(DCNF)—Republican Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton lambasted Democratic rival James Talarico’s record on law enforcement against a backdrop of 22 sheriffs on Tuesday afternoon — just one day after the Democrat nominee promised black voters a federal crackdown on policing.
In a press conference at the annual gathering of the Texas Sheriffs Association in Fort Worth, Paxton said that Talarico’s voting record and public statements about law enforcement reveal that his recent pivot to the political center appears to be just an act.
“My opponent had been trying to reinvent himself during this campaign. He’s going to tell audiences different stories depending on where he’s at. He’s trying to distance himself from positions he has previously embraced,” Paxton, who currently serves as Texas’ attorney general, told the cowboy hat-clad sheriffs. “He’s going to say he’s for law enforcement. But what he wont tell you is the rest of the story.”
Talarico is seeking to become the first Texas Democrat elected to the Senate in 38 years. Paxton and Talarico are in a statistical dead heat, according to recent polling.
The presser follows Talarico’s headline-grabbing Monday night town hall in DeSoto, Texas, a majority-black suburb of Dallas, during which Talarico endorsed reparations for slavery and a federal bill to “protect all Americans from police violence, including our black communities.” This racial justice rhetoric appears to clash with his previous campaign image as a moderate focused on affordability.
However, Talarico is simultaneously seeking to mend fences with some black Democrats following a bruising March primary win against Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who had the support of many majority black areas in the state.
During the Tuesday press conference, Paxton hit Talarico for backing a 2021 Texas bill called the George Floyd Act in the state House of Representatives. This legislation sought to end qualified immunity for police officers, among other sweeping policing reforms. During the same legislative session, Talarico introduced a bill that would ban contracts between police and reality television shows such as “Live PD.” He named this bill Javier Ambler’s Law after a black man who died of heart failure while in police custody in 2019.
Talarico’s votes on law enforcement legislation in the Texas House include opposing a bill to tighten bail requirements for violent criminals, voting against mandatory minimum sentences for human traffickers and voting against designating drug cartels terrorist organizations.
Talarico’s public statements appear to be out of step with Texas law enforcement as well. He said in 2020 that “our system of policing is deeply broken” and argued that it should be replaced.
Paxton also criticized Talarico — who represents the city of Austin in the Texas House — for donating to the Austin Justice Coalition, an organization that has advocated for defunding the city’s police department.
“That wasn’t an accident. That wasn’t a misunderstanding. That was a choice,” the Republican said during the Tuesday presser with sheriffs.
Paxton drew a stark contrast between Talarico’s past actions and his own record as the Lone Star State’s top prosecutor during the press conference. He expressed support for securing the border, cracking down on cartels bringing fentanyl into the country, the mandatory detention and deportation of immigrants, and qualified immunity for law enforcement officers.
“It is a great honor to stand with the attorney general today and endorse him. There is no problem with where he stands,” said Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn during the event. “He is a southern border champion whereas his opponent wanted to put out a welcome mat, whereas his opponent has donated money to defund the police.”
The Talarico campaign did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
On Monday in DeSoto, in response to a question about reparations for black Americans for slavery, Talarico said that “we have to correct the injustices from our past.”
“We are seeing the reverberations of slavery in modern day Texas all over the place,” he continued. “And until we as a society are committed to righting those past wrongs, of restoring our black communities, we’re never going to be able to get this country back on track.”
The Democrat said that it would transform American politics if black voters helped him clinch the election, and that this overhaul will include a path to “repair those past harms” to black Americans. Talarico also touted his advocacy for the George Floyd Act.
“We failed to pass the George Floyd Act, which would have been transformational in ensuring that police officers are actually protecting and serving all of us,” he said. “And I hope that when we win this seat, when we win a Senate majority, we can pass federal legislation to protect all Americans from police violence, including our black communities.”
Bad blood appears to linger among some Democratic voters who supported Crockett in the March primary in which Talarico’s six-point win was seen as an upset.
At a Sunday town hall in Houston, Talarico faced some tense questions from agitated voters. Some have accused the Democratic nominee’s supporters of online bullying, according to Texas media reports.
Crockett endorsed Talarico the day after losing to him — but said in June that she has no plans to campaign for her party’s Senate candidate.
Talarico on Sunday announced a $25 million get-out-the-vote effort aimed at black voters as he seeks to repair his reputation among them.
“I’m going to keep showing up and I’m asking you to continue to hold me accountable,” he said at a Houston town hall.
In the spring primary, Crockett defeated Talarico in the counties that include Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston — all of which have significant black populations — as well as nearly all East Texas counties where the Democratic Party electorate is predominantly black.
In Houston-centered Harris County, Crockett won 86% of the vote in heavily black precincts while Talarico won predominately white precincts in the county by a three-to-one margin, The New York Times reported. Talarico also carried the county’s precincts with a mix of Hispanic and white residents but lost in neighborhoods with large black and Hispanic populations.
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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.
