The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to form a task force that will explore the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to advance “critical homeland security missions.”
The rapid evolution of the threat environment requires the Department to evolve along with it, said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in an April 21 press release.
The task force will seek to integrate AI to enhance the integrity of America’s supply chains, identify and interdict the flow of precursor chemicals to counter the flow of fentanyl, and target criminal networks, the statement said. According to U.S. authorities, China is the primary source of precursor chemicals.
The department will also use AI tools to rescue victims of online child sexual abuse and exploitation as well as apprehend the perpetrators of such crimes, according to the statement.
The department will work with academia, industry, and other government partners to assess how AI can be used to secure critical infrastructure, it said.
“The profound evolution in the homeland security threat environment, changing at a pace faster than ever before, has required our Department of Homeland Security to evolve along with it,” said Mayorkas.
The United States must address the multiple ways in which AI will “drastically alter the threat landscape,” he said on April 21.
“Our department will lead in the responsible use of AI to secure the homeland and in defending against the malicious use of this transformational technology. As we do this, we will ensure that our use of AI is rigorously tested to avoid bias and disparate impact.”
AI: A Double-Edged Sword
The Homeland Security Department’s integration of AI into government operations comes as experts warn about the tech being a threat to human freedoms in the hands of oppressive administrations.
“AI-enabled tech will be capable of surveilling, micro-targeting, and influencing democratic populations in ways that were previously impossible through traditional state monitoring and privately-developed social media algorithms,” Anders Corr, principal at Corr Analytics, said in a Jan. 4 commentary.
“Through micro-targeting, micro-production, and micro-delivery of subtle propaganda, AI could determine democratic decision-making outcomes like at no other time in history, thereby making those formerly democratic processes undemocratic.”
The Biden administration has already begun integrating AI with biased ideologies in government operations. In February, Biden approved an executive order directing federal agencies to use AI to achieve “equity” objectives.
“When designing, developing, acquiring, and using artificial intelligence and automated systems in the Federal Government, agencies shall do so, consistent with applicable law, in a manner that advances equity,” the order states.
Derived from Marxist ideology, equity is different from the concept of equality, where everyone in a society is treated on an equal footing, and given the same level of treatment regardless of differences in race, religion, and other factors.
Equity, on the other hand, focuses on the forced redistribution of resources. In a socialist equitable scenario, privileges are distributed based on perceived imbalances. Such decisions are typically undertaken by an unelected group of progressive advocates.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, a founding editor of pro-free speech publication Reality’s Last Stand, has warned against such initiatives.
“Biden is not a moderate. This is a legal sprint to inject as much radical ideology as broadly and as deeply as possible in our government. This cannot be allowed. If Republicans take office, they must fully root out all of this ideological and social cancer,” he said in a Feb. 21 Twitter post.
The Race for AI Supremacy
In the field of AI, the United States could face significant threats from China. A March 2021 report (pdf) issued by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NCSAI) warns that “America is not prepared to defend or compete in the AI era. This is the tough reality we must face. And it is this reality that demands comprehensive, whole-of-nation action.”
The report points out that the competition in the field of artificial intelligence is also a “values competition.” China’s domestic use of AI is a “chilling precedent for anyone … who cherishes individual liberty,” it said.
China’s “employment of AI as a tool of repression and surveillance—at home and, increasingly, abroad—is a powerful counterpoint to how we believe AI should be used.”
“We must win the AI competition that is intensifying strategic competition with China. China’s plans, resources, and progress should concern all Americans. … We take seriously China’s ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s AI leader within a decade,” the report said.
Biden had earlier called this decade a “decisive” one for the world where generative AI and threats posed by the Chinese regime would influence the world.
While announcing AI integration, the Homeland Department also introduced new measures to counter Chinese threats, including defending critical infrastructure, disrupting the global fentanyl supply chain, and protecting against Beijing’s “malign economic influence.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
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.
No, that is not what My-Your-Ka*s wants. He is setting up what will become the eyes and ears of the most criminal and totalitarian surveillance state Americans we will ever have had to endure. Either we fight back now or forever live under the tyranny of psychopaths wanting to turn us all into Indentured Servants to fund its immoral spending.