(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I want to talk today about the controversy over diversity, equity, and inclusion, but in a little different strain. I want to compare it with affirmative action.
Affirmative action was created during the civil rights era, 1964 and ’65, and then, now, it has been with us almost 60 years. But remember what it was originally designed for—to address the historic racism and oppression of black Americans through slavery and Jim Crow, de facto segregation in some of the Northern states, but de jure segregation in the South.
And it said that because of that African Americans had not been given equality of opportunity. Statute never said anything about quotas or equality result. That’s something that came in later. But the point I’m making, affirmative action was envisioned for this historic minority that made about 12% of the population.
It was challenged in the courts for years. And it was often challenged by not just so-called whites but Asians as well because their SAT scores—to take the example of college admissions—or their GPAs were often 200 or 300 points, in the case of the SAT, and GPA, 4 versus 3.2, in the case of GPAs.
By that I mean, African Americans were being admitted with less impressive statistics than whites, but especially, Asians. And then something happened to this paradigm. When the Obama administration came in, they saw that that constituency was not big enough for the type of woke agenda that they were envisioning.
So they recreated it. They used a word, “diversity.” And diversity then would morph in, during the Obama years, to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” They added the “equity and inclusion” so you didn’t obsess on race, which was the obsession. But they didn’t want you to think about that. So then, all of a sudden, anybody was diverse on one qualification: They were not white.
That posed millions of problems because who is white in a multiracial society? Everybody has different heritages. Is it one-quarter, one-sixteenth? Should we use the one-drop rule of the old Confederacy? How do we stop fakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, etc.?
But all that aside, you can see what Barack Obama was trying to do. He was trying to say that the number of people who had been victimized was no longer 12%. It was 30%. And it was based on the idea of systemic racism. If you could not find overt racism in the 21st century, then you had to put adjectives in it. It was systemic. It was institutional. It was insidious. It was like air.
You can’t see air, but you know it’s there. So you had to have air detectors, like DEI detectors, and they would tell us you have to have trigger warnings or safe spaces or microaggressions. This was all an effort to build a victimized class. And what happened was, in the old days, there was an economic element to affirmative action.
It was clear that African Americans’ income was not comparable to non-African Americans. But under DEI, you could be an immigrant from the Punjab, you could come in from Argentina, you could come in from Taiwan, you could come in from almost any area and there were actually 16 different ethnic groups with higher incomes than whites.
So what happened? People began to say two things: “This person who we are hiring because we want to be diverse actually has more money than the people who are being excluded and has more opportunity,” No. 1. And No. 2, “They have no history of systemic exclusion.”
How does somebody who comes across the border from Oaxaca on the first day claim that he’s been a victim of insidious American racism? How does somebody who comes from Taiwan make the argument that he has been a victim of systemic racism in the here and now?
So, you had all of these immigrants coming in, and remember, DEI was, by intent, to coincide with a record number of immigrants—55 million, 16% of the population.
So what did we do? We created a new group and the result of it was—for a while, eight years—we got record numbers of Democrat voters among Asians, who had been traditionally conservative, under Hispanics, blacks, Native Americans. And then it blew up. And Donald Trump blew that up because he exposed the ridiculousness of it.
These people are trying to divide us into a Marxist binary between victimizers and victims. But the people in East Palestine were victims. The people in North Carolina were victims. And some of the victimizers are not white. And so, it’s so convoluted now. And it makes no sense in terms of economic advantage or historic racism or bias, or who is what.
Let’s just get rid of it and start to treat people as people and make identity politics incidental and not essential to who we are.
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.
Bath House Barry was the biggest lie ever shoved on ignorant masses.
Identity politics is insidious, and suicidal for any country dumb enough to fall for it. Skin color (or race, if you want to use that old, tired, worn-out term) is usually the LEAST important characteristic of a person. Yet under DEI, it becomes the single MOST important thing. Everything else (remember competency, qualifications, education, etc.) are no longer considered. Melanin content (and now, even worse, sexual perversion) is what determines hiring, not ability to do the job.
But wait; it gets WORSE. FAR worse. I remember reading a commentary years ago, where the author claimed that Obama deliberately went looking for people with severe mental and physical disabilities to hire for positions in the fed govt. It specifically mentioned dwarfism, bizarre psychiatric problems, etc. I dismissed it as hogwash. That couldn’t ever happen. Not in my America. Well, Trump just found it did. And to shame them, he read for Americans the specifics of the kinds of freaks they searched for and found. My jaw dropped to the floor. It was true!
If all Trump ever accomplished was to stop a tiny portion of this absolute madness, he will have been the best thing that ever happened to America. It is one thing to stop discrimination and level the playing field. It’s quite another to turn hiring into a political game, to deliberately go after people you know are unqualified, and put lives at risk in the process (See: FAA).
It’s not just segregation of groups — involuntarily — but the quality of the subculture of each group and their willingness to advance and integrate voluntarily that matters.
Some ethnic groups thrive whether integrated or self-segregated. It’s up to the individual.
Blacks were self-divided by the Malcolm X separatists vs. the integration of MLK followers (the side the federal govt sided with). But it should have been self-selected because many separatists succeed and advance just as the integrated do.
The failings occur when individuals make the wrong choices for themselves. When they choose gangs and lawlessness.
“Here’s why Obama created DEI”:
Because his Jewish masters told him to.
I mean, last time I checked, Obama’s cabinet was 90% Jewish.
They make up 2% of the population.
That’s not very “diverse”, and certainly not representative of the actual demographics of America.
because obama is a pervert queer reprobate, a con artist and hater of the united states due to his racist black islamic background. for starters