(Just The News)—Despite a state legislative ban, Texas public universities are still implementing so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, state lawmakers have found.
Several institutions renamed or relaunched new units under a different name to continue implementing DEI policies, lawmakers found. Others are requiring DEI credits in order to be eligible to receive undergraduate degrees, according to two reports.
As a result, state law makers have frozen increased funding requests for all public higher education institutions in the state.
State Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, filed the state’s first DEI ban in higher public education institutions, SB 17, in the last legislative session. After passing the state legislature and being signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott, the law became effective Jan. 1, 2024. It prohibits higher education institutions from spending state-appropriated funds on DEI policies. It also requires governing boards to certify institutions are in compliance with the law.
Last year, higher education institutions began eliminating DEI positions and changing hiring practices in order to comply with the law, The Center Square reported.
However, complaints from constituents continued to roll in claiming some higher education institutions in Texas weren’t complying with state law. In response, Creighton and state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, launched an investigation. Creighton chairs the Senate Education Committee and Bettencourt chairs the Senate Finance Higher Education Work Group.
They sent a letter to the boards of regents at Texas public universities stating that reports they received “were not found to be satisfactory.”
Texas Education Code “directs governing boards to ensure each member institution does not ‘establish or maintain’ a DEI office – this includes renaming, relaunching or reauthorizing a DEI unit under the guise of a different name. We have found this to be the case in numerous instances, particularly at our health-related institutions,” they said.
As a result, “due to these valid findings of noncompliance, requests for increases in state funds for all public institutions of higher education this legislative session are now frozen at levels from the previous biennium,” they said.
They also instructed the regents to provide “clear and indisputable evidence that DEI programming has been fully eliminated” in their institutions in compliance with the law.
Failure to do so will result in loss of funding, they said.
They sent the letter after two major reports were issued highlighting DEI programs in higher education institutions nationwide, including in Texas.
One report published by Speech First, a free speech advocacy group, found that 67% of U.S. colleges and universities “require students to take a DEI-related class to graduate.”
Among them are 10 in Texas: Baylor University, Rice University, Southern Methodist University, Texas Tech University, the University of Texas’ Austin, El Paso and San Antonio campuses, Trinity University in San Antonio, University of Houston and the University of North Texas.
The Goldwater Institute published a report analyzing $1 billion worth of federal grants that had been allocated to promote DEI programs in K-12 schools and universities nationwide under the Biden administration. The report sought to quantify “the financial implications of these DEI mandates on students and state taxpayers.”
It identified public universities from at least 30 states that require all undergraduate students to complete a DEI course “to even be allowed to graduate with a degree from a state taxpayer-funded institution.”
In Texas, they include Texas Tech University, the University of Texas-Austin and El Paso campuses, and University of Houston-downtown. The report breaks down the cost to taxpayers in the thousands of dollars per student to comply with the DEI credit requirements, including in Texas.
In addition to raising concerns about higher education institutions, Creighton filed another bill this legislative session to ban DEI policies in K-12 public schools, The Center Square reported.
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.