The Federal Election Commission owes Americans an explanation.
In late March, muckraking journalist James O’Keefe of O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) knocked on the doors of a few older and unemployed Americans, to ask them about their campaign donations, which were nothing less than extraordinary: Some were donating thousands of times, adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
O’Keefe videotaped their reactions as they learned their names were possibly being used by the fundraising company called ActBlue to create plausible paper trail for donations to various Democrat political campaigns and causes. The people O’Keefe interviewed were stunned.
He spoke with one woman from Maryland who allegedly contributed $18,000 to Act Blue through over 1,000 individual contributions.
The woman appeared puzzled when she learned FEC records show she was donating constantly. She said she doesn’t have the means to be that generous: “I wish I could have donated $18,000,” she said on camera.
Love him or hate him, O’Keefe is onto something: The ActBlue fundraising platform may scrape names from a single or several donations people make and then attribute other, continuous donations to them.
Although it’s painstaking work, you, too, can discover this odd donor pattern if you look through the FEC database. But the FEC apparently never saw anything untoward about obsessive-compulsive political donations by unemployed older Americans.
O’Keefe’s investigation was replicated by private investigator Kyle Corrigan of Brightline Investigations in Wisconsin. He interviewed a gentleman who had no clue he had been credited with 11,000 donations over seven years by ActBlue. He said he may have donated once a month, but that was it.
Must Read Alaska combed through the ActBlue contributions to Alaska Democrat Rep. Mary Peltola for the 2022 cycle and found the same curious pattern of multiple older unemployed people in several non-Alaska states donating numerous times in small amounts, day after day.
It defied logic. In the short campaign season from the special election primary in August, a few donors made donations nearly every day to Peltola’s campaign — mainly in $10 or $25 amounts.
One New Mexico man donated to ActBlue at least 310 times in November of 2022, Must Read Alaska discovered — over 10 donations a day. That same person donated to Peltola’s campaign through ActBlue almost every other day starting in Sept. 15, 2023, and sometimes twice a day.
A review of Rep. Peltola’s 2023 first-quarter campaign earnings at the FEC turns up the same pattern from some of the same unemployed Americans who appear to have given compulsively to her campaign last year.
Why would unemployed elderly donors sit at a computer and make $10 or $25 donations every day to an unknown Democrat candidate in a red state like Alaska?
After the O’Keefe story broke on March 28, however, the FEC was silent as a graveyard.
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson immediately asked for answers. He could get nothing. Last week The Daily Caller News Foundation published a letter sent by Sen. Johnson to the FEC, asking why his March request for an explanation of the ActBlue fundraising mill is not being treated expeditiously. The FEC had first promised it would provide him a briefing, then said it would not. The agency said it would provide an explanation for why it will not brief the senator, but then gave Johnson the cold shoulder.
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio also demanded answers.
“Two weeks ago, alarming reports emerged of fraudulent donations being reported to the FEC by ActBlue,” Rubio wrote to the FEC. “These reports indicate that numerous individuals, including senior citizens, have purportedly donated to ActBlue thousands of times a year. However, according to recent investigative reports, many of these individuals had no idea that their names and addresses were being used to give thousands of dollars in political donations, with most of these ‘donations’ going to ActBlue.”
Not only is the election accountability agency dragging its heels, but legacy media has ignored the revelation that ActBlue might have a little money-laundering issue.
Editors and reporters don’t like to admit that O’Keefe has discovered some uncomfortable information about the candidates and causes that they typically protect. O’Keefe uses brazen tactics that the Left has perfected — and he’s using those tactics on leftists themselves. What’s more, O’Keefe is not at all friendly to the mainstream media, so he’s ignored. They hope he’ll just go away.
For its part, ActBlue has not made any public statement about the straw donor allegation.
The trifecta of silence is deafening. Like the cops from “Men in Black,” we have a federal agency, the media, and the company itself saying, “Move along, nothing to see here.”
The well-oiled components of the Democrat narrative find nothing odd about an elderly unemployed American supposedly donating $230,000 in 31,000 separate contributions to ActBlue over three years. Nothing odd at all, right?
Suzanne Downing is publisher of Must Read Alaska.
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.
