(Daily Signal)—New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has carefully plucked away another small but significant element of public order.
According to the New York Post, the mayor’s office issued a directive that the New York Police Department would no longer be responding to calls relating to homeless encampments. Instead, officers will now have to first dispatch social services to deal with such matters before they are allowed to act.
The move is just the latest by the Mamdani administration to peel away public order in the Big Apple in the name of social justice.
The administration had already put up roadblocks to prevent the NYPD from removing homeless encampments, but now it will be further handcuffed.
The New York Post noted that this move represents a radical change and will likely mean that problems at homeless encampments may never be addressed at all.
“This year, the NYPD responded to more than 26,000 of the 36,000 complaints to 311 about encampments,” the Post reported. “Now, [the Department of Homeless Services] will handle triple the calls they previously responded to, with fewer than 2,000 staffers across the entire agency.”
While Mamdani has been careful not to work too directly against the NYPD since he was elected, this is just further demonstration that he’s determined to, over time, entirely undo the kind of policing that made New York dramatically safer under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. That crime-fighting revolution paid dramatic dividends for decades.
Even though many crimes have dropped to rates below their post-George Floyd riots peak, urban chaos remains a problem and, in some cases, is getting worse.
Subway and transit violence shot up dramatically after Mamdani was sworn into office. Many of those incidents were committed by unstable and mentally ill repeat offenders who had been living on the street.
And unsanitary homeless encampments filled with drug addicts and people with mental illnesses who belong in an institution are sprouting up all over town.
In fact, according to a report from the mayor’s office, the number of homeless people in the city has reached a five-year high.
And the growing numbers of homeless people are clustering in encampments that are transforming parts of the city, particularly the ones by the Intrepid Museum, Citi Field—where the New York Mets play—and under FDR Drive.
“Local residents and workers are decrying a homeless takeover under the FDR Drive, where mountains of trash, foul smells, and fights are regular occurrences,” amNewYork reported. “According to locals, the parking area under the highway from 17th Street to 23rd Street has become a massive homeless shelter.”
Mamdani did do something about one shantytown. The city swept away an encampment on Wednesday that had built up near the New York University dorms. Oh, it’s in an area likely filled with a high concentration of Mamdani superfans. A coincidence, I’m sure.
Apparently, the former denizens just moved a few blocks away and set up camp again. And why not? Mamdani has made it clear that he intends to let these kinds of encampments fester and is effectively neutering public complaints about them.
Don’t you worry about that filthy, mushrooming fentanyl den on your block, a social worker is on the case.
As a New York Post editorial explained, deploying overstretched social workers to alleviate the problem isn’t going to fix it.
“The vagrants who erect and inhabit these camps are hard-core homeless who’ve already rejected the option of living in a shelter,” the Post editorial noted. “ … Compassionate encouragement won’t dislodge people sleeping on cardboard sidewalk pallets. That’s why the city has always tasked police with handling encampments.”
Unfortunately, these sorts of anti-policing tactics by the Mamdani administration may “work” in a certain sense. The encampment problem will surely grow. But as the situation slowly gets out of hand, the administration can better defuse the blame without immediately infuriating the public.
They’ll say that the problem is “affordability,” that the budget is too small, and that systemic racism is causing an epidemic of homelessness.
All of that being nonsense, but by the time the issue is out of control the public may be more accustomed to thinking it’s endemic rather than a consequence of bad policy decisions.
Slow-growing encampments don’t drive headlines the way dramatic increases in murder rates do. Mamdani probably knows that. He may have even learned that lesson following the disaster of the “defund the police” years.
When leftist social goals were rapidly unlocked, the immediate consequences ignited an immediate backlash. He’s clearly trying to avoid that.
Methodically stripping away the enforcement of public order, eroding trust in the police, and making authorities unresponsive to those who want the situation fixed is a cynical but effective way to hide a malignant social revolution.
In that sense, Mamdani is succeeding where other leftist regimes failed, even if the eventual result will be the same miserable failure.
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.
