A male athlete swept the girls’ jumping events at California’s CIF Southern Section finals, claiming victories in high jump, long jump, and triple jump by margins that left no doubt about physical reality. Officials, bound by state law and ideology, responded not by restoring fairness but by engineering duplicate gold medals and shared podiums.
This spectacle—viral images of a male athlete atop the winners’ stand alongside displaced girls—exposes the predictable failure of California’s experiment in erasing sex-based categories in sports.
The episode repeats a now-familiar pattern. AB Hernandez of Jurupa Valley High School dominated once again, winning the long jump by over 16 inches and the triple jump by nearly two feet while edging out competitors in the high jump.
CIF’s awkward “pilot program,” revived for these meets, elevated biological females who finished immediately behind Hernandez to co-champion status. The result: awkward shared top spots on the podium, a bureaucratic band-aid that satisfies neither fairness nor inclusion.
Politicians and activists rightly called out the absurdity. The shared podium mocked the very concept of championship while pretending to honor all participants. Rep. Tim Burchett and others highlighted what common sense has long recognized: males retain significant physical advantages post-puberty in strength, speed, and leverage events like jumping.
Riley Gaines, a vocal defender of women’s sports, and former Nike executive Jennifer Sey amplified the images that spread rapidly across social media, forcing the issue back into national view.
California’s response remains tone-deaf. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office framed critics as bullies while insisting on “fairness, dignity, and respect” for all kids. Yet the dignity of female athletes—those who trained, competed, and lost podium spots to biology—receives scant mention. State law since 2013 has prioritized gender identity over sex, a policy signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown and defended despite federal pushback. President Trump’s administration previously sued under Title IX, and the underlying tensions persist.
This is not compassion; it is institutional capture by gender ideology. Sports exist as a domain where biological differences matter profoundly. Denying this reality does not advance equality—it erases the protected category of female athletics that Title IX was designed to secure. Girls who pour years into training find their records, scholarships, and opportunities diluted or displaced. The shared podium offers no victory for them, only a visual testament to policy failure.
Parents at the meet voiced frustration directly to reporters. Coaches relayed the sudden revival of the pilot program, underscoring how administrators scramble to manage optics without addressing root causes. Protests outside earlier rounds drew hundreds, reflecting broader parental revolt against rules that place male bodies in girls’ competitions.
Defenders invoke inclusion, but inclusion cannot come at the expense of fairness and safety. Biological males competing in female categories undermine the purpose of sex-segregated sports. Data from multiple studies and real-world results in swimming, weightlifting, boxing, and track consistently show retained male advantages. California’s approach—duplicate medals and rhetorical appeals to dignity—avoids this evidence while punishing the very athletes it claims to protect.
One is reminded of the ancient warning against calling good evil and evil good. As Isaiah 5:20 declares, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”
Modern institutions have inverted reality in the name of progress, demanding society applaud what biology and common sense reject. True justice protects the vulnerable—here, female athletes—rather than sacrificing them on the altar of ideology.
The path forward requires courage: separate categories by biological sex, as nearly every culture and athletic governing body did until recently. Federal enforcement of Title IX, state-level protections, and parental pressure offer hope.
California’s latest controversy should serve not as a model but as a cautionary tale. When government and institutions prioritize feelings over facts, girls pay the price—on the track, on the podium, and in the broader pursuit of excellence.
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.
