(The Epoch Times)—The moment felt crafted to send a message.
Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy stood beside former Iowa representative Steve King, who was taken down in the GOP primary by Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa) after a New York Times article alleged Mr. King had defended white nationalism. Both men were holding their hands over their hearts as they listened to the U.S. national anthem.
Last May, Mr. King in comments to The Epoch Times praised Mr. Ramaswamy, saying that he was “blazing a clear and bold trail for conservatism.” At the time, he had not thrown his support behind any candidate.
Now, though, he has endorsed the anti-woke entrepreneur. Mr. Ramaswamy has made a point of standing by him despite criticism from the legacy press.
“The fact that The New York Times says that Steve King said something a few years ago doesn’t make it true. I’ve gotten to know Steve well and trust him far more than the MSM [mainstream media],” Mr. Ramaswamy, who is of Indian descent, wrote on X on Jan. 2.
“I made a pledge to Steve, and I kept it at the fourth Republican presidential debate, talking about this issue,” Mr. Ramaswamy said at the Capitol.
The former congressman was among those who spoke at a Jan. 10 rally at the Capitol against the use of eminent domain for Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed carbon dioxide pipeline. Legal battles over the approval of its network of carbon capture pipelines are playing out throughout the Midwest, including in North Dakota.
Mr. King, still an influential political figure despite his exile from public office, has been a vocal local critic of the plans.
“It’s all driven by tax dollars and carbon credits,” he told The Epoch Times in May.
At least as early as a June appearance in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Ramaswamy was speaking out against the seizure of private farmland through eminent domain for “public use” in the form of a carbon capture pipeline, according to coverage from the Sioux City Journal.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now an independent candidate, voiced strong opposition to carbon capture pipelines at the Iowa State Fair in August when he was still contending for the Democratic nomination.
Mr. Ramaswamy is reaping political dividends thanks to his strong stance on the issue. Another speaker at the event, state Rep. Steven Holt (R-Denison), announced his endorsement during the anti-pipeline rally. He had, in Mr. Ramaswamy’s delicate phrasing, backed “another candidate” up until that point—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“[Vivek] was, to my knowledge, the first presidential candidate to focus on this issue,” Mr. Holt told the crowd.
Mr. Holt’s perspective contrasts with the view of North Dakota state Sen. Jeff Magrum (R), one of Summit’s biggest foes in the state legislature.
“He [Mr. Ramaswamy] was desperate for attention. Rather than missing a golden opportunity, he jumped onboard,” Mr. Magrum told The Epoch Times.
Just days ahead of the Jan. 15 caucus, it remains to be seen whether Mr. Ramaswamy’s strong stance on pipelines and relentless touring across the state will translate to real votes of support. RealClearPolitics’ polling average has him below former President Donald Trump, Mr. DeSantis, and his bête noire, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.
Another contender who has been polling below the top candidates, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, dropped out of the GOP race on Jan. 10.
“Better late than never,” Mr. Ramaswamy told The Epoch Times in response to talk of Mr. Christie’s departure, still unconfirmed at the time he spoke.
He told reporters he was “in this to the very end,” regardless of his performance on Jan. 15.
Founders ‘Rolling Over in Their Graves’: Ramaswamy
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution holds that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
A central concern for pipeline critics is the 2005 Supreme Court decision Kelo v. City of New London. The 5-4 decision—opposed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—permitted the government to take private property and give it to private rather than public parties.
The Court found that the City of New London’s seizure of land to sell to private developers qualified as a “public use” since it was part of the city’s plan for economic development.
“George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and John Jay are rolling over in their graves, and they were when Kelo v. New London was decided,” Mr. Ramaswamy said.
Eminent domain was also at issue when land was taken in Iowa for the Dakota Access Pipeline, which transports crude oil from the Bakken in far western North Dakota to an oil terminal in Illinois. The Iowa Supreme Court in 2019 held that those takings did not violate the U.S. Constitution or Iowa’s constitution.
The businessman was pressed on his view of oil and gas pipelines by anti-oil protesters.
“I don’t think any private company, including an oil company, should be able to use eminent domain,” he said.
‘Next Week It’s Going to Be Windmills’: Iowa Farmer
Allen and Christine Hayek are among the Iowans who stand in opposition to Summit’s vision.
At the rally, Mr. Hayek was wearing a hat emblazoned with the name of his agricultural operation, “Hayek Farms.” The fact that he shares a last name with Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, a legendary defender of private property rights, may just be a happy coincidence.
“Next week, it’s going to be windmills, it’s going to be solar panels … They’re literally going to take over every piece of ground we have,” Mr. Hayek told The Epoch Times.
He thinks the Dakota Access case was a little different.
“Even that [served] a public good,” he said.
“This thing serves no purpose other than to stick it [CO2] in a hole,” he added.
Another high-profile attendee of the Jan. 10 carbon pipeline rally was political activist and journalist Laura Loomer.
She told The Epoch Times that she was “ride or die” for President Trump, saying she couldn’t imagine him being prevented from running.
“The American people are not going to stand by for their elections to be stolen by power-hungry secretaries of state and enemies of our justice system. To remove President Trump from the ballot, it would literally cause a revolution in our country,” she said.
She suggested that Mr. Ramaswamy “would make an exceptional GOP nominee in 2028.”
John Haughey contributed to this report.
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.