Twelve Republican candidates for the state Legislature who won or advanced to a runoff in the March primary don’t want to be part of the United States.
This group, alongside a handful of other GOP candidates for local elected office, have signed the “Texas First Pledge,” an oath to support Texas’ secession that was undisclosed on most campaign websites.
Republican voters in Smith County handed a primary win to Christina Drewry, a secessionist candidate for county commissioner. It’s now common in some Texas counties to find one or more Republican precinct or county chairs controlled by a pledge-taker.
Though the pledges may appear symbolic and the wins small in the scope of the state’s sprawling political landscape, they represent years of meticulous planning by a group called the Texas Nationalist Movement, or TNM. Its goal: An independence referendum that would initiate a “Texit” from the United States.
TNM has set about building grassroots support for the campaign and electing — or converting — pledge-takers in key positions in the Texas Republican Party to clear the path for a referendum bill in the Legislature.
“The last election was a bloodbath for us,” the group’s founder, Daniel Miller, said after the March primary. “This one was glorious.”
Drewry, who entered the March primary with no political experience, said she believes the success of pledged TNM candidates such as herself was divinely ordained.
“I’m a firm believer that (God) orchestrated all of this,” Drewry said in April.
Feuding between Gov. Gregg Abbot and federal immigration authorities at the southern border has only served to reinforce the group’s appeal.
In public, Miller and his organization assume a polished, even corporate presentation: non-partisan, non-violent and focused on a single legislative goal: an orderly divorce with the federal government. What comes after, Miller says, is up to the people.
But in the privacy of TNM’s local meetings, broadsides against federal tyranny mingle with near-term aspirations for state GOP control. Whether or not secession can be achieved, the movement is using its growing base of support to shift the Republican Party further right and, members say, closer to God.
“This is a spiritual war that we’re in across America,” Drewry told the News-Journal. “If we don’t rescue Texas from state and federal tyranny, we’re headed towards communism. We’re going to lose everything.”
The group has set its sights on the 2024 Texas GOP convention in May. With a faction of delegates pledged to the cause, the Texas Nationalist Movement aims to enshrine a plank on the state GOP’s official platform calling for secession.
The anti-establishment machine
Fog lapped at the woods in late January outside of Henderson, where the Texas Nationalist Movement was hosting one of its regular recruitment meetings.
The group has held more than 6,000 outreach events since 2015. TNM says it has upwards of 600,000 registered supporters, about 40% of whom joined within the past year.
Inside HushPuppies catfish restaurant, local organizer Mike Jackson connected a laptop to a television inside a private dining room as he waited for guests to arrive. Jackson looked to be in his 70s. He wore a blue ball cap with “TEXIT” stitched across the front panel.
“I’ve been working as a local coordinator for about a year and a half,” Jackson said between puffs of a nicotine vaporizer. “I started getting interested after Jan. 6, 2021, when Joe Biden stole the election.
“And I’m a vet. Before Jan. 6, I was a red, white and blue all-American,” Jackson said.
About a third of the movement’s members are military veterans, according to an internal TNM survey.
Three guests took their seats around the table inside the Henderson restaurant. They traded stolen election theories and agreed the federal government was responsible for expensive medical bills as well as the rising cost of gas and groceries.
Roger Robinson, a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper mullet, arrived with a woman. He said a TNM booth at a Carthage gun show introduced him to the movement.
Jackson was eager to get the meeting underway. Each follows a strict pattern, beginning with a YouTube video produced by TNM detailing the group’s latest campaign — in this case, encouraging members to become delegates in precinct and county conventions ahead of the state GOP’s 2024 convention.
The video turned to a previous failed campaign to submit petitions to the Texas GOP demanding a Texit referendum be placed on the March primary ballot. While TNM claimed to have enough signatures, Matt Rinaldi, the chair of Texas Republican Party, rejected them.
Rinaldi later gave an interview on X, formerly known as Twitter, where he agreed a Texit referendum would drive many voters to the polls, “just the wrong ones.”
The interview was a potent rallying tool.
“This is what the Texas GOP establishment thinks of Texians. The establishment won today, but we’re not goin’ away,” Jackson said.
Robinson became irate as the Rinaldi clip played.
“How do we get Rinaldi unelected and run out on a rail?” he asked. “I could choke him out right now because I’m that pissed off.”
But the new TNM campaign flummoxed Robinson. The intricacies of the party convention process chafed against his desire for retribution, frustrating him.
That was a problem.
Miller, TNM’s founder, has taken great pains to publicly distance the group from the Republic of Texas movement, a secessionist organization that ascended in the 1990s and split into conflicting factions, one of which took part in a kidnapping and armed standoff.
Miller was the interim leader of the Republic of Texas movement in the early 2000s. It never recovered from the standoff incident, and he came to see violence as a fast track to irrelevance.
At the Henderson meeting, Jackson puffed at his vape, trying to guide Robinson back to the group’s strategy — and the script.
“First, you need to talk to your county GOP chairman about the pledge, and if they’re not receptive, take over your county Republican Party from the ground up,” Jackson said.
Robinson couldn’t be placated and left the meeting abruptly with the woman.
The incident underscored the difficulty of taking incoherent rage and turning it into a coherent political force. Still, such disruptions are rare, and the TNM’s peripatetic brand of local organizing may be paying off.
After countless rounds of door-to-door flyering, local meetings and gun show events, Miller said during a call with the News-Journal that party plank 225 — the one calling for an independence referendum — has passed at more county conventions than any other.
Nevertheless, scholars familiar with Texas politics tend to throw cold water on the movement.
University of Texas at Austin legal professor Sanford Levinson regularly lectures on U.S. and global independence movements. He said the Texas Nationalist Movement is missing the kind of institutional support to manifest its most ambitious goal: a breakaway with the federal government.
“It is naive to talk only of grassroots members,” Levinson said. “You also have to develop people who are connected with the wider political system who will not be regarded as cranks.”
He cited Brexit, the UK’s independence vote to shear itself from the European Union. That movement was led by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. Both were high-profile British politicians before they spearheaded the country’s independence campaign.
By contrast, the only high-profile figure in Texas to take the Texas First pledge is the state’s agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller.
Neither Daniel Miller nor the Texas Nationalist Movement enjoy broad recognition by the voting public.
The architect
Miller, 50, grew up in White Oak and at one time lived in Longview. He pulled into downtown Longview in early February wearing a sport coat and cowboy boots.
As the luminary of the Texas Nationalist Movement, Miller has spent much of his adult life engineering a road to secession and a vanguard to steer the state toward it.
He shared the story of his first brush with the idea of independence in his early 20s.
Miller entered the basement of the Longview Bank and Trust building, where a meeting was taking place. He recalled seeing a flyer earlier that day with patriotic imagery but could not remember who the group was that hosted the meeting.
“Two, let’s say, staunch constitutionalists, sat me down and handed me a copy of the U.S. Constitution and the Communist Manifesto,” Miller said. They asked him to read both and decide which of the two texts best described the federal government. Miller saw little of his country’s founding document reflected in the federal government.
By age 28, Miller had become the interim leader of the Republic of Texas movement, the forebearer to the Texas Nationalist Movement. But when that movement disintegrated and the group’s headquarters in Overton burned to the ground in 2003, Miller decided to pick up the pieces and start fresh.
The Texas Nationalist Movement was born soon after, and so was the group’s revised mission: independence through referendum. Average turnout for independence votes is high, Miller observed, and if Texans could imagine themselves not as U.S. citizens but as a separate people oppressed by a distant government, they could also vote to go it alone.
Miller researched referendum campaigns in other countries while collecting promising polling data suggesting Texans were receptive to independence.
But in Texas, there was one big obstacle standing in his way: the “grand strategies of the establishment political machine,” Miller wrote in his 2018 book, “Texit: Why and How Texas Will Leave the United States.”
“People seem to think we’re an adjunct or appendage of the Republican Party,” Miller said during an interview in Longview. “Nothing is further from the truth.
“We’re here to secure and protect the Constitutional Republic … and see the will of the people of Texas carried out. That mission goes beyond the referendum.”
Despite TNM’s non-partisan stance, Miller’s interpretation of the people’s will — their grievances, their desires — tends to reflect the will of his Christian conservative acolytes.
“Those who invoke God in the public sphere are mercilessly mocked, unless their god is Allah, Satan, a head of cabbage or themselves,” Miller wrote in “Texit,” echoing the sense of religious persecution that flows through the group’s local meetings.
During his interview in Longview, Miller also cited transgender surgery and undocumented immigrants as “chief motivators” for the group’s supporters.
“We believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is an existential threat to our way of life here,” Miller said.
During the past 30 years, independence has typically won out in countries where referendums have been put to a vote. The majority of those wins, however, were owed to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
A political scientist at the University of Coventry named Matt Qvortrup noted a pattern in the handful of failed independence campaigns during that period: They all occurred in developed democracies.
Underground agendas
Guided by strategy set forth in Miller’s book, the Texas Nationalist Movement studiously avoids defining the future independent country it wants. Miller’s analysis of the failed 2014 Scottish Independence vote pointed to a fatal error: That campaign listed its goals ahead of the vote.
“The Scottish independence movement started answering questions about how things were going to work. It became an official platform, and a lot of Scotland did not like that platform,” said David Monson, a TNM organizer for Smith County who handed out copies of Miller’s book in Tyler earlier this year.
Texans also might balk at the religious fundamentalism and hardline policies favored by TNM supporters and candidates.
That hasn’t stopped the group from defining the Texas it wants today — or alluding to the kind of independent Texas the movement envisions.
Just days after the gathering in Henderson, TNM’s Tyler chapter conducted its monthly meeting at Texas Music City Grill and Smokehouse. The event wasn’t just an opportunity for prospective members to learn about the movement; it was a chance to meet local secessionist candidates running for office.
Twenty-five or so guests — all white, most 60 or older — sat in a U-shape in front of a TV. Taxidermied animals ornamented the walls.
Drewry, the Republican Smith County commissioner candidate, and Chris Green, a challenger for Smith County sheriff — both pledge takers — nestled among the crowd while Monson presented that month’s TNM YouTube video.
With his cowboy hat and a gruff drawl, Green took the stage first. He spoke little about the referendum campaign; instead, he painted a picture of rioters and armed conflict with the federal government.
“If the feds come in here with a constitutional directive saying, ‘Hey, give us your guns; let us come into your house and give your family a vaccine’ – well, I was a former game warden. I know (who) my gun owners (are) outside of town,” Green said.
“I promise you I can rely on them — and we’re going to need them — if something like that ever occurs,” Green said.
Monson didn’t attempt to guide the stump speech back to TNM’s commitment to pacifism as Jackson had during the Henderson outburst.
“We saw all the destruction, fires and rape with Black Lives Matter,” Green continued. “You want them to burn, rape and pillage Tyler?”
An audience member with the words “Southern Heritage” tattooed across both arms listened intently.
Green was followed by calls for a pitched battle with more moderate Republicans.
Drewry, a stay-at-home mom whose journey into politics began after the 2020 presidential election, trained her salvos on the Texas GOP. She described the nationalist movement as a vehicle for far-right policies and a means to insert Christianity further into government.
“We can’t be outnumbered by milquetoast Republicans that want to erase our values,” she told the Tyler crowd. “This country is founded on biblical values, and they’re coming after God.”
This time, Monson joined in with Drewry and told attendees, “We need to be the people speaking up for God, keeping our culture, heritage and traditions that make us Texas.”
Drewry hollered an “amen” of approval.
Biblical values need to be injected into the Legislature, judiciary, executive branch and schools, she told the News-Journal in April. Pledge-takers already claim three State Board of Education seats and could control a third of the board pending wins by two TNM-backed candidates in the November general election.
Drewry wrapped up the Tyler presentation by listing more policy priorities TNM delegates should support in their local party conventions, including an end to gun-free zones. According to Texas law, those zones exist in hospitals, sporting venues, schools and government buildings.
The referendum campaign appeared secondary to the candidates. Tangible legislation, intraparty warfare and the potential of using the nationalist movement in the pursuit of both dominated the discussion.
Few questions from the audience concerned the viability of an independent Texas or how it would function. The questions that did were met by nebulous answers from Monson.
Independence worked well as an abstract symbol, less so as a concrete destination.
Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of Texas politics at the University of Houston, said he believes the chances of the referendum making it to voters is slim.
“It’s an extremely remote possibility it would even get to the ballot,” he said, “because it’s only likely to embarrass the (Republican) Party in its efforts to maintain the superiority it’s had electorally for more than 20 years.”
Texas’ State Republican Executive Committee voted against a Texit resolution on just those grounds last year. “Even putting it on the primary ballot tars the party as the party of secession,” said committee member Rolando Garcia.
“But that doesn’t mean the political impact of the Texas Nationalist Movement can’t be sizable,” Rottinghaus said. “The way that the Republican Party has ideologically shifted to the right has been from the grassroots up, not from the elites down.”
“Traditionally, people at the political edges have been successful in moving the Texas Republican Party in their preferred direction,” he said. “I think that will be the legacy of the movement.”
In the event that Texans did rally behind secession, Levinson, the UT Austin legal professor, said a lesson from the UK’s Brexit campaign was instructive: A majority of British voters now regret the decision to leave the EU.
Rottinghaus held up another example of independence gone awry. Texas has achieved independence twice already, first from Mexico, resulting in the short-lived Republic of Texas, and a second time during the Civil War, when the state joined the Confederacy to protect its agricultural slave economy.
“Texas has had a lengthy history of flirting with secession,” he said. “It didn’t go well last time, and I can’t imagine it would go well now.”