It was more talk than coffee this time. Daniel Miller spent the night wrestling a camera that kept dropping out, but underneath the chaos was a single question he kept pressing on the audience: how differently would every one of these fights play out if Texas governed itself.
The longest stretch went to the so called school choice bill that arrived dressed up as Texas Education Freedom Accounts. Miller is blunt that it is neither real school choice nor a true voucher program. The trick was in the branding. By calling it school choice, the establishment froze everyone in place. Support the bill and you were for parents, oppose it and you were against them. Read the actual text, he says, and what you find is a poorly built government money grab, which is why out of state mega donors poured roughly twelve million dollars into the effort and why Greg Abbott maneuvered Kelly Hancock into the acting comptroller seat to keep his hand on the contracts. You can call a turd a Tootsie Roll, he said, but it still tastes bad.
From there a viewer flagged a buried headline. Remittances from the United States to Mexico fell from 64.7 billion dollars in 2024 to 61.8 billion in 2025, the steepest drop since the 2009 financial crisis. Most commentators credit immigration enforcement. Miller is not convinced. With roughly 146,000 removals, he doubts deportations explain a number worth about three and a half percent of Mexico’s entire economy. His read is harder to hear. The economy is bad, the labor market is the weakest in five years, restaurant chains are folding the way they did before the last crash, and there is simply less money to send home.
Questions answered in this episode
- Will the TNM file the Texas Independence Referendum Act resolution, and other resolutions, at the precinct and county conventions after the March primary?
- How does the convention resolution process actually work, and what came of the 2016 floor fight that put the independence-vote plank in the Republican Party of Texas platform?
- Are Texas Education Freedom Accounts a poor substitute for real vouchers, and did Texas truly enact meaningful school choice?
- What should supporters make of Texas First Pledge signers who backed the voucher bill?
- Why are remittances from the United States to Mexico falling, and is the immigration crackdown really the cause?
- Is the broader economy as bad as it feels, and what does a wave of restaurant closures signal?
- Can TNM Social registration be reopened for people having trouble signing up?
- What will Daniel be speaking on at the Abbeville Institute conference in Montgomery, Alabama in March?
He closed with two teasers. A members only live stream on the path forward in 2026, gated to TNM members on TNM Social, and a Texian weekend event taking shape for April. And a reminder that the anniversary everyone keeps calling the birth of America was, in his telling, the day thirteen colonies chose to govern themselves. The question Texas faces, he argues, is the same one.
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