Two politicians from Mexico traveled last week to Washington, D.C., to share chilling stories of how their left-wing government is punishing them for speaking out against gender ideology.
(Article cross-posted from Daily Signal)
The politicians, Rodrigo Iván Cortés and Gabriel Quadri, criticized Mexico’s ruling party, the Movement for Social Regeneration (or Morena), which runs a government with a totalitarian streak.
Salma Luévano, a Morena representative in Mexico’s Congress, identifies as a “trans woman.” Luévano has hurled charges of “gender-based political violence” against Quadri, one of the two visiting politicians who spoke during a private event in Washington held by the legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom International.
What “violence” had Quadri committed? He had tweeted about the unfairness of men who say they identify as women taking places from actual women in sports and politics.
Mexican law requires that women hold 50% of the seats in Congress; it counts Luévano and another “trans woman,” María Clemente García, as part of the female quota. Never mind that the two lawmakers are men—which is what Quadri objected to.
An election tribunal determined that Quadri had committed psychological, sexual, and digital violence against women. As punishment, he had to delete the offensive tweets, post court-drafted public apologies twice per day for 15 days, and complete courses on gender-based and transgender violence.
Quadri also had to register as a “gender-based political violator.” This last condition may prevent him from running again for office.
Another Critic Silenced
In charge since 2018, the Morena party demands that Mexican politicians and clergy alike support its socialist agenda. And it silences those who voice objections.
At the center of conflict again as a “trans woman,” Luévano has proposed legislation to amend Mexico’s Law on Religious Associations and Public Worship. The measure would punish churches whose traditional teachings on sexuality contradict the new gender ideology.
Luévano himself has no qualms about acting offensively. The transgender lawmaker appeared in Mexico’s Congress to present his proposal while costumed as a Catholic pope.
Cortés, then a member of Congress and last week a visitor to Washington, criticized the proposal as violating religious freedom. Worse, he referred to Luévano as “a man who self-ascribes as a woman.”
Like Quadri, his former colleague, Cortés also has been convicted of committing “political violence.” Cortés lost his final appeal Wednesday when the Superior Chamber upheld the lower court’s verdict and found him guilty of political, digital, symbolic, psychological, and sexual violence.
Politicians aren’t the only ones censored by the Mexican regime. The government also has muzzled Cardinal Archbishop Carlos Aguiar Retes of Mexico City and Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez of Guadalajara.
Both cardinals were convicted of violating the nation’s Constitution when they told their Catholic flocks that the Morena party’s values are contrary to their faith. Two other bishops and a prominent priest were convicted on similar charges.
Censorship Grows Elsewhere
Of course, Mexico isn’t the only country where the Left’s embrace of gender ideology has led to censorship.
Erika Nieto, a Colombian YouTube star, posted a video discussing her belief that marriage is a union of one man and one woman. A Colombian court forced Nieto to remove the video after an activist complained. The Constitutional Court of Colombia reversed the lower court’s ruling, but not without a fight.
In England, the Rev. Bernard Randall lost his post as a school chaplain after he questioned the tenets of gender ideology in a sermon. Someone reported Randall to British anti-terrorist authorities. He sued the Church of England school over his dismissal, but lost in court.
And then there’s the high-profile case of Päivi Räsänen. She is the Finnish politician who faced criminal charges for social media posts she made in support of Biblical teachings on marriage and sexuality.
Räsänen was acquitted of all charges against her in 2022, but the prosecution appealed. She will return to court to defend her rights again later this month.
Meanwhile, a bill in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, Canada, would empower the attorney general there to create “2SLGBTQI+ community safety zones.” There, “acts of intimidation” and distributing “hate propaganda” would be punishable by a fine of up to $25,000.
What qualifies? Is praying an act of intimidation in Canada? Is the Bible a kind of hate propaganda? Maybe so.
Our northern neighbor’s Supreme Court just handed down a decision in a case, Hansman v. Neufeld, which involved a defamation lawsuit and accusations of hate speech. A school board trustee, Barry Neufeld, objected to the sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum in use in British Columbia schools.
Neufeld was accused of having “bigoted” and “transphobic” views. In its ruling against Neufeld, the court stated that “the transgender community is undeniably a marginalized group in Canadian society.”
UN’s Internal Struggles
These cases illustrate what critics of gender ideology have argued for years: It is, at bottom, totalitarian. The disciples of this ideology seek to silence critics through state censorship for some and self-censorship for most.
Under the banner of prohibiting “hate speech,” these legal and political tactics are the West’s new blasphemy laws. A century ago, Christian countries banned blasphemous speech against the church. Many Muslim countries still prohibit speech that disparages Muhammad.
Now, gender ideologues likewise seek to impose their orthodoxy through legal and political pressure. A ban on “hate speech” is a favorite weapon in their censorship arsenal.
Bodies within the United Nations system are wrestling with this conflict between gender ideology and freedom of speech. The U.N. Security Council and the U.N. Human Rights Council each passed resolutions this summer targeting “hate speech.”
The Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on “Countering religious hatred constituting incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence” in reaction to Quran burnings in Sweden and Denmark.
This resolution, promoted by Muslim countries, is intended to protect Islam from criticism or offense. Some Western countries opposed the measure in the name of free speech, but still support censorship when it offends the new orthodoxies of gender ideology. They failed to note the irony.
The Security Council resolution “urges” governments to “publicly condemn” speech that is “motivated by discrimination including on the grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, religion or language.” It gives a nod to freedom of expression with its admonition to do so “in a manner consistent with applicable international law.”
But the resolution also “urges” U.N. member states to “instill the principles of tolerance and respect” and “prevent the spread of intolerant ideology.”
Upholding Fundamental Rights
So, which intolerant ideologies will be on the receiving end of such measures? Gender ideology doesn’t peacefully coexist with other beliefs. And the U.N.’s track record on these conflicts is not good.
The United States is unique in its strong First Amendment protections for speech and religious belief. But these are fundamental rights that apply to everyone, no matter where they live.
The desire not to be offended, in contrast, doesn’t carry the same weight. The right way to combat hateful speech, or bad ideas, is with more speech and good ideas.
Laws against vaguely defined hate speech—whether employed to protect the feelings of Muslims or sexual minorities or anyone else—are a bad idea. That’s true both at home or abroad.
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.