(Daily Caller)—While crime rates may be going down around the country – if you believe the FBI’s latest crime statistics, anyway – in the nation’s capital, crime continues to rise.
The city is on pace to record the highest number of murders since George W. Bush’s first term, and carjackings are skyrocketing. It’s the soft-on-crime policies promulgated by the District of Columbia government that’s responsible for this crime wave, and everyone knows it.
What can be done to restore law and order?
A comparison of crime in the District of Columbia in 2023 versus crime in D.C. just a year earlier is instructive. In 2022, there were 182 homicides; as of Nov. 15, 2023, there were 243 homicides, representing a 34% increase.
In 2022, there were 1,839 robberies; so far in 2023 there have been 3,075, a 67% increase.
In 2022, there were 3,109 motor vehicle thefts, compared to 6,142 in 2023, a 98% increase. And while there were 485 carjackings in all of 2022, as of October 3, 2023, there were already 753 carjackings, a 55% increase.
Statistics can be dry. Sometimes stories can convey the truth with more impact.
Late one evening just a few days ago, a federal agent fired at three people seen breaking into a car parked outside a home in Georgetown, one of the more expensive neighborhoods in the nation’s capital. Federal agents don’t regularly fire their weapons to prevent crimes like auto theft – in fact, Department of Homeland Security guidelines prevent agents from firing warning shots or shooting at a moving vehicle in an attempt to stop someone fleeing the scene of a crime, even when the automobile in question is owned by the federal government, as this one was. (In fact, in this case, the vehicle was part of the Secret Service protective detail assigned to guard President Biden’s granddaughter, Naomi Biden.)
An unoccupied vehicle outside the president’s granddaughter’s home isn’t the only vehicle attached to a prominent Democrat politician to be the object of a crime in the nation’s capital, though. Last month, Texas Democrat Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked outside his apartment building in Washington’s Navy Yard neighborhood, an upscale residential area revitalized by the construction of Nationals Park, ballfield of the city’s MLB franchise. (Cuellar was unharmed, and his car was found a day later a few miles away.)
Ideas have consequences; so do actions, even if it sometimes takes time for the effects to become evident. In this case, the District of Columbia Council took actions that sent clear signals about crime, and the consequences have become evident.
First, in the summer of 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd demonstrations, the council voted to defund the police by cutting the police budget. Last year, the council enacted the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Act, which heightened scrutiny on police officers and made it easier to fire them – an anti-police law so bad that majorities in both houses of Congress tried to overturn it.
Then, in November of 2022, the council voted to “modernize” the city’s Criminal Code. That “modernization” (read: “softening”) eliminated virtually all of the code’s mandatory minimum sentencing requirements for violent crimes, even as it drastically reduced maximum penalties available to the courts.
Moreover, the revisions established the right to a jury trial for most misdemeanor offenses, which would have overloaded an already crowded court system and reduced the resources devoted to prosecuting the more serious felony cases.
Even D.C.’s exceedingly progressive mayor, Muriel Bowser, was aghast. She vetoed the bill, but the council overrode her veto.
Not surprisingly, with an underfunded, handcuffed police force and the softening of the penalties attached to serious crimes, crime spiked. See statistics above.
Enter the U.S. Congress, which resides in the nation’s capital and has a stake in the matter – in fact, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the power “to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” over the capital city. Despite the fact that Democrats control the Senate, and might have been expected to run political cover for the all-Democrat D.C. city government, both houses of Congress passed legislation overturning the criminal code revisions promulgated by the D.C. Council – and on March 20, 2023, President Joe Biden signed that overturning into law.
But the crime rate still soared. Apparently, criminals believe the mood in D.C. is still “soft on crime,” despite what the president and the Congress did to reverse the softening of the city’s criminal penalties.
So now the Congress is considering an even tougher action – three Republican Congressmen have introduced H.R. 5195, the Seat of Government Act. The new bill would repeal the 1973 D.C. Home Rule Act, which created the District’s current government, and would, thereby, return full control of city government functions to the Congress.
With a Democrat in the White House and a Senate controlled by Democrats, it’s hard to see how that bill could successfully run the traps and become law.
Of course, that’s what the soft-on-crime crowd at D.C. City Hall probably thought about that bill the president signed back in March, too.
Sound off about this story on The Liberty Daily Substack.
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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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.