The Convention That Proved It Could Win, the Arson That Nearly Ended It, and Why He Will Not Say the Pledge

August 24 marked 30 years since Daniel Miller began the fight for Texas independence, and this was the first Late Night Coffee Talk since. A viewer asked him to name the highest high and the deepest low of those 30 years. The high was the 2016 Republican state convention. TNM did not have a booth that year. They pulled two tables into a hallway and worked the floor from there, and they watched the establishment spend the whole convention maneuvering to keep an independence vote from reaching the floor in front of the cameras. Miller’s point was not that they lost. It was that everyone in the hall saw it taken away and understood why. If it ever came to an actual vote, it would win. The low was the year TNM was founded. The old headquarters burned, and he was clear that it was arson, not an accident. The founding papers were signed at a glass-top table in a room that is now Kara’s office, and then Hurricane Rita hit.

Another viewer asked him to draw the line between TNM and the Republic of Texas group that ended at Fort Davis. Miller traced it. The modern independence movement was born in December 1995, split in November 1996 and again in February 1997, and by the time of the standoff there were three competing factions. He tried to pull them back together and watched it come apart anyway, and he argues that state and federal officials escalated the situation until a confrontation was close to inevitable. What followed he calls the desert years, roughly 1997 to 2002, when plenty of Texans still wanted independence but had no legitimate instrument to carry it. TNM came out of a two-year study of independence movements worldwide and was built deliberately to be that instrument. On Rick McLaren he was careful. McLaren was never president of anything and never sought the title, and Miller will not accuse him of bad motives, though he says the same cannot be said of others in that leadership.

The longest answer of the night went to the Pledge of Allegiance, which Miller calls the Bellamy Oath. He walked it clause by clause and argued that it asks Texans to affirm things that are not true. Madison described the Constitution as federal rather than national, so “one nation” was foreign to the founders. “Indivisible” fails against Article 1, Section 10, the Tenth Amendment, and even Salmon P. Chase in Texas v. White, who listed ways states could leave. Miller refused to recite it through two campaigns, one for state representative and one for lieutenant governor, and says the reason is simpler than politics. He will not bear false witness. Under all of it sits the divided loyalty problem. Nobody can put two things first, and a Texas nationalist cannot pledge allegiance to the very thing he is seeking independence from.

Questions answered in this episode

• Will there be any Texians at the Republican convention in Dallas next month?
• How would you handle a county commissioner who consistently ignores you?
• How do we deal with the Muslim and Hindu influx that has come into our state under Abbott?
• What would you call your highest high and your deepest low over the last 30 years?
• Even before I learned of the socialist origins of the Bellamy Oath, the so-called Pledge of Allegiance, I had a problem with it because it teaches schoolchildren to take oaths lightly. Any thoughts?
• Can you distinguish the history of the TNM from the militant secessionist group the Republic of Texas?
• What about Rick McLaren and the people who were running the Republic of Texas at the time?
• The number of Texians declaring seems to be rising fast. Is there a list somewhere where we are all named?
• There have been a lot of new Declared Texians. Do the people watching understand what it means?
• When is the next Texicon?