At a GOTV event in Cypress, a suburb north of Houston, he vowed to turn Harris County “dark red.”
“I have two priorities in this election,” Abbott told a crowd of several hundred people at Cypress BBQ. “Number one is to win reelection. Number two is to win Harris County. I’ve got $90 million in my bank account and I’m going to spend most of it in Harris County.”
He said he was supporting efforts “precinct by precinct” to “turn out voters who voted in the presidential election, turn out voters who never voted before. We’ve got to win Harris County and make Harris County dark red after this election.”
Under Democratic leadership, the county, and its largest city, Houston, have been plagued with corruption, lack of accountability over billions of mismanaged or missing taxpayer dollars, increased taxes, high crime, and dilapidated water and road infrastructure, many residents argue. Newly elected Houston Mayor John Whitmire, a Democrat, has launched an effort to combat public corruption, reduce crime and improve infrastructure, crediting the governor and state legislature for providing assistance, The Center Square reported.
Earlier this month, Abbott launched a new task force targeting violent repeat offenders in Houston. Both he and Whitmire also launched additional efforts targeting homelessness and crime, The Center Square reported.
In recent elections, crime has been a top concern among Houston and Harris County voters after judges continued to release repeat offenders on low or no bond who are later arrested for committing another violent crime. The state legislature has attempted to address the issue by passing legislation, which Abbott has signed into law. This year, he signed another bail reform bill into law, which restricts judges from releasing violent repeat offenders. The legislature also passed resolutions adding 17 constitutional amendments to the ballot, including bail reform and sanctioning judges.
Proposition 3 authorizes magistrates to deny bail to individuals accused of committing a range of felony offenses, including sex crimes, violent crimes and human trafficking. It also requires a judge or magistrate to provide clear and convincing evidence that denying bail was necessary for the safety of the community, law enforcement, or the victim of the alleged offense.
Proposition 12 makes it easier to effectively sanction judges and justices for judicial misconduct.
“Early voting has already begun,” Abbott said, flanked by residents holding signs of family members who were killed by criminals after judges released them. “We need your participation because some of these things truly are life and death matters.”
“Harris County was the worst of the worst, but not the only county in the state that had this problem. You’ve had leftist judges let people arrested for murder back out on the street. The time has come to end that,” Abbott said.
Former Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, a Democrat, also urged voters to pass Proposition 3.
“This is a club you don’t want to be a member of, but we need your help,” she said, pointing to families holding signs of their lost loved ones. “Proposition 3 is not just something on paper. It’s people’s families. These are children, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers of people.”
If Proposition 3 passes, it will “eliminate the excuses for rogue judges who insist that the law makes them let people lose on bond,” she said.
Ogg, who has long called for bail reform, broke with her party last year and endorsed Abbott, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Houston, and other Republicans who were tough on crime, The Center Square reported.
While she was DA, 350 attorneys in her office filed nearly 900,000 criminal cases in eight years. “That is way too many cases for a few lawyers,” she previously argued, adding that her office was “kept understaffed because there’s a real push by my party not to incarcerate violent people.” Ogg often found herself at odds with Democratic Harris County commissioners who refused to fully fund law enforcement, prompting the state to get involved. She lost her reelection bid last year in a tight race.
Although Kamala Harris won Harris County with 52% in the November 2024 election, Republicans won nine county-based judicial seats. Republicans also won majorities in regional appellate courts statewide, flipping two courts to Republican majorities in historically Democratic strongholds. Six Republicans also won their Texas Supreme Court races, including justices from Houston, The Center Square reported.
Many credit the Judicial Fairness PAC and Stop Houston Murders, a nonpartisan citizen-based movement, for helping oust incumbent Democratic judges.
Abbott argues more can be done, which is why he is urging voters to pass all 17 constitutional amendments, including Proposition 3 and 12 to improve public safety.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
