The board of Free Louisiana, the group organizing for Louisiana’s independence, has voted to adopt the Self-Determination Covenant, a shared code for state independence movements written by the Texas Nationalist Movement. The Louisiana group announced the vote on X, calling the Covenant “a basis for US state independence movements to cooperate and synergize.”
The Covenant runs to a single page an organization signs to be recognized in the network TNM is building among independence movements in other states. A signer pledges to pursue independence peacefully and settle it at the ballot box. The full text is posted at usexit.org/covenant, marked as still under review, on the platform TNM launched in July to bring its organizing model to other states. TNM wrote the Covenant and administers it.
Free Louisiana presented the decision as a rejection of an old label. “This covenant shows that today’s independence movements are not neo-Confederate,” the group wrote. “Today’s movements are for a state’s mainstream, not for a fringe.” The group said it had helped shape the draft, which TNM wrote and Free Louisiana’s board then voted to adopt.
TNM has spent two decades building the largest movement of its kind in the country, and in July it launched usexit.org to offer that organizing model to people in other states. TNM President Daniel Miller has said publicly that the group is now in contact with independence organizers in several of them. Signing the Covenant is how one of those groups is recognized and connected to the rest. It does not make them part of TNM. Each group stays independent and answers only for itself.
The idea is not new. Scotland voted on independence in 2014, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016, and Quebec has held two votes on leaving Canada. Each asked a version of the question TNM asks in Texas: whether the people of a place should decide its future at the ballot box. Free Louisiana’s case, and TNM’s, is that a movement willing to put that question to a peaceful vote is not the fringe its opponents describe.
“Self-determination rests on one principle, that a people governs itself by its own consent,” Miller said. “We put that principle in writing and asked every movement in this network to hold to it. Free Louisiana read it and adopted it by a vote of its own board. That is what a serious movement looks like, and Free Louisiana will not be the last to sign.”
TNM has argued for years that Texas leads a movement larger than itself. Free Louisiana, putting its name to a Texas-written standard it helped draft, is the proof it points to.
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