Don’t Poke the Bear: Setting the Record Straight on a Rival’s TEXIT Lies

Daniel Miller opened this Late Night Coffee Talk with a full plate. A forensic audit summary flagging nearly 450,000 duplicate voter registrations, the Biden administration gutting sunset review of federal regulations, 60 local TNM groups spinning up across the state, and a packed campaign calendar in his run for lieutenant governor. He set almost all of it aside. Over the prior 48 hours, a fellow lieutenant governor primary candidate, Aaron Sorrells, had gone public attacking the Texas Nationalist Movement, the case for independence, and Miller himself. Miller’s rule is that an unrebutted lie becomes accepted truth, so he spent the night answering it on the record.

Point by point, Miller walked through the contradictions. Sorrells claimed long membership in the TNM, but the organization’s records show he joined on August 20, 2021, just before asking to team up and seek an endorsement. Sorrells warned that a vote on independence would trigger civil war because Washington depends on Texas pipeline access, then proposed kicking the blue states out of the union, imposing no-fly zones, and cutting off that same pipeline access in winter. Miller pointed out that the orderly path is a vote of the people followed by a negotiated transition, not the unilateral scheme his rival described. He also took apart the claim that Brexit was a disaster, citing reporting that Britain’s economy was poised to outpace Germany and France.

Miller defended the word Texian as a national identity of the Republic era, naming Juan Seguin, Jose Navarro, and Lorenzo de Zavala, and rejected the smear that the term or support for independence is racist. He retold the economics straight: Texas overpays Washington by roughly 103 to 160 billion dollars a year, money that comes back with strings attached, like blood drawn out and partly spilled before it is pumped back in. And he noted that his critic collected zero petition signatures, never registered as a circulator, and gave nothing to the effort, while Greg Abbott needed a statewide machine and millions of dollars to gather 20,000 signatures against the TNM’s far higher threshold. His closing charge to every Dan Patrick challenger: keep the main thing the main thing, stop attacking allies, and focus on March.