TEXAS — Secessionist talk in Texas makes news about once a year, and each time it does, Daniel Miller, the president of the state’s loudest independence movement, is surprised by the media’s alarmist headlines.
“Folks kinda freak out when we pop up, and it’s like… guys, we’ve been at this a long time,” said Miller, the head of the Texas Nationalist Movement. “We’ve been at this as an organization since 2005. We’re in it for the long haul.”
But this year’s calls for a “Texit,” a localized play on the term for Britain’s exit from the European Union, came with a bit more heft, thanks to some big state and national Republican figures weighing in on the idea on the heels of a presidential election that saw President Donald Trump refuse to concede to his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
Renewed calls for Texas independence have “become sort of the tail end of the whip in the sense that Texans, by and large, have had a problem with the political establishment in Washington D.C.,” Miller said. “Things that have been bubbling under the surface and over time, people have given up on the federal side.”