(Daily Signal)–The United States could collapse if it can’t control the border, says Jay Hayward, 68, of Grinnell, Iowa
“Illegal immigration, this is serious,” Hayward told The Daily Signal on Saturday while standing in line to attend a Donald Trump rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa.
“This is a great nation. If it doesn’t turn around soon, we could be looking at some sort of collapse,” he added. “Is there anyone other than me that feels like this is Rome 476 A.D.?”
But the border crisis isn’t his only concern. As a Chicago native, he said he’s also worried about election security.
“The rule of law; free, fair and open elections,” Hayward added. “I am from Chicago and I have seen them steal elections for most of my life.”
The Daily Signal talked to Iowa voters just less than two months away from the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses about what are their most pressing concerns. Like Hayward, some named border security and election integrity. Still others talked about the economy and free speech as pressing issues that candidates should address in 2024.
“I’m tired of being censored, afraid to say something to offend people,” said Sheila Toms, 50, a resident of Lytton, Iowa, also while waiting in line to attend the Trump rally in Fort Dodge.
Toms said she was uncertain what could be done to hold Big Tech accountable. A woman standing next to her–who didn’t want to be interviewed–said, “Elon Musk needs to buy them all.”
“Amen,” Toms said to the Musk reference. She also answered, “More oversight. They are the new generation … Tech companies are how the kids are learning in school.”
The biggest problem facing the United States is the decline of constitutional government, said Michael Ames, 53, of Winterset, shortly after attending the Thanksgiving Family Forum on Friday in Des Moines, Iowa.
“I worry about us wandering away from our constitutional, Judeo-Christian roots,” Winterset told The Daily Signal. “So that’s a huge thing for me.”
The forum featured three presidential candidates—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Ohio businessman Vivek Ramaswamy—in a discussion of issues. The event was put on by The FAMiLY Leader, a Christian conservative organization, and The Daily Signal was the media sponsor.
Also attending was Jay Fox, 23, of Urbandale, Iowa, who supports the next president holding Big Tech companies accountable for meddling in the elections.
“They should hold Big Tech accountable, especially for election interference,” Fox said. “Big Tech should be like a town square for people to be able to speak their minds. I don’t like the censorship. I’m not a fan of it.”
Fox was disappointed about Ohio voters’ decision to add unrestricted abortion to the state’s constitution. However, he viewed it as a short term setback for the pro-life cause and doesn’t think conservative candidates will waver.
“I just think it wasn’t a good turnout,” he said of the Ohio referendum. “I still think candidates will double down on their pro-life stances.”
Fox said the last time the United States has been on the right track was 2019, or before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were on the right track, it seems like just a few years ago, right before COVID probably,” he said.
However, Joel Duvall, 50, from Madrid, Iowa, said you would have to go back to the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s to find when the country was really on the right track.
“Reagan. We’ve had a few times where we were possibly on the right track but I think as a country, as a whole, when we were on the right track was under Reagan’s leadership,” said Duvall, who was also attending the Family Forum.
Most Iowa voters asked about the last time the country was heading in the right direction said it would have been just before the pandemic, or during the Trump administration.
Charles Daugherty, of Cedar Rapids, agreed with Duvall that it was during the Reagan administration.
The 77-year-old Daugherty also added he worried about a lack of respect in the United States.
“Both parties, we have to learn how to be civil to be able to discuss with a calm attitude what we believe because we are commanded to love,” Daugherty, who was attending the Family Forum, said. “Jesus was able to speak to people and they liked to hear what he had to say. He wasn’t condemning, didn’t call people names.”
He said political name calling can drive good people from political engagement.
“I have a young lad in the last election who was excited to vote in his first presidential election, but he didn’t vote because he felt that in the debates the candidates—two for president—were acting like eight-year-olds,” Daugherty said. “Now that is an opinion of our 20-somethings. We can’t have respect unless we give respect.”
The border could have far-reaching consequences for the country, said Alden Trotman, 48, who is a visiting nurse from Penedel, Pennsylvania and now living in Audubon, Iowa. He traveled to Fort Dodge to see the Trump event.
“You allow an unknown amount of people into the borders. We are the only country in the world that does this,” Trotman said. “You do that in Germany, Saudi Arabia, France, Italy, you do that in any other country, you are packed up and shipped out that day. Why should we be any different? If you earn the right to be here, God bless you. But don’t sneak in.”
Trotman said certain Big Tech firms were a problem.
“Some parts that are valuable, pushing medical advancements, technology, learning to advance people is a great thing,” he said. “To control and spy and try to influence what we do is not good technology. Tik Tok is a company run by China. Their version of Tik Tok in China has an algorithm that promotes people doing wonderful things. The same Tik Tok that we have, the algorithm promotes us to do silly things and the dumber we can be the funnier it gets and the funnier it gets the more we promote them. Education is not something that is promoted.”
Melissa Wnuk, a resident of Ames, Iowa attending the Trump rally, said the top issues are the economy, clean elections, and border security.
Elaine Vanwyk, 80, of Pella, Iowa, said despite the outcome in Ohio, she doesn’t believe the Republican presidential candidates seem to be backing down from the pro-life cause.
“As far as we’ve heard, they have a strong pro-life case, all the Republican candidates,” said Vanwyk, who attended the Family Forum with her husband Jerry.
Barbara Vaughn, a resident of Swea City, Iowa attending the Trump rally, named her top 2024 issues as “the economy, the wall, the illegal immigrants coming in … causing every type of problem.”
Jonathan DeRose, 31, a resident of Alta, Iowa, who traveled to the Trump rally, is concerned about free and fair elections.
“We all know—or most of us know—there was fraud going on,” DeRose said. “We need to do away with the system that would help the fraud go on.”
Dennis Longhenry, 72, of Webster City, Iowa, had some policy prescriptions for elections.
“No mail-in ballots, because I got six of them in 2020,” Longhenry, who was attending the Trump rally, said. “I was going to put Trump on every one of them, but I thought I’d go to jail. Also, if you’re not legal you don’t vote. If you’re not a citizen, you don’t vote.”
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.