Somebody running an account called The New Mexico Ranger posted a map on Sunday showing New Mexico grown fat enough to swallow West Texas out past the Pecos. The caption read, behold greater New Mexico.

I answered that night with a map of my own. The Republic of Texas as it drew itself in 1836, up the Rio Grande to its source and then due north, taking in Santa Fe and reaching into what are now five other states. Four words under it. Don't push your luck.

It has been seen more than ninety thousand times since.

The whole story, with both maps

Iceland went to the polls a week ago Saturday and told its own government no, on eighty two percent turnout, when asked whether to restart the European Union membership talks it shelved in 2013. Scotland published a finished Independence Referendum Bill that it is not permitted to introduce, because the Supreme Court in London ruled in 2022 that Scotland may not hold that vote without Westminster's consent, and no British government has given it since 2014. And Alberta set October nineteenth for ten questions about its place in Canada, one of them asking whether the province should begin the legal process toward a binding vote on separating. That one reached the ballot by citizen petition. Premier Danielle Smith will not campaign for it, has been asked to cancel it, and has refused, on the ground that the question belongs to Albertans rather than to her. We said where we stand on Alberta when they started, and nothing about that has changed.

Three peoples, one question, and the only one that cannot get a ballot printed is the one that accepted early, in good faith, that its right to ask belonged to somebody else.

Set that beside four counties on our own western line petitioning to leave Santa Fe and the pattern is hard to miss. Peoples deciding who governs them is ordinary business now, running on two continents at once, and the argument against it is never that the question itself is illegitimate. It is only ever that somebody else would prefer you not ask.

What Scotland published

While Edinburgh was publishing a bill it is not allowed to introduce, a provision of House Bill 1056 quietly came into force in Texas. Gold and silver are legal tender here now.

The headline is a good deal bigger than the statute. The metals qualify when they carry their weight and purity and are not passed off as government currency. Nobody can be made to accept them. No Texan can be required to offer them. What the law creates is an option between two people who both agree to it, and the machinery that would make it practical at a register does not exist yet. The comptroller is directed to stand up an electronic system, backed by bullion held in the Texas Bullion Depository, that would let Texans move metal the way they move dollars. That piece is authorized for the spring of 2027.

So it is plumbing rather than a revolution, and I am not going to oversell it. But I have spent a long time arguing that a people who mean to govern themselves have to be able to run their own economy, and money sits at the top of that list. Every function Texas can already perform for itself is a function it never has to ask permission to perform.

Nobody marched for this one. The statute simply came on, on a Tuesday, and now it is true.

What the law actually says

For years the case for Texas independence lived in about six places, none of which knew the others were there. The polling on one site, the legal argument on another, county organizing somewhere else again. If you wanted to hand a skeptical brother in law one link, there wasn't one to hand him. There is now. thetnm.org has been rebuilt from the studs, and the whole case sits under one roof. The plan, the polling, an FAQ built for the exact moment somebody says fine, but what about the currency, or the border, or the military. A live count of registered supporters, which crossed 668,000 this week. A map of all 254 counties, so you can look up your own and see where it stands. Will Kacy walked the whole thing on this month's This Month @ the TNM, about eleven minutes, and it is the fastest tour there is.

The second door is the one I am less proud of. A great many of you have a TEXIAN account you have never once used, created for you back when you signed something. When you went to sign up, the app told you an account already existed and to go sign in, and then would not let you sign in, because there had never been a password on it. So you did the reasonable thing and gave up. I would have given up too. That was ours to catch, it sat there far longer than it should have, and the people it was quietly turning away were the ones who had already said yes.

It got fixed on Friday. If that was you, the door opens now.

Take the tour

• Something else went live that we never announced. Inside TEXIAN you can now pull up your own state representative and state senator and call, email, or post at them in one tap. All 179 Capitol numbers are loaded, and each member's Texas First Pledge status shows right on the card, so you can see before you dial whether the person you are calling has already put his name to it.
• Eight sessions are out of the TEXITCON vault, one every morning since I last wrote you, thirty six still to come. This morning's is Margaret Byfield on the federal 30x30 land agenda and what it wants with Texas dirt.
• Late Night Coffee Talk is Thursday at 8 Central. The Alamo memorial march is Saturday evening in San Antonio, Rains County has a booth at the county fair on the fifteenth, Llano has a meet and greet on the seventeenth and the courthouse square on the nineteenth, and Brazoria County is at the Lake Jackson civic center on the twenty sixth.