Originally published at TexianPartisan.com.
This morning, WIRED published “Don’t Listen to Anyone Who Thinks Secession Will Solve Anything” by Ryan D. Griffiths, a political science professor at Syracuse University hawking his new book The Disunited States. The article is a greatest-hits compilation of every lazy argument against self-determination — the Russia smear, the India/Pakistan analogy, the Texas v. White citation, the “it’s too complicated” hand-wave — packaged for a progressive audience that is increasingly arriving at the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, governing themselves isn’t such a crazy idea.
It mentions the Texas Nationalist Movement exactly once, in passing, lumped in with internet memes and Marjorie Taylor Greene tweets.
Here’s the full response.
Who He’s Really Talking To
Before we get to the arguments, it’s worth understanding what this article actually is.
Look at the architecture. The piece opens with the Minneapolis ICE shooting, Tim Walz’s “Fort Sumter” comment, and Jesse Ventura suggesting Minnesota join Canada — all blue-state touchpoints. The poll he highlights most prominently is a YouGov survey showing that 61 percent of Californians agreed their state would be better off independent. His hypothetical scenarios feature Gavin Newsom leading a California breakaway. His publication venue is WIRED — a magazine whose readership skews overwhelmingly progressive, urban, and coastal.
Griffiths is not arguing with us. He is not talking to Texans. He is talking to his people — blue-state progressives who watched Trump deploy the military to Los Angeles, watched ICE agents shoot citizens in Minneapolis, watched the federal government wage war on sanctuary cities, and who are now sitting at their kitchen tables arriving at a conclusion that terrifies the political establishment: maybe we should leave.
That 61 percent in California aren’t TNM supporters. They are WIRED readers. They are Griffiths’ neighbors, politically. And they are scaring him.
The entire article is an intervention — a professor writing in a progressive magazine telling progressive readers to suppress their growing instinct that self-governance might be the rational response to a federal government they believe is spiraling into authoritarianism. His message is not “secession is impractical.” His message is: don’t even think about it.
This is why Texas gets so little serious treatment in the piece. If Griffiths gave TNM the full treatment — the 600,000 supporters, the RPT platform plank history, the 220+ pledge signers, the electoral wins, the legislative priority designation — his progressive readers might realize something dangerous: that a serious, organized, democratic independence movement already exists. That it has been building political power for two decades. That it is winning elections and reshaping the internal politics of the largest state party in the country.
That would validate the very impulse he’s trying to suppress. So he buries it. He lumps TNM in with memes and tweets, waves vaguely at “a smattering of organized independence movements,” and moves on to convincing progressives that even thinking about secession makes them a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin.
Why Now
It’s worth asking why a Syracuse professor is publishing a book and a WIRED article about this in March 2026. The answer tells you more than the article itself does.
For the first time in American history, self-determination sentiment is surging on both sides of the political spectrum simultaneously. The right has been building for decades — that’s us. But now the left is arriving at the same destination independently. Sixty-one percent of Californians. Governors mobilizing National Guard units against federal agents. Walz invoking Fort Sumter. Blue-state secession talk isn’t fringe anymore. It’s a kitchen table conversation in progressive households from Portland to Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, the United States is about to spend all of 2026 celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — a secessionist document. Every speech, every commemoration, every op-ed about the founding principles will remind Americans that this country was built on the right to leave a government that no longer serves its people. That is a rhetorical environment that benefits movements like ours enormously, and the establishment knows it.
And then there’s the political moment itself. Trump’s second term has created conditions where blue-state residents are experiencing what many Texans have felt for decades — a federal government acting against their interests with no democratic remedy in sight. The empathy gap is closing. For the first time, progressives and conservatives are looking at the same federal system and reaching the same conclusion from opposite directions: this isn’t working, and maybe the answer isn’t winning the next election — maybe the answer is self-governance.
That convergence is what Griffiths is trying to prevent. Oxford University Press didn’t publish The Disunited States because American secession is an academic curiosity. They published it because the political class sees what’s coming and is hungry for arguments against it. Griffiths’ book and this WIRED article are not scholarship responding to a question. They are ammunition manufactured for a fight the establishment knows it’s about to have.
The Junk Drawer
Within a few paragraphs, Griffiths collapses the following into one undifferentiated mass: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 2023 tweet about a “national divorce.” Jesse Ventura’s off-the-cuff suggestion that Minnesota join Canada. The Calexit movement. The Texas Nationalist Movement. Online chatter about civil war after shocking news events. Silicon Valley futurists forecasting American fragmentation. A 2000s-era internet meme dividing the continent into “Jesusland” and the “United States of Canada.”
This is less of an analysis and more of a junk drawer. A tweet, a meme, a podcast quip, an astroturf operation with Russian ties, and a 20-year-old organization with more than half a million supporters — all treated as interchangeable data points. An undergraduate political science student would lose marks for this.
The Texas Nationalist Movement is not an internet meme. It is the largest and most organized political independence movement in the Western Hemisphere, operating continuously since 2005 with a defined political strategy, a legislative agenda, a grassroots organizing infrastructure, and a clearly articulated democratic mandate: let the people of Texas vote.
India Is Not Texas
The analytical backbone of Griffiths’ argument is a comparison between American secession and ethnic partition. He invokes India/Pakistan (1947) and Cyprus (1974) as his primary analogies, then projects their violence onto any hypothetical American secession scenario.
Those were partitions imposed along ethno-religious lines in societies where communal identity was geographically intermixed and where the drawing of borders was an act of coercion, not democratic choice.
Texas independence is none of those things. Texas has a border — the same border, settled by the Compromise of 1850 and maintained through nearly two centuries of continuous legal existence. TNM’s entire political program is built around a single proposition: let the people of Texas vote on independence in a binding referendum. This is not partition. It is self-determination — enshrined in the UN Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The appropriate historical analogies are the ones Griffiths doesn’t want you to think about: the Czech-Slovak Velvet Divorce. Norway-Sweden in 1905. The Baltic States’ Singing Revolution. Montenegro in 2006. Scotland in 2014. Quebec in 1980 and 1995. All democratic. All peaceful. All conducted along existing administrative borders by populations exercising self-determination.
Griffiths is a comparative politics professor. He knows these cases exist. He chose to lead with India/Pakistan and Cyprus because they serve his thesis. That is advocacy dressed as scholarship.
The “Intermixed” Straw Man
Griffiths argues that “red and blue America are intricately intermixed” — and therefore secession is impossible without violent population transfers.
This is true of American ideology. It is irrelevant to the question of Texas independence.
TNM does not advocate for the secession of “red America.” We advocate for the independence of Texas — a geographically defined political entity with a fixed border, a functioning state government, a $2.8 trillion GDP (8th largest economy in the world, ahead of Italy, Russia, and Canada), its own power grid, its own National Guard, and its own legal code.
Texas independence is not about separating conservatives from progressives. It is about Texans — all of them, in all their political diversity — governing themselves. Democrats in Texas would vote in Texas elections. Republicans in Texas would vote in Texas elections. Every sovereign nation on earth contains internal political diversity. The existence of that diversity is not an argument against self-governance. If it were, no nation could exist.
Texas v. White — Read the Whole Thing
Griffiths cites the Supreme Court’s 1869 Texas v. White decision as though it settles the question. This is the default move of every lazy commentator who wants to wave away secession without engaging with it.
Chief Justice Salmon Chase wrote that dissolution could occur “through revolution or through consent of the States.” That second clause is the one Griffiths wants you to skip. The Court itself acknowledged a legal pathway to dissolution.
Moreover, Texas v. White was decided four years after the Civil War by a Court operating in the political context of Reconstruction. It has never been tested against a democratic, referendum-based independence process because no such process has been attempted.
But set aside domestic law entirely. The right of self-determination is a principle of international law, exercised by dozens of nations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The United States itself was founded on this principle — the Declaration of Independence is a secessionist document. The American Revolution was a unilateral secession from the British Empire, undertaken without the “consent” of the Crown.
If Griffiths’ framework held, the United States of America would not exist, and he’d still be paying taxes to King Charles.
The Russia Smear — And Who It’s Really For
Griffiths dedicates an entire paragraph to Louis Marinelli, the early Calexit leader who relocated to Russia. Then he broadens: “Even when secession movements are homegrown, rival powers are likely to encourage them.”
This is guilt by association extended to guilt by category. By this logic, any political position a foreign adversary might support is inherently suspect. Russia has promoted racial division in America — was the civil rights movement a Russian operation?
And if we’re playing the “who benefits?” game, Griffiths should look in the mirror. His thesis — that secession movements should be suppressed, that territorial integrity must override democratic self-determination, that central governments have a right to deny referenda — is indistinguishable from the stated policy of the Chinese Communist Party toward Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong. Beijing has used precisely these arguments, in almost identical language, to justify denying self-governance to millions of people. By Griffiths’ own logic, his work is effectively articulating CCP policy on secession. Should we conclude his book serves the interests of Xi Jinping?
Of course not. That would be absurd. But it is exactly as absurd as the implication that supporting Texas independence serves Vladimir Putin.
TNM has no ties to Russia, has never had ties to Russia, and has explicitly and repeatedly rejected any foreign government involvement in the Texas independence question. Griffiths deploys the smear anyway because it works on an audience that doesn’t know the difference between Calexit and TNM.
“No Prominent Leaders”
Here is the sentence that reveals the depth of Griffiths’ disconnect from reality:
“Thankfully, there are no prominent leaders, regional governments, or parties calling for secession today.”
Allow me to introduce the professor to the world he apparently hasn’t researched.
The organization. The Texas Nationalist Movement has over 600,000 registered supporters. It has operated continuously since 2005 with a full-time staff, a digital organizing platform, a media operation, a PAC, and a relational organizing app. There is no comparably scaled independence movement anywhere in the Western world.
The party infrastructure. The Chair of the Republican Party of Texas — the largest state party organization in the United States — is Abraham George, a Texas First Pledge signer. The Vice Chair, D’Rinda Randall, is a signer. SREC members across the state are signers.
The platform timeline. In 2016, a resolution on Texas independence was narrowly rejected at the RPT convention. In 2020, a platform plank affirming the right to secede passed with 93 percent of the delegate vote. In 2022, a second plank calling for a legislative referendum received more delegate votes than border security, election fraud, or support for the armed forces — the most popular plank at the entire convention. In 2024, both planks were reaffirmed and elevated: “The Texas Legislature should pass a bill in its next session requiring a referendum in the next General Election for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation. This referendum should be a legislative priority.”
Not a suggestion. A legislative priority — in the official platform of the largest state party in the country, reaffirmed at three consecutive conventions.
The electoral results. More than 220 officials and candidates have signed the Texas First Pledge. In 2024, ten pledge signers were elected to the Texas House — up from zero — with Shelley Luther, Mitch Little, Wesley Virdell, Andy Hopper, and David Lowe each beating incumbents.
In the March 3, 2026 Republican primary — twenty days before Griffiths’ article was published — 83 Texas First Pledge signers were on the ballot. From the Governor’s race to precinct chair. Roughly 30 won outright. Every incumbent who signed the pledge held their seat — nine for nine. Don Huffines won the Comptroller’s race with 57 percent, becoming the first pledge signer elected to statewide constitutional office. Steve Toth knocked off Dan Crenshaw in a congressional primary. County chairs went eight for eight. Roughly 1.6 million Republican primary voters — three out of every four — cast a ballot for at least one pledge signer. The 90th Texas Legislature convenes in January 2027 with more Texas First members than any session in history.
The attack that backfired. In at least two March 2026 races, the opposition spent hundreds of thousands on mailers attacking candidates specifically for signing the Texas First Pledge. “Secession” in big scary letters. The full playbook — the same playbook Griffiths runs in WIRED, just with a lower word count and a glossier finish.
Andy Hopper was hit with everything they had. On Election Day in Decatur, a voter told the opponent’s campaign volunteer he was voting against her specifically because of that mailer. Then he walked over to Hopper and said: “I voted for you last time, but I realized when your opponent went after you on secession that she was a total RINO. And we need to secede.”
Hopper won. Seventy percent.
If 600,000 supporters, 220+ pledge signers, a statewide constitutional officer, ten state legislators, the RPT chair and vice chair, a legislative priority in the platform of the largest state party in the country, and 1.6 million primary voters don’t qualify as “prominent” — then Griffiths is defining the word to exclude the evidence that contradicts his thesis. That’s not scholarship. That’s a tautology.
What He Never Asks
The most glaring omission in Griffiths’ entire article is any engagement with the democratic case for self-determination. He spends the bulk of his 1,700 words on logistics, precedent, geopolitics, and hypothetical violence. He never once addresses the core question:
Do the people have the right to choose their own form of government?
This is the foundational question of modern political philosophy, from Locke to Jefferson to the UN Charter. Griffiths treats secession as a problem to be managed, not a right to be exercised. He frames the question entirely from the perspective of the federal government — its interests, its precedent concerns, its geopolitical position — and never from the perspective of the people who would be voting.
A scholar genuinely interested in the question would engage with the democratic case, weigh it against the practical concerns, and reach a conclusion. Griffiths skips the first step.
The Title Says It All
“Don’t Listen to Anyone Who Thinks Secession Will Solve Anything.”
Not “here’s why secession is impractical.” Not “here are the risks.” Don’t listen. Dismiss them. They’re having what Griffiths calls a “histamine response” — an allergic reaction, an involuntary spasm, something irrational and pathological.
In his framing, the millions of Americans who have expressed support for self-determination are not rational political actors exercising judgment. They are bodies having a reaction. They need to be diagnosed, not listened to.
This is the attitude of a political class that has failed to earn the consent of the governed and would rather pathologize dissent than address it. It is the attitude that drives people toward secession in the first place.
The S-Word
There’s one more thing Griffiths does that deserves attention, because it’s so pervasive most readers won’t notice it: his exclusive and deliberate use of the word “secession.”
Count the number of times Griffiths uses “secession” or “secessionist.” Now count how many times he uses “independence” or “self-determination.” The ratio tells you everything about his framing strategy.
“Secession” is a word that does political work. In the American context, it is welded to 1861 — to slavery, to Fort Sumter, to the bloodiest war in American history. Every time Griffiths writes “secession,” he is dragging his reader back to the Confederacy, back to a war fought over the right to own human beings, and asking them to see the modern independence movement through that lens. It is the linguistic equivalent of his India/Pakistan analogy — a framing device designed to make the reader feel the worst possible version of the idea before they’ve had a chance to evaluate it on its own terms.
But the rest of the world doesn’t use this word. When Scotland held its independence referendum in 2014, the BBC didn’t call it “Scottish secession.” When Czechoslovakia dissolved in 1993, no one called it “Czech secession.” When Norway left Sweden in 1905, the word was “independence.” When the Baltic states left the Soviet Union, the word was “independence.” When South Sudan held its referendum in 2011, the word was “independence.” When Montenegro voted in 2006, the word was “independence.”
The word “secession” is an American provincial term, loaded with American provincial baggage, and Griffiths deploys it precisely because of that baggage. It is not a neutral descriptor. It is an argument disguised as a label.
What we advocate is independence — the same principle, described by the same word, that has been exercised by dozens of nations in the modern era without anyone reaching for Civil War analogies. Griffiths knows this. He’s a comparative politics professor. He has studied these cases. He chooses “secession” anyway, because “independence” sounds too reasonable and “self-determination” sounds too democratic for an article whose thesis is that people shouldn’t be allowed to choose.
Language is the first battlefield. Griffiths is fighting on it. So should we.
The Bottom Line
Ryan Griffiths has written 1,700 words that amount to a single thesis: secession is messy, therefore don’t do it. This is the argument of a man who views the American union as an end in itself rather than as a political arrangement that exists only so long as it serves the people within it.
The Texas Nationalist Movement does not ask anyone to take secession lightly. We ask them to take self-governance seriously. We ask a simple question: Should the people of Texas have the right to vote on whether Texas should be an independent nation?
Griffiths’ answer is no. The people should not be allowed to choose. The Union must be preserved — not because it serves Texans, but because it serves itself.
That is not an argument. It is a confession.
Great article and exactly right!
Mr. Miller had me until this sentence: ‘Every time Griffiths writes “secession,” he is dragging his reader back to the Confederacy, back to a war fought over the right to own human beings, and asking them to see the modern independence movement through that lens.’
I support independence for any states that desire it. The Union (or, rather, the Empire) is dysfunctional and must be broken up. Independence advocates need not prove their bona fides by spitting on the honorable Confederate dead.
Not my point. I’m illustrating what Griffiths is trying to implant in the mind of the reader.
Understood, Mr. Miller. Thank you for the clarification. Mea Culpa.
Excellent point Earl. I am ashamed that I didn’t pick up on it. Thank you.
Bear in mind that Salmon Chase was parroting Lincoln’s claim that the United States was established by the Articles of Confederacy and that the statement “for perpetuity” still applied.
“Perpetuity” had no more strength than “a unanimous vote to make any changes.” Apparently, that was thrown to the side when in 1787 the “new” requirement was 75%.
While the points made in this critique/review are strong and well thought out; I can’t help but think Griffiths stronger points still pass the scrutiny provided in this article. Mainly the fact the financial logistics would be a nightmare i.e. the divvying up of national debt, military assets, social security, medicare/medicaid, ect.
Also the part about the rest of the U.S. federal government disallowing any newfound independent sovereignties a seat at the international table seems valid enough given the U.S. has a rich history of destabilizing developing nations and hegemonic tendencies.
Again, this particular analysis was very enlightening, especially regarding the idealogical importance of independence movements. I personally have a newly discovered interest of the TNM. I would love to hear any comments and dialogue in response to those specific concerns raised about the logistical challenges a succession could face in America. How would the respective economies function? How would we fight for international legitimacy and win?