TNM v. Meta and the Redo of Texas v. White: The Day Facebook Kicked the Dog

Daniel Miller came to this Late Night Coffee Talk a day late and visibly rattled, and this time the buildup was earned. The news was TNM v. Meta, the case the Texas Nationalist Movement filed as the first plaintiff under the Texas anti-social media censorship law. Miller expected Facebook to fight on the statute itself, to drag it out, to try to drag it into a federal court in California. Instead a single line in Meta’s latest response gave away the game. Their lawyers wrote that the TNM was trying to compel an out-of-state provider to disseminate content promoting secession, that the request defied the law, and that the petition should be dismissed. Meta did not attack the speech statute. It attacked the right of Texans to govern themselves.

That, Miller argued, turns a censorship fight into something far larger. By asserting that what the TNM advocates is illegal, Meta has put Article 1, Section 2 of the Texas Constitution, the inalienable right of the people to alter, reform, or abolish their government, squarely at issue. Miller framed it as a chance to do to Texas v. White what should have been done long ago. He walked through why that ruling is weak. It began as a dispute over bonds, not secession, and became Salmon P. Chase’s retroactive stamp of approval on the federal government’s wartime conduct. He cited Chase’s own contradictions, including a private warning that trying Jefferson Davis would condemn the North because secession is not rebellion, plus Jacobson v. Massachusetts holding that no federal power flows from the Preamble, and the Tenth Amendment. And he insisted that even a loss in court changes nothing, because independence is a non-justiciable political question, not something unelected federal judges get to settle.

All of it, he reminded viewers, plays out as the legislative session opens, with the Texas Independence Referendum Act sitting in Legislative Council waiting to be filed. The opposition in the Legislature, Miller said, shares Meta’s premise, that ordinary Texans are too foolish to govern themselves. He pressed everyone to register support, call their representatives and senators, download the bill, and join the relaunched Online Response Corps. Then he took questions.