It’s a really good time to be a separatist.
Just ask Daniel Miller, the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement who has been fighting for two decades to free Texas from the burdens of big government in the United States. Brexit was a good thing. Now, he has a platform to talk about “Texit.”
“Our phones are ringing off the hook. Our social media is going nuts. We are definitely riding a wave of momentum. and we plan to ride it all the way to getting and winning a referendum on succession,” Miller told TPM in an interview shortly after the Brexit vote results were announced. “It is just a phenomenal thing. I know our supporters are energized by it.”
After the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union last week, separatists, secessionists and 51st state advocates (those who want to break off from existing states to become their own states, but not their own nations) see Brexit as an opportunity to finally show tepid supporters there is a path forward to revolt against their current borders.
“The result of the Brexit vote has enticed people who were previously afraid to hope in something again,” Miller said. “Now we see that a lot of folks are ready to come out of the shadows.”
In Texas specifically, Miller is calling on Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to possibly “convene a special session” to discuss a referendum on secession, something the Texas Nationalist Movement has pushed in the state legislature every year since 2009, to no avail. While the Texas Nationalist Movement has yet to see any actual movement there, at the 2016 Republican state convention last month, the group brought forward a party plank allowing for such a referendum. It was ultimately struck down, but got much further than many expected.
“The plank fell two votes shy of going to the convention floor of nearly 4,000 delegates,” the Associated Press wrote at the time.
“We proved a point and that point was that this issue is not one that is just held by a bunch of fruitcakes or fringe political types,” Miller said.
Miller said Brexit just built on that momentum.
On Friday, Miller said he was swamped with phone calls from other advocates in states outside of Texas like Florida, Louisiana, Virginia and Missouri who’d seen the Brexit news and wanted to chart a path forward for their own states. (A movement already exists in Alaska to do just that.)
For 51st state advocates, Brexit, also offered a sense of optimism. After Northern Colorado’s failed bid to leave Colorado in 2013, Brexit represents a surge of new energy.
Mark Baird, a spokesman for the Jefferson movement–which seeks to break off a number of Northern California and Southern Oregon counties to become its own state–told TPM that he saw a lot of parallels between what the people of rural California and Oregon face and what individuals in the United Kingdom faced in when it came to self-determination.
“It is demonstrative that it can be done. That is huge for us,” Baird said.
Baird–who declined to provide TPM with a formal title because his movement “is grassroots” and “nobody is important here. We just want liberty” – said his group plans to sue the state of California in upcoming months for lack of representation, something he planned to do regardless of Brexit, but which he said has energized his efforts.
“The Constitution guarantees us a Republic,” Baird said. “We don’t have that here. We have government for afar, and they have no empathy for how we live, and that was exactly what Brexit was about.”
In New York, John Bergener, who has been fighting to split the state of New York in two so it is more representative of rural voters whose views don’t align with the more liberal residents of Manhattan, told Politico that Brexit “left me feeling a little optimistic.”
“We will study it,” he said.
Among the many things that British Prime Minister David Cameron failed to foresee, including his own political demise, was that his call for an EU referendum in the UK would ultimately inspire American separatists across the pond.
“We have vote pledges coming in by the second. I think by the end of the weekend we will have doubled our volunteer base,” said Miller of Texas. “At this point the momentum is our side.”
