This is a bombshell, albeit a few months too late. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sent a request to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) to change rules following his office’s nearly year-long investigation to straw donations made through left-wing donations processor ActBlue.
According to Paxton, foreign money as well as domestic money that is greater than the legal limits are being funneled through “straw donations” to enrich Democrat campaigns and leftist causes.
As he noted on ?:
Our investigation into ActBlue has uncovered facts indicating that bad actors can illegally interfere in American elections by disguising political donations.
It is imperative that the FEC close off the avenues we have identified by which foreign contributions or contributions in excess of legal limits could be unlawfully funneled to political campaigns, bypassing campaign finance regulations and compromising our electoral system.
I am calling on the FEC to immediately begin rulemaking to secure our elections from any criminal actors exploiting these vulnerabilities.
BREAKING: Our investigation into ActBlue has uncovered facts indicating that bad actors can illegally interfere in American elections by disguising political donations.
It is imperative that the FEC close off the avenues we have identified by which foreign contributions or… pic.twitter.com/8E5vfaYxDL
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) October 21, 2024
Here’s the news story from Bethany Blankley at The Center Square:
AG Paxton: Texas Investigation Into ActBlue Uncovers Suspicious Donations
(The Center Square) – A nearly year-long investigation into ActBlue, a Democratic Party online donation platform, alleges a large number of suspicious donations have been made, resulting in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton petitioning the Federal Election Commission to get involved.
On Monday, Paxton petitioned the FEC to consider implementing new regulations to prevent straw donations from being made on online political fundraising platforms.
Since launching the investigation, Paxton said it’s been publicly reported that potentially fraudulent transactions have occurred on political committee online platforms.
“Certain platforms appear to facilitate straw donor transactions, where a contributor disguises his identity by attributing his contribution to another, unaware person,” the petition states.
Alleged straw donations are being made through the use of prepaid credit cards, which he says “are a favorite tool of fraudsters.”
Paxton’s office launched an investigation into ActBlue in December to determine if the platform’s operations were compliant with all applicable laws. In response to the investigation, Act Blue implemented a new measure in August requiring donors using credit cards to provide “CVV” codes. Paxton says this alone isn’t enough to prevent straw political donations from being made.
The OAG’s investigation says it found a large number of suspicious donations that were made “through obscured identities and untraceable means,” necessitating FEC action.
Through the use of prepaid cards it “appears that straw donations are systematically being made using false identities, through untraceable payment methods,” Paxton said.
Texas’ FEC petition includes partially redacted findings from the OAG’s investigation and recommends that the FEC implement regulations to close fundraising loopholes “that jeopardize American election integrity.” The FEC previously considered implementing such regulations, which ActBlue vocally opposed.
ActBlue’s opposition “is no longer tenable” in light of Texas’ investigation, Paxton said. “If not corrected by the FEC, bad actors can – with trivial ease – illegally funnel foreign money into American elections, exceed political contribution limits, and more.”
“Certain platforms appear to facilitate straw donor transactions, where a contributor disguises his identity by attributing his contribution to another, unaware person,” the petition states.
Alleged straw donations are being made through the use of prepaid credit cards, which he says “are a favorite tool of fraudsters.”
Paxton’s office launched an investigation into ActBlue in December to determine if the platform’s operations were compliant with all applicable laws. In response to the investigation, Act Blue implemented a new measure in August requiring donors using credit cards to provide “CVV” codes. Paxton says this alone isn’t enough to prevent straw political donations from being made.
The OAG’s investigation says it found a large number of suspicious donations that were made “through obscured identities and untraceable means,” necessitating FEC action.
Through the use of prepaid cards it “appears that straw donations are systematically being made using false identities, through untraceable payment methods,” Paxton said.
Texas’ FEC petition includes partially redacted findings from the OAG’s investigation and recommends that the FEC implement regulations to close fundraising loopholes “that jeopardize American election integrity.” The FEC previously considered implementing such regulations, which ActBlue vocally opposed.
ActBlue’s opposition “is no longer tenable” in light of Texas’ investigation, Paxton said. “If not corrected by the FEC, bad actors can – with trivial ease – illegally funnel foreign money into American elections, exceed political contribution limits, and more.”
ActBlue says it’s raised more than $15.8 billion online since 2004.
In the third quarter of fiscal 2024, it says “6.9 million unique donors gave over 31 million contributions to 18,396 campaigns and organizations, totaling over $1.5 billion.”
“This quarter was the largest in ActBlue history,” it said.
Donors gave small amounts totaling $4.2 million to pro-abortion organizations in the quarter, a more than 208% increase from Q3 of 2020. They also gave small amounts totaling more than $5 million to pro-gun control groups, a 48% increase from the same period in 2020, it says.
ActBlue notes that 67.4% of all contributions were made with a saved payment method or digital wallet; 71.8% were made from a mobile device, a 14.8% increase from the third fiscal quarter of 2020.
“The record-breaking surge of small-dollar donations in Q3 2024 has clearly demonstrated the power of grassroots energy in shaping America’s political landscape,” ActBlue said. “As the Democratic Party heads into the final stretch of the campaign, these contributions are fueling races across the country, from local contests to the presidential election. Democrats are positioned to fight for victory in November, driven by this commitment and enthusiasm.”
Last month, U.S. House Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. raised concerns with the Treasury Secretary that ActBlue was being used to evade campaign finance laws, The Center Square reported.
The federal and Texas investigations were launched after U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, demanded answers from the FEC in April 2023 about ActBlue’s “schemes to garner illegal campaign donations.”
Rubio cited reports saying that “numerous individuals, including senior citizens, have purportedly donated to ActBlue thousands of times a year” but many “had no idea that their names and addresses were being used to give thousands of dollars in political donations, with most of these ‘donations’ going to ActBlue. It should come as no surprise that ActBlue serves as a vessel for fraud, considering the intentional lack of security engrained within their donation processes and systems.”
Over the last several months, ActBlue has argued that small donations represent “a new standard for grassroots political engagement. Donors from across the nation showed incredible generosity and a new sense of energy and momentum in electing Democrats up and down the ballot.”
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.
