Report on the Presidential Governor of the Provisional Republic of New Texico
Journal Entry: April 4, 2026 - 9:54 PM (Mountain Time)
Editor’s Note:
This is a concentrated version of the previous article for wider circulation. The following was posted as a comment on this Texas Monthy Article. It was swiftly rejected as spam (maybe becuase I put this website address on it, I’ll try again later without that external link). If you have any suggested locations where these border dispute articles could meaningfully be posted, let me know in the comments or spread them around yourself. It is an opportunity for some ‘good trouble’ as John Lewis would say.
Report on the Presidential Governor of the Provisional Republic of New Texico
April 4, 2026 - 9:54 PM (Mountain Time)
Over the past several days, while Texas and New Mexico continue their increasingly unserious border flirtations, I have found myself in intermittent and imaginary contact with a man from the western edge of the state who has now advanced what he insists is the only truly intelligent solution.
His name is Billy ‘the Snake’ Schytte.
Billy, who appears to have appointed himself Presidential Governor of the Provisional Republic of New Texico, has been following this border dispute closely and has concluded that both Texas and New Mexico are thinking too small.
His position is that if people are finally willing to admit that West Texas is not really Texas-Texas in the cultural, geographic, temporal, climatic, cinematic, or metaphysical sense, then there is no reason to merely redraw a county line here or there. His proposal is to take the entire western vertical slice of Texas, run it all the way south to the Mexican border, and establish a new sovereign desert republic to be known as New Texico.
He insists this is not secessionist extremism but administrative clarification.
Billy’s argument, in brief, is annoyingly coherent.
He points out that much of West Texas already:
operates on Mountain Time in spirit,
looks like New Mexico in film,
shares more in common with sparse-country borderland culture than with Houston or Dallas,
and has spent decades being governed by people too far away to smell the weather.
He also notes, not incorrectly, that Texas itself often speaks of “West Texas” as though it were already a separate country requiring special handling, atmospheric interpretation, and occasional pity.
His feeling is that if everyone already knows it’s different, then the polite thing to do is formalize the situation.
Among Billy’s early policy planks are:
correcting the time zone injustice
aligning government with actual geography
reducing Texas’s southern border burden by shifting a substantial section of it to the new republic
and, perhaps most ambitiously, building what he calls the Big Bend Maritime Corridor, a canal system intended to give New Texico future access to the Gulf while simultaneously solving several border, economic, and beachfront deficiencies.
When I pointed out that the Gulf is not especially close, Billy responded:
“That’s quitter talk. We got all this sand. The oceans are risin’ so, in the future, we’ll meet them half way. That’s beachfront property just waitin’ on the water.”
Suggesting he appears to be planning for long-range climate instability and seems to believe that when enough of the lower Gulf Coast and Florida become untenable, New Texico will be well-positioned to absorb displaced populations, provided they are willing to respect local timing, sparse-country values, and constitutional seriousness.
Billy comes from what he describes as “railroad people”, drives a red 1955 Chevy pickup, carries his grandfather’s working gold Swiss pocket watch, and holds strong views on the decline of modern machinery, federal overreach, and why no one should trust a system that can’t be repaired with ordinary tools in ordinary daylight.
He is also, somehow, very persuasive.
Among his better recent observations:
“Government ain’t nothin’ but organizing shit with stationery.”
And:
“Bad government is finally getting your shit together and then forgetting where you put it.”
And perhaps most importantly:
“When shit hits the fan, it won’t be Billy Schytte.”
At this stage, New Texico remains unrecognized by both Austin and Washington, though Billy appears to regard this as a temporary administrative lag.
I am not yet prepared to endorse the Republic of New Texico as a fully actionable statecraft initiative. But I will say this: the more Texas talks about annexing pieces of New Mexico, the more likely it becomes that someone like Billy the Snake Schytte will decide Texas itself needs to be partitioned for its own good.
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