Survey the headlines on any given morning this week and the temptation toward despair practically markets itself. A Middle East ceasefire that exists mostly on paper keeps shuddering toward collapse. A Los Angeles election that looked, on Tuesday night, like a genuine populist breakthrough is being quietly subtracted away one mail tranche at a time. And the United States Senate, controlled by Republicans, cannot summon the will to pass the very bill designed to stop exactly the kind of slow-motion vanishing act now playing out in California. Three fronts, three apparent defeats, all in the same news cycle.
The believer is given a different vantage point, and it is not naive optimism. Scripture does not promise that the news will be good. It promises something far stranger and far sturdier, that the God who numbers the hairs on our heads also removes kings and raises them up, and that the very things plotted for evil are routinely the raw material He uses for good.
Joseph said as much to the brothers who sold him into slavery. The cross itself, the single greatest injustice in human history, was the means of redemption. So before the panic sets in, it is worth asking a harder question. What if these defeats are not the end of the story but the setup?
That is not a license for passivity, and it is certainly not a reason to pretend the problems are smaller than they are. It is a reason to refuse despair while we name the rot plainly and trust the One who sees the whole board.
I will be discussing this on my live show today.
Here are my notes:
- The U.S.-Iran ceasefire brokered through Pakistan has been violated repeatedly, with a U.S. naval blockade still in force and President Trump now floating an “immediate” ceasefire.
- A negotiated settlement risks leaving a successor to the slain Ayatollah Khamenei and the IRGC’s machinery intact rather than dismantled.
- In Los Angeles, progressive Nithya Raman has edged past Republican Spencer Pratt for the No. 2 runoff spot as late mail ballots are tallied, with roughly 150,000 still uncounted.
- Raman has gained faster in late returns than even incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, straining the familiar claim that Democratic ballots simply arrive last.
- The SAVE America Act failed again in the Senate on June 4 by a 48-50 vote, with Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell, and Thom Tillis joining every Democrat.
- Majority Leader John Thune has insisted the votes simply are not there among his own conference.
- The throughline is that each apparent loss may expose corruption or break a stranglehold that a tidy “win” would have preserved.
A Ceasefire That Should Not Comfort Anyone
The arc of the Iran conflict has been dizzying. After February strikes that killed Ali Khamenei and gutted much of Iran’s military infrastructure, Tehran installed Khamenei’s son as successor and the region lurched toward open war before Pakistan brokered a two-week truce in April that has since been extended indefinitely and broken by both sides more than once. A U.S. blockade remains in place. On Monday, the President posted that Israel and Iran were “looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE.”
Here is where the MAGA instinct toward peace deserves a second look. A deal is not automatically a victory. If the negotiated outcome leaves a Khamenei dynasty in place and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still holding the levers it has held for forty years, then what has been purchased is not peace but a pause, a fresh coat of paint on the same prison. A pseudo-settlement that freezes the regime in amber would be the diplomatic equivalent of treating a tumor with a bandage.
And yet the turmoil itself, ugly as it is, may be doing what no white paper ever could. A regime whose myth of invincibility has been shattered, whose founding cleric is dead, whose economy is strangled by a blockade, is a regime whose grip is loosening. The chaos that looks like failure on cable news may be the very pressure that finally cracks the IRGC’s hold on the Iranian people. The worst thing for that long-suffering nation might be a clean deal that rescues the mullahs. The best thing might look, for now, like a mess.
The Slow-Motion Election in Los Angeles
For about a day, it appeared Los Angeles might do something genuinely surprising and send Pratt, a registered Republican who lost his home in the Palisades fire, into a November runoff against Karen Bass. Then the counting continued. By Sunday, Raman had erased a roughly 40,000-vote deficit and slipped past Pratt for second place, with something like 150,000 ballots still outstanding.
The honest case here is not that a specific fraud has been proven. That will be up to the US Attorney and the DOJ to uncover, and I’ve argued that if they can’t figure it out, then there’s something very wrong with them.
The real indictment is structural. When a state combines universal mail balloting, legal ballot harvesting, weeks-long counts, and minimal voter identification, it does not need a smoking gun to forfeit public confidence. It has built a system in which fraud could occur and in which no result can be fully trusted either way. That is the scandal, and it is bipartisan in its corrosiveness.
Even the innocent explanation strains credulity here. The standard line is that Democratic ballots simply arrive late. Fine. But Raman has been outgaining not only Pratt but Bass herself in the late tranches, pulling a disproportionate share of supposedly tardy votes relative to where she started. When the third-place finisher outruns the established frontrunner in overtime, a reasonable citizen is entitled to ask why, and to find the shrugging answers unsatisfying.
The hope buried in this mess is real. Perhaps a count this opaque finally persuades ordinary Angelenos, including Democrats who assumed the machinery worked in their favor, that a system nobody can audit is a system nobody should trust. Disillusionment is unpleasant, but it is the precondition for reform.
A Senate That Cannot Find Its Own Spine
Which brings us to Washington, where the obvious legislative answer keeps dying at the hands of the people elected to pass it. On June 4, the SAVE America Act failed again, 48-50, with Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, and Tillis joining every Democrat to sink it. The measure could not even clear a simple majority, never mind the sixty votes a filibuster demands. Thune, for his part, has reduced the whole affair to arithmetic, telling reporters the votes are not there and that he is stuck being “the clear-eyed realist.”
It is a humiliating spectacle, a party that campaigns relentlessly on election integrity and then cannot hold its own caucus together when the roll is called. Commentator Monica Crowley tied the two stories together with a bluntness the leadership lacks, writing that no one believes the Los Angeles results and that the country is “finished” unless the bill passes.
And still, the failure clarifies. A bill that quietly never reaches the floor protects no one and exposes nothing. A bill that fails in the open, with the defectors named and the math laid bare, tells voters precisely which senators talk about fraud and which ones are willing to act. Sunlight is not always pleasant, but it is rarely wasted. The fecklessness that just sank the SAVE Act has now been recorded, and an electorate that watches Los Angeles dissolve in slow motion is not likely to forget who refused to help.
We cannot wait for Republicans to “save” us, even politically, because they do not possess the will. We are to lean on God alone and do His Will alone.
What the Sovereign Sees That We Cannot
String these three together and a pattern emerges that should steady the Christian heart. The Iran deal that looked like a triumph could have entombed a tyranny. The Los Angeles defeat may be the disillusionment that finally moves the conscience of a corrupted city. The Senate’s embarrassment may be the exposure that reform requires. We are remarkably poor judges of which moments are victories and which are losses, because we read only the current page while the Author holds the whole manuscript.
Daniel, serving a pagan empire, confessed that it is God who “changeth the times and the seasons,” who “removeth kings, and setteth up kings.” Isaiah reminded a fearful people that the Lord’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor His ways our ways, but as high as the heavens above the earth. The proper posture is neither denial nor despair. It is the strange confidence of people who have read the end of the book and know that the same hand at work in slavery, exile, and a Roman cross is not idle now.
So let the headlines do their worst. The believer’s hope was never anchored in a ceasefire, a vote tally, or a Senate roll call. As Joseph told the brothers who had betrayed him, looking back on years that must have felt like nothing but ruin, “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.”
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.