James Talarico wants Texas to believe he is a Christian seminarian with a Bible in one hand and a workingman’s lunch pail in the other. What keeps falling out of both hands is the actual gospel, and what keeps landing on the table is a stew of class warfare and religious mush that would have made the old mainline liberals blush.
Breitbart pulled the latest clip. In a resurfaced video, the Democrat running against Ken Paxton for U.S. Senate does not merely soften the edges of the faith. He denies the center of it. Christianity and Islam, he says, are “equal pathways to truth.”
Then he draws his little circle.
I find that they’re all kind of equal pathways to truth. You know, that’s how I think, you know, I always think of all of the world’s faith traditions as like a circle with that divine mystery of the universe in the middle. And we all have different names for that mystery.
He lists the names like a man reading off a campus interfaith brochure.
Whether it’s God or Yahweh or Allah or Nirvana, the Great Spirit, whatever you call it, this is all, you know, different pathways to the same kind of fundamental truth of reality.
That is not a slip. That is the pitch. Jesus is one flavor. Allah is another. Nirvana gets a seat. The Great Spirit gets a seat. The Cross becomes décor. The empty tomb becomes optional. And a man who still calls himself a Christian asks Texas to send him to Washington to lecture the rest of us about “Christian nationalism.”
Jesus Did Not Leave Room for Talarico’s Circle
Scripture is not confused on this point. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
That sentence does not survive Talarico’s geometry. If Allah and Nirvana lead to the same “fundamental truth,” then the Incarnation was a branding exercise and Calvary was theater. The apostles did not die for a brand. They died because they preached a Name.
Talarico has been running this line for years. On The Weekend Show in 2024, he insisted Christians, Muslims, and Jews “all worship the same God,” added that “Muslims love Jesus,” and described the Abrahamic faiths as “branches on the same tree.”
On Ezra Klein’s show he said Christianity “points to the truth” while other “religions of love point to the same truth.” He talks about cups and languages. English, Spanish, French. Same cup. Different words. Cute. Except Christ did not say He was one vocabulary among many. He said He is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no man comes to the Father but by Him.
Islam does not “love Jesus” the way the New Testament loves Him. The Quran denies the Son. It denies the Cross as Christians confess it. It denies the Trinity. You can be polite about your Muslim neighbor and still tell the truth about that. Talarico will not, because the truth ruins the circle.
This is the same candidate who, in a 2021 Texas House invocation, opened with “Holy Mystery, you have so many names,” then cited the Torah, the Koran, the Gita, the Dharma, and the First Epistle of John before closing “in all your many names.”
Love as cosmic glue. The Big Bang as liturgy. Jesus reduced to a “barefoot rabbi” who left two commandments and, apparently, no exclusive claim on salvation. He asked the chamber to honor “not just the name of Jesus, but the way of Jesus,” which in Talarico-speak means policies. Always policies. The gospel becomes a floor speech.
The Seminarian Who Keeps Insulting the Church
Give the man this much. He is consistent. Breitbart reported that Talarico called Christianity the “most violent” religion and said it had done “more damage” to Islam than the other way around. He framed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as seasons of the same show and put his own faith in the bloodiest slot. That is a hell of a thing to say in Texas while asking for Christian votes.
He has called himself a “Christian who hates Christianity.” He has said God is “beyond gender” and, on the House floor, that “God is non-binary.” He has claimed the Bible is “silent on abortion.” He has preached that “God is not a Christian.”
He has said Islamic mystics and Rumi shaped his faith “as much” as Christian writers. He has quoted the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas to blur male and female on the way into the kingdom. He has suggested atheists in the Texas Legislature can be “more Christ-like” than the Christians sitting next to them.
None of that is “taking the Bible seriously.” It is taking the Bible hostage. You keep the words that flatter a progressive platform. You sand off the words that judge it. You baptize the result and call the people who notice “Christian nationalists.”
A faith that cannot say Jesus is Lord in a way that excludes rival lords is not courage. It is marketing. And marketing is what you do when you need the pews on Sunday and the DSA donor list on Monday.
Then He Reaches for the Hammer and Sickle
The heresy would be bad enough if it stayed in the pulpit. It does not. Talarico’s economics are the other half of the concoction, and they are not a secret.
In a September 2020 Zoom forum with the Austin Sierra Club, obtained later and blasted across the race this month, the then-state representative thanked “young activists” for connecting three things he called oppressive systems. Climate change. White supremacy. Capitalism. Then he said the quiet part.
I think only ending the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together are we gonna be able to begin the process of dismantling them.
The New York Post, Fox News, and RedState all ran the tape. On the same call he compared Texas oil and gas to “being the leader in cassette tapes in the 1980s” and promised that industry “is not gonna last.” This is the man now asking energy-state voters to trust him with a Senate seat while his campaign blurts that he is a “proud capitalist.”
Proud capitalist. Dismantle capitalism. Pick one. The 2020 version is the honest one. It is the language of campus Marxism dressed up as climate pastoral care. Link the engine of American prosperity to racial original sin, declare the whole machine oppressive, and then preach “political love” as the solvent. That is not the Book of Acts. That is a reading list.
Jonathan Turley called it a touch of Trotsky in the Texas Senate race, and he was not reaching. The Democratic Socialists have been chanting “dismantle” for years. Talarico did not invent the slogan. He just put a clerical collar near it and hoped Texas would confuse the costume for conviction.
Why the Mixture Matters
Heresy and Marxism are not random hobbies that happen to share a candidate. They serve the same appetite. Both need a world without a final Judge and without a created order that refuses to be redesigned. If every religion is a path to the same mist, then no commandment binds.
If capitalism is just another “oppressive system” welded to white supremacy, then Texas oil, private property, and the ordinary family that lives off both become moral problems to be managed by the state.
That is why Talarico talks constantly about love and almost never about repentance. Love, in his usage, is a mood that ratifies the platform. It blesses abortion because “Jesus never talks about” it. It blesses the gender revolution because God is “non-binary.”
It blesses Islam as a sister path because interfaith dialogue “brings out new flavors.” It blesses the dismantling of the economy that built the state he wants to represent. The one thing it will not bless is the exclusive Christ who divides sheep from goats.
Texas is not required to play along. A senator does not have to pass a systematic theology exam. He does have to tell the truth about what he worships. Talarico worships a mystery in the middle of a circle. Christians worship a risen Lord who walked out of a grave and left every rival claim on the floor.
Ken Paxton is a flawed man. Voters already know that. What they are being offered on the other side is not a humble Sunday school teacher with better health care ideas. It is a seminary-trained politician who will use the language of Jesus to empty Jesus of His uniqueness, then use the language of justice to treat prosperity as a sin. That concoction does not produce revival. It produces a softer state and a thinner church.
The apostles were offered syncretism too. They did not draw a circle. They named a Name. Texas can still do the same.
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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.
