(The Daily Signal)—It didn’t take long for Daniel Penny, the subway savior who was persecuted by the New York City justice system for having the temerity to help fellow passengers, to be completely vindicated.
By trying—and, fortunately, failing—to convict Penny in the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless drug addict with a long rap sheet who yelled out, “I don’t care if I die. I don’t care if I go to jail,” before being subdued, New York authorities signaled that they are more committed to social justice than genuine justice.
Violent criminals who have committed their lives to villainy will be given endless second, third, fourth, and 37th chances. They are victims of oppression, racism, and societal transgressions, according to the Left.
But if a good man individually steps in to help others in a moment of crisis, he will be punished. So, good men, if they are around at all, do nothing.
Like clockwork, several new violent and horrifying incidents took place on the New York City subway in the days before Christmas. One made national headlines.
On Sunday morning, a woman was lit on fire by an assailant while apparently sleeping on the F train. She later died from her injuries. A few viral videos emerged from the incident showing the woman being consumed by fire while the suspect in the attack literally fans the flames.
I won’t link to the videos here. You can find them yourself if you wish, but be warned, they are disturbing.
The videographers provided commentary, but no aid. In fact, nobody seemed to be doing anything to help the woman. In one of the videos, a police officer appeared to be standing near the burning victim, but made no attempt to rescue her from the fire.
The New York Police Department said the officer’s behavior was correct protocol, but it’s hard to imagine watching calmly as someone burns to death.
To make the incident even more heinous, the arson suspect is a 33-year-old illegal alien, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil. He had been staying at the Days Inn hotel on 36th Street, one of the city’s numerous taxpayer-funded “migrant” shelters.
Zapeta-Calil illegally crossed the U.S. southern border in 2018 before being deported by the Trump administration. He had since made his way back into the country.
Yet, somehow, this wasn’t the only serious incident in the past week.
On Christmas Eve, two people were stabbed at Grand Central Station.
The suspect, identified by police as 28-year-old Brooklyn native Jason Sargeant, began repeatedly yelling at a female victim, “What’s your problem?” He is said to have then lunged at her and slashed the 26-year-old’s throat.
“I wish I could be able to travel to my livelihood and not be attacked,” the victim said, The New York Post reported. “I wish there were cops in Grand Central when I was attacked. There were none. I was running for help, and there was no one there.”
She further said that no passersby even called 9-1-1, and that it was her neighbor who she was on a FaceTime call with when the attack happened who made that call.
These incidents are prime examples of why the “crime is actually plummeting” narrative we’ve heard from the media the past few years isn’t being bought by the public. There may be city and FBI data that show statistical declines in some crimes since it began skyrocketing in 2020, but our cities still feel chaotic, and these incidents are too frequent to be just random chance.
“The immolation was the 11th subway murder in New York City this year, surpassing this century’s high point of 10 in 2022,” the City Journal’s crime expert, Rafael Mangual, wrote on Monday. “Between 2000 and 2019, the NYC subways saw an average of 2.2 murders per year. Since 2020, the city has averaged eight murders a year—a nearly fourfold increase—despite significantly lower ridership, which means that the risk of such incidents is even higher than the raw numbers suggest.”
Somehow, tone-deaf Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul posted on social media just hours after the subway immolation, celebrating how she had made the subway safe and increased ridership.
Two hours ago, Kathy Hochul took a victory lap for making subways “safer.” She congratulates herself on the same day two subway riders were stabbed in Queens (one in the face and one in the chest) and another was barbarically burned alive.
Has there ever been a more tone-deaf… pic.twitter.com/KIPujqpKa3
— Ritchie Torres (@RitchieTorres) December 22, 2024
Incredible.
The party of Big Government doesn’t want to actually govern; it merely wants to rule. Its members insist on lecturing, coasting on vibes, and handing over policymaking to their ideologically fanatical activist class that thinks men can be women, no person is illegal, and criminals are the real victims.
The Regime says all is well: “Don’t trust your instincts or your lying eyes.” It has dubious government-approved (and later stealth-edited) stats and selfies to prove us wrong.
Yet, Americans can find plenty of evidence on social media and in their own lives that proves the entire lot of farcical, force-fed narratives to be bunk. Penny’s story resonated because, when a decent man had to intervene because of the failure of authorities to deal with street crime, those same authorities tried to turn him into the villain.
Now, everyone is paying the price because the justice system turned justice on its head.
Americans—even many New Yorkers—want the chaos and crime to stop. They want order restored. They don’t want to hear about illegal aliens killing subway riders and young girls. They don’t want to live in fear while commuting to work or going on a jog or visiting friends in the city.
Maybe now, as the evidence of failure becomes undeniable, something will change.
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.