(ZeroHedge)—House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is scrambling – both to keep his job, and to pass several bills to devote billions in US taxpayer funds to foreign entanglements that Johnson’s conservative base has little-to-no appetite for. The bills would provide around $60.8 billion for Ukraine, $26.4 billion for Israel, and $8.1 billion for Ukraine. Meanwhile, following Republican outcry – Johnson included a fifth bill which would revive the Secure Border Act – so US border security is essentially an afterthought.
In order to appease said base, Johnson – who faces a growing threat of removal by House conservatives – has added a US border security measure to the package, which he told lawmakers the House would vote on Saturday night. The $95.3 billion package includes three aid bills to send funds to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, after claiming that the situation in Ukraine was at a tipping point, and the “axis of evil” of Russia, China and Iran are coordinating to help Russia to push further into Europe, like Hitler.
Speaker Mike Johnson: "We're going to stand for freedom and make sure that Putin doesn't march through Europe… we're the greatest Nation on the planet, and we have to act like it"
He confirms Trump supports him and the record-breaking Ukraine funding plan he just introduced pic.twitter.com/uTUjs7rRz2
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 17, 2024
Seriously?
“To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys,” said Johnson, the Washington Times reports.
He’s a stupid, gullible, dishonest person whose incompetence is eclipsed only by his cowardice. Imagine being alive and sentient and witnessing the last 10 years of Deep State skullduggery and then allowing yourself to be manipulated by the most corrupt intelligence apparatus on… https://t.co/h0DIvuNstb
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 18, 2024
The Ukraine aid would be provided as a loan, but with provisions allowing for the loan to be canceled.
A fourth bill would allow the use of seized Russian assets for aid, and sanctions for Russia, China and Iran. It also includes the language of a House-passed bill requiring TikTok to divest from China, a proposal that stalled in the Senate.
A fifth, separate bill includes core components of the House GOP’s Secure the Border Act. -Washington Times.
Far-right conservatives in the House balked at the new plan, calling the border language “watered down” and demanding it to be attached to Ukraine aid.
Conservatives slam
Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) called it a “joke,” arguing that Johnson is more worried about Ukraine than the US-Mexico border – which the speaker had previously promised to pair together.
“He certainly doesn’t want to try to use border security because I guess he’s afraid it might mess up Ukraine,” Good added.
Rep. Thomas Massie said on X that Johnson “plans to pass the rule for the $100 billion foreign aid package using Democrats on the Rules Committee,” adding “This is the Uniparty “reveal.””
This is the Uniparty “reveal.”
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 18, 2024
GOP Gives up on Johnson: @RepThomasMassie says Mike Johnson has betrayed the Republican conference on 2 big occasions and he is about to do it a third time. Massie has called on Johnson to resign as John Boehner did and allow the GOP to elect a new speaker. #TheGreatAmericaShow pic.twitter.com/Xz2RY2kJAG
— Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) April 18, 2024
The Secure Border Act – passed by the House but shut down in the Democrat-led, open-border Senate, would restart the construction of Donald Trump’s southern border wall, and would include other measures to stem the flow of migrants.
Momentum Builds for Ouster
According to The Hill, momentum is “growing quickly” to oust (‘vacate’) Johnson if he moves to alter the ‘motion to vacate’ rule as part of the above package. The move would raise the threshold for forcing a vote on a motion to vacate – which can currently be called by a single lawmaker. This would reverse an agreement struck between former GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy (CA) and conservatives in January of last year as a condition of their support for his leadership.
Johnson denied that he’s considering such a modification, however he told CNN on Wednesday that the ouster mechanism “has been abused in recent times,” adding that “maybe, at some point, we change that.”
The denial has done little to mollify the conservatives, who huddled with Johnson for a long and tense discussion on the chamber floor Thursday — a meeting that featured plenty of yelling. Afterward, some of the conservatives said they’re ready to support a motion to vacate if Johnson endorses the rule change making it harder to launch that very process.
“It’s a red line for me, for sure,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) told reporters after the gathering broke up.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who led the effort to oust McCarthy from the Speakership in October, would not commit to supporting Johnson’s removal over the rule change but suggested that it could be the last straw for him.
“I think a motion to vacate is something that could put the conference in peril, and Ms. Boebert and I were working to avoid that,” Gaetz said. “Our goal is to avoid a motion to vacate. But we are not going to surrender that accountability tool, particularly in a time when we are seeing America’s interests subjugated to foreign interests abroad.” –
The controversy comes as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has repeatedly threatened to drop a motion to vacate on Johnson over his willingness to negotiate deals with Democrats on key issues such as federal spending, government surveillance, and most recently – Ukraine aid.
“He’s serving Ukraine first and America last, and that would be the worst thing to do,” said Greene. “I can’t think of a worse betrayal ever to happen in United States history. And here’s what’s really ironic: the constitutional attorney, Mike Johnson, is literally betraying the American people in order to keep his grip of power on the Speakership.”
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.