Texas Secessionists -- Why You May Have Them All Wrong

You know you're dealing with people who live in a different world from the rest of us when someone can drop a line like, "You know, most people actually believe that George Washington was really the first president of the United States," and he'll receive a bunch of sympathetic chuckles at all the sheeple who don't know what's really been going on.

That was just one of the uncomfortably confusing moments when we attended the "Republic of Texas's 14th Congress Session" in the tiny town of New Baden. The group's stated goal is to enforce "Texians' Right to Independence As a Nation Under God's Law."

Translation: These folks still aren't ready to let go of those few sweet years in the 19th century when Texas was its own nation.

After eating some chopped beef sandwiches and chicken-fried steak with the secessionists, we learned a few things about them and the world they live in.

They're not backward rednecks
One of the easiest dismissals of the sort of people who meet to talk about things like seceding from the union is that they're a bunch of uneducated hillbillies who don't know what they're talking about.

So naturally we were surprised to pull into the parking lot of the New Baden Community Center and find the parking lot full of as many Lexuses as pickup trucks.

"I got some weird looks when I pulled into town," George (all names have been changed), the luxury car driver, explained during a smoke break. "They're not used to city boys around here."

Yet a vast majority of attendees at this secessionist meeting hailed from Houston, Dallas or their respective suburbs. They're educated people -- doctors and lawyers, in addition to contractors and laborers.

They're also not the overtly racist, red-state stereotypes that those on the left might suspect them to be. A hot topic of conversation included a YouTube video that several of them claimed to have seen in which British soldiers are attacking Iraqi civilians. While nobody would confuse these folks with the crowd from Camp Casey, the anti-authoritarian sentiment among them meant that they sympathized with a bunch of Muslim civilians, rather than the white soldiers in the Queen's Army.

They are very serious
When you visit the Republic of Texas Web site, which consists of people who hold titles like "Chief Justice" in various "Texian" district and county courts, the natural reaction is to assume that these people are kind of like Civil War reenactors or renaissance fair patrons, playing in a fantasy world and getting together to elect themselves to imaginary offices.

It's not really a social club, though -- most of the people who attend do so because, among other things, they're trying to learn about ways to avoid paying taxes (which they really, really hate -- more on how they plan to argue with the IRS later).

It's also worth noting that, at a meeting of about 40 secessionists, our cursory estimate of gun ownership among attendees would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 percent.

This is Texas, of course, where a 71-year-old country music legend spent the previous week on trial 75 miles west of New Baden for allegedly shooting a man in the face, so guns aren't exactly a surprise.

They live in a totally different world from the rest of us
We soon discovered the "George Washington was the 14th president" thing (probably due to confusing the president of the Continental Congress with the president of the United States, but we were too scared to ask), wasn't the only wacky but commonly accepted truth among this crowd.

One particularly optimistic notion popular among the group is something called "personal sovereignty," the idea that a person is not required to pay taxes unless he or she consents to being taxed.

And, of course, there's the claim that Texas never entered the Union. For proof, they say one need only look at the fact that the Texas flag can be flown at the same height as the American flag. (For the record, any state flag can be flown at the same height as the American flag.)

Following an afternoon with the secessionists, we didn't feel any closer to revolution. But we did get the feeling that regardless of who has the tallest flagpole or how many lies might be in our history books, there'll always be people talking secession as long as there are people paying taxes.