The Slowest Emergency: Suing Facebook While TEXIT Breaks Into the Mainstream

Daniel Miller opens the midweek coffee talk on a high. The TEXIT issue is everywhere right now. Fox News ran a story, a fresh poll has 66 percent of likely voters backing a vote on independence, and Dr. Steve Turley dropped a video that name-checked the Texas Nationalist Movement and framed secession sentiment as a serious paradigm shift. Daniel reads it as the moratorium cracking open. You hit the wall until you see the first sliver of daylight, and the daylight is here. His warning is that this is exactly the wrong moment to rest on laurels. The legislative session is coming, and the goal is concrete: get the Texas Independence Referendum Act filed, get it a hearing, get it through both houses, and put a vote on the ballot in November 2023.

Then he turns to the fight he did not expect to be discussing. He planned to report from court this morning on the lawsuit against Facebook, the one TNM filed under Texas law over the platform suppressing links to its content. Instead, Facebook’s lawyers moved overnight to yank the case out of state court and into federal court in Beaumont, and Daniel expects the next move to be a push toward California. A month after filing, the emergency restraining order still has not gotten its first hearing. He calls it the slowest emergency he has ever seen. His argument is that the moment Facebook took a dollar of taxpayer money, including state subsidies, it lost the right to tape over Texans’ mouths, and he ties the suppression to the Twitter Files, asking who pressured Facebook to put a thumb on the scale.

The rest of the hour belongs to the audience, and the questions get straight answers. He explains how the Texas Legislative Council once stripped the referendum language out of James White’s bill on a bogus constitutionality claim, and how the same office actually helped sharpen Kyle Biedermann’s version last session before it died without a hearing. He insists this stays a question for the ballot, grounded in Article 1 Section 2 of the Texas Constitution, not a fight. And when a viewer flags the Texas Tribune dragging in the Confederacy and the extremist label, Daniel’s read is blunt. That smear is all the opposition has, it means TNM is over the target, and every line of it has already been answered.

Questions answered in this episode

• Can you explain the Texas Legislative Council process, and how it blocked the referendum bill a few sessions ago?
• When it comes down to it, can Texas leave by a vote, or will we have to fight for our freedom?
• Besides donating and telling friends, how can I actually contribute to the movement?
• When Texas exits, do we lose our constitutional rights, and are freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and free speech protected in the Texas Constitution?
• If red counties in New Mexico want to join Texas after it leaves the union, can they?
• Will Governor Abbott have to sign the referendum bill if it passes both houses, or might he veto it?
• If the people of Texas vote to leave, what would the federal response be?