Conservatives haven’t been as interested as progressives are in capturing the federal bureaucracy, or at least they’ve been much less successful. That goes double for the Census Bureau, whose committee on race long has been the plaything of sociology professors and affinity groups.
For this reason, rank-and-file conservatives may not grasp the importance of the racial changes being proposed by the Census Bureau. That would be a mistake. The Left really cares about the census, which means conservatives should pay attention.
The balkanization of the United States, often along government-fabricated racial and ethnic lines, is one of the building blocks of the cultural Marxist threats in this country. The Census Bureau’s new proposal expands and deepens this racial dispensation.
That’s why I wrote a comment last week to the Office of Management and Budget on the proposals from the Federal Interagency Technical Working Group on Race and Ethnicity Standards. The comment can be found here .
Conservatives—indeed, Americans of all stripes—should read what the Census Bureau proposes to do, then read my comment, and add a comment of their own, which they can do here.
Once you get through the bureaucratic gobbledygook (which must be intended by some in the permanent administrative state to confuse the citizenry), you find that what the proposals do is create one more racial category—this one for Americans originating in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)—and effectively turn an earlier OMB-crafted umbrella ethnic group, “Hispanics,” into its own racial category.
In my comment, I strongly recommend against adoption of these changes. The government’s creation of yet one more minority group out of a population now classified as white would be a monumental mistake. Likewise, “Hispanic” is a government label for people from many races. It is not its own race.
What we really should be doing is scrapping our current racial categorizations altogether.
“Your proposal itself admits the political and non-scientific nature of such categorizing,” I tell the Census Bureau’s Working Group in my comment. Then I quote the proposal, which says: “The categories developed represent a sociopolitical construct designed to be used in the self-reported or observed collection of data on the race and ethnicity of major broad population groups in this country and are not biologically or genetically based.”
“This is indeed a ‘sociopolitical construct’,” I say in my comment, “one that was devised by only one political side, i.e., activists on the Left, in the 1960s and 1970s, as has been amply demonstrated, and then foisted on an unsuspecting nation for the first time in 1977 through OMB’s Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, Standards for Maintaining, Collecting and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity (SPD 15).”
“The American people have never voted on whether they preferred to be so categorized,” I add.
Not that the current National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations would necessarily care. Many of its 27 members hail from organizations on the progressive side of the spectrum, such as the Urban Institute, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Empowering Pacific Islander Communities, and the Alaska Federation of Natives.
And this is actually an improvement from five years ago, when four of the National Advisory Committee’s seats were held by so-called partner organizations from the identitarian Left—Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), the Mexican–American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO), and the National Urban League.
The Left’s role in racial categorization is by design and goes back to the creation of such national advisory committees in the 1970s and 1980s, when militants on the Left forced OMB to create these umbrella categories and officialize them through the Census Bureau.
Since then, America has become what sociologist Alice Robbin dubs “an interest group society.” Ethnic affinity groups deeply entrenched in the Census Bureau, she adds, become “influential beyond their numbers in the public policy process, as well as in influencing administrative policy regarding rules for statistical and administrative data collection and reporting.”
Robbin, not a conservative, described the process in this manner: “Federal statistics have created a similarity of identity where none existed, as with ‘Latino’ identity based on shared language rather than culture, and as with an ‘Asian’ identity based on shared discrimination and ethnic stereotyping.”
Do conservatives, now finally waking up to the threat of wokeness, want more of this?
In my comment to the Office of Management and Budget, I tell the working group that “the proposal engages in circular reasoning when it says that ‘federal race and ethnicity standards are inherently complex because they seek to capture dynamic and fluid sociopolitical constructs.’ The federal government cannot be striving to catch up to realities that it has itself created. Once again, these ‘sociopolitical constructs’ were engineered by the government itself.”
The Census Bureau’s proposal states that these actions “do not identify or designate certain population groups as ‘minority groups.’ Additionally, the standards state that these categories are not to be used for determining the eligibility of population groups for participation in any federal programs.”
This is either hypocrisy or ignorance. These standards are used by government at all levels, as well as the private sector, to hand out benefits.
The first executive order that President Joe Biden signed after taking office, on Jan. 20, 2021, the Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, put his administration on a path toward race-based policies, all based on the census categories.
Still not interested, conservatives?
Article cross-posted from the Washington Examiner.
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.