The confession arrived buried in a sentence Texans had already heard. For two months, James Talarico’s Senate campaign told reporters that he and his chief of staff developed feelings for each other, that she then left his office, and that only afterward did the romance begin. This week the campaign told the New York Times something slightly different, and the difference is three words long.
developed feelings for each other and started dating, she left the office
That is spokesman JT Ennis, revising the campaign’s own script. The dating now precedes the departure. Which means Talarico was in a romantic relationship with a subordinate he was paying with taxpayer money, and his campaign spent the spring telling voters he wasn’t.
The Timeline Never Worked
Brianna Menard joined Talarico’s Texas House staff in March 2020 and stayed until January 2023, rising from legislative director to chief of staff. Talarico volunteered this spring that he had been with the same woman for roughly four years. Texas Scorecard did the arithmetic in June and found the obvious problem: a four-year relationship starting in 2022 overlaps with Menard’s employment by the better part of a year.
The campaign’s answer was to insist the feelings came first and the dating came later, a distinction offered with a straight face and no supporting detail. Journalists asked follow-up questions. The campaign declined to answer them, and declined as well to say whether Menard was the only staffer Talarico had been involved with.
Now we know why the campaign wanted the subject closed.
The Next Job Came With a Reference
Menard did not leave Capitol employment when she left Talarico’s office. She became chief of staff to state Rep. Salman Bhojani, another Democrat, in a taxpayer-funded position. Bhojani told the Texas Tribune in 2022 that he hired her after Talarico personally recommended her, reaching out shortly after Bhojani won his seat.
So the sequence, as the campaign now concedes it, runs like this. A sitting legislator begins a romantic relationship with the woman running his office. He then uses his standing among colleagues to place her in an equivalent post down the hall. She later moves into lobbying, registering for the Texas Medical Association, where TexasLobby.org lists abortion among her areas of focus. At every stage the public paid the salary, and at no stage did the public get a straight account.
She Was Not the First
In June, former Mexican American Legislative Caucus executive director Irma Reyes confirmed publicly that she had also been in a relationship with Talarico, one that ended roughly five years ago.
My private personal relationship with James Talarico ended five years ago
Reyes said she would not comment further, and she is entitled to that. But her statement establishes something the campaign has refused to establish for itself, which is that Talarico’s history with Capitol staff is a pattern rather than an incident. Republican National Committee spokesman Zach Kraft pressed the point in June, saying Talarico should be transparent with Texans about how many staffers he has been inappropriate with. The campaign has still not answered.
Nothing Illegal, Which Is Rather the Point
Texas House rules do not bar lawmakers from relationships with staff members or with lobbyists. The Times noted as much. No statute was broken, no ethics complaint is pending, and anyone waiting for a prosecution will wait a long time.
That is precisely what makes this a character question rather than a legal one. Talarico did not need to lie. He could have said in May what his campaign said in August, absorbed a week of coverage, and moved on. Instead he authorized a version of events that was false, let it circulate for two months, and revised it only when a friendly outlet made the revision unavoidable. The cover-up here was not protecting him from indictment. It was protecting him from an inconvenient news cycle.
The Brand He Built
This matters more for Talarico than it would for most candidates, because Talarico has made moral seriousness his entire pitch. He earned a master’s in theological studies from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in May of last year, remains in good standing toward a Master of Divinity, and says he intends to seek ordination in the Presbyterian Church whatever November brings.
He has preached from his home pulpit that Christian nationalism is a cancer on his religion. His supporters wear shirts about flipping tables. He built a national profile on the argument that his opponents wear their faith as costume.
A man who runs on being the honest one in the room does not get to be casually dishonest about his own conduct and treat the exposure as a right-wing hit job. And that is the reflex his campaign has settled into. When the Texas Tribune and ProPublica reported this month that Talarico voted in five elections using his parents’ address after buying a home six miles away in June 2022, and did not update his registration until September 2024, the campaign cited credible threats from right-wing actors and declined to say when he actually moved in.
Ethics attorney Andrew Cates, who called the residency statutes broad and vague, doubts either Talarico or Ken Paxton committed fraud. Fair enough. But Talarico has been demanding Paxton answer questions while walking past reporters who ask him the same kind.
Scripture is not gentle with this arrangement, and the man studying for ordination knows the passage better than most of us.
For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.
Texans have three months to decide whether a candidate who campaigns on integrity should be graded on the version of events he offered first or the version he offered when the first one collapsed. The campaign built the trap and stepped in it. Voters only have to notice.
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.
