Special Episode: Spirit of Texas | Crossroads

Texas holds a unique place in American culture. From the iconic image of the cowboy to the allure of the vast American frontier. But why is this? And what does Texas show us about the spirit of America and its character? Welcome back everyone. You might be wondering where we're at. So we recently got invited to Texas by Content 2020, the film festival, to receive an award for our last documentary. We thought it'd be nice while we're out here to come enjoy the sights and scenes in Texas, come meet some nice people, and also after the election, get a good sense, I think, of what this country really stands for. So come along and join us in this special episode. Enjoy. I've been chasing down this dream for as long as I've known. Sometimes I get to thinking that my life might be wrong. I was a bitter cold day in New York. We escaped a heavy blizzard and took a four-hour flight to sun-soaked Texas. It felt like landing in another country. My first impression of the Lone Star State were these enormous American and Texas flags. After we left the airport, they were everywhere. It suggested something interesting, that the Texas story is the American story. Texas got its name from a Native American word meaning friends. In 1683, when Spanish-Franciscan priest Damian Masanet entered this new world, he met some Indians and misunderstood the word they used to introduce themselves. Tecas means friends or allies, but he took it as the name of the land and the name stuck. Texas is America's second largest state, both in land and population, and has also kept a strong culture of farming and ranching. And indeed, we saw a lot of cows. The state is also quite wealthy, with the second highest GDP in the country and it exceeds the GDP of Canada and Russia. But even more important to Texas is its unique culture and its founding story. Before the film festival, I decided to go learn more about what this story really means. 185 years ago, in 1836, the Mexican President, General Santa Anna, who took Mexico from Spain and proclaimed himself the Napoleon of the West, led thousands of troops to attack the Alamo, which had less than 200 defenders. Now in his eyes, the Alamo was just an irregular fortification hardly worthy of the name. Despite overwhelming odds, the Alamo defenders held off the Mexican army for 13 days. The Alamo eventually fell and every defender was killed, but their actions helped secure the future freedom of Texas. Unlike many famous battles, the reason the Alamo became one of the most critical battles in American history was not because of its victory, but rather because of its failure. The defenders knew they wouldn't survive, but they sacrificed their lives for freedom. And remember, the Alamo became a slogan for anyone resisting tyranny. In his famous letter to the people of Texas and all Americans in the world, William B. Travis, commander of the Texan forces, wrote, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country, victory or death. The spirit moved countless Texans and Americans. Two months later, General Samuel Houston and the Texan army defeated Santa Anna in the Battle of San Jacinto that lasted as 18 minutes. After his own water loop, Santa Anna signed the peace treaty, paving the way for the Republic of Texas to become an independent country. Back to the present. We're here in front of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. We're going to talk to some folks here about what the Alamo means to them. I'm curious, being from Texas yourself, I mean, what meaning does it have for Texans in terms of the spirit of Texas? And America. Because when they saw what was happening, they sent out riders outside of Texas to try to get help from other states. So it's not just Texas, it's also the other states in America. The people that came in to help the freedom of these people, these suppressed people by the dictator. And you ask what meaning does it have for Texas? Well, they got rid of the dictator. He gave us our freedom. Now we're not pursued by armies from Mexico saying you can't have that gun or you can't have that black powder or spiking our cannons where we couldn't use them. We're descendants of one of the guys who served and died here. And he was a young man in his 20s, and he gave his life for freedom. And he was one of just thousands, millions maybe, that have given their lives for freedom in one way or another. And so that's a symbol of the Alamo. The Alamo is that symbol to me. It just shows our fight as a people for freedom. And I think now, you know, as much as any time, is we're in a fight. And maybe we're not doing it with guns and with, you know, with sieges and those kind of things. But we're in a fight for our very freedom and the very values of our country. After visiting the Alamo, I walked the streets of downtown San Antonio. But due to the pandemic, the seventh most populous city in the United States had become a ghost town. So I decided to go to the countryside to see if I could find out more about the Texas story. This brought me to Cassie in a town with a population of about 500 people. What is it about small town America in terms of character? What's the difference, would you say? Well, I think small town America, for me, and a difference for everybody, I have friends that don't understand how I can, how my wife and I can live here, and we absolutely love it. They want the nightlife. There's 500 different restaurants they can go to and all that. That's okay. But I think that one thing around here, people know each other, people will help each other out. I mean, it's kind of like our police officer over here, Chief New. You can give him a call, and he'll go do something that the average police officer could not do in a major city. City management director, he handles all of our infrastructure. He helps people out all the time. There's just things that in a big city, no way, go find a plumber or go find, so you have that kind of thing. And if you need somebody to, you know, watch your dogs or to, you know, your mom's sick, can you drive them to the hospital? That's available. It's just a phone call away. It's the old tradition of just having neighbors and everybody, and it doesn't mean everybody, it's a love fest. I mean, there's this and every, occasionally, but it's, I found in all the years, I lived down in the woodlands for about 25 years, which is a huge master planning community north of Houston, beautiful. I've got more close neighbors around here than I had 25 years of living there than my neighbors on the very street, just because everybody's gone to work, you come home, you're in your house, you get up and go again, and you go to your various churches or whatever you're involved in, and we love it. While we were in Cossie, there was a speech at the community center on Texas leaving the United States. And while the topic may be controversial to some, it showed that the spirit of Texas independence is still very much alive. By now, many of you probably heard that Texas may look to secede from the union. This is new movement now called Texit, and to speak with us about this, we have Daniel Miller. He's with the Texas Nationalist Movement, and he's going to talk to us about his push to make Texas leave the union. You know, at the end of World War II, there were 54 recognized countries around the world, and by the end of the 20th century, there were 192. Those countries did not fall from space. The earth did not get any bigger. They were people and countries or areas that were just like us in Texas that said, look, we just want the ability to govern ourselves the way that we want to be governed. You know, people in Texas are sick and tired of living under 180,000 pages of federal laws, rules, and regulations, that if you printed them out and stacked them, would be taller than the San Jacinto Monument. That's the monument to our victory against Santa Ana and our independence from Mexico. You know, and think of that situation when you put it in those terms and realize that we fought a war to be independent from a dictator, but yet the laws, rules, and regulations that it administered upon us or forced upon us by two and a half million unelected bureaucrats dwarfs our monument to our victory for independence. I mean, it's like going to a doctor, the doctor drawing all of the blood out of your body, spilling about 40% of it on the floor, re-injecting the rest of it, and then saying, hey, you realize you wouldn't be alive without me, right? I mean, that's how this relationship is. The idea of independence is branded into Texas, from its nickname as a Lone Star State, to the fact that it joined the Union as an independent nation, to its own military, Texas National Guard, and with its over 21,000 troops with both air and land capabilities, it's among the strongest military forces in America. From a certain perspective, Texas is just like a small America that's both prosperous and efficient. If Texas were a country, it would be among the world's top 10 economies and oil producers. And in addition to that, there are 50 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Texas, ranking third in the U.S. after New York and California. But still, could Texas really function as its own country? Another question is, do most Texans actually support Texas independence? On the TNM website, more than 400,000 people have already declared their support for Texas, but Texas has a population of close to 30 million people. I understand Texas is a red state, and a lot of people aren't happy with the election. How do you think this has changed things? Well, look, we wouldn't be pushing for a referendum if we didn't think we could win it. You know, the fact of the matter is, is that we put this thing to a vote. We anticipate we're going to slam dunk it by 10 to 15 points, maybe more. I think it really depends on exactly what the federal government does between now and the time the vote happens. Does anyone anticipate that they're going to reverse course and suddenly say, you know what, Texas, we get you, we understand your concerns? No, what we're going to get is, we're going to get more jobs killed through the Green New Deal, we're going to get more centralization, more socialism, more power sucked into Washington D.C., and we're going to see the rights of the people of Texas eroded and trampled on. When they're talking about, you know, taking someone like Beto O'Rourke, who said, you know, hell yes, I'm going to take your AR-15, right, and when they take these radicals that are in Congress and say, look, we're going to put them in charge of your health and your economy and energy and all of these things, then the people of Texas, you know, we know exactly what we're going to expect. So yes, we'll win by 10 to 15 percentage points and possibly more, depending on exactly how radical Washington D.C. gets. How does this actually work? Yeah, it's a process question. We get a lot of those, as you can imagine, but I would just encourage people to look and see what happened in Scotland in 2014 and the U.K. and the Brexit vote. It's a very similar situation. For us here in Texas, we don't have citizen initiative, so we can't, no matter how many signatures we collect, we cannot force something on the ballot. But what we have to do is we have to engage these legislators and we need a statute in place that will allow us to go to the polls and vote for that. Now, good for us, State Representative Kyle Biderman, being the hero that he is, filed HB 1359, which will do exactly that thing. So we make it through the legislature, Texans will go to the polls in November of 2021 to vote on the issue of Texas leaving the union. The next day, I attended Content 2020. Now, the Epoch Times was honored to win the Best Documentary Award in the News and Journalism category. And during the News and Journalism lunch, I was invited to share my experiences as an investigative reporter researching radical and subversive movements in the United States. And people started telling me, those people attacking us, those are spies. And then I come from a background like James Bond movies and stuff like that. I'm like, like, that's that's not a spy. You know, it's like the guy looks like he hasn't showered in a week, you know, like, like sweaty, you know, like, you know, they don't look like spies. I'm like, no, that's that. He should be wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Never thought anything like it. And so once I uncovered these guys, and started reporting on them, I started seeing interesting things, namely that I started getting followed, that people would surround me, people would threaten to kill me. Contacts I had would tell me one, for example, said, they taught the T city woke up, tires were slashed on his car. And he said, they told me that they if I keep talking to you, they're going to hire a hitman to chop off one of my hands. And of course, what did I do, I wrote a story about it, and I said, well, you know, if they do it now, they'll will know who did it. Because if you go back and read the Communist Manifesto, what does it say? Communism abolishes eternal truths. And what is eternal truth, right? It says communism abolishes all religion, and all morality. We think it's an economic theory, to go back to the 1930s. It was never an economic theory, it was a metaphysical theory, meaning it is a belief. And it's a belief of a cult of man. And that you can only create that cult of man by destroying God, and everything that God created in man. It is a system to recreate society in the image of man, and not in the image of God. And so everything they do is to make you abandon your faith. Everything they do is to undermine your morals, to destroy your traditions, to destroy your family values, to destroy everything that your country and your culture and your character is based upon. And it is only through that, if they can achieve it, that they can achieve their goals. And so at Epoch Times, we of course have our slogan, Truth and Tradition, meant to speak the truth and uphold traditions. This is something we're going to be doing into the distant, distant future, and we will never be silenced. During this conference, I took the opportunity to talk with some of the attendees, and got a sense of the role of faith, personal responsibility, and independence in the American character. People are starting to see Hollywood as being this big business that has a lot of practices that people may not agree with happening in it. And also that the trajectory of it is moving away from tradition, moving away from values, moving into a lot of political realms that people just don't feel comfortable with these days. They're too tired of it. And we see now the faith film industry getting a lot more professional, making really good films sometimes. And also making films that talk to us with meaning, right? Not even per se, you know, getting preachy, but just having meaning, right? What do you think the value of that meaning is in film? It's extremely important because people are seeking and they're not finding. You know, we talked a little while ago about the frivolity of the internet and all these kind of things, right? And I think people seek that frivolity. They seek that escape because they're afraid of what the answer that they may not be able to find, or they're afraid of the answer that they are finding. And so they're looking for a way to give them a hope to kind of give their brains a shock into thinking, I don't have to, I won't have to deal with it. I can grin and bear it. I can go ahead. It's not really happening because they're watching all, you know, that's why they're getting involved in all this stuff. And so the value sector of filmmaking is extremely important because people may not know of Christ yet. They may not even be prepared, but there's a precursor to that word. There is a value, there's a principle centeredness, there's a understanding of family, there's an understanding of marriage, there's an understanding of just humans, one to another, brotherhood, right? There's so many values that civility, my God, what would we, where would we be if we were just to be civil with each other? Before we're talking about being born again, we're talking about all these other things. Just if we had some kind of respect, just so we can disagree and yet love one another and just still be able, you know, be like children that they disagree, they're fighting in one way and the next thing they're good and ice cream, you know, if we can turn back to that, that in itself would change the landscape of what's happening in America and around the world. You were telling me something interesting just a bit ago about people looking for justice, but you said they're looking for justice in the wrong places, all the wrong places. Most times, Joshua, buildings that are designated as justice centers, and this is where the general public has to go from time to time for some reason or another. And they expect to go into these buildings and come out of these buildings with the thought and attitude that they have received, what they consider to be justice. But they don't understand that absolute and perfect justice comes from only one source, only one source, and that is Father God. Now, someone sent me a quote from another saint, actually. There was an interesting quote, it said something along the lines that basically you find similar traits among saints and heroes, that oftentimes they're people who are willing to take risks. But the saint also said you find that same trait among criminals. And actually, the line between saints and heroes and criminals can be very thin. It's just a choice of how you deal with the hardships put in front of you. And I mean, that was something that really had me thinking. It's making me think about your story, too, of finding people and seeing in them talents and values that they do not see in themselves, and helping them to nurture those values to change them, right? You know, as a teacher, that's what I do. A young person comes to college, and they have these big dreams of what they're going to be. And they think that coming to college and just sitting there is going to miraculously make this wonderful job appear on their fourth year, May, when they walk across that stage. They don't realize how much work and effort and time it is going to take. They haven't developed their savvy wings yet, so they don't realize that it's going to take an understanding of how to do. That's my job. My job is to lead and guide them in the how-tos. So some of their savvy may be considered game. So I've got to see the game in them and use it for their own good. That's an interesting way of looking at it, actually. If you were to let people know one thing about your work and what you hope to build through all this, what would you tell them? I really want people to know God first and foremost, and I want to give glory to Him, you know, because if it wasn't for the Lord, I wouldn't be here. You know, I wouldn't know anything, what I'm going to do. I never aspired to be a filmmaker, you know, it just kind of happened as I started following the Lord. In 1864, 28 years after the siege of the Alamo, the phrase, in God we trust, was first used on a two-cent coin, and this was declared by Congress as the national motto in 1956. And this put the U.S. in sharp contrast to the atheist and anti-religious regimes that were then taking over the world during the Cold War, such as the Soviet Union. Americans' belief in God has changed little after more than 200 years of good times and bad. The United States is still a deeply religious country, and the American spirit is rooted in the belief in God and the belief that, as the Declaration of Independence declared, people are endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that government is instituted among men only with the purpose of protecting these rights. I'm delighted to realize this again through this trip to Texas. Well, folks, I hope you've enjoyed this special episode as much as we've enjoyed filming it, and I also hope that maybe you found some of the same hope that we've also found here. You know, one thing I've seen coming out here to Texas is that the spirit of the American character and what America stands for is still alive and will always be alive as long as we ourselves hold it. And really seeing community, seeing people maintaining their values, their faith, their traditions, really, this is what America is. This is what we are. Folks, as always, appreciate all of you, and again, as always as well, please take care of yourselves, stay informed, and stay free. Thank you. We filmed this episode just before the snowstorm hit Texas, and like many people, we didn't expect the storm to hit so badly. There's a strong spirit of independence and faith in Texas, and that's something that really stood out to us while we were there. We hope this video will encourage all of you to stay strong during this hardship, and our hearts go out to everyone in Texas.