(Daily Caller)—One of the great triumphs of the internet and smart phone revolution has been how rapidly access to these communication technologies have spread to nearly every office building, home, and school in America.
It’s a miracle of private sector innovation and the magic of the free enterprise system that technologies that were only the play things of the super-rich a generation ago are now so ubiquitous that almost all of the poorest Americans have access — and even many of the poorest people in the most remote villages in Africa have smart phones.
Consider the lightning speed of deployment: home internet access reached half of Americans in 2000. Now it’s 92%. Today 19 out of 20 households have home access to the internet on their smart phones. Nearly nine of ten homes have broadband access.
No other technology — not cars, not radio, TV, cable TV, air conditioning — has been made so universally available at affordable prices to the masses so quickly.
Does this sound like a market that needs assistance from the government?
If you answered yes, you also probably believe that Al Gore invented the internet.
This didn’t happen by accident. In part it was due to smart public policy decisions made many years ago. Former congressman Chris Cox, who wrote the first bipartisan law in the 1990s to accelerate internet deployment, explains the successful strategy: “We achieved this rapid deployment by keeping internet regulation free and lawsuit free.” Bill Clinton, who was the president at the time, deserves credit too.
But now the Biden Administration — which never saw an industry it didn’t want to regulate and control — has deputized the Federal Communications Commission to police the internet. They are doing so under the guise of “preventing digital discrimination.”
It’s a preposterous claim because almost all blacks and Hispanics now HAVE internet and cell phones.
But to solve a fictitious problem, in 2021 Biden jammed through a Democratic Congress the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. That absurd bill appropriated $65 billion to help expand access to high-speed Internet — even though nearly everyone already had it.
But when the government regulators get involved in an industry — they don’t improve it — they find ways to strangle it. A good example was the so-called Net Neutrality law that socialized broadband hookup. That only effect of stalling out deployment and when the Trump administration repealed those rules, households had access to improved and speedier downloading capabilities.
Biden and the Democrats in Congress couldn’t resist playing the race card. The new law instructed the FCC to ensure that the billions in federal spending also “facilitate equal access” to the Internet.
The FCC lawyers then chose a standard known as “disparate impact,” which means if they can find a minority neighborhood somewhere at any time that lacks the same internet access as a high-income area, they can slap the telecom companies with a lawsuit. You can almost hear the trial lawyers drooling.
The accusers don’t even have to prove any intent to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. These threats of lawsuits will inhibit — not spread internet access.
As an example of the unfairness of this policy, if a telecom provider offered a new service, but not enough members of a protected group sign up for the service, the FCC could impose a multi-million dollar fine and require the company to fix the inequities.
But this is a fishing expedition because the government can’t show any discrimination so far to punish. Don’t take my word for it. The FCC openly admits in its 235-page filing released in November that they could find “little or no evidence” of “intentional discrimination by industry participants.” And they found no evidence that discrimination “contributes to disparities in access to broadband internet service across the Nation.”
This would be like the government suing appliance stores for not selling enough TVs to blacks and Hispanics.
FCC commissioner Brendan Carr warns that Biden’s FCC has been given the authority to second guess every aspect of an Internet service provider’s operations, from network maintenance and installation to everyday business operations such as pricing and marketing.
In other words, the Democrats want to turn the internet into a regulated utility to oversee “access, content and pricing.” This will work about as well as airline regulations in the 1970s and health care regulations in the 2000s — both of which raised consumer prices and limited access.
Don’t be surprised if some of the telecom companies decide it’s not worth the threat of lawsuits and regulatory penalties and opt not to participate in expanding internet and broadband access. And in that case the poor and minorities will truly have reason to complain. That’s what always happens when government tries to fix things that don’t need fixing.
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Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is: “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”
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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.
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