Senator Ted Cruz | The All-In Inauguration Series

The conversation was recorded at the inauguration of the 47th president, Donald J. Trump. The opening introduces Senator Ted Cruz of Texas as a special guest, and the host who introduces him calls Texas "now my great state".

The talk starts with a request for a boot recommendation. The boots are identified as Lucchese, handmade at the company's factory in El Paso. This pair has the Senate seal on the front and the "come and take it" flag on the back. The flag leads to a short history lesson aimed at the panel's newer Texan, who is teased for having started to say "y'all".

In this account, Texas was part of Mexico in the 1820s and 1830s, and General Santa Ana is called the dictator of Mexico. Santa Ana ordered the Texians, the period name for Texans, in the small South Texas town of Gonzales to hand over their guns, and above all the cannon that guarded the town. The Texians answered with a flag showing the cannon and the words "come and take it," flew it over the town, and that, in the telling, began the Texas revolution.

The story ends badly for the town before it ends well for Texas. Santa Ana arrived with about 6,000 soldiers and took the cannon. The revolution is compared to the American revolution: a string of defeats, including the Alamo and Goliad, both described as slaughters, followed by victory at San Jacinto under General Sam Houston. Texas then existed as the Republic of Texas from 1836 to 1845. One participant takes the lesson to be resiliency, and the speaker agrees.

We lost every damn battle.

One host, who grew up in New York, spent 20 years in California and is starting a second year in Texas, asks about growth. In Texas, the host says, you can build homes and factories, home prices have fallen two years in a row, and there are no state taxes. In the host's other two home states, prices rise 10 to 20% a year. The host's exaggerated example of California NIMBYism is a children's cancer ward blocked because it would cast shade on a protected flower species.

The answer is that California once knew how to do this. Fifty years ago it was the country's economic engine, and the speaker says it is now "cursed by idiot politicians" who are wrecking it. The speaker says "none of this is rocket science". Texas believes in freedom, low taxes and low regulations. Its ethos is traced to wildcatters, described as men with fourth-grade educations who drilled holes in the ground and became, one after another, the richest men on earth.

An anecdote supports the point. Some years earlier, the speaker met the CEO and executive team of a sanitation company with no Texas ties that had moved from California a few months before. The speaker expected them to name taxes, regulations or lawsuits as the biggest difference. Instead they named culture. In their telling, a businessman in California is a pariah, with exceptions for tech and Hollywood: say "I'm a businessman" at a party and people turn and walk away. The speaker calls that weird from a Texan point of view, saying Texans lionize entrepreneurs. A host's aside suggests that the tech exception may not hold.

They said the biggest difference is the culture.

A host pushes back on blaming politicians. California was also a pioneering state, going back to the gold rush, and in a democracy voters elect the politicians. So what changed among California's voters but not Texas's, when every state started out as a pioneer state?

The reply calls it cause and effect and points to amnesty, which the speaker dates to 1987 and attributes to Ronald Reagan. At the time, the speaker says, 3,000,000 illegal immigrants lived in the United States. Congress offered the public a deal: secure the border, fix illegal immigration for good, and in return grant amnesty to the people already in the country illegally. In the speaker's account, the public accepted, the amnesty happened, and the border was never secured.

The speaker then applies this to California, which is said to have had the highest concentration of illegal immigrants. California voted Republican for president in 1988 after six straight cycles of doing so, and 1988 was the last time. A participant brings up Schwarzenegger, and the speaker clarifies that the claim is about presidential races only.

The speaker says the amnesty law "played a significant part" by changing who votes in the state. A second factor is offered more tentatively, prefaced with "You guys would know the state politics more": public employee unions realized they could vote themselves an ever-larger share. The causal story rests on the sequence of dates and the claim about where immigrants were concentrated. No other data is given in the conversation, and the hosts do not test it.