The prophet Amos asked a question that the modern American left cannot answer without imploding.
Can two walk together, except they be agreed?
It is a reasonable question, and the honest reply is no. Two cannot walk together unless they have agreed on where they are going. Which makes the spectacle of “Queers for Palestine” one of the strangest processions in political history, a movement marching arm in arm with an ideology that would, given the authority, throw its members off the roof. They have not agreed on a destination. One half is walking toward liberation and the other half is walking them toward a cliff, and only one half knows it.
This is the contradiction at the soft green center of the red-green alliance, and it is worth pressing on precisely because the left works so hard to keep it from being pressed.
An Ideology That Has Already Said No
The usual conservative argument runs that Western progressives simply do not understand the people they are defending. That is too generous. The Islamist movement has told them, plainly and repeatedly, that the affection is not mutual.
When a recent Gaza-bound flotilla set sail, the presence of an openly gay activist aboard drew open condemnation from fellow participants, who treated his sexuality as an offense against the cause itself. One activist asked, in so many words, why a sacred struggle should be degraded by the slogans of a movement he regarded as deviant. The rainbow was not welcome on the boat.
That episode did not require interpretation by a hostile outsider. It was self-interpreting. The very people the Western left insists on calling allies looked at the left’s most cherished identity and called it filth. And the response from the activist class was not reconsideration. It was silence, followed by a fresh round of marches.
The Geography Settles the Argument
One does not need theory here, only a map. There is no Pride parade in Gaza. There is no safe house for same-sex couples in Tehran. There is no rainbow flag in Kabul, unless it is being burned. In the territories and regimes that the slogan exists to celebrate, homosexuality is not merely frowned upon, it is criminalized and, in places, fatal. Critics have noted the obvious, that a gay activist who actually relocated to the society he champions would be fortunate to leave it alive.
The comparison the satirists reach for is cruel because it is accurate. “Queers for Palestine” has the internal logic of chickens campaigning for the colonel, of a flock organizing on behalf of the wolf. The defenders of the slogan know this, which is why they invented a word, pinkwashing, to punish anyone who points it out.
Notice the sleight of hand. The accusation of pinkwashing does not deny that Israel protects gay life and that Hamas extinguishes it. It concedes the fact and then forbids you from mentioning it, on the grounds that mentioning a true thing is itself a form of propaganda. When your rhetorical defense amounts to “stop noticing,” the argument is already lost.
Why Intersectionality Cannot Survive Contact
How does an entire activist culture end up here? Through a framework that sorts all of humanity into oppressor and oppressed, ranks the oppressed against one another, and then insists the rankings never conflict. Inside that framework the Palestinian cause sits near the top and the Western gay activist sits somewhere below, which means that when the two interests collide, the lower-ranked interest is simply told to be quiet.
The framework cannot admit that its favored victim might also be a victimizer, because admitting it would collapse the entire scaffolding. So the gay activist is asked to subordinate his own survival to the hierarchy, and, astonishingly, many agree.
This is what makes the contradiction more than a punchline. It is a live demonstration of what happens to the red partner inside the alliance. He is not an equal. He is a resource, useful for his numbers and his moral branding, expendable the moment his identity becomes inconvenient. The flotilla told him so to his face. The map tells him so every day. The history of every place where this alliance has actually taken power tells him so in blood.
Amos asked whether two can walk together without agreement, and the left has spent years insisting that the answer is yes, that solidarity can paper over the fact that one partner wants the other dead. It cannot. The two are not walking together. One is being walked, eyes forward, toward a destination the guide has never once hidden. The only question is how far down the road he gets before he finally looks up.
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.
