Crumbs in Austin and a Texas Lawsuit Shipped to San Francisco

This was old-school Late Night Coffee Talk, Daniel Miller with a cup in hand and a backlog of viewer questions, recorded the night before the anniversary of the day he first committed to the fight. He opened on TEXITCON, the independence gathering that returns in Waco from November 9th through the 12th. The old single-day TEXICON has been rebuilt into a four-day convention with more than fifty speakers and sessions, an expo hall, tracks on political, cultural, and economic independence, and a new activism track for supporters who already have the arguments and want to learn how to organize, lobby, and work social media. Miller was blunt about why he wants a packed house. The press and the political class keep insisting TEXIT support does not exist. He wants a crowd big enough to put that lie to bed.

Then came the California in the title. A federal judge, Mark Truncali, ruled that the movement’s lawsuit against Meta, filed under a Texas law in a Texas court over the censorship of links to the movement’s website, has to be litigated in San Francisco. Miller said he saw the venue gamble coming and does not blame the judge. He blames the Legislature. State Representative Briscoe Cain and State Senator Bryan Hughes, he charged, deliberately stripped a protection out of the original bill in the prior session, the loophole that handed Meta its exit. The fix passed this session, too late for this case. He framed it as proof that Texas cannot govern itself under the current arrangement, and he pledged to chase the fight into a California courtroom rather than fold.

The back half turned personal. August 24th, 1996, in a Sheraton in Tyler, Miller decided to spend his life on Texas independence. He told the story of the leaderless meeting at a Longview restaurant where the organizer was forced by his employer to quit on the spot, and Miller raised his hand to run the room. He talked about the cost few supporters ever see, the years on a terrorism watch list, the nerves when a trooper ran his plate, the co-founders and allies who died before they could draw a breath in a free Texas. His message to anyone treating the cause as a hobby was unsentimental. Independence is a bare-knuckle fight, your word is your bond, and the status quo is an existential threat that leaves no room for thumb-sucking or quitting.