(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’re having a big discussion in this country about immigration, both legal and illegal, and one of the themes has been whether a person came legally or illegally, what was their attitude about the country they came to, and did they show appreciation or gratitude?
And that could be defined as obeying our laws or professing a love for this country, aside from showing gratitude by becoming legal.
And this came up in a variety of context. We had a great number of licenses here in California, 17,000, that were issued to people who were illegally in the United States, and they weren’t even residents of California. We had a lot of drunk driving incidents and violence, murders from people who came across the border. In the south, we had people on campus from the Middle East who were overtly expressing support for Hamas, Hezbollah, antisemitic sloganeering.
And most importantly, in Minnesota, during the COVID-19 years, the Somali community got a billion dollars or multibillion-dollar grants—we don’t really know the depth of this scandal—supposedly to supply food and meals, and even in some cases, health services to indigent people or people who were impacted negatively by COVID-19 and apparently, under the nose of Gov. Tim Walz, under the nose of Attorney General Keith Ellison, under the nose of the point person for the Somali community, Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman.
This fraud went on and on and on. And it was only due to a federal attorney who uncovered it because it was a matter of—much of it was a federal matter because the funds came from Washington, and there have been indictments and they’re still occurring.
But what’s interesting is nobody in the Somali community who was a political representative or supposedly told us what a great community that this was ever bothered to see what they were actually doing.
There were a variety of state and local laws that were violated, but there were no prosecutions. Walz cannot explain why the feds had to step in and why he never even investigated this until the media and the Trump administration drew his attention to it. Keith Ellison allegedly has talked about expecting campaign contributions from the Somali community in some kind of quid pro quo fashion. Ilhan Omar’s on a video where she points to one of the restaurants in question, allegedly for serving these fraudulent—I shouldn’t say serving, not even serving the meals at all.
But this opened a larger question. If you were an immigrant and you came to the United States from a war-torn, impoverished, and dangerous place, like Somalia, shouldn’t you express gratitude?
Ilhan Omar came here, to take one example, and she’s the most prominent example of this controversy right now. She came here at 13 and she was given every benefit of being a U.S. resident and then a U.S. citizen. She was given a generous scholarship to go to college. She was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives. She was elected to Congress. I think she’s a four-term congresswoman.
She insisted, even though she was an American citizen, to wear the traditional Somali hijab, even though there was a rule in the House, an old rule, that people don’t wear headwear or gear or hats inside the Capitol chambers when Congress is in session. They made a special exception just for her.
But I mention this because she has a long line of indiscretions, and they form a pattern.
She said that the United States was a trashy country. She said that the dictatorship in America, i.e., the Trump administration, was not much different from the one that she left in Somalia. She said that Charlie Kirk, right after his death, was a scholastic terrorist. I don’t know if that means a random terrorist or just an incidental terrorist or habitual terrorist, but that was a terrible thing to say right after his death.
She also said that it’s the Benjamins, baby, when she was making the argument that, as she put it, we in the Congress don’t have to have an allegiance to a foreign country and implying that Jewish members put Israel ahead of the United States.
And so, she’s been part of “the squad” and she’s had to apologize for some of her antisemitic rhetoric. She’s expressed overt criticism of the country that befriended her and allowed her to be educated at mostly at public cost, to be a representative of Congress, to write a book with a major New York publisher.
She’s also, she put on one of her financial disclosures that she almost had a zero net worth. Now, after her marriage to Tim Mynett, who seems to have made quite a lot of money through his association with politicians, she now says that her, in her financial disclosure, that their net worth may be as great as $30 million.
There’s also an accusation that, allegedly, allegedly, that she may have formalistically married her brother to ease his citizenship application, and then that marriage was legal and then it was dissolved as she married again. And we don’t know if that’s true, but one thing we do know, it’s true, she’s never said under oath, “I didn’t do that. I did not do that. I swear under oath that I never married my brother. And this is the proof.”
So, at least we don’t have a testimony of that. She may have said it informally, but I don’t think in a court of law she said that.
My point is that, in this greater discussion about the fraud that goes on in Minnesota and our worry about immigrants on campus, behind the wheel of a semi-truck, administering a fraudulent food program, coming across the southern border, and then committing acts of violence, maybe, just maybe, we should ask of our immigrants a little gratitude, that they left and voted with their feet to come to the United States.
And in this whole nexus, Ilhan Omar stands out as a person for two reasons. As an immigrant example, this country has lavished no more benefits on anyone than her. Every imaginable opportunity was extended to her, and yet, in reciprocity for that, she’s attacked the president of the United States, she suggested that the country was trashy, she said that Charlie Kirk was a terrorist, she said 9/11—she said something happened on that day, something happened. No, not something happened, 3,000 Americans were murdered.
And now she’s mysteriously a multimillionaire. And we still don’t know how the entire story of how citizenship was attained, from her brother and whether, as some people charge, she actually married him, which would be immigration fraud.
And so, Ilhan Omar is an example of what’s wrong with legal and illegal immigration, that we allow people from countries that are, I don’t want to use the word “Third World,” but are in chaos, in tumult, they come as refugees, they’re extended every benefit, and very soon they realize that their advance or their success politically hinges on the degree to which they express themselves as victims or as hard leftist or as ingrates. And she’s done all of that.
And it’s no surprise that she’s very prominent among the hard-left politicians, and she’s a quite wealthy woman.
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.