A California billionaire who poured millions into Kamala Harris’s campaign just helped knock a sitting Republican congressman out of his own primary. And the target wasn’t some moderate RINO. It was Andy Ogles, a Freedom Caucus member and open Trump ally who had the president’s endorsement.
On Thursday night, fifth-generation dairy farmer and former state agriculture commissioner Charlie Hatcher defeated Ogles in Tennessee’s 5th District Republican primary. With most of the vote counted, Hatcher took about 53 percent to Ogles’s 47 percent. The seat is deep red. Hatcher is now the heavy favorite in November.
But the real story is not the final tally. It is the money that helped make it possible.
The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, a super PAC bankrolled almost entirely by Democratic donors, dropped roughly $2 million into the race opposing Ogles and boosting Hatcher. The group has raised more than $6.7 million this cycle. Its biggest check writer is Chris Larsen, the San Francisco crypto billionaire and executive chairman of Ripple. Larsen has given the PAC millions, including a single $5 million contribution.
That same Larsen previously sent more than $5.4 million to a super PAC supporting Kamala Harris in 2024 and has continued writing large checks to Democratic committees and causes.
Ogles saw it coming. In the days before the vote he told Fox News Digital exactly what the spending meant. “When you have a group spending roughly $2 million in a Republican primary, that tells you how much money they’re making off of government subsidies, and they’re upset that the government welfare has been taken away from them.”
He was not wrong. The PAC’s own leadership has been blunt. Tom Matzzie, CEO of a solar company and chairman of the group, has said the purpose is to punish lawmakers who oppose the renewable energy subsidies.
“If you’re an extremist on American energy, you’re on our target list.” Ogles had voted against the green welfare written into the Inflation Reduction Act and other Biden-era bills. That made him a marked man.
The ads themselves were pure political theater. They painted Hatcher as the true “America First,” “pro-gun, pro-life, pro-Trump” candidate while attacking Ogles with personal claims. Never mind that the cash behind those ads came from a man who bankrolled Harris and is already talking about boosting Gavin Newsom in 2028. The Blaze documented the same pattern: liberals in MAGA clothing, running a covert operation inside a Republican primary.
President Trump had endorsed Ogles and reaffirmed that support. “Andy will be really enshrined as one of the best congressmen that you’ll ever see,” Trump posted earlier. Governor Bill Lee went the other way late, endorsing Hatcher and citing their personal relationship from Hatcher’s time as agriculture commissioner. Redistricting also scrambled the map, flooding the district with new voters who did not know Ogles as well.
Still, the outside money was the decisive force. The Freedom Caucus Fund spent hundreds of thousands trying to defend Ogles. It was nowhere near enough to match the California cash.
This is not an isolated stunt. The same super PAC previously spent heavily to help defeat Chip Roy in his Texas attorney general primary after Roy fought the green energy giveaways. The message is clear. Oppose the subsidy machine and the industry will come for you, even if it means using Democratic billionaire money to reshape a Republican primary.
Ogles put it plainly: the attack happened because he is close to the president, because he is outspoken, and because he speaks plainly. “If trying to build an energy sector that is self-reliant, because it’s a national security issue, makes me an extremist, then so be it.”
Scripture has a word for the kind of divided loyalty on display here. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”
The green energy complex has chosen its master. The question for Republican voters is whether they will keep letting that master buy influence inside their own primaries.
Hatcher now advances as the nominee. He talks about farmer common sense and supporting the Trump agenda. Fine. But the voters who just chose him should understand exactly who wrote the largest checks that helped clear the path.
A California Democrat who funded Kamala Harris just helped decide a Tennessee Republican primary. That should bother every conservative who claims to believe in limited government and energy independence.
The subsidies are the prize. The primary was the delivery system. And a Trump-backed congressman is the latest casualty.
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.
