Drive a Stake Through It: Meta, the AG, and a Banner Over the Capitol

Daniel Miller opened this Late Night Coffee Talk with a hot cup and a hard week behind him, and the news was stacked three deep. The Texas Nationalist Movement’s lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta, filed back in November under HB20, has stopped being a free-speech case and become something larger. In its latest filing Meta argues that because the Supreme Court supposedly declared TEXIT unconstitutional, the company is within its rights to bar Texans from posting about independence at all. Miller’s answer was blunt. The TNM is not going to court to overturn Texas v. White. The TNM’s position is that the ruling has been dead for a long time, and this is the chance to drive a stake through its heart and bury it so deep no one utters it again.

Then came the boost almost no one outside the movement saw coming. Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office filed an amicus brief in support of neither party, defending the state’s interest and the constitutionality of HB20, and swatting down Meta’s claim that a Texan suing under Texas law should be hauled into a California courtroom. With the AG carrying the HB20 fight, the TNM gets to press the self-determination question directly, and Miller put out an open call for lawyers and allied groups, from Cal Exit to the Foundation for New Hampshire Independence to the Alaskan Independence Party, to file their own amicus briefs. Meanwhile a single-engine plane circled Abbott’s inauguration on the south steps of the Capitol for roughly two hours trailing a banner that read we want a vote on TEXIT. The mainstream press stayed nearly silent. Fox 7 covered it and the story got picked up in Australia.

The longest stretch went to the Rally Against Censorship, a Defiance Press event Miller is set to speak at. One venue backed out over an unrelated book, the next, Southern Star Brewery, canceled after Kyle Rittenhouse was added to the lineup and the backlash rolled in. Miller said he had real sympathy for a business owner squeezed from both sides, right up until the CEO went on television, told several shifting versions of the story, and pivoted from Rittenhouse to blaming the Texas independence cause itself. The trouble with that, Miller noted, is that Southern Star had already hosted a TEXIT tour stop in the very same room. His advice to supporters was to treat it as a litmus test and vote with their dollars, and he reminded the CEO that 66 percent of likely Texas voters back the cause. The event has since moved to the Lone Star Convention and Expo Center in Montgomery County.