Daniel Miller ran this Late Night Coffee Talk from the podcast studio for the first time, troubleshooting a balky camera live on air while the questions piled up. He opened on the interview he had just recorded with State Representative Steve Toth, who is leaving the Texas House to challenge Dan Crenshaw for Congress and who handed Miller a line he wished he had coined first. You are either a contender or a pretender. Miller’s point was that Texas government is broken because it is run by pretenders, and that the same test applies to anyone claiming to work for independence.
He then turned to the fight that flashed across his chat mid-show: Secretary of State Jane Nelson filing against the Republican Party of Texas over its push for closed primaries, with Attorney General Ken Paxton jumping in on the party’s side. Miller has no love for Nelson either. He walked through how her office and the attorney general’s open-records division ghosted the TNM’s records request during the petition fight, and how the voter-roll data the state sold the movement was, in his words, hot garbage that left him with even less faith in election integrity than he started with.
The longest and sharpest stretch was historical and legal. Miller dismantled the persistent myth that Texas entered the union by treaty, explaining that the Senate of the Republic ratified a treaty the U.S. Senate then voted down, after which Congress annexed Texas by joint resolution and a popular referendum of the people. Because Texans voted themselves in, neither Texas nor its residents have standing to attack that annexation. He closed by reading the ICE confrontations in Portland, Oregon, and Illinois as a Gene Sharp playbook run in reverse, with Antifa using violence to provoke a harsh federal reaction, manufacture victimhood, and win back the levers of power in Washington at the midterms. The Texas National Guard being sent to Illinois, he warned, is about as close to a Fort Sumter moment, and to open balkanization, as the country has come.
Questions answered in this episode
- Can Texas separate from the United States over violations of the annexation treaty, and is it even true that Texas joined by treaty?
- When does Daniel think TEXIT will actually happen, especially when the border seems to be going well under Trump?
- What is holding the masses of Texans who already see the problems back from pushing TEXIT past the tipping point?
- If the governors of California, Oregon, and Illinois are so angry over federal immigration enforcement, why do they ignore their option to leave the union?
- What does Daniel think about Brandon Herrera challenging Tony Gonzales for Congress?
- What do the riots against ICE mean, and how are they affecting the relationship between the states and the federal government?
- How long until there are large ICE riots in Dallas or Houston?
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