(Daily Signal)—Democrats gathered in Chicago, Illinois on Monday to kick off the first day of the Democratic National Convention with the ostensible theme “For the People.” Despite the theme, the stage was mostly dominated by political and cultural elites when compared to the Republican National Convention last month in Milwaukee. Rather, it was three other themes that set the tone for the week ahead.
1. Betting Big on Gender Politics
With Democrats set to nominate the first female person of color as a major party’s presidential nominee, the convention to put the spotlight on female speakers. First Lady Jill Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Lauren Underwood of Illinois, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass were among the female politicians who addressed the crowd gathered in Chicago Monday night.
The Democrats’ decision to put its female leaders front and center on night one suggests Democrats are set to lean in on the widening gender gap in American politics that is particularly pronounced amongst young voters. A February Gallup poll found that 40% of women aged 18-29 identify as liberal, while only 25% of young men do.
While political attitudes are not as segmented between the genders in older generations, exit polling from previous presidential elections show how men and women are increasingly sorting themselves into red and blue. In 2008, the gender gap was seven points; by 2020 it was 12 points.
With Kamala Harris atop the Democratic ticket, the gap is poised to grow even wider. “It is now close to, or certainly in the ballpark of, the biggest gender gap we’ve ever seen,” Paul Maslin, a pollster at FM3, told Politico. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed women favored Harris by 12 points, while men favored Trump by nine.
All this helps explain why the Harris campaign has opted for an aesthetic (including its co-option of pop star Charli XCX’s “brat” branding) and communications strategy geared towards young women online. Democrats seem to believe turning out these young, female voters come November, though messaging on abortion and other social issues, is the key to victory.
2. Create Chaos on the Right
Democrats seem poised to use the DNC’s domination of the primetime airwaves this week to bait the right into fighting itself. If night one is any indication, Democrats’ strategy to break conservative ranks will be through continued attacks against The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to pit the think tank against the Trump campaign.
With a comically large copy of the Project 2025 reader, “Mandate for Leadership,” in hand, Michigan Senate Majority Whip Mallory McMorrow took the stage for a primetime speaking slot on night one.
“This is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term,” McMorrow proclaimed on the DNC stage despite both the Trump campaign and Heritage Foundation’s insistence that the campaign and Project 2025 are independent of one another. McMorrow went a step further, claiming that Project 2025 plans “to turn Donald Trump into a dictator” by “reissu[ing] Trump’s Schedule F Executive Order to permit discharge of nonperforming employees” and “ending law enforcement activities of independent agencies.”
“That is not how it works in America,” McMorrow later screamed as screens behind her read “Choose Democracy,” seemingly unaware that the proposals reinstitute elected checks on unelected bureaucrats.
The doomsday scenario? “Donald Trump would be able to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents,” McMorrow said.
Pot, meet kettle.
Before leaving the stage, McMorrow promised that Democrats would be back tomorrow with another speech on proposals in Project 2025, even though the Harris campaign has previously admitted to misleading voters about Project 2025’s objectives and its relationship to the Trump campaign.
3. Out With the Old, In With the new
Monday night also featured ghosts of presidential elections past.
In what felt like a swan song address, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton took the stage Monday night to proclaim that the glass ceiling is shattering for real this time.
“Tonight, so close to breaking through once and for all, I want to tell you what I see through all those cracks and why it matters for each and every one of us. What do I see? I see freedom,” Clinton told the audience. “On the other side of that glass ceiling is Kamala Harris raising her hand and taking the oath of office as our forty-seventh president of the United States.”
The glass ceiling wasn’t the only Clinton reprise in her DNC speech. Clinton went for the deep cut with the revival of her “it takes a village” mantra, the title of her 1996 book. “We have to fight for Kamala as she will fight for us. Because you know what, it still takes a village to raise a family, heal a country and win a campaign,” Clinton said. The late Bob Dole rolls in his grave.
“The future is here. It’s in our grasp,” Clinton said to conclude her remarks. The bitter pill for Clinton to swallow is if that future comes, she likely won’t play a major part in it. “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten played as she exited stage left.
The Bidens won’t be playing a large role in that future either, at least if the party has its way.
First Lady Jill Biden preceded her husband, still the incumbent president, late Monday night. The first lady breezed past lingering questions that remain about the nature of her husband’s decision to not run for reelection. “When I saw him dig deep into his soul and decide to no longer seek reelection and endorse Kamala Harris,” Jill Biden said, was a moment she “f[e]ll in love with him all over again.”
“Joe knows that our nation’s strength doesn’t come from intimidation or cruelty. It comes from the small acts of kindness that heal deep wounds, from service to the communities that make us who we are, from love of a country that shines with promise and renewal,” the first lady claimed. But “Kamala Harris knows that too.”
Harris, and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are “inspiring a new generation,” Jill Biden concluded.
Speaking for the old generation, President Joe Biden took the stage at almost 10:30 p.m. Chicago time. Biden was teary-eyed as he walked on stage, and remained visibly choked up as he approached the microphone and the crowd chanted “we love Joe!” and “thank you, Joe!”
In the midst of making official the unceremonious passing of the torch to his vice president, Biden was defiant about his record as president. Biden proclaimed his administration took on Big Pharma, beat back inflation with the Inflation Reduction Act, the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and America’s continued involvement in the war in Ukraine.
Not before long, Biden was scraping the bottom of the barrel. He boasted that his administration has invested in, and built, charging stations from electric vehicles—even though only 7 chargers have been built. The president insisted that now there are fewer border crossings than when Donald Trump left office, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows that in January of 2021 there were 78,414 migrant encounters on the southern border while there were nearly 105,000 in July. Biden also claimed that “when Trump left office, Europe and NATO was in tatters,” despite the largest land war in Europe breaking out under Biden’s watch. Nevertheless, Biden promised it was “not a joke!”
The president had his trademarked stumbles in a stemwinder carried on for nearly an hour, but nothing like the troubles that beset him in the presidential debate that led to his political demise in June.
Nearly an hour in, Biden finally decided to hand Harris the baton as promised. The president said he knew Harris would make a good president “because like many of our best presidents, she was also a vice president.”
“That’s a joke,” Biden added.
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.
Silly, silly non–articles — America is soooo far into communist rule of an anarcho–tyranny structure – all is chaos, there is no government!
Rube clowns too lazy to read the SUSSMANN INDICTMENT, when John Durham and his legal staff laid out the Deep State subjugation of governmental agencies!
Meanwhile, cretins like Sean Hannity continue to bleat that its only a few G–tards, most are decent folk?!?!
Riiiiiigggggghhhht …….
We are ao far beyond standard POLITICAL THEATER today –clowntards too dumb to comprehend how voting machines and ballot readers are rigged — the Anerican illiterati!