(Daily Signal)—An Oakland City Council hearing revealed where left-wing views of justice lead, when the council debated a resolution Monday night to call for a cease-fire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Deep blue, out-of-touch cities in the San Francisco Bay Area often like to play United Nations, so that’s hardly news. What created a firestorm on social media is what happened after a line calling Hamas a “terrorist” organization was offered to the resolution.
All hell broke loose. For hours, speaker after speaker condemned the label. (The resolution passed, but without the amendments, which were defeated.)
Watch the video for yourself. It speaks volumes about unfiltered left-wing politics.
WATCH: Last night's #Oakland City Council meeting was disturbing. The council chambers were plagued for hours with support for terrorists, #antisemitism, and denial of the October 7th attacks. The Jewish community in the Bay Area stands strong against hate, and we call on our… pic.twitter.com/9cbHcGFMAw
— JCRC Bay Area (@SFJCRC) November 28, 2023
“The notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative. Many of those killed on Oct. 7, including children, were killed by the IDF,” said one woman, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
Another speaker said that condemning Hamas is the product of “old white supremacists.”
Gen Z leftists showed up in force.
A young woman wearing a face mask said that “calling Hamas a terrorist organization is ridiculous, racist, and plays into genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media, and we should be doing everything possible to combat.”
Another young woman, also wearing a mask, said: “I support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, including through Hamas, the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance.”
In a smaller sense, the video certainly brought shame to the city of Oakland. I say that as a native of Oakland.
While the Oakland City Council devotes time to worthless virtue-signaling and giving an extended sounding board to pro-Hamas leftists, the city faces acute problems. Crime and homelessness are out of control.
An August report from KTVU-TV found that “violent crime is up 12% since last year at this time, and robberies increased 30% year-over-year.”
KTVU, Oakland’s Fox network affiliate, also reported in August that there had been 11,000 reported burglaries to that point this year, a 44% increase from the same time the previous year. Given the general lack of enforcement and punishment for criminals, I’m guessing that the total number of unreported burglaries pushes the number up much higher.
Violent crime had already spiked considerably since 2020’s summer of riots. In Oakland, the trend continues. While the NFL’s Oakland Raiders left town a few years ago, pirates have now showed up on Oakland’s shorelines. Yes, pirates.
Homeless encampments around the Bay have doubled as miniature pirate coves. Boats and properties in Oakland harbors are frequently raided.
Security in Oakland comes only for those who can afford it. Wealthier neighborhoods are now hiring private security to deal with robberies and break-ins. It’s a true progressive paradise. But for those who pay attention to its troubles at all, Oakland has become a laughingstock. That conclusion brings me no joy.
It’s a basic conservative impulse to love where you come from. Unfortunately, while there are still a handful of things I love about Oakland and the Bay Area, what it has become makes me sad and sick.
I loved my Oakland A’s baseball team, which will also soon be gone. I love my family and friends. I love the pleasant weather and natural beauty. I love the Oakland Zoo. But the ethos of the city and the people who run it are contemptible to me.
Oakland is an example of how even the most pristine pieces of real estate can be ruined by ideology and an inversion of justice. What’s happening there isn’t an isolated incident, though. It’s an indication of what’s to come, given the current ideological trajectory of our institutions.
While many liberals and Democrats have come out against the pro-Hamas speakers at the Oakland City Council meeting, I only ask: “What did you expect?”
The message of the fanatics at the meeting flows perfectly with left-wing notions of social justice.
Individual acts of evil are irrelevant for the “oppressed” fighting “oppressors.” If we are to take their rhetoric about “colonization” and land acknowledgments seriously, it’s hard to see this ethos not leading to violence or at minimum excuses for violence.
Hamas has gladly picked up on this rising ethos, too. Former Hamas terrorist chief Khaled Mashal said on Saudi television recently that wiping out Israel is entirely justified.
“We are the victims of the occupation. Full stop,” he said, according to The Telegraph of London. “Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October million. Everything we do is justified.”
Hence, you can see how natural the alliance among Hamas, Islamists, and the far left really is.
Is it any wonder young people are suddenly “discovering” Osama bin Laden’s 2002 message to America on TikTok and finding they agree with it?
I’m sure that more than a few Democrats, especially Jewish Democrats, are horrified by this emerging reality. They should be. But their condemnation of the young, woke pro-Hamas fanatics will fall on deaf ears.
The Left created this monster, and now it’s eating them up. Young leftists took their rhetoric about “systemic racism” and the evils of Western civilization seriously and now they look to destroy it, literally.
Old guard Democrats won’t be able to stave off this rebellion for long. What’s happened in Oakland won’t stay in Oakland.
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.