Republished with permission from Robyn O’Brien

I’ve been doing this work for nearly two decades. I know what it looks like when a politician suddenly discovers food safety as a campaign issue. There’s a particular quality to the language, urgent, parental, righteous, that sounds familiar to anyone who has spent years saying it.

Attorney General Ken Paxton announced this week that his office has launched a “sweeping investigation” into glyphosate residue in food, issuing Civil Investigative Demands to Bayer and PepsiCo. “If any corporation is using regulatory loopholes to poison our kids with glyphosate,” he said, “we will find out and we will secure justice.”

I want to take this seriously. I really do. Because the issue is serious. I’ve spent decades meeting with leaders and speaking about it in my home state of Texas. Texas is one of the largest agricultural states in the country. This issue impacts Texas cotton farmers and Texas consumers, my family and friends there.

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the United States. Bayer has paid out more than $11 billion to settle cancer claims tied to Roundup. The EPA’s formal safety review of glyphosate has been listed as “pending” since 2015. It is still pending. These are not fringe concerns. They are the documented, public record.

But I’ve also been around long enough to know the history of Texas candidates and the difference between a cause and a campaign. And right now, I need to be honest with you about which one this looks like.

I didn’t come to this work as an activist. I came to it as an investment analyst and a mother, two roles that turned out to be more compatible than I expected. When my youngest daughter had a severe allergic reaction, I started digging. What I found wasn’t a conspiracy. It was a system: regulatory agencies with revolving doors, industry-funded studies that shaped policy, and a food supply that had changed faster than our ability to understand it.

What I also found was that the parents who cared about this, deeply, urgently, across every zip code and political affiliation, were rarely the ones with a microphone. The ones with microphones showed up later, polished and organized.

Ken Paxton won his Republican Senate primary runoff on May 26. The announcement from his office came on June 2. That one-week gap is not incidental context. It is the context.

Here is what the polling looks like right now. The most recent survey, conducted the day after Paxton’s runoff win, shows him trailing Democrat James Talarico 44% to 47% in the general election. His net favorability sits at -19. Read that again.

Fifty-seven percent of Texas likely voters view him unfavorably. But the number that is concerning his campaign most is this one: nearly a third of the Republicans who voted for John Cornyn in the runoff, voters Paxton needs to consolidate, say they would vote for Talarico in November.

More than half of them cite Paxton’s criminality and corruption as their reason.

How do I know this? I am from Texas. Friends and family are on the front line on this issue and voting in this election.

As one Houstonian wrote to me: “Living the Ken Paxton hell in Texas. This is a political move like few others. The damage he has single-handedly done in this state is too immense to describe.”

So I need you to think about this for a moment. Ken Paxton is bleeding moderate Republican voters specifically because they don’t trust his character. He’s bleeding voters who can no longer tolerate his lies and corruption. He needs those voters back. And what better way to make a character argument than to position yourself as the man standing between corporations and your children’s food? And haven’t we seen this before?

The Civil Investigative Demands his office issued are real legal instruments, they compel document production and carry genuine authority. I want to be fair about that. But the framing, “poison our kids,” “no corporation is above the law,” “we will secure justice”, is the language of a stump speech, not a legal brief.

We have seen this playbook before. Very, very recently. And it is worth walking through it carefully, because the parents who trusted it last time deserve to understand what happened.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made glyphosate a centerpiece of his platform. He had spent years building that credibility, he helped win a $289 million verdict against Monsanto, he named the chemical by name, he talked about what it was doing to our children’s microbiomes and immune systems and cancer rates. When he endorsed Donald Trump and the MAHA movement found a home inside the Republican Party, millions of parents who had been fighting this battle in relative obscurity felt, for the first time, like they had a seat at the table. Like someone with real power was finally listening.

Then Trump won. Kennedy was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. And in February 2026, Trump signed an executive order designed to boost domestic glyphosate production, framing the herbicide as essential to national security and agricultural independence. Kennedy, the man who had built his entire public identity on holding chemical companies accountable for poisoning communities, defended it. The movement that had carried them both to power erupted. One strategist predicted it could cost Republicans ten to twenty House seats in the midterms.

So here we are again. At the state level. Same language. Same parents. Same children.

I am not recounting this to be partisan. I am recounting it because it is the most instructive recent case study we have in what happens when food safety becomes a vehicle for electoral ambition rather than a sustained policy commitment. When a movement is co-opted for votes. The MAHA coalition gave politicians a winning message and received, in return, an executive order that accelerated production of the very chemical they had been promised would finally be addressed. That is not a failure of good intentions.

That is how the system works when the politics matter more than the outcome.

Ken Paxton is now reaching for the same language, “poison our kids,” “no corporation is above the law”, in a Texas Senate race where he is trailing and desperately needs to win back moderate Republicans who don’t trust his character. The framing is not aimed at Bayer’s legal team. It is aimed at the suburban Texas parent who voted for Cornyn last week and is still deciding whether Paxton is someone she can trust in November. The question is whether she has seen enough of this playbook to recognize it.

Here is what I’d want any parent reading this to understand: the gap between a Civil Investigative Demand and actual reform is enormous, and it is filled with lawyers, lobbyists, successor officials, and time.

We also have the receipts on how Ken Paxton handles Bayer when there is no election on the line.

In 2017, Bayer moved to acquire Monsanto in a $63 billion deal that would combine the world’s largest seed company with one of its largest pesticide makers and leave just three corporations controlling the global agrochemical market. The Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation. More than a dozen state attorneys general joined it. Texas farm groups and nonprofits wrote directly to Paxton, urging him to join. Texas is one of the largest agricultural states in the country. The merger directly threatened Texas cotton farmers, Texas consumers, Texas food prices.

Ken Paxton did not join the investigation. He said nothing. He did nothing. The merger closed in 2018, Bayer absorbed Monsanto’s glyphosate liability along with its market dominance, and Texas farmers have been living with the consequences ever since.

That was Paxton and Bayer when there were no votes at stake. Now there are votes at stake, and suddenly Bayer is poisoning our kids and no corporation is above the law. Bayer spent nearly $92 million on federal lobbying between 2017 and 2024. They do not panic when an attorney general holds a press conference a week after winning a primary. They have seen this before. They wait.

And Paxton won’t even be attorney general much longer. He is leaving the office regardless of what happens in November.

We now know who will almost certainly inherit this investigation: Mayes Middleton, the Republican nominee for Texas attorney general, who ran his entire primary campaign on being, in his own words, “MAGA Mayes,” a Trump loyalist who made his alignment with the president the centerpiece of his candidacy, not corporate accountability.

The odds that Middleton picks up a glyphosate investigation targeting Bayer, a company deeply embedded in the agricultural chemical industry that Republican donors depend on, and pursues it with rigor are slim. Paxton almost certainly knows this.

The investigation was never meant to outlast him.

Let that land for a moment. The investigation Paxton announced with great fanfare will be handed to a man whose political identity is built on loyalty to the same administration that signed an executive order boosting glyphosate production. Middleton will inherit the CIDs, the legal staff, and the choice of whether to pursue them, quietly, without cameras, with no election on the line.

That chain of custody matters more than the announcement. It almost always does. And right now, that chain leads somewhere that should give every Texas parent pause..

None of this means the investigation should be dismissed. If Paxton’s office has assembled a legal team that is genuinely prepared to pursue this, to follow the evidence to the regulatory failures at the FDA and EPA that allowed these residues to accumulate in the first place, not just issue demands and hold press conferences, that would be meaningful work regardless of the timing.

But the parents in this country who are worried about what’s in their children’s food deserve more than an announcement calibrated to move poll numbers. They deserve to know what specific legal standards Paxton’s office is using to evaluate labeling compliance. They deserve a commitment from the candidates running to replace him about whether they will carry this investigation forward. They deserve, at minimum, a timeline, not a slogan.

What I know from two decades of watching this system is that the corporations being investigated are very, very good at waiting out election cycles. They have done it before. They will do it again. A CID issued in June by an outgoing attorney general running for Senate is, from Bayer’s perspective, a manageable inconvenience. A sustained, multi,year, fully staffed legal effort with bipartisan cover and successor commitment is something different entirely.

What I know as a Texan is that many are questioning Paxton’s motives here.

As one Texas voter shared: “This guy is the worst of the worst. He is a corrupt, cheating, liar. He did this to get new donors and as a political stunt to try and save his career. When he could have just been a better human. I live in Austin and have to be mindful of posting such an opinion. However I had to message you and share my thoughts.”

Ken Paxton has announced something. Many are waiting to see evidence.

And they’re not wrong to question the motives here.

We heard a lot of campaign promises about glyphosate in 2024. We heard them from a man with much more credibility than Paxton on the issue, someone who had spent years in courtrooms holding Monsanto accountable, who knew the science, who named the chemical by name on the debate stage. Then came the cabinet seat. Then came the executive order boosting production of the very herbicide he had promised to address. Then came his full throttle endorsement of the production of that chemical. The promise lasted about a year.

Now it’s 2026. New election. New candidate. Same chemical. Same language. Same urgency.

“Poison our kids.” “No corporation is above the law.” “We will secure justice.”

We have heard this before. We will hear it again. It’s strong campaign rhetoric. And it worked to secure the 2024 presidential election.

And Bayer, which has spent nearly a hundred million dollars lobbying the federal government over the past decade, which has paid out more than eleven billion dollars in settlements while its product remains on shelves, will keep doing what it has always done while the promises cycle through.

Didn’t MAHA PACs use this exact playbook to secure the 2024 presidential election? They did. They mobilized a movement, channeled genuine parental rage about glyphosate and food dyes into votes, delivered the White House, and within months watched the administration sign an executive order boosting the very herbicide they had promised to eliminate. The outrage was real. The follow-through was not.

So the question worth asking now is a simple one: are the MAHA PACs running the same play in Texas? Is Ken Paxton’s sweeping investigation into corporate poisoning a genuine legal reckoning, or a familiar bait and switch, this time aimed at Texas voters who are tired of the corruption, appreciate the honesty of Talarico and are paying attention to what’s on their plates.

The playbook feels dangerously familiar, and Texas voters are being asked, once again, to trust a politician who cares about their votes more than he cares about the safety of the food supply.

Buyer beware.