(DCNF)—Republican Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton said he hopes to raise awareness about Democratic opponent James Talarico’s “weird” statements in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation on Saturday.
The Republican attorney general is seeking to cut through Talarico’s well-funded rebrand as a moderate by highlighting his embrace of left-wing identity politics, including his past remarks about there being six genders and his “love” for trans children.
“We have a saying in Austin. We call it weird. Well this guy’s weird. His positions are weird,” Paxton told the DCNF during the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference in Washington D.C. “He went to San Francisco to raise money. In my opinion, those are his people. They’re not in Texas.”
Paxton weighed in on Talarico’s statement that “God is nonbinary,” which he made during an October 2021 speech in the Texas House opposing a bill to reserve girls’ school sports for biological females. Talarico had described the legislation as “hateful” at the time.
“I think if you look at the scripture it’s pretty clear God is not ‘nonbinary.’ He is expressed in three forms in the trinity, and not as James Talarico is suggesting,” said Paxton.
Talarico has recently come out in opposition to child sex changes and now describes himself as a “border security Democrat,” portraying himself as moderate in high-profile appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast and the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
Paxton argued that Talarico probably sounds like his prior, more progressive self in behind-closed-doors fundraisers in Chicago and the Bay Area in California.
“There is no genuineness to it,” Paxton told the DCNF. “None of his past statements, none of his voting record matches up to what he’s now saying.”
Talarico is a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian. He now admits the “God is nonbinary” comment was “cringey” but insists it is a distraction from Paxton’s record, emphasizing the Attorney General’s 2023 impeachment. Paxton was acquitted on all of his charges.
Paxton conceded that his GOP primary battle against longtime incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn — who he trounced by 28 percentage points in a May runoff — had been bruising. The prolonged nomination contest also shortened his runway to fundraise. By Election Day, Paxton will have had just five months to raise money as his party’s nominee compared to Talarico’s eight months of fundraising.
But Paxton has made headlines for years by launching lawsuits on behalf of Texans against Big Pharma, against Big Tech and against blue cities for evasions of immigration law — among many other issues.
Talarico raised $11 million through the controversial Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue in one month, Paxton said.
Paxton said his team is “suspicious” of the sourcing of all of that money in light of revelations about the collapse of the company’s legal and compliance team and illicit foreign donations flowing through the platform.
But being outspent is a familiar predicament for Paxton.
Paxton defeated Cornyn in a May runoff despite being outspent by roughly 15 to 1 in the $120 million race, including an onslaught of outside money from the senator’s Washington network.
Paxton received an endorsement from President Donald Trump one week before the runoff. Trump broke with the typical Washington protocol to endorse the challenger, with whom he has a close relationship. Paxton spoke about his relationship with Trump in his remarks to the conference Saturday, sharing that the president was his first call after his 2023 acquittal.
Asked how he plans on replicating his success in the general election if he finds himself massively outspent, Paxton insisted that as long as he successfully defines what he and Talarico stand for, he will clinch the election in November.
“As long as we have enough resources and money to define him … who he really is, with his own words, not me saying anything, just him, we will win this race,” he said.
Paxton’s advantage over Cornyn in part stemmed from Cornyn’s position on gun rights. Cornyn supported a bill signedinto law by President Joe Biden in 2022 to fund state red flag laws and tighten background checks on gun buyers under 21, leading to consternation within the Texas Republican Party.
Talarico said in a podcast interview earlier in June that he supports the Second Amendment “with limits,” likening it to the First Amendment.
“You have the right to protest, but you need a permit before you go start a rally on a street corner somewhere,” he said.
In 2020, Talarico said that Trump allows “weapons of war on our streets,” according to a clip unearthed by the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Paxton emphasized the importance of the Second Amendment to the DCNF.
“The Second Amendment was designed to protect citizens not just from bad people but also from their own government,” he said. “It was designed to have a backstop when the government gets out of control and becomes authoritarian. That’s something that’s happened historically in countries around the world. The Founders envisioned that, so it’s extremely important.”
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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.
