Everywhere else in American politics this year, the progressive movement has stopped pretending. The activists who spent a decade insisting a man could become a woman now say it to your face and dare you to object. The candidates who once smuggled their radicalism past voters in soft language have decided the soft language is no longer worth the trouble. The mask is off — nearly everywhere.
Then there is James Talarico. The Texas Democrats’ nominee for United States Senate, set to face Attorney General Ken Paxton in November, is doing the one thing the rest of his movement has abandoned. He is putting the mask back on, and he is doing it in real time, in front of us, with the cameras rolling. A Democrat has not won a Senate seat in Texas since the 1980s, and Talarico has evidently concluded that the only way to break that streak is to convince Texans he is not the man his own record says he is.
What we are watching is not a conversion. It is a costume change.
What He Said When He Thought It Played Well
Start with the trans debate that has dominated Texas politics. In a 2021 interview with an Austin Fox affiliate, Talarico waved away concern over biological males in girls’ sports as a Republican fever dream, accusing the governor of trafficking in “far-right conspiracy theories about trans children causing problems on sports teams, which we know does not occur in the state of Texas.”
On the floor of the Texas House, debating a bill to keep boys out of girls’ athletics, he reached for Scripture and announced that “God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between,” while informing his colleagues that modern science recognizes not two biological sexes but six.
This was not a man caught off guard. It was a man preaching.
The same certainty governed everything else. In April 2022, addressing an animal-welfare group, Talarico declared that “it is now existential that we try to reduce our meat consumption” and proudly proclaimed that his campaign had “officially become a non-meat campaign” buying only vegan products — a daring pitch in the state that practically invented brisket.
And as recently as this March, with the Senate race already underway, he posted a video insisting that “you can’t call yourself a Christian and destroy God’s creation with greenhouse gasses.” For a seminarian, it was a tidy bit of theology: vote my way on energy policy, or forfeit your claim to the faith.
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What He Says Now That Texas Is Listening
Then Paxton dispatched John Cornyn in the Republican runoff, the general election opened in earnest, and James Talarico discovered humility. Asked by the networks to account for the very statements he had once delivered with such relish, he allowed that some were “cringey” and confessed that he had “missed the mark.”
His campaign, meanwhile, suddenly wanted everyone to know the candidate is a devoted friend of Texas oil and gas, fully committed to an “all of the above” energy strategy. When the vegan footage resurfaced, his team answered not with conviction but with a photograph of the candidate gnawing a turkey leg, and Talarico himself went on a friendly podcast to insist he had been eating barbecue all along.
Notice what changed and what did not. The man did not change. The audience did. Every softening, every walk-back, every freshly minted love of fossil fuels and smoked meat arrived at the precise moment the people listening stopped being a progressive primary electorate and started being the voters of Texas.
Repackaging Is Not Repenting
Here is the tell, and it is the whole point. Talarico is not renouncing his beliefs. He is renouncing the optics. “Missed the mark” is the language of a man who knows a statement is indefensible but cannot bring himself to call it wrong — a phrase engineered to sound contrite while surrendering nothing.
He did not take back the six sexes. He did not retract the theology. In the very breath that he dismissed his old comments as cringey, he reaffirmed the most radical one, maintaining that God is beyond male and female and reaching for the Apostle Paul to sanctify it: in Christ, he reminded the room, there is neither male nor female.
That is not the testimony of a man who has rethought anything. It is the strategy of a man who has rethought his branding. The seminary enrollment, the talk of a barefoot rabbi flipping tables, the carefully scriptural cadence — none of it is evidence of conversion. It is set dressing. Same radical, new costume. The beliefs are intact; only the collar is new.
And that is exactly why the performance should sober us rather than amuse us. The most dangerous deception is never the obvious one. It is not the activist with blue hair shouting down a school board. The deceiver has always understood that the effective lie is the one dressed as the truth, the poison handed across in a communion cup.
And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.
A counterfeit gospel preached from a campaign stage is not politics as usual. It is spiritual wickedness wearing a collar, gender ideology baptized in borrowed Scripture and offered to believers trusting enough to mistake the costume for the man. Talarico is wagering that a divinity credential and a few well-chosen verses can accomplish what his record never could — persuading the Christians of Texas that a movement at war with God’s design is somehow its truest defender.
Refuse to Be Deceived
The answer to a counterfeit is not cynicism. It is discernment.
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
Test the spirits. Read the record. Find out what a candidate believed when he was certain no one important was listening, because that is the moment a man tells the truth about himself. Pray for the discernment to tell the light from its imitation. Share what you have found so others can watch the same pattern take shape. And then do the one thing no rebrand can survive: show up. The antidote to a counterfeit is not despair but a wakeful, discerning church standing at the ballot box, refusing to be fooled by a man who is counting on precisely that.
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.
