(Daily Signal)—The federal Department of Education spends $75 million annually on foreign language and culture educational programs in the United States, but much of that funds academic centers that side with America’s antagonists and enemies.
Just look at funding to study the Middle East.
Beginning Oct. 20, university Middle Eastern studies centers have co-organized a weekly “Gaza in Context” series.
The sessions accept the premise of Gaza’s alleged “structural subjugation and apartheid existence” caused by Israel’s “settler colonialism.” The most recent session on Nov. 20 recasts the Hamas-Israel war as a war on the “children of Gaza.”
The list of co-organizers has grown and now includes centers or programs at George Mason University, Georgetown, Rutgers, Harvard, Brown, Columbia, the University of Chicago, CUNY, University of Illinois Chicago, George Washington University, New York University, and others.
At least five of those universities have recent grants under the Department of Education’s National Resource Centers Program to promote study of the Middle East. The same five—Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Georgetown, and George Washington University—also have recent grants to give fellowships under the Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program.
It’s increasingly difficult to see how these federal programs are achieving their mission.
The law establishing international and foreign language education programs emphasized the importance of educating American experts in order to protect the “security, stability, and economic vitality of the United States.”
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That goal does not seem to be in the mission statements of Middle East studies centers.
Meanwhile, as critics have long noted, many of the federally funded academic centers also receive funds from abroad. The centers often produce graduates who have more sympathy for foreign countries than for the United States.
National Association of Scholars analyst Neetu Arnold produced an extensive report, aptly named “Hijacked,” showing how centers at many universities have been funded by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or other Middle Eastern countries.
Critics of the Department of Education might have an uphill battle in abolishing the entire department. But while that goal should remain Plan A, an easy piece of the department to zero out is Title VI of the Higher Education Act, which funds international and foreign language education programs.
If members of Congress remain concerned about educating experts in foreign languages and cultures, they should remember that the government is already funding plenty of other ways to develop such experts. For example, the Department of Defense’s National Security Education Program serves some of international and foreign language education’s core purposes, and that agency is focused on national security.
But if members of Congress just cannot stomach ending a federal program, funding should at least be redirected away from universities whose centers work against American interests. Eligibility for the programs could be restricted to military academies, where we should be able to trust that students and graduates intend to serve and protect America.
I made several such recommendations in a report published earlier this year.
>>>READ THE REPORT: “Transforming Federal Foreign Language Programs to Serve U.S. Interests”
Higher education’s reputation is at a low point, particularly as university leaders, faculty members, and students demonstrate moral confusion at best and violent advocacy for terrorism at worst over the Hamas-Israel war.
And a new survey of employers shows that almost all of them deny that colleges are “graduating students with relevant skills that today’s business community needs.” Two out of five said that a college degree is irrelevant, while another two in five said a degree would make someone a less-attractive hire.
Now is a good time to listen to the public and stop funding university programs that prefer America’s antagonists to America and our friends.
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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.