News.com.au Moves the Texas Revolution to 1846 and Dynasty to Texas

On Sunday, News.com.au decided Australians needed Texas explained to them, and it assigned the job to someone who had apparently never read a page of Texas history. The result is the most confident wrong article about Texas published this week, which in an election week took real effort.

The piece, by freelance writer Jamie Seidel, ran under the headline “Tech giants eye independent Texas utopia as Democrats sweep historic state election.” Its theory is that Silicon Valley billionaires plan to turn Texas into a corporate “network state.” Along the way it quotes Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) President Daniel Miller’s post-election column and credits it to the “Texas Partisan,” a publication that does not exist. The one that does is the Texian Partisan, which is publishing this correction.

The history section opens with the Texas Revolution, which, according to News.com.au, broke out “in 1846.” That will come as news to the men who died at the Alamo in 1836, and to Sam Houston, who won the war at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, a full decade before the site’s version of events begins. By 1846 the Republic of Texas had come and gone. President Anson Jones handed authority to the new state government on February 19 of that year, according to the Handbook of Texas. News.com.au dated the birth of the Republic to the year it was buried.

Texas, the article goes on, is “the home of Dynasty, rodeos, barbecue, ten-gallon hats and tumbleweeds.” Four out of five is a passing grade on most quizzes. Dynasty was set in Denver, Colorado. The prime-time soap about Texas oil money was called Dallas, which is a fairly large hint.

The site promotes Alberta to a “state” of Canada, a rank no Canadian province has ever held, and it retires Gov. Greg Abbott two months early as “Former Governor Abbott.” He holds office until January 19.

Then comes the claim that was not a slip at all. The article calls TNM “the Republic of Texas’s successor” and sets it beside Richard McLaren, who led an armed standoff in the Davis Mountains in 1997. TNM was founded in Nederland in November 2005, eight years after that standoff, as a separate organization with its own charter, and it has spent every year since asking for one thing: a vote of Texans. The same sentence that calls TNM the successor concedes that it “has taken a less confrontational approach,” which is one way to describe 21 years without a standoff. Miller has asked News.com.au for a correction.

The site’s legal analysis takes one sentence: “even the concept of secession is illegal,” it says, citing the U.S. Supreme Court. The case it was reaching for is Texas v. White, decided in 1869, and TNM’s answer to it is published at thetnm.org. Three paragraphs later, the same article reports that Alberta just held a referendum on leaving Canada. A careful reader could conclude from News.com.au’s own reporting that independence questions get settled by a vote, which is TNM’s position and the opposite of the point the article was trying to make.

As for the billionaires, the article quotes no one from TNM proposing a charter city run by venture capitalists, because TNM’s plan is a referendum of Texas voters. The network-state theory belongs to the academics and venture capitalists the article quotes, and TNM is not among them.

The piece does get two numbers right. Texas has a larger economy than Australia and more people, the site reports, correctly for once. Texans can be trusted to decide their own future. Whether News.com.au can be trusted to describe it is a separate question, and its own article has already answered it.