This week on Late Night Coffee Talk, Daniel Miller opened the books on what actually happens the day after Texas votes to leave. Asked which post-independence negotiation deserves top billing, he went straight to the federal debt. Not because Texas owes a cent of it. Under international custom, he is clear, a newly independent Texas carries no obligation to assume Washington’s liabilities. He pointed to it because the debt question is the hinge the whole negotiation swings on. Lock down the disposition of the debt and the rest of the board starts to settle itself: federal property sitting inside Texas, military equipment, the Medicare trust fund Texans paid into, a Social Security totalization agreement. He expects a loud, stout fight at that table, and a real incentive on the other side to finish it fast, because uncertainty wrecks an economy and the shock would land harder on the rest of the union than on Texas.
From there the questions ran the gamut. Miller read the tea leaves on three primary runoffs, Paxton against Cornyn, Chip Roy against Mayes Middleton, Jim Wright against Bo French, while making the same point about each: every one of them could erase the guesswork by signing the Texas First Pledge. He also walked through the actual math behind the movement’s legislative targets, tracing them to network science’s tipping-point research, diffusion of innovation, and Erica Chenoweth’s work on movements, layered into what he calls a cascading tipping point measured across the pillars of power rather than the whole population at once.
He closed with the asks that matter right now. The TNM needs to be in the room at the Republican Party of Texas convention to defend the platform planks calling for a vote on independence, an expensive presence he asked supporters to help fund. And he renewed the call for one person in each of Texas’s 254 counties to step up and organize, the difference, he said, between walking into the 2027 session with fifty people and walking in with five thousand.
Questions answered in this episode
- Which post-independence negotiation should be the highest priority or the most time-sensitive?
- Are any of the Republican primary runoff candidates more pro-TEXIT than their opponents, even though they have not signed the Texas First Pledge?
- What is the political sentiment around the Hanuman statue in Southeast Texas, and does the issue actually move voters?
- What should we make of the apparent resurgence of diseases like Ebola, and is it really gain-of-function and depopulation at work?
- Who derived the mathematical tipping point the TNM Foundation lessons use for legislative pressure, and how?
- Could a new Texas republic write into its constitution that only constituents, no PACs and no foreign entities, may fund political campaigns?
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