(The Daily Signal)—A high-ranking official at the Department of Education under President Joe Biden met with representatives of the Southern Poverty Law Center a year before the center put parental rights groups, including Moms for Liberty, on its “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, according to documents obtained by The Oversight Project.
The department also appears to have hosted training that described groups the SPLC has attacked as “our opposition.”
According to documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, Dietra Trent, executive director at the White House initiative on historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), met with Southern Poverty Law Center staff on July 5, 2022, one year before the SPLC put parental rights groups on its “hate map” June 6. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“It is shocking to see in writing the evidence that innocent parents were harassed and targeted by their own federal government for exercising their right to free speech and for speaking out during the COVID school shutdowns,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Liberty Justice told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday.
“We have known for some time the Biden administration has made it their mission to attack parents who publicly advocate for their children’s education,” she added. “Attending public school board meetings and voicing concerns about our children’s education should not put a target on our backs to be silenced by the federal Government.”
“Though the Biden administration would like to believe otherwise, parents are the only people that should get to make decisions on behalf of their children,” Justice said. “We are grateful for the Heritage Foundation for standing up on behalf of all parents. “
The Meeting
Taylor Emerson, then a confidential assistant to Miguel Cardona, the education secretary, organized the meeting.
As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has leveraged its track record of suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy to develop a “hate map” it uses to smear enemies. The SPLC has put conservative Christian groups, immigration-reform groups, parental rights groups, and other organizations that oppose its leftist agenda on the “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.
Last June, the SPLC added a new category to its map, “antigovernment extremist groups.” That new category includes groups in an “anti-student inclusion movement”; namely, parental rights groups including Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, No Left Turn in Education, Courage is a Habit, and others.
Biden’s White House notoriously helped craft the National School Boards Association’s letter comparing concerned parents with domestic terrorists back in October 2021. That letter, later retracted, led to an FBI memo, also later retracted.
SPLC leaders and staff met with White House officials at least 11 times since January 2021, when Biden took office, and Biden nominated an SPLC attorney to a federal appeals court. The SPLC’s ties with the Biden administration raise troubling questions about whether the administration plans to target concerned parents again, and these new documents suggest the Department of Education considers the SPLC a credible partner.
Nina Patel, then a senior policy counsel at the SPLC, reached out to Trent on May 10, 2022. “The SPLC has tracked extremist groups for over 50 years and has offered institutions and government officials practical, evidence-based recommendations and resources to understand and deal with these types of threats,” Patel wrote. “If we can be of any assistance, please do not hesitate to reach out.”
She introduced Trent to her colleagues, LaShawn Warren, chief policy officer, and Michael Lieberman, senior policy counsel for hate and extremism. She said Lieberman “led the effort to enact federal hate crime legislation and continues to work on combatting radicalization upstream through education and prevention.” She also mentioned SPLC President Margaret Huang‘s testimony to a House committee “about the threats targeting HBCUs and discussed the need to ensure that students have digital literacy skills, taught in an inclusive educational environment, along with other recommendations.”
“I would be interested in learning more about the digital literacy skills you referenced below,” Trent responded. She said the Department of Education is “working with federal partners to host a series of campus emergency prevention, recovery and response trainings on several HBCU campuses.”
After scheduling back and forth, Patel ultimately organized a meeting between Warren, Lieberman, and Emerson, the confidential assistant to Education Secretary Cardona. The meeting took place on July 5, and that morning, Patel asked Emerson to include Kevin Myles, the deputy director of programs and strategy at the SPLC’s education arm, Learning for Justice.
A later follow-up email showed that Myles, the Learning for Justice staffer, was able to join the call on July 5.
Neither the Department of Justice nor the SPLC responded to a request for comment on the call as of press time.
‘Our Opposition’
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project also turned up a document from the left-leaning group Equality Federation, which appears to be an employee training document.
The document, titled “The Legal Assault on Trans Youth & How to Fight Back,” describes conservative organizations as “our opposition.” The federation highlights Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization SPLC has branded an “anti-LGBTQ hate group”; Moms for Liberty; The Heritage Foundation; and the American Principles Project.
The slide deck lists the "Christian Right" as opposition, along with @ADF, and @Heritage and @Moms4Liberty pic.twitter.com/MApkrPldeE
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) January 29, 2024
The Department of Education did not respond to a request to clarify the circumstances surrounding the slides in question. The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment about whether the SPLC worked with the Equality Federation to develop the “opposition” list.
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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.