it’s just a large Republican state and the Republican Party as a whole has gone in an unfortunate direction?

Much of the direction that the Republican Party has taken nationally has its roots in actions that were taken in Texas, such as redistricting. The pioneer of redistricting was Tom DeLay and the Texas Legislature, when it turned red and began to carve up districts like mine, where I live in Austin. Austin is probably the most liberal city in the entire southern tier of the United States, and now it’s been carved into six different congressional districts with five Republicans and one Democrat representing Austin. Representatives from other states actually came to Texas and talked to [former speaker of the Texas House] Tom Craddick and Tom DeLay about how they’d accomplish it. Texas became a model for that.

There is a national Republican agenda for cutting back taxes. Naturally, that causes a failure to deliver the services. You can see that in education, all over, especially in the deep red states— Kansas, Oklahoma, our neighbors, where teachers are seriously underpaid, and the education of our children is really suffering. That’s true in Texas. The nation’s report card, which came out a couple weeks ago, has Texas down in the bottom 10 or 15 percent of the nation’s students. It’s at the bottom or right next to the bottom in terms of how much money it spends per student in the state, which is similar to what’s happening in other states. A lot of it has its origins in Texas.

What are your biggest fears about Texas, and are they distinct from your fears about the future of the country?

They are very much tied up. Ten percent of all the schoolchildren in America right now are Texans. We’re really failing in the education of our future workers in the state, and it has national repercussions. Texas is going to double in population by 2050, but the infrastructure of the state is already challenged. There’s been very little planning to accommodate that massive influx of population. Both Dallas and Houston are expected to have populations of 10 million people in just 12 years, and yet the cities are really, really struggling with the infrastructure. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the state has done so little to provide the kind of infrastructure that Texas really needs.

You’ve written a lot of books on a lot of different things, from the Middle Eastto Scientology. Was the experience of writing this book at all different just because of how much it means to you personally?

Yeah, it really was. It was also a lot of fun. I know we’ve been talking about my dismal forecast for our politics. But I love Texas. I love a lot of things about Texas. I’m in a band; we play a lot of Texas music. I love to drive around the state. I have a ton of friends in the state. I like the epic friendliness and openness that is so characteristic of Texas. There’s a great spirit of boldness and entrepreneurialism that I admire quite a lot. I enjoy living in Texas, but there are things that I feel should be addressed and corrected. I love Texas enough to want to add my voice of concern.

What has it been like to be in Texas during this post-Parkland gun debate?

The only politician that I’m aware of with any real standing in the state to have addressed this is John Cornyn, who put forward a very modest gun proposal in the Congress. He took some hits for that, but I think he at least was one political figure in the state that felt that something had to be done rather than nothing. Our attorney general, his solution with the Sutherland Springs church shooting was to arm the parishioners. That’s a characteristic response of our current political leadership.

What do you make of Ted Cruz? At one level, I think people would say he’s the stereotypical Texas senator, he’s extremely conservative on every issue, etc. But in a way he seems like the least Texas person possible.

Well, I agree that he does not strike anyone in Texas as being a native Texan, and he’s not. He’s a Cuban by way of Canada. It’s not that there aren’t a lot of immigrants from other places in Texas. He’s one of them. When I think of Ted Cruz, he reminds me more of a British imperialist in the 19^thcentury, maybe with a curly mustache and a monocle while he divides up the globe. I think he’d be far more at home in that kind of ultra-elite circle than he is in the kind of rough-and-tumble of Texas. It’s creepy to see him in his video about making machine gun bacon.

Excuse me?

During his campaign, he issued a video called “Making Machine Gun Bacon with Ted Cruz.” It’s not actually a machine gun; it’s an AR-15, this school shooter gun that’s semi-automatic.* He’s at a gun range, and he wraps some bacon around the muzzle and encloses it in foil and then he starts firing away, and soon grease is flying and so on. He takes this fully cooked piece of bacon off the muzzle and goes, “Nothing like machine gun bacon,” and talks about how much he likes to make bacon for his family on the weekend. I suppose this was to show a jollier and more humane side of the candidate. It just comes off as being extremely creepy.