Texas Independence Group Leader Rages Against 'Project Fear'

Texas independence leader Daniel Miller has hit out at what claimed was a "project fear" campaign being waged by those who oppose secession by the Lone Star State.

The comments were made by Miller, president of the Texas Nationalist Movement (TMN) during a "late-night coffee talk" he hosted for the group on Thursday.

His words come amid an ongoing confrontation between federal authorities and Texas Governor Greg Abbott over illegal immigration over the Texas-Mexico border. On January 22 the Supreme Court ruled federal agents can remove razor wire placed along the border by the Texas National Guard on Abbott's orders, after which the governor claimed his state was facing an "invasion."

During his talk Miller compared the Texas independence campaign to the unsuccessful Scottish independence campaign, which lost a referendum on breaking away from the U.K. in 2014, and the victorious Brexit campaign, which won a referendum on taking the U.K. out of the European Union in 2016.

Hitting out at opponents of Texan independence, Miller said: "This is not a pillow fight. Not by any stretch of the imagination. When the time came that they realized that this was serious—they understood how bad of a position they were in and how good of a position we are in to make Texas independent—they would throw everything and I mean everything.

"They would call us everything but a child of God in an attempt to stop us. You're seeing it unfold before your eyes. It is pretty much what we expected. It's project fear. What we saw during Brexit, what we saw during the Scottish independence referendum, it is essentially no different. They only know one playbook and they run with it."

Scottish nationalists used the phrase "project fear" to describe claims made by the victorious unionist campaign, such as that Scotland wouldn't be allowed to continue using the British pound in a currency union should they vote for independence. It was later adopted by Brexit campaigners during the 2016 referendum to attack claims made by those who wanted Britain to remain in the EU.

Miller continued: "Independence is a bare-knuckle sport. You've got to expect the opposition to throw blows but you also have to be ready to do so as well. We're going in 100 percent on the truth and we're going to club the opposition over the head with it.

"We're years out of the Brexit vote and the remainers are still moaning about their loss. That's the price of independence. The price of independence is once you get it there's always going to be a long line of people that want to take it away from you."

Polling conducted exclusively for Newsweek by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, who surveyed 814 eligible voters in Texas from 1-3 February, found 23 percent would have voted for the state's independence in a hypothetical referendum, against 67 percent who would have voted to remain "a state within the United States."

However when asked the broader question of "to what extent, if at all, would you support or oppose Texas succeeding from the United States and becoming an independent republic" 33 percent of Texans said they would either support or strongly support secession against 39 percent who said they were opposed.

Speaking to Newsweek Miller said the poll showed the Texas nationalist movement deserves to be taken seriously.

He said: "Contrary to the opposition narrative that support for Texit is non-existent, this poll shows that support for the issue is strong enough to warrant a public discussion and a vote on the issue.

"Even if one believes the accuracy of this poll, it shows that Texit is polling at the same support level as Brexit and Scottish Independence before their referendums were held. It also shows that the opposition to Texit is far weaker than they pretend."

However Joshua Black, a political scientist who is also part of the Texas Politics Project, told Newsweek that "these results largely support the notion that the secessionist sentiment is a minority one in Texas."