(The Epoch Times)—Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) on Wednesday declared the election of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as House speaker a sign of the strength of the “MAGA movement” in the GOP and the waning power of the “swamp.”
After a three-week leadership void in the House, the GOP conference chose Mr. Johnson as their speaker nominee; he went on to win 220 votes in the first floor ballot on Wednesday.
Mr. Gaetz, who led the motion to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the former speaker, touted Mr. Johnson’s victory as exemplary of the growing power of the “MAGA movement” on Capitol Hill.
“The swamp is on the run. MAGA is ascendant. If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention,” Mr. Gaetz declared during an interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Wednesday.
The Floridian congressman shed light on the internal party deliberations that led to Mr. Johnon’s election following the short-lived race of Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who withdrew his name hours after receiving the GOP nomination on Tuesday.
Mr. Johnson was runner-up to Mr. Emmer, who was the third speaker nominee after Reps. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) failed to garner the needed support.
Mr. Gaetz said that following Mr. Emmer’s withdrawal, Mr. McCarthy was the sole GOP member to object to a request by Rep. Marcus Molinaro (R-N.Y.), a freshman congressman, for unanimous consent to waive the rules and take a non-binding poll on whether Mr. Johnson “could be our speaker nominee.”
Mr. McCarthy’s objection, in Mr. Gaetz’s view, was evidence that the former speaker “was worried that there was going to be this great, unifying moment” of rallying behind Mr. Johnson that would hurt Mr. McCarthy’s chances of being reelected, so “he scuttled the unifying moment.”
Mr. McCarthy had not put his name in the ring to run again for the speakership. The Epoch Times contacted Mr. McCarthy’s office for comment.
Gaetz Says He ‘Wasn’t the Force for Chaos’
Mr. Gaetz said that Mr. McCarthy sought write-in votes, nominating himself. However, he received only 33, according to Mr. Gaetz.
“So, they flame out terribly,” Mr. Gaetz said. “Mike Johnson’s gaining momentum. Ultimately, McCarthy gets 43 to vote for him on a secret ballot. But Mike Johnson gets a majority.”
Mr. Johnson then requested a roll-call vote, said Mr. Gaetz. “So that those 43 would have to announce themselves as being for a candidate who wasn’t even running, instead of a unifying force like Mike Johnson,” he added.
“And when we called for the roll call, do you know how many people voted for Kevin McCarthy? Zero,” said Mr. Gaetz.
Mr. Gaetz accused the former Californian speaker of attempting to sabotage the chances of the last four speaker nominees, including Mr. Scalise, Mr. Jordan, Mr. Emmer, and Mr. Johnson, while maneuvering in the shadows to be reelected himself.
“Everyone in the room knew at that moment that I wasn’t the force for chaos; I wasn’t causing disunity; that for the last three weeks, the reason the House of Representatives has been paralyzed is because, for his own selfish gain, Kevin McCarthy was sabotaging the candidacy of anyone else because he was plotting a return,” Mr. Gaetz charged.
Mr. Johnson received a prolonged standing ovation from fellow Republicans upon his nomination by Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
Mr. Gaetz hailed Mr. Johnson’s election to the speakership as a victory over “the swamp,” the term made popular by former President Donald Trump, the creator of the MAGA movement, which stands for Make American Great Again, his 2016 campaign slogan.
“They are crying, they are hand-wringing, they are bed-wetting over on K Street because we have an honorable, righteous man who is about to take this position. He’s going to do great things for the country,” Mr. Gaetz said, referring to “the swamp.”
Mr. Gaetz, who has been “seat mates” with Mr. Johnson on the House Judiciary Committee for seven years, praised the newly-minted speaker.
“He is sharp. He will be as respected in the homes of our most meaningful, righteous, and patriotic donors as he will [be] at the rallies with our most enthusiastic and meaningful activists,” Mr. Gaetz said.
Mr. Johnson’s election was praised by the former speaker nominees, Mr. Emmer and Mr. Scalise.
“I know Mike will keep our majority united as we continue to deliver on the commitments we’ve made to our constituents,” Mr. Emmer said.
Mr. Scalise praised Mr. Johnson’s commitment “to things bigger than himself.”
Mr. Johnson, 51, is an attorney and former radio host. He carried a Bible when he accepted the gavel on Wednesday.
In his first speech as speaker, he said the House is “ready to get to work again” to solve the problems at home and abroad affecting Americans.
“Our mission here is to serve you well, to restore the people’s faith in this House, in this great and essential institution,” he said.
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.
So?! What has changed?! Sure seems to be devolving daily?!
Never heard of the CISA Act of 2018 to ensure future massive election fraud? Worked in 2020 and 2022, signed into law by Presidemt Trump, either Trump was again played or he’s controlled opposition?!