In the heat of California’s crowded gubernatorial race, billionaire Tom Steyer has made his position crystal clear: biological males belong in girls’ high school sports, and any objection amounts to a cruel “right-wing attempt” to victimize transgender youth. This stance, delivered on a recent podcast, underscores a deeper truth about progressive priorities in the Golden State.
When forced to choose between protecting the opportunities and fairness earned by generations of female athletes and affirming the latest gender ideology, Democrats like Steyer unhesitatingly choose the latter.
Steyer’s comments come as controversy swirls around athletes like AB Hernandez, a biological male competing in girls’ track and field events. Recent victories in high jump, long jump, and triple jump have highlighted the predictable physical advantages that puberty confers on males, advantages no amount of rhetoric can erase. Yet rather than acknowledge this basic biological reality, Steyer frames exclusion from girls’ teams as punishment that exacerbates mental health struggles, citing high suicide attempt rates among transgender youth.
This framing inverts victim and perpetrator with remarkable precision. The true victims here are the girls displaced from podiums, scholarships, and records—young women whose years of dedication are rendered meaningless by policies that treat sex as a feeling rather than a fact.
The Biology Denial at the Heart of the Policy
Steyer’s appeal to compassion rings hollow when measured against observable reality. Males who have gone through puberty retain significant advantages in strength, speed, and skeletal structure. Denying this does not protect vulnerable children; it erases the protected category of female sports that Title IX was designed to create. What began as a reasonable accommodation has become an outright displacement of girls from their own arena.
Critics rightly note that California’s approach turns competitive fairness into a political litmus test. While Steyer and his fellow Democrats fret over the emotional well-being of a tiny percentage of students identifying as transgender, they show little concern for the far larger population of biological females watching their dreams deferred. This selective empathy exposes the contradiction at the heart of modern progressivism: inclusion for some requires exclusion—and often humiliation—for others.
Recent scenes at California track meets, where female athletes have been forced to share podiums or lose qualifying spots, illustrate the human cost. Parents and girls have spoken out, only to be dismissed as bigots. Steyer’s rhetoric follows the familiar script: pathologize dissent, medicalize identity, and shame anyone who points out that boys are not girls.
Political Calculations in a Failing State
California faces crises of homelessness, crime, failing schools, and out-migration. Yet in the Democratic primary to replace Gavin Newsom, Steyer and others have elevated this cultural flashpoint. Their eagerness to champion policies rejected by the vast majority of Americans—and by growing numbers even within their own party—suggests a party more interested in signaling virtue than solving tangible problems.
Republican candidates in the race have taken the commonsense position: protect girls’ sports by recognizing biological reality. This stance aligns not only with science and fairness but with the instincts of parents across the political spectrum who understand that erasing sex-based categories harms the most vulnerable.
The debate transcends sports. It touches on fundamental questions of truth, parental rights, and whether institutions exist to serve reality or reshape it according to elite ideology. When billionaires lecture the public on compassion while defending policies that disadvantage working-class and middle-class girls, the disconnect becomes impossible to ignore.
A Return to First Principles
California’s experiment with gender identity in sports has produced exactly the outcomes sensible observers predicted: stolen victories, demoralized girls, and bitter division. Steyer’s defense offers no solution beyond doubling down on the very policies creating the harm.
As Scripture reminds us in Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” This created order is not a suggestion but a foundation for human flourishing. Societies that defy it do not progress; they unravel, one displaced girl and one confused policy at a time.
The coming primary and general election will test whether California voters recognize the cost of this ideology. Female athletes deserve better than to be collateral damage in a billionaire’s virtue campaign. Common sense, biological truth, and basic fairness demand a course correction—one that puts girls first in girls’ sports.
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.
