Editor’s Note: The story below by Joseph Lord from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times is written as news and therefore attempts to remain unbiased. I appreciate that, but I had to change the title. It was originally offered as “Christie Says Transgender Procedures on Minors Should Be Allowed If Parents Consent.” I’m not a fan of the term “transgender procedures” because it downplays the permanent impact of what is actually done to confused children, even if their brainwashed parents consent. With that said, here’s Joseph’s article…
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a declared candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, says he thinks transgender procedures on minors, including hormone blockers, should be allowed as long as a parent consents.
While governor of New Jersey, Christie signed into law a measure that allows self-identifying transgender minors to use the bathroom that accords with their professed gender identity. That proposal advanced amid national debate over whether transgender people should use opposite-sex bathrooms, particularly biological males using female bathrooms.
Now, a number of states have passed laws restricting access to transgender procedures for minors as the country has seen a sharp uptick in the number of youths who question their gender identity.
States with laws that limit transgender procedures include Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona. Similar legislation is pending, having been approved by at least one state legislative chamber, in Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Missouri, Kansas, and Wyoming. In total, 33 states have at least a pending bill addressing the topic.
Critics of transgender transitions by minors say minors aren’t developmentally equipped to make such decisions, arguing that the procedures used—double mastectomy, chemical or physical castration, and potentially sterilizing hormones and puberty blockers—are permanent and don’t take into account the prospect that a child may become more comfortable with their biological sex later in life. Supporters say these procedures are the most effective way to treat gender dysphoria, the subjective feeling that one’s “true” gender does not align with the gender they were “assigned” at birth.
Christie took a midline position on the issue, suggesting that he would allow the procedures as president but would emphasize the importance of parental involvement.
“Many Republican governors across the country have been banning hormone therapy and puberty blockers for transgender people under 18 years old,” anchor Jake Tapper said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“As governor of New Jersey, you signed into law some legal protections for trans people, including students. What do you make of your fellow Republican governors and candidates going in the opposite direction?”
Christie responded, “Jake, what I believe we should be focused on most importantly in these issues, is making sure there’s parental involvement and every step along the way.
“I don’t think that the government should ever be stepping into the place of the parents in helping to move their children through a process where those children are confused or concerned about their gender. And I just would say the parents are the people who are best positioned to make these judgments. And so what I’d like to make sure each state does is require that parents be involved in these decisions.
“The fact is, that folks who are under the age of 18 should have parental support and guidance and love as they make all of the key decisions of their life. And this should not be one that’s excluded by the government in any way.”
The comments put Christie at odds with some of his top rivals for the Republican nomination.
Former President Donald Trump, far and away the front-runner in current polling for the party’s nomination, has vowed to “defeat the cult of gender ideology” as a key plank of his 2024 platform. Trump has said that he would “protect children from left-wing gender insanity,” saying he would seek to punish doctors who perform such procedures on minors.
“No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender,” Trump said. “Under my leadership, this madness will end.”
The controversy has also been a pet issue for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s Trump’s closest competitor in various polls.
Last year, DeSantis signed a law—dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its critics, despite no overt reference to any gender identity or sexual orientation—preventing teachers from discussing controversial ideas of sexuality and gender in the classroom with children younger than 10 years old.
More recently, DeSantis signed into law a comprehensive package that limits access to transgender procedures and opposite-sex bathrooms.
That bill sought to define biological sex, describing a female as “a person belonging, at birth, to the biological sex which has the specific reproductive role of producing eggs” and a male as “a person belonging, at birth, to the biological sex which has the specific reproductive role of producing sperm.”
Christie’s position, while it may appeal to some independents, could put the candidate in conflict with the prevailing attitude of voters within his party.
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.