I can already hear the chorus of rebukes from those who claim to be “conservative” or “populist” but who are really just straight-ticket Republicans. “Don’t sacrifice the good to chase the perfect,” someone will say. Someone else will chime in with, “Weak Republican policies are better than strong Democrat policies.” Still others will say, “You’re probably a Democrat pretending to be a Republican.”
In reality, I don’t pretend to be a Republican. I’m an America First patriot, and while I never have and never will vote for a Democrat, there are a whole bunch of Republicans on Capitol Hill who haven’t done anything to earn my vote, either. One of them is Kevin McCarthy, the de facto future Speaker of the House should Republicans regain the majority. Some will say he’s not quite as RINO-evil as his counterpart in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, and I wouldn’t disagree. But that’s like saying we should be thankful to swim in sewage because at least it’s not lava.
When the GOP’s “Commitment to America” was leaked, I instantly hoped it was just an early draft. My initial read revealed it was so replete with milquetoast platitudes and obscure non-promises that certainly McCarthy and his cronies had come up with something that had more legs. We’re in a time when the people crave bold and even bodacious solutions to the massive problems we face. I may not be one of them as I prefer government to just get the heck out of the way instead of trying to solve problems, but ahead of a midterm election against an immensely unpopular member of the other party sitting in the Oval Office, I would have expected a far clearer plan than what was presented.
It turned out Fox News host Tucker Carlson agrees. As he noted during last night’s show after playing a clip of soon-to-be Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni:
“She’s not kidding. She’s as serious as the moment we are currently living through. Our rights are under attack, she said. The sovereignty of our nation is under attack. And critically, ‘The prosperity and well-being of our families is under attack.’
“And that’s true. That’s why it’s resonating, because it’s real and not just in Italy. It’s true here. American families are facing the very same onslaught from the very same poisonous ideologies. The difference is in this country it’s rarely acknowledged except on the fringes.
“Meloni is not on the fringes. She’s the new Prime Minister of Italy, she will be, and she’s saying it out loud. Contrast that to what’s happening in the United States. House Republicans just spelled out what they’re running on. It’s a document called the ‘Commitment to America.’
“It’s fine. Probably not much in it you disagree with it. Have you heard of it? No, you probably haven’t. You probably haven’t read it. Nobody really cares. Why? Because there’s nothing real in it. There’s not a single word in that document about the attacks on the American family that you see every day. That’s at the center of most people’s concerns. ‘How are my kids? Will they have a life that resembles mine? That was called the American Dream, does it still exist? Will they be able to afford to live the way they grew up? Will they have the opportunities that we had?’
“No. People are upset about that. Why wouldn’t they be? But nobody says it and that’s odd because we know, and now it’s been proven that when politicians are brave enough to tell the truth about what’s actually happening, they tend to be rewarded for it.”
Unfortunately, the document isn’t just missing commitments to families. It’s missing a huge concern for millions of Americans, a concern that is spreading in light of recent revelations that have crept into the mainstream. According to Daniel Horowitz at The Blaze:
There is no recognition whatsoever that this is the Fourth Reich, the economic collapse is not by accident, and that we have suffered through the greatest tyranny and civilization destruction of all time. That is to say, the biggest omission from this document is COVID fascism. It’s as if the past two and a half years never occurred. There was no throwaway line even nodding toward banning all mandates, much less reviewing the genocide of gain-of-function research, dangerous vaccines, ending the PREP Act and immunity for pharma, and making sure this can never happen again. There was no recognition that the inflation is a result of the policies from COVID, which the GOP collaborated with. There is also no acknowledgement that the energy crisis is not just about inflation, but about building on the COVID lockdowns and social control to impose an equivalent scenario with energy and food.
History buffs are divided about the effects of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” the spirit animal predecessor of McCarthy’s document. I tend to lean toward it accomplishing very little. Sure, it helped Republicans have an unprecedented red wave and they certainly tried to implement some of those contract proposals, but at the end of the day very little tangible came from it other than to rebuke the Clinton administration and force Senate Democrats to play defense. They passed bills that stalled in the Senate.
Unfortunately, this new version is far weaker, has fewer details, misses the most important issues facing Americans, and has even less of a chance of being successful than Gingrich’s plan. Even if the GOP takes control of the Senate as well, it’s very unlikely they’ll be able to pass anything meaningful that would get signed by Joe Biden. The only real difference they’ll be able to make is to slow the bleeding by not proposing more horrible ideas. Otherwise, they’re going to be allowing the same basic budgets that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are pushing.
One can even argue that this “Commitment to America” is so bland, it even has talking points that are indistinguishable from Democrats. For example, one of McCarthy’s bullet points is to, “Provide greater privacy and data security protections, equip parents with more tools to keep their kids safe online, and stop
companies from putting politics ahead of people.”
I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but it’s not a differentiator. If a Democrat lawmaker said those exact words in a campaign ad, nobody would bat an eye and wokesters wouldn’t call to have the candidate cancelled. Why? Because it’s generic and doesn’t require any actual action. It’s just words. It’s an empty promise. They’ll pass bills that never become law and they’ll claim they’re doing a fabulous job as a result.
There are some good points in the document, but nothing is memorable. Nothing is startling. Gingrich called for big ideas like a balanced budget amendment and term limits. He could do that knowing Bill Clinton would veto anything that made it through the Senate. McCarthy’s document doesn’t even take advantage of that cover. It’s as if the document was written to prevent damage and to not give Democrats anything to attack.
The real power they’ll have is in cutting budgets, which they won’t do. They’ll be able to hold some people accountable through hearings. As important as those two things are, they didn’t promise much in those realms in their Commitment to America. It’s as if they don’t want to commit to real actions.
It’s pure GOP Establishment weakness on full display. At least Gingrich had passion behind his proposals. The Contract With American was, as Shakespeare might say, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” This new Commitment to America still signifies nothing, but also bypasses the sound and fury in favor of safe and uninspiring.
- Hand-curated links from conservative and Christian sites — NO legacy media garbage links. Patriots get their news every day at JDRucker.com
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.
Well said. The Uniparty (Dems + RINOs) is trying to preserve the illusion that the contest is between Dems and Republicans. But the Dem-alternative RINOs reliably vote for Dem’s omnibus budget-busting rights-infringing bills (and judicial appointments), and are for sale to do more of this. Lotta hubris about GOP poll stats; but too many RINOs survived the primaries. No change.
I have very little confidence in McCarthy and even less in Mitch.
We need an Ultra-MAGA as speaker and senate leader.
We need to completely destroy the democrats’ version of ‘democracy’ and rebuild the republic.
I generally agree. We need radical reform if we are to save this country.
The weak yammering we’ve come to expect from the E-GOP.