Dr. M. Andrew Holowchak, one of the most published authorities alive on Thomas Jefferson, brought Daniel Miller onto his Jefferson philosophy show and said the movement is what Jefferson would have advocated for.
Dr. M. Andrew Holowchak has built a career on Thomas Jefferson. He has written or edited dozens of books, 31 on Jefferson alone, authored the Jefferson entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and edits The Journal of Thomas Jefferson and His Time. His peers regularly call him the foremost living authority on Jefferson’s thought.
In a new episode of his show, The Real Thomas Jefferson, co-hosted with Cap’n George Gori, Holowchak turned that expertise on the Texas Nationalist Movement. He told TNM president Daniel Miller, “I saw a lot of Thomas Jefferson in what you’re trying to do,” and called the movement’s aims what Jefferson “would have advocated for.” Gori opened by counting Texas independence among the questions that “would have been dear to Thomas Jefferson were he alive today.
The two had met in March at the Abbeville Institute’s conference on the Declaration of Independence in Alabama, convened for its 250th anniversary. Miller spoke there at the invitation of Abbeville president Brion McClanahan. Holowchak sat in on the talk, heard Jefferson in it, and asked Miller onto the show. Their conversation runs 39 minutes and is embedded above.
Article 1, Section 2 of the Texas Constitution holds that all political power is inherent in the people, who keep “at all times the inalienable right to reform, alter, or abolish their government.” That is the Declaration of Independence, almost verbatim. Miller granted the borrowing without apology. The founders of Texas “cribbed off TJ,” he said, and every Texas constitution since the Republic has carried the line. In Texas, self-government is not a slogan. It is constitutional law.
Miller mapped two roads that lead people to the same place. The first is the grievance case. The relationship between Texas and the federal system is broken, and people arrive through the federal debt, monetary policy, defense, or the border. Stack every federal rule and regulation on paper and the pile rises higher than the Washington Monument. One line drew a laugh: the approval rating of Congress, Miller said, “falls somewhere between pineapple quiche and leprosy.”
The second case runs deeper. Texas is the eighth-largest economy on earth, a nation of 31 million people that ranks high on every measure by which nations are judged. We need no list of complaints to justify governing ourselves. As Miller said, “We want a government that begins and ends at our borders, and that’s it.”
Miller’s thesis is blunt. “Texas will be independent either by design or by default.” By design means a lawful exit, a referendum where Texans vote their way out on their own terms, the way Britain left the European Union. By default means the center does not hold. Miller pointed to roughly $40 trillion in federal debt, a debt-to-GDP ratio now past 100 percent before unfunded liabilities, a Social Security reckoning arriving around 2031, and states whose values diverge further every year. A union under that much strain does not last forever. If Washington will not let Texas leave on purpose, the math may pull the union apart on its own.
The path Miller works is peaceful, lawful, and democratic, and he said so plainly. “We’re not fighting a revolution,” he told the hosts. “We’re working a process that is constitutional, that is legal.” Holowchak, asked for years by his students what Jefferson would do, answers that Jefferson would recommend revolution, meaning the people’s right to alter or abolish their government, taken straight from the Declaration. Miller pursues the same principle through a vote rather than a rebellion.
The TNM has gathered more than 276 signers to the Texas First Pledge, candidates and officeholders from statewide office down to local races who commit to uphold Article 1, Section 2 (taketexasback.com). Polling, Miller said, shows a referendum held tomorrow would pass, and not by a little. What remains is passing the law that puts the question to Texans.
Miller ended with the question he keeps coming back to. Suppose your state were already a self-governing nation, with control over its own borders, money, and defense, everything 200 other nations control. Now suppose someone asked you to give all that up and join the union. Knowing everything you know about Washington today, would you vote to join? And if the answer is no, why tolerate staying one second longer than you absolutely have to?
Watch the full conversation above. Then make up your mind, and be counted.
