(Daily Signal)—Wokeness is impossible to escape. Everywhere you turn, you see rainbow flags, Black Lives Matter signs, or calls for “diversity and inclusion.” Companies force DEI trainings on staff. FBI agents march in Pride parades. Teachers tell kids in school that they are oppressors or oppressed based on their skin color. Target stores sell transgender swimsuits and Bud Light teams up with a grown man who acts like a little girl. Even Buzz Lightyear and “Star Wars” have gone woke.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is falling all over itself to push transgender pronouns, to promote drag queens, and to celebrate Pride—even on Easter Sunday!
It’s enough to drive anyone with common sense up a wall. Yet when Americans dare to say, “Enough!” they find themselves branded “authoritarian” for wanting a moment’s peace.
If you don’t get on board with woke, you oppose “democracy.” You’re a bigot, a racist, or a Christian nationalist.
Where does this insane idea come from? It comes from the spin masters at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The SPLC has long demonized mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits by putting them on a map with Ku Klux Klan chapters. It updates this “hate map” annually with a “Year in Hate and Extremism” report for the previous year. On Tuesday, it published the report for 2023.
That report reads like a dispatch from a “Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia, where evil white Christian jackbooted thugs have seized control of the government and are forcing everyone to adopt their propaganda. The report is so divorced from reality, it would be downright hilarious if so much of the legacy media, corporate America, the Democrats, and the Department of Justice didn’t take it deadly seriously.
In a classic case of projection, the SPLC report warns that the Right is trying to take control of the culture and erase the poor persecuted left-wing minority groups while the SPLC covers for the woke movement, which has already seized the commanding heights of American culture and is straining to silence dissent. It calls conservative efforts “ethnocide” (the erasure of an ethnic group’s culture, akin to genocide), and “Christian supremacy.”
Back at home in the real world, the woke elites have already taken control of the culture and worked to dismantle America’s heritage. Christians, Jews, and even atheists who hold beliefs about the world and America that used to be the norm find themselves living in what feels like a different country—nay, a different world.
Education
Woke ideology has seeped into the education system at an alarming pace.
Critical race theory, or CRT—a lens by which teachers tell white students they are oppressors and black students they are oppressed in a “systemically racist” America—amounts to a new form of “anti-racist” discrimination on the basis of race.
Transgender ideology teaches kids that males can become female and vice versa, encouraging experimental medical interventions while ignoring the horrific toll that “gender-affirming care” takes on young bodies.
Yet for the spin masters at the SPLC, efforts to weaken the suffocating grasp of woke ideology on America’s institutions amount to cultural tyranny. To them, commonsense Americans’ campaign against critical race theory and transgender ideology in schools is a form of oppression, while “drag queen story hour” is a symbol of “freedom” and is important for “democracy.”
The SPLC has something of a fetish for drag queens. Not only did it praise drag as a symbol of "freedom" and a tool to promote "democratic engagement," but it attacked @againstgrmrs for protesting "drag queen story hour." ‼️ pic.twitter.com/DhIHCyxW86
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) June 7, 2024
The “Year in Hate and Extremism” includes a long section demonizing parental rights groups and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for “ethnocide through authoritarianism.” That section compares Florida’s efforts to prevent discrimination (what else do you call shaming students for the color of their skin?) to the “forced acculturation” of Native Americans in previous eras. It suggests parental rights groups and DeSantis are trying to “control a man’s thinking” to make minority groups more subservient.
Another section raises the alarm about school choice, suggesting that it is a secret “Dominionist Christian” plot to take over society.
The SPLC warns against “dominionism,” the idea that “only Christians … have the right to control government and all influential posts in society and culture.”
“The goal of much of this theology is to strip government of functions such as education and welfare and … reserve those for churches,” the SPLC warns. It claims “dominionists” want to “siphon off public funds and put them in the hands of a reactionary minority.”
The SPLC strains to connect its attack on school choice to racial segregation. It warns that dominionism aims “to fulfill a decades-old dream, begun when segregated schools were ruled unconstitutional, to keep education shackled to a narrow, authoritarian version of Christianity.”
So, parents who are fed up with the woke takeover of public education, who want to find schools that won’t indoctrinate their kids into CRT and transgender orthodoxy, and who want the education dollars they pay in taxes to follow their children when they leave this woke school system are pushing a form of segregationist “authoritarianism?”
If anyone is “authoritarian” in this situation, it’s the leftist activists who subverted the public school system in the first place, not the parents who want another option.
Religious Freedom
The SPLC report also demonizes efforts to defend religious freedom.
The “Year in Hate” goes out of its way to attack House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., mostly for his previous work with the Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom. The SPLC claims that ADF “often pits Christians unfairly against LGBTQ+ people in a legal gambit to undermine nondiscrimination laws through claims of ‘religious freedom.’”
In reality, ADF’s most famous client, Christian baker Jack Phillips, will gladly sell cakes to anyone, but he refuses to craft custom cakes to celebrate same-sex weddings because he believes marriage is between one man and one woman. Colorado’s government used a “nondiscrimination” law to punish him for this, and ADF sued on his behalf. ADF did not “unfairly” pit anyone against anyone. LGBTQ activists are constantly demonizing conservative Christians and attempting to silence them. The SPLC demonizes ADF for pushing back.
Shoring up the Deep State
The SPLC report also condemns an effort to restrain the federal bureaucracy, which has acted like a “deep state” under former President Donald Trump and under President Joe Biden. Bureaucrats bragged about opposing Trump from within, and many officials have openly complained about Biden’s support for Israel during the war in Gaza.
Project 2025, a coalition of more than 100 commonsense and conservative organizations led by my former employer, The Heritage Foundation, aims to rein in the administrative state and make it more accountable to the people’s elected president, as the Constitution envisions. The SPLC faults the coalition for working with “at least nine hate and antigovernment groups with strong ties to the Republican Party,” singling out mainstream conservative organizations that the SPLC has repeatedly attacked: ADF, the Center for Immigration Studies, and Moms for Liberty.
“The coalition’s ‘Mandate for Leadership’ [a manual for the next conservative president containing policy recommendations for reforming federal agencies] characterizes Christianity as under threat and frames some policy recommendations as part of a ‘Judeo-Christian tradition,’” the SPLC notes. “It also calls for staffing the federal bureaucracy with ideologues recruited with the assistance of many partner groups.”
The SPLC suggests that Christianity is not under threat, that the Judeo-Christian tradition does not undergird American freedom, and that the federal bureaucracy has not already been flooded with ideologues—and the SPLC is completely wrong on all three counts. The organization and its allies are the very people threatening conservative Christianity, demonizing the Judeo-Christian tradition, and seeding the administrative state with left-wing activists.
When conservatives launch a plan to counter this influence and restore sanity to the situation, the SPLC cries foul.
Antisemitism
Perhaps the most galling aspect of the SPLC’s report involves antisemitism, however.
The SPLC admits that “antisemitism on college campuses” is a “legitimate issue,” yet it does not condemn any group for harassing Jews on campus. It does not mention the anti-Israel agitators at the New York college Cooper Union who locked Jewish students inside a library while shouting, “Free Palestine!” It does not mention the anti-Israel demonstrator who physically blocked a Jewish student from walking on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus.
Instead, the report states that “a faux hypersensitivity toward antisemitism was particularly visible among right-wing media and politicians in the United States as they utilized the legitimate issue of antisemitism on college campuses to disingenuously further an attack on higher education.”
Almost as an afterthought, the SPLC notes that colleges should “review and revise their policies,” before it moves on to condemning the conservatives who call out antisemitism.
These “accusers need to acknowledge their own ties to antisemitic narratives before accusing others,” the scolding SPLC intones. “Certain politicians targeting education overlook their associations with groups like Moms for Liberty, which has a chapter that quoted Hitler, and entities like PragerU, known for promoting right-wing ideas and neglecting the realities of slavery and indigenous peoples in American history, and fostering a pro-white Protestant narrative that emboldens extremist groups.”
In other words, conservatives can’t criticize anti-Israel rioters for antisemitism because one Moms for Liberty chapter quoted Hitler—never mind that the chapter was quoting Hitler ironically to demonstrate how the woke Left took over education. Conservatives can’t speak up about Jews getting harassed because they might agree with PragerU, which presents Judeo-Christian heritage as a good thing. Oh, horrors!
The SPLC also warned, “The upcoming election year will likely witness a continued use of George Soros as an antisemitic trope to symbolize the existence of the ‘deep state.’”
Never mind that George Soros, a Hungarian American hedge fund billionaire of Jewish heritage, bankrolls a broad swath of the modern Left and is largely responsible for the “Rogue Prosecutor” movement that helps elect left-wing local prosecutors who refuse to prosecute most crimes, all in the name of racial equity. Never mind that his son, Alex Soros, who has now taken the reins at his father’s Open Society Foundations, is providing free political advice to Democrats in opposing Trump.
Ignore all that and remember: It is the height of “antisemitism” to suggest that George Soros may be impacting our political system!
Democrats should refer to Trump as a convicted felon at every opportunity. Repetition is the key to a successful message and we want people to wrestle with the notion of hiring a convicted felon for the most important job in the country! https://t.co/WLLMWatlkP
— Alex Soros (@AlexanderSoros) May 31, 2024
Of course, the SPLC doesn’t just defend Soros out of the goodness of its heart. It has financially benefited from Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society, which gave the SPLC a $75,000 grant in 2016.
Rather than addressing the antisemitism on college campuses, the SPLC weaponizes the issue against conservatives and defends its political allies.
‘White Supremacy’
Longtime readers know that I almost always bring up a few points when writing on the SPLC. First, my book, “Making Hate Pay,” documents how the SPLC became the far-left smear factory it is today. It took its “hate map”—a fundraising tool masquerading as a report on white supremacist terror networks left over from the Ku Klux Klan—and weaponized it to demonize conservatives. Second, both my book and my reporting illustrate how the SPLC is notoriously unreliable, and a court is actively considering defamation claims against the center.
The latest SPLC report once again demonstrates that the “hate map” smears mainstream conservative and Christian organizations by associating them with the Klan. The SPLC spells out that association in black and white in the report’s introduction: “The Southern Poverty Law Center’s preeminent ‘Year in Hate’ report provides a comprehensive analysis of the organizational infrastructure—the groups—upholding white supremacy in the United States.”
In short, if you disagree with the SPLC’s agenda, you’re part of the “white supremacy” nexus supporting “ethnocide,” “Christian supremacy,” “authoritarianism,” and whatever new term we can think of to make you seem nefarious.
The only way to escape these epithets, you see, is to get with the all-of-government, all-of-society woke CRT transgender program, which isn’t authoritarian at all.
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.
“Woke ideology has seeped into the education system at an alarming pace.”
“SEEPED” —- With massive funding from the GATES FOUNDATION and SOROS outfits and the Pritzkers and Wyss and Warren Buffet and son Peter and Jon Stryker —- hardly “seeped” more like a deluge of epic proportion!
Yes, the Biden regime and SPLC and others have shifted “WHITE SUPREMACY” over to the more “INCLUSIVE” “CHRISTIAN SUPREMACY” to include Christians of every race and color and ethnicity —- and none of these PSEUDO–conservative outfits like Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute and Brownstone and others want to EXPLAIN this?!?!
Magda Teter writes the book “Christian Supremacy” while Michael Teter is the director of THE 65 PROJECT, which these pseudo–conservative organizations consider a FORBIDDEN TOPIC —- why?! WHY??????
They religiously avoid all mention of: THE 65 PROJECT, AMERICAN LAW INSTITUTE, SOROS JUSTICE FELLOWS, SOS PROJECT —– why, why, why?????
https : //www [dot] influencewatch [dot] org/organization/65-project/
A moment of sanity: yes Project 2025 has a fabulous plan —- but what has changed since Trump signed the CISA Act of 2018 which ensured that Manchurian Joe would be SELECTED in the 2020 massive ELECTION FRAUD?!
Zilch, zero, nada, nothing . . . . .
All these useful idiots forever injecting their CIA memes — nothing has changed since 2020, 2022 — ao why any different results?!
Take a gander at the 2022 NY state election —- 52 of the 62 counties use Dominion Voting Systems while the remaining 10 counties use ES&S★ —-
https : //x [dot] com/Katlia124/status/1590192619577303041
★ And Obama’s younger sister who consults at his Obama Foundation, Maya Soetoro–Ng, founded a nonprofit with the daughter of the founder of ES&S, Robert Urosevich!
“Wokeness” sissy too terrified to call it communism?!?!
DEI?! Pantyboys too terrified to call it communist political minder systems?!
When the COHEN family ruled the SPLC they began spinning this “white supremacy” meme and narrative — a COHENcidence???