The Bush family just finished the job it started decades ago. Neil Bush, son of one president and brother of another, voted for James Talarico and then bragged about it on Facebook. His niece Barbara Bush already wrote a check to the super PAC bankrolling the same radical Democrat.
This is not a one-off tantrum. It is the dynasty’s last gasp of relevance, spent trying to drag Texas into the UniParty swamp they spent a generation defending.
According to Fox News, Neil posted that he had never put a political message on Facebook before but broke that habit because he voted early for Talarico. He cited “deep concern about Ken Paxton’s record” and “genuine admiration for the character and principles” he sees in the Democrat. He also took a shot at President Trump, claiming Trump and those who “enabled him” have “done enormous damage to the Republican Party.”
Barbara’s $2,500 contribution to Lone Star Rising PAC, the main outside vehicle for Talarico, was reported earlier in the same cycle by multiple outlets including Breitbart.
“My vote was motivated by two things: deep concern about Ken Paxton’s record and genuine admiration for the character and principles I see in James Talarico.” — Neil Bush
That is the polished version. The actual record is uglier. Talarico once told Sierra Club activists that capitalism, white supremacy, and climate change are interlocking “oppressive systems” that must be dismantled together. He compared Texas oil and gas leadership to being “the leader in cassette tapes.” He has described God as nonbinary, claimed there are six biological sexes, called himself a “Christian who hates Christianity,” and argued that Christianity and Islam are equal pathways to the same truth. On abortion he pointed to Mary’s “consent” before the Incarnation as biblical cover.
These are not fringe college comments. They are the public theology and politics of the man Neil Bush just endorsed.
The Dynasty That Always Chose the Swamp
None of this should surprise anyone who watched the Bushes operate. George H.W. Bush raised taxes after promising he would not. George W. Bush pushed amnesty, expanded federal power after 9/11, and left the country with two unfinished wars while the administrative state grew.
Both men treated the Republican Party as a vehicle for managed decline and elite consensus rather than a defense of the constitutional order. Their post-presidency years have been spent collecting applause from the same media and donor class that spent years attacking conservatives.
Neil himself carries his own baggage. As a director of Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan he faced regulatory findings of conflicts of interest involving loans to business associates. The thrift collapsed at a cost of roughly a billion dollars to taxpayers. He received a formal reprimand and a cease-and-desist order from the Office of Thrift Supervision. That is the man lecturing Texas about “character” and “accountability.”
Ken Paxton already buried one Bush. In the 2022 attorney general primary runoff he crushed George P. Bush, the last family member still holding statewide office, by roughly two-to-one. Paxton won the Republican nomination for Senate this year by beating John Cornyn in a runoff after Trump endorsed him. The family response has been predictable: sit out or actively undermine the candidate who represents the voters who rejected them.
What the Bushes Are Actually Protecting
Lone Star Rising is not a grassroots operation. It has taken millions from Reid Hoffman and other Democratic megadonors while running ads that try to rebrand Talarico as a moderate. The race is tight. Multiple polls show Talarico with a narrow edge or a statistical tie. MAGA Inc. has already put $10 million behind Paxton. Outside groups on both sides have spent hundreds of millions. If Paxton holds the seat, it will be the clearest statement yet that Texas Republicans no longer need the Bush brand.
The family is not crossing over because Paxton is imperfect. They are crossing over because Paxton fights the administrative state, challenges election practices they preferred to leave unexamined, and refuses to treat the Democratic Party as a legitimate partner in managed decline. That is the opposite of the neoconservative project that defined the Bush years: endless wars abroad, open borders at home, and a polite consensus that kept the donor class comfortable.
But most importantly to the Bushes is that if Paxton loses, it would vindicate the RINOs and NeoCons who backed their brother in swampy arms, Cornyn. It will be used as an example of why the GOP should listen to the Old Guard of the UniParty instead of President Trump or MAGA.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
When Paxton wins, the Bush dynasty does not merely lose another race. It gets written into the history books as the family that spent decades advancing the UniParty and then openly backed a radical Democrat to stop the voters who finally rejected them. That is not principle. It is the last act of a spent political brand.
Texas has already moved on. The rest of the country is watching to see whether anyone else still pretends the old names matter.
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.