Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been quite a controversial article by one Jacob Savage in the conservative magazine Compact. In it, he describes the destruction of a whole generation, career-wise, of white males, particularly in the entertainment industry, screenwriting, journalism, the humanities, academia.
And his thesis is tri-part. He says that, traditionally, white males had dominated these fields, as they did others. And that was a part of demography. After all, until about 1965 or ’70, 90% of the country was so-called white, but as immigration increased and there was more emphasis on feminism, civil rights, the white male hierarchy decided to help people who otherwise would not be encouraged to apply to these marquee jobs.
And this was sort of a proto affirmative action. And then it was reified by the government. And so, we saw the beginning in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s of affirmative action, and this reduced the number of white males from their demo from being overrepresented, let’s say 70%, when their demographic now is 35, down to the millennium proportionality.
There was no disproportionate demographics. They were more or less proportionate in screenwriting and writing and movie scripts, etc. Right before and then especially after George Floyd, there was something, I guess we would call it reparations or repertory hiring, admissions. In my case, I watched Stanford University go down to 9% white males were admitted to their freshman class, even though that demographic is about 35% of the population.
And this radically changed journalism, screenwriting, academia. And as Mr. Savage points out, some of the exclusionary actions were outright and unabashed, I would call it, racism. He doesn’t, he says prejudicial behavior. So, you would get down to 8%, 9%, 10%, 11%, 12% white males. That meant there was almost no opportunity. And instead, women and minorities were hired.
He ends the article by suggesting that if you get rid of meritocracy—and all of these fields, forget about the tribal affiliations of those who were in them, they did have meritocratic standards. So, I guess I came away from his article thinking, if you don’t think the movies are very good today, the “Star Wars” franchise has gone downhill, the “James Bond” franchise has gone downhill, the entertainment at the halftime shows are pretty bad, Disneyland is not very welcoming anymore, you know the scenario. It’s because we destroyed standards and we replaced them with tribal chauvinism.
Where I think some of you are gonna disagree with this very powerful and well-written article is that he allots no anger, no blame. He says that the white male hierarchy that implemented these changes on another generation, i.e., his generation, it is not to blame, and the people who took advantage of these repertory or race-based or gender-based hiring should not be faulted either. They just took advantage of a welcoming position.
And then, rather than being defined, he sort of shrugs his shoulders and says, I told my children maybe I didn’t succeed. It was kind of tragic. I do blame the older white hierarchy, mostly liberal professors, liberal journalists, liberal directors, liberal actors, liberal screenwriters. They all had nice cushy jobs. They earned them. Then they decided in their utopian generosity that they were going to admit people into their guilds without the same criterion that they had had because it made them feel better.
In other words, they didn’t accept Tom Sowell’s or Shelby Steele’s advice or Jason Riley’s that says, when you do that, you’re going to encourage mediocrity and opportunist, and you’re going to deprecate the work of African Americans or Hispanics that are very talented. But that’s what you’re going to do just to gratify your own sense of ego and shame. And that’s exactly what happened.
So, I do blame that group because all they had to do is say, they could have said: “We have to have a radical change at Disney Pictures. We have to have a radical change at sitcoms. We have to have a radical change in screenplays. And because we have seven white males in the journalism room and we’re all 70, we’re making great money, one of us is gonna have to retire and give our slots to other white males that are young, and then we can hire additional ones.”
They didn’t do that. It was all, I’m going to experiment on these Guinea pigs without any exposure of my title, my job, my salary, my benefits. And they destroyed a whole series of genres.
The other thing that I would say is I do blame the people who took advantage of that, especially those who knew they were not qualified. And then to stay in those positions when they did not have the meritocratic criteria, they had to perpetuate the idea of systematic racism.
What do I mean by that? Anybody, to take one example, who listened to Joy Reid on MSNBC, “The ReidOut,” or whatever her show was, knew that she was A) not truthful, B) paranoid, C) hypocritical, D) ignorant. I don’t care where she went to school or what kind of degree she got, she was not qualified for that job. She tanked all of their ratings. People did not wanna watch her.
And I don’t think that she was an innocent victim. I think she took advantage of that goodwill, especially when she was supercharged after the death of George Floyd to take advantage of that situation and to voice, I think, opinions that were objectively racism. So, not everybody, but I do think people took advantage of this system.
What did he end up with, Mr. Savage? He sort of said this was so unfair and so tragic. We lost such talent. It was so unfair.
Yes. But I would urge all of you listeners to read a little essay in response by Jeremy Carl. He said, no, no, that’s not—you’ve got the diagnosis right, but you don’t have the therapy right. We don’t just shrug our shoulders and say that was unfair, and it’s tragic, and millions of lives were destroyed. We fight back. And that’s what President Donald Trump has done with the destruction of DEI. And Jeremy Carl said it’s racism. Whether it’s white on black or black or white, or white on minority or minority on white, doesn’t matter.
You don’t address a perceived injustice by creating a greater injustice. You don’t destroy the lives of a whole generation of people for the goodwill of your own spirit or something to make you feel good. No. These people were culpable. They did great damage, and they have to be held accountable.
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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.