(DCNF)—A nationwide protest effort to restore tax-dollar funded scientific research and DEI programs planned for Friday, March 7, is bankrolled by a host of liberal organizations.
The campaign, named Stand Up For Science, describes itself on its website as a “grassroots operation” that is organized by university professors from different universities, but it is also “sponsored and supported” by seven different left-leaning organizations.
Stand Up For Science plans to host “nationwide nerd parties” in 32 different cities across the U.S. “to defend science as a public good and pillar of social, political, and economic progress,” to get the attention of lawmakers in a “uniquely impactful way.”
The upcoming protests are among the many recent efforts to contest President Donald Trump’s second administration. The Daily Caller News Foundation recently reported that a group of liberal academic elites also protested the admin’s cut to federal research funds.
The campaign listed three major policy goals on its website, including ending alleged “censorship and political interference in science,” securing and expanding “publicly funded science” and defending “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in science,” as they claim that “attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility are attacks on science itself.”
The group also calls for the restoration of “all DEIA programming within federal agencies to pre-January 1, 2025 status” and to abolish “restrictions on the topics of scientific research that are eligible for federal funding.”
According to the group’s donation page, it is “fiscally sponsored” by the Coalition for the Advancement & Application of Psychological Science (CAAPS), a left-wing nonprofit committed to being “anti-racist” and pursuing “decision-making processes from a diversity, equity and inclusion framework.”
CAAPS is a gender ideology proponent and has written that it “encourages further research that leads to evidence-based clinical guidelines for gender-affirming care that support child and adolescent gender identity development.”
The Stand Up For Science campaign lists six other progressive backers under its “sponsored and supported” section, including Freedom Together Foundation, formerly known as the JPB Foundation, American Association of University Professors, Union of Concerned Scientists, American Psychological Association, Genetics Society of America and the United Auto Workers.
The JPB Foundation was founded in 2011 by leftist billionaire Barbara Picower, the widow of Jeffry Picower, one of the main beneficiaries of the infamous Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. JPB Foundation became one of the largest grant-making foundations in the country and was a major funder of Planned Parenthood in the past, providing three grants to the group, together totaling $6.9 million in 2017, according to Influence Watch.
In 2023, Deepak Bhargava became the foundation’s president. He told Inside Philanthropy the name change to Freedom Together Foundation also came with a priority shift, the Foundation now focusing on “organizing and social movements.” The organization also restated their mission to “help people” to “change unjust systems and create a more democratic, inclusive, and sustainable society.”
While Stand Up For Science’s website states that one of its major goals is to end “censorship and political interference in science” one organizer told Scientific American that “science and politics are really incredibly intertwined.”
“Politics defines who can be a scientist. Politics defines which grants get funded and what gets attention,” the organizer said. Scientific American confirmed that the group is planning to meet with elected officials in Washington, D.C. this week, before the rally.
“I think, a lot of times, people who don’t know a scientist kind of think it’s secretive work that goes on far away that they can’t really relate to,” another organizer told the popular science magazine. “But science is here for you and to serve you and to benefit your community.”
The Trump administration’s cuts to government agencies have been under fire, particularly from those on the left. Trump has taken a series of executive actions to deflate government agencies as part of his goal to reduce the waste of tax-payer dollars and to cut down on bureaucracy.
Similar protests erupted in 2017 during President Donald Trump’s first administration, called March for Science. Scientific American confirmed that Stand Up For Science is not organized by those associated with the former movement, though the groups have been in contact and March for Science organizers have been “generous with their advice and time and connections.”
Stand Up For Science did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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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.