(Daily Caller)—Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s daughter works for an anti-fossil fuel activist group connected to a sprawling liberal dark money network.
Somah Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and daughter of Deb Haaland, is a communications coordinator for the Pueblo Action Alliance (PAA), a New Mexico-based activist group advocating for “indigenous solutions as means to dismantle and eradicate white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, hetero-patriarchy and extractive colonialism” that has drawn scrutiny from some elected Republicans for its engagement on land use policy, according to its website. PAA is a fiscal project of the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), a group that has received more than $1.5 million since 2020 from funds managed by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit company that oversees a vast dark money network aligned with left-of-center organizations and causes.
In 2022, the Windward Fund, a nonprofit operating as part of the Arabella network, gave SWOP $150,000 after giving it more than $136,000 in 2021 and $70,000 in 2020, according to the Windward Fund’s tax filings. The New Venture Fund, another nonprofit leg of the Arabella network, gave SWOP $282,000 and $425,000 in 2021 and 2022, respectively, after giving SWOP more than $467,000 in 2020, according to the New Venture Fund’s tax filings.
Arabella Advisors-managed funds have also supported other organizations that advocate for a bevy of left-wing political causes, such as campaigns pushing for oil divestment and less stringent criminal sentencing, according to Influence Watch. The five nonprofits that compose Arabella Advisors’ network, including the Windward Fund and the New Venture Fund, do not have to disclose the source of their funding. The five nonprofits also make grants to each other in some cases, making it more difficult to identify the origins of the money, according to the Capital Research Center.
The company provides management services to the nonprofits in exchange for fees, according to the Capital Research Center, and it is currently subject to an investigation by Brian Schwalb, the attorney general for the District of Columbia, for alleged violations of tax law.
Somah Haaland identifies as a “non-binary” person and supports a range of left-wing views, according to her public posts on X, formerly Twitter. For instance, she once donned a shirt that read “all colonizers are bastards” specifically to go shopping in wealthy neighborhoods in July 2020, a time when racially-charged Black Lives Matter riots were breaking out in numerous American cities.
As the PAA’s fiscal sponsor, SWOP helps the organization by handling matters including “fiduciary oversight, financial management and other administrative services” while PAA works to achieve standalone nonprofit status with the government, according to the National Council of Nonprofits.
President Joe Biden announced in December 2020 that he intended to nominate Deb Haaland to become the Interior secretary, a powerful cabinet position that provides considerable influence over the country’s energy policies on public lands. SWOP and PAA are both vehemently opposed to fossil fuel development, and Haaland’s record as Interior secretary has been generally hostile to oil and gas activity on public lands and federally-controlled offshore areas.
Deb Haaland came under fire for her agency’s June decision pertaining to the future status of oil and gas leasing activity in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon region. The Department of the Interior (DOI) closed off public lands within ten miles of the Chaco Canyon from any future fuel leasing activity for the next two decades, a move which Haaland’s Laguna Pueblo tribe celebrated; however, a different tribal group opposed the decision, saying that it would deprive them of economic opportunities, according to Source NM.
Some observers, like Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma, said that Deb Haaland had a “conflict of interest” in that decision, a sentiment echoed by Protect the Public’s Trust, a government watchdog group that filed an ethics complaint against her in August.
Deb Haaland “was evidently involved” with the PAA prior to assuming the top job at DOI, and she purportedly met with PAA leaders during her tenure, according to a June letter sent by House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman. Somah Haaland also reportedly participated in a 2022 PAA trip to Capitol Hill to lobby on legislation that would bar leasing public lands for oil and gas development, according to the same letter.
Additionally, in September, Haaland’s DOI released the most restrictive five-year offshore oil and gas leasing schedule in contemporary American history. Haaland touted the agency’s leasing schedule, which drew sharp criticism from energy industry trade groups like the National Oceans Industries Association and the American Petroleum Institute.
“It’s no surprise Arabella’s dark money network pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into the fiscal sponsor of a radical group tied to a sitting cabinet secretary and her daughter, because Arabella seeks power for itself and radical policies for America,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The PAA’s website also includes a section titled the “New Mexico Venceremos Brigade” highlighting the organization’s efforts to encourage people to join Venceremos Brigade trips. The Venceremos Brigade is a group that organizes work trips for Americans to visit communist Cuba, established with the help of Cuban officials “for indoctrinating and recruiting American leftists, arranging and coordinating meetings between international terrorists, sponsoring terrorist activities among Puerto Rican Americans, and providing training for terrorists,” according to a 1976 report by the Department of Justice.
The PAA also features a prominent reference to the year 1680 on its website, an allusion to the Pueblo revolt against Spanish colonizers that year. The website says “1680 to infinity” and that “the Pueblo revolt never ended.”
The DOI, PAA, SWOP, Windward Fund, New Venture Fund and Arabella Advisors all did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
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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.