Color Revolution Talk, the AI Arms Race, and Why Texas Should Leave by Design

With Election Day set for November 3, Daniel Miller opened this week's questions with one from John in Llano County about progressive groups holding talks with former intelligence, military and government officials. As Daniel described it, their plan is to wait for the federal government to cross a set of red lines, then declare it illegitimate. He doubts they have gamed out what comes next, because a state cannot deal with an illegitimate federal system without withdrawing from it. The federal system cannot absorb simultaneous political, cultural and economic shocks, so Texas becomes independent by design or by default, and the only choice left to Texans is which one. A French academic told him this week about a colleague's new book predicting the United States will be something else entirely within 20 years. Daniel's one disagreement was the timeline, which he thinks is too generous.

Asked about AI as a surveillance tool, Daniel said governments already use it, predictive policing included, and that surveillance is the smaller worry. He compared this moment to the nuclear arms race. The powers that could split the atom wrote the history of the late 20th century, and the 21st will divide the same way between those who have AI and those who do not. Texas, he argued, needs a stake in it.

On the election, Daniel walked through the Texian Partisan's live results page, which sorts early voters by how they voted in the March primaries. Through October 28, almost half had voted in neither primary. He would not publish a prediction, though he called the Paxton and Talarico race a coin toss that TNM's own election models keep flipping on. Asked about a TNM political party, he pointed to UKIP, the third-party pressure group that moved David Cameron to call the Brexit referendum.

He also previewed the relaunched Texian Store, where Declared Texians can order shirts printed with their own Declared Texian number or a personal referral QR code.