(The Epoch Times)—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, with President Donald Trump’s endorsement, won the Texas Republican primary runoff against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
With almost 99 percent of the votes counted, Paxton took a whopping 64 percent of the vote to Cornyn’s 36 percent.
The runoff marked a dramatic turnaround for Cornyn, who, as a four-term senator, had led in the first round of the primary on March 3, winning 42 percent of the vote to Paxton’s 41 percent.
Paxton now faces Democratic challenger James Talarico in the November general election.
While Paxton, having emerged from several controversies, enjoys significant support from Republican voters, some Democrats reacted positively to Paxton’s win, viewing him as a candidate they might have more opportunities to challenge.
As the race moves forward, it is expected to be one of the most expensive ever, as Democrats anticipate a chance to win a statewide election in the midterms. Democrats haven’t won a statewide election since 1994.
Here’s what to know about Paxton.
‘MAGA Warrior’
Paxton is considered one of the most prominent U.S. legal conservatives, taking up issues such as defending the Texas border with Mexico, the Second Amendment, and the right to life.
He has also been closely aligned with Trump, becoming one of the first attorneys general to support Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election. When endorsing Paxton, the president called him a “MAGA Warrior” who has always delivered for Texas, and criticized Cornyn for not being supportive enough during tough times.
Paxton filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration on immigration, border security, censorship, and to protect the state’s oil and gas industry.
One example is Paxton’s legal win that stopped the Biden administration’s attempt to redirect appropriated funds for border wall construction, thereby forcing the resumption of construction.
Securities Fraud Charges Dropped
After five months in office, Paxton was indicted in 2015 on first-degree felony securities fraud charges. He was accused of defrauding investors in the Dallas-area tech company Servergy by failing to disclose that he was paid by the company to recruit them.
The case lingered for nearly a decade, and prosecutors finally dropped the charges against him.
Under an agreement with the prosecution, Paxton was to pay $300,000 in restitution and perform community service without admitting guilt.
“There will never be a conviction in this case, nor am I guilty,” Paxton said in a statement at the time.
Impeachment Attempt Failed
In 2023, Paxton survived impeachment by the Texas legislature, becoming one of three state officials ever impeached. While Paxton was acquitted, the other two, former Gov. James Ferguson and former State District Judge O.P. Carrillo, were removed from office in 1917 and 1975, respectively.
With the backing of Dade Phelan, state House speaker at the time, the House issued 20 articles of impeachment, including charges of bribery, abuse of office to benefit a donor, and obstruction of justice. The Texas Senate acquitted him on all counts. The most senators voting to impeach on a single article was 14, well below the 21-vote threshold needed. Most were Democrats.
Paxton criticized his impeachment and temporary suspension from office, describing the proceedings as politically motivated and supported by Democrats and certain Republicans.
However, the impeachment exposed evidence of an extramarital affair. Angela Paxton, Paxton’s wife, who was also a sitting state senator during his impeachment trial, filed for divorce in 2025 after 38 years of marriage.
Lost Whistleblower Lawsuit
Paxton fired top deputies in 2020 after they accused him of bribery and abuse of office. The former employees reported him to the FBI, which launched an investigation during the Biden administration. Paxton denied the allegations against him.
After negotiations, Paxton agreed to pay the former staffers $3.3 million. However, the deal fell through, and the whistleblowers were ultimately awarded $6.6 million in 2025 by a judge who found that they were fired in retaliation and that Paxton violated the Texas Whistleblower Act.
Paxton decided not to appeal the case, but called the judgment “ridiculous” and “not based on the facts or the law.”
In early 2025, before Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. Department of Justice declined to prosecute Paxton, ending the federal probe into the whistleblower complaints.
Law License Threatened
In response to Paxton’s 2020 lawsuit challenging the presidential election results, the Texas State Bar filed an ethics suit against him related to his support of Trump’s claims.
The state bar had sought to sanction Paxton, and the punishment could have ranged from a private reprimand to disbarment.
The Texas Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit in 2025 after the state bar filed a motion to dismiss. This came after the high court had previously tossed a separate lawsuit against Paxton’s top aide for involvement in the 2020 election challenge.
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.
