Twenty years ago today, I was officially part of founding the Texas Nationalist Movement. I’d be lying if I said I knew then what this organization would become or the impact it would have on Texas politics.
Back in 2005, the conventional wisdom said we were doomed from the start. Critics predicted we’d fade into obscurity within a year—just another fringe political movement that couldn’t gain traction. The skeptics, the naysayers, the political establishment—they all said the same thing: Texas independence was a fantasy, a pipe dream that would never amount to anything.
They were wrong.
From the Ashes
The TNM didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Earlier Texas independence efforts in the 1990s imploded, leaving advocates like me without any viable path forward. Those movements collapsed under the weight of their own mistakes, discrediting independence advocacy and leaving no infrastructure behind.
I’d been advocating for Texas independence since August 24, 1996—a date that marked when I crossed my own line in the sand. But by 2005, it became clear that a new approach was needed. Not confrontation, but education. Not violence, but politics. Not breaking the system, but working within it to give Texans the power to choose their own future.
The TNM’s founding principle was simple: let the people decide. Put the question of Texas independence to a vote and trust Texans to make the right decision for themselves and their families. That principle has guided everything we’ve done for two decades.
The Wilderness Years
The early years weren’t glamorous. We were building from scratch—developing infrastructure, training volunteers, educating Texans about why independence mattered. By 2011, we’d grown enough to stage our first public rallies at the Texas State Capitol, demanding that lawmakers introduce legislation to let Texans vote on independence.
Those early demonstrations were small. We didn’t have thousands showing up. But we had something more important—we had Texans who believed enough in self-governance to stand in the cold and demand their voices be heard.
The skeptics kept predicting our demise. They said we’d never break through, never be taken seriously, never move the needle on public opinion. But membership kept growing. By 2013, we’d reached 250,000 supporters. We organized rallies in January of that year despite cold, rainy conditions, and managed to get at least one lawmaker to mention independence on the opening day of the legislative session.
Small victories. But victories nonetheless.
The Brexit Effect
June 23, 2016, changed everything.
When British voters chose to leave the European Union, the political establishment on both sides of the Atlantic went into shock. The “experts” said it couldn’t happen. The polls said it wouldn’t happen. But the people spoke, and they chose independence.
The 2014 Scottish independence referendum had already shown us that you could have a serious vote on independence—that it was possible to put the question to the people in a democratic process. But Brexit proved something even more important: you could win.
Within hours, #TEXIT was trending across social media. I recognized immediately what Brexit meant for our movement—it provided international validation that independence movements could win at the ballot box. If the British people could reclaim their sovereignty from Brussels, Texans could reclaim theirs from Washington.
The parallels were obvious. British frustration with unelected bureaucrats in Brussels mirrored Texan frustration with federal overreach from Washington. Brexit proved that you could have an adult conversation about independence, put it to a vote, and trust the people to decide their own future.
The media coverage exploded. Suddenly, outlets that had ignored us for years wanted to talk about TEXIT. The movement that the political establishment had dismissed as fringe was now part of the mainstream conversation.
Brexit taught us something crucial: winning is possible. The path forward existed. We just had to follow it.
The Floor Fight
But Brexit’s impact extended beyond media coverage. That summer, at the 2016 Texas Republican Convention, we forced something that the political establishment desperately wanted to prevent: a public floor debate on Texas independence in front of 9,000 delegates and assembled media from across Texas and the United States.
The Establishment tried to block it. They pulled every procedural trick they could think of to keep the issue from reaching the floor. But we’d done our homework. We’d built relationships with delegates. We’d educated them about why this mattered. And when the moment came, we had the votes to force the debate.
Nine thousand delegates watched as the independence question got debated in the open, with media from across the country covering every word. The Establishment couldn’t suppress it. They couldn’t keep it quiet. They had to face it head-on in the most public forum possible.
We didn’t win the vote that year—the convention narrowly rejected bringing a secession resolution to the floor. But we’d achieved something more important: we’d forced the Texas Republican Party to have a public conversation about independence in front of the entire state. The issue couldn’t be dismissed as fringe anymore. It was mainstream enough that thousands of GOP delegates were willing to debate it openly.
That moment changed the trajectory. The political establishment had tried to keep independence advocacy bottled up, treated as something too extreme to discuss. We smashed that bottle wide open.
Legislative Breakthroughs
In January 2021, State Representative Kyle Biedermann filed HB 1359, the Texas Independence Referendum Act. This wasn’t some symbolic gesture or political theater. This was a serious legislative vehicle designed to give Texans the right to vote on independence.
The bill didn’t pass out of committee. But that wasn’t the point—not yet. The point was that a sitting member of the Texas House had enough courage to file legislation that the political establishment considered radioactive. Biedermann’s willingness to carry that bill signaled something important: independence advocacy was gaining acceptance within the Republican caucus.
In March 2023, HB 3596 was filed as another version of the referendum act. Again, the bill didn’t advance. But again, that wasn’t the full story. Each filing normalized the conversation a little more. Each hearing educated more Texans. Each debate chipped away at the idea that independence was somehow unthinkable.
The political establishment loves to claim that certain topics are “off the table” for discussion. Texas independence was supposed to be one of those topics. But we kept putting it back on the table. And eventually, the table started to look different.
The Platform Victories
The 2016 floor fight set the stage for what came next. Four years later, in 2020, the Texas Republican Party adopted a platform plank on secession with 93% delegate approval. Ninety-three percent.
Let that sink in. The dominant political party in America’s second-largest state—representing millions of voters—approved a secession plank by an overwhelming supermajority. This wasn’t some narrow squeaker or procedural accident. This was a decisive statement.
June 2022 took it further: the Texas Republican Party adopted platform language explicitly calling for the Legislature to pass legislation allowing a referendum on whether Texas should “reassert its status as an independent nation.”
The political establishment immediately tried to downplay it. They said it was non-binding. They said it faced legal obstacles. They said it didn’t really mean anything. But they were wrong. It meant everything.
For years, independence advocacy had been treated as fringe, extreme, outside the mainstream. Now the Texas GOP had put it in their official platform—not once, but repeatedly, with stronger language each time. We’d moved from the margins to the mainstream in less than two decades.
The 2024 GOP Convention doubled down again, explicitly designating the independence referendum as “a legislative priority.” Plank 203 of the 2024 platform couldn’t have been clearer. Plank 21 went further, emphasizing that “Texas retains the right to secede from the United States.”
These weren’t accidents. These were the result of thousands of TNM members working within the party structure, educating delegates, building relationships, and making the case that Texans deserved the right to decide their own future.
The Petition Drive
In late 2023, we launched our most ambitious project yet: collecting enough signatures to place TEXIT directly on the March 2024 Republican primary ballot.
Under Texas law, we needed 97,709 valid signatures—five percent of the total vote from the 2022 Republican gubernatorial primary. We collected 170,097 total signatures, submitting 139,456 that met our internal validation standards.
The organizational capacity required for that effort was massive. Thousands of volunteers across all 254 counties worked to gather signatures, validate them, and prepare them for submission. On December 11, 2023, we delivered those signatures to Republican Party of Texas headquarters in Austin.
Texas GOP Chairman Matt Rinaldi rejected the petition, claiming we’d submitted one day late and that electronic signatures weren’t valid. We disputed both claims. Texas’s Uniform Electronic Transactions Act explicitly validates electronic signatures. And our submission was timely under any reasonable interpretation of the deadline.
We filed emergency petitions with both district court and the Texas Supreme Court. Both efforts failed. But here’s what the petition drive accomplished: it demonstrated our organizational strength, generated weeks of sustained media coverage, and proved that tens of thousands of Texans were willing to publicly declare support for independence.
The political establishment wanted to suppress our voices. We made sure everyone heard us anyway.
Electoral Victory
November 2024 delivered concrete results: ten Republican candidates who had signed our Texas First Pledge won election to the Texas House of Representatives.
The Texas First Pledge commits signers to four principles: upholding Texans’ constitutional right to alter their government, voting for legislation supporting an independence referendum, honoring the referendum outcome, and working toward fair separation if Texans approve independence.
Ten newly elected state representatives—David Lowe, Shelley Luther, Keresa Richardson, Brent Money, A.J. Louderback, Wesley Virdell, Janis Holt, Andy Hopper, Steve Toth, and Mitch Little—had all signed that pledge. They campaigned on it. They won on it.
The political establishment tried to paint the Texas First Pledge as extreme. Voters disagreed.
We now have 65 current Texas officeholders who’ve signed the pledge, including legislators, county officials, and constables. The new chairman and vice-chairman of the Texas GOP—Abraham George and D.R. Randall—both signed the pledge before their elections.
This isn’t fringe anymore. This is mainstream Texas politics.
Building County by County
While the headlines focused on legislation and elections, we’ve been doing the unglamorous work of building sustainable grassroots infrastructure.
In February 2025, we launched our first official county branch in Angelina County at an event in Lufkin. That launch represented months of organizing, training, and preparation. By October 2025, we’d expanded into nine additional counties: Wheeler, Ochiltree, Potter, Randall, Nueces, Williamson, Cameron, Bandera, and Kendall.
We appointed county organizers for Nacogdoches, Smith, Tarrant, Parker, and Caldwell counties. We’re now active or organizing in over 60 of Texas’s 254 counties, representing approximately 78 percent of Texas voters.
Each county organization includes seven-person leadership teams handling specific functions—outreach, communications, finance, events, volunteer coordination. These aren’t paper organizations. These are working teams executing real plans to educate and organize their communities.
The foundation of any successful independence movement is local organization. We’ve spent the last several years developing the tools, training, and support systems necessary to empower Texans at the county level. That work doesn’t generate headlines, but it’s building the infrastructure we’ll need to win when TEXIT comes to a vote.
Beyond Politics
The TNM’s influence extends beyond traditional political organizing. We publish the Texian Partisan, providing pro-independence news coverage and analysis unavailable in mainstream media. I host the Texas News podcast, giving detailed updates on Texas political developments from a nationalist perspective.
We established the Texas Nationalist Movement Political Action Committee to find, train, and support candidates for municipal, county, and state offices who understand that Texas comes first.
I’ve appeared on every major news network, including Fox News, CNN, CNBC, BBC News, and many more. I wrote “Line in the Sand” in 2011 as a primer on Texas nationalism. In 2018, I released “TEXIT: Why and How Texas Will Leave The Union,” which became a four-time Amazon bestseller.
I ran for Lieutenant Governor in 2022 against incumbent Dan Patrick. The campaign gave me a statewide platform to make the case for independence and demonstrate that TEXIT advocacy translates into real electoral support.
All of this serves a purpose: normalizing the independence conversation, educating Texans about why independence matters, and building the political infrastructure necessary to win.
The Numbers
Our growth has been remarkable. We went from 250,000 members in 2013 to over 380,000 by 2020. Today, we have over 633,000 supporters across all 254 counties.
Before the social media censorship regime took root, we had more followers on social media than the Republican and Democratic parties in Texas combined. We operate with over 5,000 statewide volunteers who’ve combined to host more than 6,000 events. And we’ve done all of this 100 percent funded by our members and supporters—no large corporate donors, no outside interests, just Texans investing in their own future.
A 2022 SurveyUSA poll found that support for Texas independence exceeded 60 percent. Even when pollsters put their thumbs on the scale in attempts to discredit us, other surveys still show support ranging from the mid-twenties to the low-thirties. When framed as “Texas should reassert its right to self-government,” the numbers climb significantly higher.
Here’s what matters: even with pollsters actively trying to suppress our numbers, we still outperform Catalonia, Quebec, Scotland, and Brexit at this stage of our lifecycle. In those places, support for independence was in the twenties when those movements first gained serious attention. We’re ahead of where they were.
A Beacon for Self-Determination
Our work hasn’t gone unnoticed internationally. We’ve participated in self-determination conferences around the world, connecting with independence movements from every continent. The TNM serves as a beacon of hope for other movements seeking peaceful, democratic paths to self-governance.
These international connections matter because they demonstrate something the political establishment desperately wants to deny: the push for self-determination isn’t some aberration or fringe ideology. It’s a growing global movement of people who believe that government should derive its legitimacy from the consent of the governed—and that when government fails to serve the people, those people have the right to alter or abolish it.
The critics will keep trying to discredit us. They’ll cite court cases. They’ll claim constitutional barriers. They’ll accuse us of everything from foreign influence to extremism. None of it changes the fundamental reality: Texans have the right to determine their own future, and once we put that question to a vote, the political and legal landscape shifts entirely.
The path forward isn’t about asking permission from federal courts or waiting for Washington to approve our right to self-governance. It’s about building the political will among Texans to assert that right—and we’ve spent twenty years doing exactly that.
Looking Forward
As we mark twenty years since the TNM’s founding, I’m more confident than ever that we’re closer to achieving our objectives.
In the lifecycle of an independence movement, we’re outperforming Brexit. We’re outperforming Scottish independence. We’ve done what seemed impossible in 2005: we’ve normalized the Texas independence conversation, elected dozens of officials who support giving Texans the right to vote, and built a grassroots infrastructure covering most of Texas.
Our strategy for the coming years focuses on several priorities. We’ll file the Texas Independence Referendum Act again in the next legislative session. We’ll work with legislators on policy initiatives involving borders, currency, and other sovereignty issues. We’ll continue county-level organization to cover more of Texas’s population.
The logic is simple: the closer we can move Texas to structurally and operationally functioning like an independent nation, the easier separation becomes once we win the TEXIT referendum.
A Movement That Defied Expectations
Twenty years ago, when I founded the Texas Nationalist Movement from the ashes of discredited predecessor organizations, conventional wisdom predicted irrelevance.
Instead, we’ve achieved what seemed impossible:
We elected ten state legislators who explicitly support an independence referendum.
We convinced the Texas Republican Party to adopt platform language calling for a referendum vote.
We built a supporter base exceeding 600,000 Texans.
We collected nearly 140,000 petition signatures in a matter of months.
We established county organizations covering 78 percent of Texas voters.
We normalized the independence conversation in mainstream Texas politics.
Whether Texas ultimately becomes an independent nation remains to be determined by the people of Texas in a fair vote. But the TNM has already fundamentally altered Texas political discourse. The movement that critics dismissed as fantasy has become one of the most significant political organizations in the state—and one of the largest independence advocacy movements in the world.
Most people who start movements like this don’t live to see them succeed. I’ve been at this since 1996—29 years of advocacy, organizing, educating, and building. Twenty years since officially founding the TNM.
Over these two decades, we’ve lost supporters who believed from the beginning but didn’t live to see how far we’ve come. Some were there in the early days when nobody believed this was possible. Others came along later, caught fire with the vision, and gave everything they had to the cause. They won’t see the finish line, but their contributions built the path we’re walking now. This victory, when it comes, will be theirs as much as anyone’s.
Others have come and gone. Their passion has waxed and waned. They’ve gotten frustrated with the pace or distracted by other causes. That’s human nature. But the TNM remains. Those who truly believe remain. We’ve outlasted the skeptics, the critics, and the fair-weather supporters because we understand something fundamental: this isn’t about quick wins or political theater. This is about the long game—building the foundation for Texas independence one supporter, one county, one election at a time.
The skeptics said we’d fail. They said Texans didn’t want independence. They said we’d never move the needle on public opinion. They said we’d never get serious legislative attention. They said we’d never elect officials who supported our objectives.
They were wrong at every turn.
The line in the sand I drew in 1996 has become a movement measured in hundreds of thousands of supporters, dozens of elected officials, and a permanent place in Texas political conversation.
I don’t know exactly when we’ll win the TEXIT referendum. But I know we will win. Because once Texans understand they have the right to determine their own future—once they realize the Federal Government isn’t going to fix itself and that our only path to true self-governance is independence—the outcome becomes inevitable.
Twenty years down. However many it takes to get to the finish line.
Texas will be free.
