(Daily Signal)—The rapid expansion of Texas’ Muslim population and Islamic institutions have captured the attention of conservatives beyond the Lone Star State. As Republicans met in Dallas for the Republican National Committee’s Midterm Convention, members of Congress, state lawmakers, and everyday Texans are sounding the alarm about Islamism and Sharia in the United States.
The controversy has prompted key figures such as U.S. Reps. Keith Self, Brandon Gill, and Chip Roy, as well as congressional candidate Brandon Hererra, to speak out on the issue.
At the Midterm Convention, elected officials and attendees told the Daily Signal that the rise of Islam in Texas could just be the beginning and merits a forceful response from American conservatives.
Texas Officials and Congress Weigh In
At the convention, the Daily Signal caught up with state officials and congressional candidates to get their thoughts on the ongoing debate.
State Rep. Brian Harrison, who has been calling for a special session relating to Islamism, said that Texans are worried and the Texas Legislature needs to act.
“I think my constituents and Texans all across the state are very concerned, and it’s not even just an academic concern. They’re looking at photos and videos coming out of Europe and the United Kingdom, and they’re very concerned that that type of thing could happen here,” he said. “I actually think we shouldn’t wait till November. This is a threat this year, and we should deal with it right now.”
Harrison added that Texas lawmakers shouldn’t be doing “the bare minimum” when combatting the problem.
“We shouldn’t be funding organizations that have ties to organizations that call for the violent overthrow of Texas or the United States government. This is the bare minimum,” he said. “I’m very concerned about some of our grant programs, that potentially are going to those organizations in the state of Texas.”
In Washington, D.C., Self and Roy, two conservative members of Congress, have also continued to raise concerns about Sharia law.
Earlier this month, Self introduced a resolution titled “Denouncing Sharia Law in the United States,” which reaffirms that the “primary role of elected officials in the United States of America is to provide for the security and protection of its citizens as well as preserving the liberties provided to them by the Nation’s Founders.”
Meanwhile, Roy sent a letter to several high-ranking federal officials asking them to look into a planned Islamic development being built near Camp Bullis Military Training Reservation in San Antonio. He asked officials to “examine whether any criminal, civil, financial, or immigration statutes have been violated in its effort to fulfill its campus expansion project.”
Herrera, the Republican congressional candidate for District 23, which covers San Antonio, said the rise in Islam “should be a concern” for Texans.
“If it’s not addressed, it’s something that continues to grow faster, and it completely changes the identity of the state,” he said. “You’re seeing that now in DFW [Dallas-Fort Worth] and where I live and where I’m going to represent, San Antonio to El Paso.”
Herrera added that for a while it seemed to be “a Houston issue” or a “Dallas issue,” but now has spread throughout the state.
“Now it’s moving right into where we live. Right next to my area is Camp Bullis military installation,” he said.
“It needs to be handled by the state Legislature and needs to be handled by local municipalities, and it needs to be handled by the federal government” Herrera said. “One of the things we need to prioritize is making sure we don’t import hordes of people who hate Western civilization.”
Gill, along with Self, also has criticized Dallas Fort Worth International Airport’s plans to install wudu, or ablution stations in Terminal D. Self said the stations were not an accommodation but a “conquest.”
Concerns raised by officials come as Islamic institutions continue to expand across the state, with new mosques, schools, and development projects drawing attention in communities across Texas.
Growth of Islam in Texas
The growth of Islam has accelerated significantly over the past three decades. In 1990, Texas had an estimated 140,000 Muslims, according to the Texas State Historical Association. More recent estimates now place the state’s Muslim population between 300,000 and 500,000.
As the Muslim population has grown, organizations and activists have sought to raise awareness about the implications.
Last month, the Daily Signal spoke with the Allied Special Intelligence Group, an organization that uses its knowledge of special operations military skills, counterintelligence, and human intelligence to educate and train citizens on how to “legally and lawfully delay, disrupt, dismantle, and remove Communists/Marxists and Terrorists networks” from communities, with the goal of protecting “our Constitutional Republic.”
Two of the group’s operatives, John Bennett, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, and Matt Shea, who served as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, created a presentation for Texas pastors on how to combat the Islamification of Texas.
Bennett and Shea’s presentation argued that Islamists seek the destruction of Western civilization and that Sharia law is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, including the First, Second, Fourth, Eighth, 13th, and 14th Amendments.
The presentation also argued that the church is the main target for Islamists. Shea told the Daily Signal at the event, “The church is what conserves the values that have made this country great, and that’s why they want to attack it.”
In addition to the presentation, pastors were also shown Chris Burgard’s film “Remember the Alamo: Don’t Sharia My Texas,” a documentary that argues that there is a coordinated effort to introduce Sharia law into American society, with Texas serving as the primary target. Throughout the documentary, speakers claim that Dallas has become the “Mecca of the West.”
Research from the Allied Special Intelligence Group says there are at least 314 mosques operating in Texas. A social media post claimed that 48 mosques have opened in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the past two years. Additionally, RAIR Foundation USA has also highlighted the rise in mosques and Islamic centers opening rapidly in the Lone Star State.
One of the most controversial projects is the development associated with the East Plano Islamic Center, known as EPIC City.
RAIR Foundation USA reported in 2025 that the Islamic center acquired 402 acres in Josephine for a planned development that would include 1,000 homes, a mosque, a private Islamic K-12 school, multifamily housing, a senior living community, parks, sports fields, and recreational spaces.
Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office later said an investigation found evidence that entities connected to the development violated state and federal securities laws. Paxton’s office requested that the Texas State Securities Board review its findings and refer the matter back to the attorney general’s office for potential legal action.
Additionally, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered that construction on the development may not begin as the legal issues surrounding the project continue.
Another controversial expansion project is in McKinney, where the City Council unanimously approved a mosque relocation project for the McKinney Islamic Association.
The site is a 5-acre tract along Virginia Parkway near two residential neighborhoods and a high school. It would include a 37,000-square-foot facility with a mosque, educational spaces, a gymnasium, and meeting rooms. It will also be designed to accommodate 3,000 people.
The approval has since sparked major debate within the community, with a recall petition effort underway targeting McKinney Mayor Bill Cox and council members Justin Beller, Geré Feltus, and Ernest Lynch.
In Richardson, an Islamic academy purchased a former Korean Baptist church to convert it into a school, mosque, and seminary.
RNC Convention Attendees Discuss Islam and Sharia
While attending the convention, the Daily Signal asked attendees from Texas and across the country about their thoughts on the growing debate.
One attendee, Roma Daravi, the vice president of public relations at The Kennedy Center, spoke freely about “radical Islam.”
“Texas particularly has a massive problem when it comes to radical Islam. A lot of people don’t know, but there is a new mosque popping up in Texas every single week. Those numbers are astounding,” Daravi said. “In order to enforce our Judeo-Christian values, we have to make sure that we’re involved in our community, that we’re involved in our government, that we’re involved in our schools, what our children are learning.”
Daravi said that there is a lot of worry that America could become the next United Kingdom, but she stressed that “it’s not too late.”
Another attendee, who flew in from Georgia, told the Daily Signal that she doesn’t believe Islam will “have much of an effect on anything.”
“I think that people in local communities will vote on that, and I’m not afraid of it. I think everybody has a right to believe in their own religion, and it will play out in politics,” she said.
Meanwhile, another woman who moved to the United States from Europe warned that Islam is “not compatible with Western values.”
“There’s no assimilation to it because these are two different cultures,” she said.
America, United States, European … they’re very different than certain cultures, and it’s just not compatible,” she added. “Once they’re in a country, it’s very, very difficult to get them out.”
The female attendee added that securing the border and vetting people who enter the country is the best way to prevent Islamification.
“I think that the first thing to prevent something like that to happen in the U.S. is to stop people even from entering that represent these values,” she said.
The debate over Islamism and the growth of Islamic institutions is becoming increasingly important to grassroots activists and local communities across Texas, and elected officials and candidates are taking varying approaches to address the problem.
As Republicans look toward their upcoming elections and legislative sessions, how they handle Islamism and Sharia could shape the political conversation and landscape—not just in the Lone Star State, but across the country.
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.
