- Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) launched a Faith Advisory Council on March 10, 2026, as part of his evangelical outreach effort ahead of a May Republican primary runoff against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
- Three council members — Dr. Jack Graham, pastor Max Lucado, and Dr. Gus Reyes — are affiliated with the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), a group that advocates for chain migration and pathways to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
- The EIT is a project of the National Immigration Forum (NIF), which received millions in funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and used the NIF as a financial pass-through to spread pro-mass immigration messaging among evangelical communities.
- Ali Noorani, who led the National Immigration Forum from 2008 to 2022, publicly praised Cornyn in 2021 for sponsoring amnesty legislation, highlighting the senator’s longstanding alignment with open-borders advocacy.
- Graham and Lucado are also signatories to the EIT’s “Evangelical Statement of Principles for Immigration Reform,” which explicitly calls for chain migration policies and a citizenship pathway for those in the country illegally.
- This is not Cornyn’s first controversy over immigration group ties — video previously surfaced of him praising LULAC, a left-leaning organization that has fought Texas sanctuary city bans, backed abortion advocacy, and helped illegal immigrants resist federal deportation efforts.
- The revelations raise serious questions about Cornyn’s credibility on immigration enforcement among conservative Texas voters, particularly as he faces Paxton — a Trump-aligned candidate — in what is shaping up to be a defining primary battle.
Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), facing a Republican primary runoff against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, unveiled a Faith Advisory Council this week touted as an outreach effort to evangelical Christian voters. However, several pastors named to the council have longstanding ties to a George Soros-funded organization that has pushed refugee resettlement, chain migration, and pathways to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
The council was announced Tuesday, March 10, 2026.
Soros-Linked Group at the Center
Three members of Cornyn’s new Faith Advisory Council — Dr. Jack Graham, pastor Max Lucado, and Dr. Gus Reyes — are affiliated with the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), a group that advocates for sweeping immigration reforms framed in religious language. Graham and Lucado are also signatories to the EIT’s “Evangelical Statement of Principles for Immigration Reform,” a document that calls for family unification policies (commonly known as chain migration) and a pathway to citizenship for those who entered the country illegally.
The EIT is a project of the National Immigration Forum (NIF), an open-borders advocacy organization that received substantial funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The NIF served as a financial pass-through for millions of dollars in Soros money directed toward advancing pro-mass immigration messaging among evangelical church communities.
Ali Noorani, who led the National Immigration Forum from 2008 to 2022, publicly praised Cornyn in 2021 for sponsoring amnesty legislation, calling the senator’s move a positive development for broader immigration reform efforts.
Cornyn’s Statement
“As our state and nation are in turbulent times, we need leaders who serve with principle, wisdom, and integrity,” the Cornyn campaign said in announcing the council. The statement added that “a key element to principled leadership is who a leader consults when confronting complex problems” — an ironic framing, given the immigration track record of several advisers named to the group.
A Pattern of Pro-Open Borders Associations
The Faith Advisory Council revelation is not the first time Cornyn’s connections to immigration advocacy groups have drawn scrutiny from the right. Last July, a video surfaced of the senator offering praise for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a left-leaning organization that has consistently opposed immigration enforcement measures.
LULAC filed suit against Texas in 2017 over legislation signed by Governor Greg Abbott that ended sanctuary city policies statewide. The group has also aligned itself with abortion advocacy, DEI programs, and affirmative action — and has actively educated illegal immigrants on legal strategies to obstruct federal deportation efforts.
Primary Context
Cornyn is heading into a May runoff election against Ken Paxton after neither candidate secured an outright majority in the Republican primary. Recent polling has shown Paxton performing competitively regardless of whether former President Donald Trump weighs in with an endorsement. The Faith Advisory Council appears to be part of Cornyn’s broader effort to consolidate support among socially conservative Texas voters ahead of that contest.
Critics on the right argue that staffing such a council with figures tied to Soros-funded immigration advocacy undermines the senator’s credibility on one of the defining issues of the current political moment — and raises questions about where Cornyn truly stands on border security and immigration enforcement.
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.
