(Just The News)—The Texas Rangers have opened a criminal investigation into Camp Mystic, the all-girls Christian camp located in Hunt, Texas, where 25 campers and two counselors were killed during the historic July 4, 2025, flood.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed by parents who lost their daughters at the camp alleging gross negligence and other claims. In February, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged the Texas Department of State Health Services to not issue a license for the camp to operate until state investigations are concluded. Since then, two more investigations have been opened.
Patrick again contacted DSHS urging the agency to not issue a license to the camp. He publicized a letter he sent DSHS stating the state Senate and House investigating committees were still gathering facts about the deaths that occurred at Camp Mystic.
He also said the Texas Department of Public Safety announced the Texas Rangers, which are part of DPS, have launched a criminal investigation into Camp Mystic. The Texas Rangers are assisting DSHS with an investigation the agency has launched in response to more than 600 complaints it has received about the camp. The complaints allege negligence and also call on DSHS to not renew the camp’s license.
“In light of all this new information, the ongoing legislative investigation, your DSHS investigation, and now the criminal investigation of Camp Mystic by the Texas Rangers, I reiterate, you should not renew or approve a camp license for Camp Mystic, or any other camp the same operators intend to run, until your investigation, and all criminal and legislative investigations are complete and necessary corrective actions are taken,” Patrick said. He also said Texans deserve to have transparency and clear answers and this cannot happen until the investigations are complete.
Texas Rangers search and recovery operations for missing flood victims in Kerr County remain ongoing, including for missing Camp Mystic camper Cile Steward.
In February, parents of Camp Mystic daughters who died at the camp sued six DSHS officials alleging they violated their daughters’ constitutional rights to life and bodily integrity, The Center Square reported. They argue DSHS never should have granted the camp’s license to begin with last year because the camp was not in compliance with state law requiring written and posted evacuation and disaster plans or evacuation procedures other than instructing girls to remain in their cabins.
The lawsuit was filed by Houston-based Yetter Coleman and Mithoff Law on behalf of the parents of nine deceased daughters: Lila Bonner, Chloe Childress, Molly Dewitt, Katherine Ferruzzo, Lainey Landry, Blakely McCrory, Anna Margaret Bellows, Sarah Catherine Marsh and Mary Kathryn Jacobe.
Despite this, the camp submitted an application to have its license renewed at the end of March. It has already accepted applications for roughly 900 campers to attend its Cypress Lake location this summer, enough to host all six sessions this summer, a camp spokesperson told The Center Square. The camp is holding an orientation with parents and their daughters who plan to return and has posted information about camp safety on its website.
“The safety of our campers and counselors is and always has been our highest priority,” the camp says. “Even before the Texas Legislature enacted new laws to enhance camp safety across the state, Camp Mystic began working with engineers and safety experts to make improvements at Cypress Lake. We are committed to go above and beyond what is required to provide the safest possible camping experience for your daughter.”
The camp denies all culpability for the girls’ deaths last July 4. Its owners argue they are in compliance with new camp safety laws.
“Our decision to partially reopen areas of the camp is informed by our faith and our commitment to continue the nearly century-long mission and ministry of Camp Mystic to provide a Christian camping experience for girls that allows them to grow physically, mentally and spiritually,” the camp told The Center Square. “Camp Mystic is working with engineers and other experts to comply with all elements of the recently passed camp safety legislation. Camp Mystic Cypress Lake, which we are planning to re-open this summer, is a separate property that is not adjacent to the Guadalupe River and sustained no damage from the historic flood on July 4.”
The camp also said it “has cooperated with every investigative request we have received, including our thorough cooperation with the work of the Senate and House General Investigating Committees. We have worked closely with the Texas Rangers since the tragic events of July 4, assisting them in their search and recovery efforts, which are ongoing. We look forward to cooperating with the Texas Rangers and supporting them in their efforts to gain a thorough and accurate understanding of what happened on the South Fork of the Guadalupe River during the early hours of July 4.”
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.
