The Texas Nationalist Movement has published a free course in Texas civics on the TNM Academy, its education platform inside the TEXIAN app. The course went live this week and is open to anyone, member or not, without charge.
It is not a primer. Texas Civics runs to 34 lessons and roughly 50,000 words, about nine hours of study, built to the standard of a college Texas-government course rather than a weekend explainer. The lessons work from primary sources, the Texas Constitution, the U.S. Constitution, and the Election Code among them, and they teach real case law, from Wickard v. Filburn to South Dakota v. Dole. Each lesson ends with a worked example and a quiz a student has to pass with a perfect score before moving on.
What it covers is the machinery of self-government at every level: the Texas Constitution and where it came from, the plural executive, the Legislature and the 140 days it is given to work, how a bill becomes law and where most bills quietly die, the courts, elections and why the primary is the contest that usually decides, redistricting, the county and the city, the school district and the appraisal district. It is not a general survey of American government. It sets aside the federal government’s internal workings and most of civil-liberties law, and it is organized toward one end.
The course’s own description names it: “how Texas actually governs itself, from the constitution down to the precinct chair, and the lawful, constitutional path a Texan walks to put independence to a vote.” The final lessons build to exactly that. Because Texas has no statewide citizen initiative, the course explains, the only body that can place an independence question on the ballot is the Legislature, which makes the road to that vote a matter of primaries, conventions, and the ordinary, unglamorous work of moving the people who already hold the offices.
The Movement has long argued that Texans are governed by machinery most of them were never taught to run. Texas Civics is the answer it built, a full, sourced, no-cost account of how that machinery works and how a Texan lawfully moves it. It is open now to anyone who creates a free account on the TEXIAN app.
Comments have moved. The real debate about Texas independence now happens with thousands of Texians in the app.
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