| Twenty-five years ago, an armed militia tried to secede. When will it happen again?  Photograph by Gregory Smith / Corbis / Getty In the nineteen-nineties, a group calling itself the Republic of Texas declared themselves sovereign from the United States, claiming that the annexation of the state, in 1845, had been illegitimate. As Rachel Monroe writes in a captivating retelling of this strange episode, the organization’s leader, a charismatic winemaker named Rick McLaren, established an embassy in an old travel trailer in the mountains of West Texas, began ordering passports and badges, promised his followers enhanced freedom and no taxes, and connected with other militias across the country. He was surrounded by bodyguards, and drove in a convoy of vehicles. All this was getting to be a bit much for one of McLaren’s neighbors, Joe Rowe. “It was like he was a goddam South American dictator,” he recalls. And then things really took a turn: in late April of 1997, members of the group shot Rowe in the shoulder before taking him and his wife hostage—the opening salvo in a tense standoff between McLaren and his followers and law enforcement, which unfolded over the course of the next week. Was this a political movement, a cult, or a plain-old grift? And could the next secession attempt in Texas be around the corner? —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor | 
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