(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. This weekend we saw rioting in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement for its efforts to apprehend illegal aliens and employers who were hiring illegal aliens.
And the riots started out initially without very many numbers but then they turned violent. And by violence, I would define that as throwing rocks at cars, torching cars, defacing government buildings, and attacking law enforcement.
But here’s what’s interesting. The mayor, Karen Bass, came down, in her public comments, on the side of the protesters who were protesting the idea of deportation at all. Kind of like former Vice President Kamala Harris used to march against deportation.
And California Gov. Gavin Newsom then gave a series of editorializations that I think have ruined his chances ever to be a serious national candidate. He said this was “chaotic,” this was “reckless.” And he said that they were just trying to have “an arbitrary” deportation “quota.”
Gavin, 12 million people came into the country illegally. That was 3 million a year. That was 250,000 per month. That was over 8,000 a day. They have not been able to deport more than a thousand on most days—sometimes 500. They would have to deport 8,000 people every single day for four years to get back where we were with 20 million illegal aliens when President Joe Biden entered office. So, it’s not a quota, it’s an effort to stop an invasion.
And it’s a very funny invasion because now Gavin is mad that they nationalized the California guard. President Donald Trump has that ability. And people said, “No. No president—they have to request it.” No, they don’t. You think that JFK said to George Wallace, when he nationalized the Alabama National Guard, said, “Would you please let us nationalize your guard so you can be removed from stopping African American people going to the University of Alabama?” No.
So, what I’m getting at is, on one side of these violent acts, you have these protesters. And I’ll just give a word of advice. You’re going to lose the optics—Democrats, the Left, and immigration protesters—if you have a lot of people here illegally and they’re waving, not the American flag, but the Mexican flag, as they’re committing acts of violence.
Think of the logic: “I am waving the flag of the country under no circumstances I want to return, but I am attacking the officers and the infrastructure of the country that under every circumstance I want to stay in.”
That might explain why, in the midst of all of this negative publicity, a CBS poll taken to show that people were outraged showed that just the opposite: 54% of the American people are for continued deportations.
So, you know what is really “reckless,” Gavin? You know what is “chaotic?” It’s you. You. You. You. You did not intervene to stop the violence.
Donald Trump does not want to see a May, June, July, August, September 2020 $2 billion in property damage, 35 people killed, 1,500 officers assaulted, $14,000 in arrests, precinct burned, courthouse burned, historic church burned. He doesn’t want to see that.
And you’re egging this on. And you think it’s going to be peaceful when people throw rocks at cars, innocent bystanders and people wave the flag as they burn things—the Mexican flag of a foreign country. You are undermining your own argument.
And what is your argument? I don’t know what it is. What is your argument, Karen Bass, the mayor—now that you’re not in Ghana and you’re here in the United States during a burning? Is it burning is OK, whether it’s burning a car or burning a whole neighborhood down? And you don’t act.
It was pathetic, the chief of police of Los Angeles, I felt like it was some Soviet apparatchik, he was saying, ”There is no violence. We are very proud of First Amendment.” And it’s like, I was given a text that my job is in danger, probably, if I say the truth because meanwhile, the LA County sheriff was saying, “We’re going to warn you that we will stop this. And we will make arrests. And we will use tear gas.”
And apparently, they saw a different riot. And they were more in charge of that area of the rioting than the Los Angeles Police Department.
But I guess Mayor Bass—they’re scared, the LA police chief and the police hierarchy. Because they see that when the fire chief objected to Mayor Bass being on—I don’t know—a junket, or the deputy mayor being arrested for phoning in a bomb threat, or the water and power director leaving a reservoir that was critical to the survival of Pacific Palisades empty and unattended for months and fire hydrants not working and she voiced—they fired her.
So, I guess this police chief says, “If I tell the truth that these people are violent and they are assaulting officers and the mayor is doing nothing and the governor is doing nothing, I will be fired. So, I will lie and say it’s mostly—I am really impressed by the restraint of the protesters.”
Final bottom line: If you take an oath to enforce the laws of your state or the country and you see people swarming detention centers, swarming the streets, obstructing traffic, burning cars, trying to injure people with rocks, and you do nothing, then you are forsaking your oath of office.
And secondly: Mayor Bass, Gov. Newsom, would you please tell us what is your position on 12 million people who entered the United States illegally, who are residing illegally at a time when the country is running a $2 trillion deficit and your state, at one point, recently owed $75 billion that it did not have?
What is your solution? Is it to let one more million in? Three more million in? Five more million in? What is it? What is your solution to find the 300,000 to 500,000 people believed to have criminal records? Just tell us, what is your solution?
What is your solution when you have, apparently, violent protesters waving the flag of a foreign national country as a way of persuading us that we should not deport them when they are burning things and committing violence about the country they want to stay in but waving the flag of the country they do not want to return to?
What is the position of the Mexican government? Because I can tell you that there is a bill right now—the big, beautiful bill—that will tax remittances, the $63 billion.
And all this is going to do is give rise to voices who will say, “I think we need a higher percentage to tax these remittances because they’re not getting the message. The people who are demonstrating and violent apparently think that we are going to subsidize them with social services, to free up money so they can send to Mexico, on tax, $63 billion—their greatest source of foreign exchange—while they run $170 billion trade surplus, while the cartels kill between 60,000 and 80,000 Americans.” That’s an unsustainable situation, as are these riots.
Bottom line: I think, Gavin Newsom, you took your recent effort to be moderate, centrist, your podcast, and you lit a fuse and you blew it up. Nobody in their right mind would ever vote for you for anything after you went into a volatile, dangerous situation and tried to pour gasoline on it by essentially saying you, the governor, will not do anything to restore order or quiet. And you sided with people committing violence against their fellow residents of Los Angeles.
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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.