Joe Biden has been on an all-of-government cultural crusade since his first day as president. He has caused a great deal of division in our country, but the adverse consequences of his actions have been most pronounced in the military, from promoting the tenets of critical race theory to using taxpayer funds to facilitate abortions. And as usual, Biden is seeking to blame the mess he created on others.
Instead of focusing on building the best fighting force in the world, the Biden administration is promoting officers based on racial and cultural “equity.” They have launched a full-court press to root out alleged “white supremacy” in the military. The administration’s “extremism stand-down day” in 2021 and diversity, equity, and inclusion training requirements reportedly used up nearly 5.9 million man-hours across the service branches. And the Navy issued training materials stating that conservative views of “marriage, abortion, and LGBTQ rights” are “not considered mainstream.”
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., ranking Republican member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, says that by the end of this year, “there will be 30,000 fewer active-duty soldiers than the day President Biden took the oath of office. Public trust in the military is also plummeting. The Reagan Institute found that under 50% of Americans trust the military, down from 70% a few years ago.”
In trying to shift blame for the mess he has created, Biden is demonizing Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., because he is holding up military nominations and promotions to protest the Defense Department’s policy of paying for abortion-related expenses of service members and their dependents. Longstanding congressional policy strictly limits taxpayer funding of abortions in the military and other federal programs. Biden supported such funding limits for decades as a senator but suddenly flipped on the policy as a candidate for president in 2019.
The House of Representatives has approved a national defense authorization bill that reins in Biden’s radical cultural policies, but his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, claims that the bill will never make it to Biden’s desk. Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” program, Sullivan disingenuously blamed the amendments in the defense bill on “a small group of Republicans” who “created a trap we don’t need to find ourselves in.”
Sullivan went on to denounce Tuberville for placing a hold on the military nominations and promotions, claiming his protest of Biden’s abortion policy “is making America less safe” and that Tuberville’s action is an “attempt to score domestic, political points.”
Never mind that Biden initiated the legally suspect funding for abortion-related expenses and other divisive cultural policies. The commander-in-chief seems more determined to push his radical cultural agenda in the military than to address the dangerous decline in military readiness and recruitment on his watch.
More than 5,000 veterans have stepped up to support Tuberville’s principled stand and to urge Biden’s Department of Defense to reverse course. In a letter to Senate leaders Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the veterans say Biden’s policy “is not just illegal, it shamefully politicizes the military, circumvents the authority of Congress, and exceeds the authority of the Department of Defense.”
They argue that Biden’s policies have caused “an unprecedented crisis of recruitment” and that the focus of our military “must be on keeping the American people safe, not advancing the left-wing social agenda.”
The veterans go on to say that the mission of the U.S. military “is to defend and protect all American lives—not subsidize the practice of destroying innocent and vulnerable American children via abortion with taxpayer dollars.” They conclude by commending Tuberville for “doing a great service for the American people—including its service members.”
Political correspondent Byron York has pointed out that Senate Democrats held up a much larger number of military promotions in 2020 to protect the status of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who played a key role in bringing a whistleblower complaint against then-President Donald Trump. It is time for Biden to recognize that his core responsibility as commander-in-chief is to protect the American people, not impose a radical cultural agenda on those who risk their lives to protect our freedoms.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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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.