(Daily Signal)—Some people are more equal than others it seems according to the Senate’s most prominent avowed socialist.
Sorry for using an overused “Animal Farm” reference, but in this case it was too on point to pass up.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has been widely and rightly mocked for his hilariously hypocritical response to Fox News’ Bret Baier on Wednesday night.
Baier asked Sanders why he chartered private jets to travel the country on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with fellow socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-NY.
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According to The Washington Free Beacon, Sanders spent $221,000 on chartered private jets in the first quarter of 2025.
Sanders refused to apologize for the lavish—and not incidentally, carbon-spewing—travel, snapping back at Baier, “You think I’m gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United … while 30,000 people are waiting?”
Sanders pointed out that President Donald Trump flies in private jets, but since when did Trump call himself a democratic socialist?
This revealing moment shouldn’t be a surprise. Sanders has moved his targets in the past to conform to his own personal circumstances. He used to rail against the “millionaires and the billionaires,” but it’s mostly just billionaires these days now that he’s a millionaire himself.
Being a socialist politician who has never held a real job sure pays off, right?
Yes, the “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies are drawing good-sized crowds. But besides the rank hypocrisy, there is something more deeply fraudulent about Sanders’ tour with AOC.
It’s all a sham.
I don’t doubt Sanders is a true-believing socialist. He spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union after all.
What’s a sham is the idea that Democrats are suddenly going to go all in for economic leveling or become the party of the “working man.”
That version of the Democratic Party fully died in the age of Obama. The New Deal coalition is dead. What Democrats represent now are elite institutions, Ivy League schools, law firms, government bureaucracies, and powerful NGOs. What animates their party is cultural issues, LGBTQ, DEI, open borders, and the intolerant cult of “tolerance.” That and resistance to all things Trump.
It couldn’t be clearer to me that this was the direction of the Left when I attended a socialism conference back in 2019. Yes, they went through the rote message of economic leveling that they’ve always been at least nominally for. But all the fire and passion was for transgenderism and the breakdown of “oppressive” family structures.
Sanders may try to portray himself as an outsider, an independent, but he’s always ultimately been a party man. Years ago, believe it or not, he said that open borders was a right-wing idea. That version of Bernie Sanders is long gone. Now, he toes the line.
Whatever sideshow Sanders puts on to rally the masses, it has nothing to do with the direction of the Democratic Party or the broader Left.
Despite the fact that Democrats have hit their lowest poll numbers since polling on party popularity began, they’ve shown few signs of willingness to change on substance at all. Some cleverer Democrat politicians have rhetorically tacked Right or to the center. Others have tried to recapture their disintegrating working-class base with socialist rhetoric. But it’s all a mirage.
The party is just as woke as ever. They are simply adjusting to a world in which their immense institutional advantage is crumbling, and they actually have to make their case to an American people who’ve become fatigued by the post 2020 insanity.
And when traditional power structures within the party are truly threatened, they use their old DEI tricks to gatekeep.
Just look at what happened to activist David Hogg when Democrats gave him a vice chair position at the DNC to signal that the party was welcoming to young men, a demographic they have almost entirely lost.
As soon as Hogg suggested that he would challenge old Democrat incumbents he was hit by a complaint from a party member that his DNC chair position “discriminated against three women of color candidates.” It was a perfect representation of how institutions controlled by the Left operate and why young men are fleeing the party in droves.
Railing against the billionaires and pretending to fight the “oligarchy” rings false when they are the ones who represent the billionaire class, the cultural elites.
Just look at this recent New Yorker profile of the movers and shakers of New York, most of whom are notable left-wingers. This would include Alex Soros, the son of billionaire liberal donor George Soros and one of the most prolific Democratic Party donors himself.
“Alex Soros, investor” LMAO
Investor in what, Dem politicians? pic.twitter.com/f4dZ2Hr1VE
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) May 5, 2025
They aren’t fighting oligarchy. They are the oligarchy.
Trump and entrepreneur Elon Musk may be very wealthy. Vice President JD Vance may have gone to Yale Law School. But it couldn’t be any clearer that they are loathed by the ruling elite. To borrow an old phrase used against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they are “traitors to their class.”
And so when Trump, the billionaire, makes his pitch to the American people—to the working and middle classes—it strikes voters as more genuine. He really seems to like and understand them. He stands as their champion against institutions that failed them in the last decade.
When Sanders flies around in his private jet to fight the oligarchy, it just seems like a shallow attempt to sucker voters into thinking that Democrats really care about the people now.
Maybe Sanders’ message could be a winning one for Democrats, but it doesn’t pass the smell test.
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.
