Texas was never supposed to be a nail-biter. Republicans have not lost a statewide race there in more than three decades. President Trump carried the state by about 14 points in 2024. And yet Ken Paxton, the attorney general who just beat John Cornyn with Trump’s endorsement, has spent the summer getting out-raised, out-advertised, and occasionally out-polled by a 37-year-old Austin Marxist who once grouped capitalism with white supremacy and climate change and said all three needed dismantling.
That standoff just ended. MAGA Inc., the super PAC tied to Trump, disclosed a $10 million ad buy on Saturday — $5 million boosting Paxton, $5 million hammering James Talarico — its first major general-election spend of the midterms. The money goes to television, connected TV, and digital ads across the state.
Trump told reporters Friday the PAC would spend “whatever amount of money necessary,” putting the midterm number in the $400 million to $500 million range and calling the war chest “my money.”
He was not whispering.
High Tax Talarico Meets an Actual Checkbook
Talarico has been living on oxygen. The Texas Tribune has him at $72 million raised since the campaign began, mostly small-dollar, against $16.8 million for Paxton. He has owned the airwaves. He talks like a Sunday school teacher who wandered into a DSA meeting and decided both rooms could be his. He collects groceries for the neighbors while calling the Dallas midterm convention a “Billionaire Ball” with a $20,000 ticket.
His campaign’s answer to the $10 million was the usual sermon.
Billionaire-backed dark money groups are lying about James Talarico because they’re scared of the people-powered movement we’re building to fix this broken, corrupt political system.
MAGA Inc. spokesman Alex Pfeiffer did not bother with the liturgy. He called the Democrat “High Tax Talarico” and said he “wants to take money out of Texans’ pockets.”
The ads hit Talarico on taxes and rural hospitals and sell Paxton’s Protecting the Texas Promise Agenda — doubling the child tax credit, tax relief for medical bills, and a $50,000 deduction for first-time homebuyers.
Paxton put it this way on X.
While James Talarico has a record of raising taxes on working families, my Protecting the Texas Promise Agenda cuts costs and makes life more affordable. Thank you, President @realDonaldTrump, for your support. Together we will win for Texas and America.
A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.
The Cassette Tape Prophet
Talarico’s people now call him a “proud capitalist.” That is adorable. In a 2020 Sierra Club forum, he thanked activists for linking “climate change and white supremacy and capitalism,” then said only by ending the way those “oppressive systems work together” could they begin “dismantling them.”
In the same appearance he compared Texas oil and gas — the industry that still produces more than two-fifths of America’s crude — to “being the leader in cassette tapes in the 1980s.” That industry, he promised, “is not gonna last.”
His campaign later said those comments “missed the mark.” They did not miss the mark. They hit the target he was aiming at when nobody in Midland was listening.
This is the man selling himself as the common-sense preacher who will un-rig the economy. He beat Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary. He hired a Cornyn deputy after Paxton finished Cornyn off. He talks about Jesus and then preaches that God is not a Christian when the subject is abortion or Christian schools. The costume changes. The instinct does not.
A Toss-Up in a State That Should Not Be One
Recent surveys have the race inside the margin. An Overton Insights poll shared with the New York Post had Talarico up 44.0 to 43.4 among likely voters and tied at 50 when leaners were included. Other surveys have flipped a point either way. Cook and Fox have treated the seat as a toss-up.
Republicans hold the Senate 53-47. Texas is one of the states that can keep it that way or turn a bad night into a disaster.
Breitbart notes MAGA Inc. had barely touched the general election before this — an $827,000 outlay for Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina and almost nothing else. Elon Musk’s America PAC had already started writing checks for Paxton. The cavalry was late. It is not imaginary.
Talarico will keep calling it dark money. He will keep collecting canned goods while the Dallas convention fills up. Fine. Texas voters can decide whether they want a senator who treats oil like a dead format and capitalism like a sin, or an attorney general who spent years fighting the Biden-era lawfare machine and now has Trump’s PAC on the air.
Ten million dollars does not buy a soul. It does buy a fair fight. After a summer of Talarico ads with no answer, that is the least a red state is owed.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
